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"why won't the lights work?" i thought to myself this dark morning as i slowly made the realization that there was a power outage. didn't we just have one last thursday? why does the city of changshou hate electricity so much? thankfully water was still running, albeit cold water. given the choice though, i rather not have electricity in the morning than not have water. later i realized i probably could've used the stove to heat up some water since it uses gas (all i had to do was manually ignite it with a match). i dug out the mini flashlight from my bag (preparedness! yay!) and went to go use the bathroom. i used my plastic basin to catch some water and do a quick wash before getting dressed. cold? yeah, but not crazy cold. it was sort of refreshing actually.

our entire block lost power, but across the street, the long rectangular block still had electricity (they were the ones without it last thursday). naturally the elevators didn't work so i walked down 11 flights of stairs, not too bad. i brought my flashlight but there was emergency lighting in the stairwells.

shirley arrived at the bus stop and immediately put her hands over her hair so we couldn't see her new haircut. bangs are the new style in china these days for women and her stylist gave her bangs with a vengeance. it made her look doll-like. to make matters worse, the stylist she wanted was busy, so she ended up paying more to a more expensive (and supposedly more experienced) hairdresser who decided to give her this look.

i'm planning on going to the chongqing zoo tomorrow with lihui but i feel runned down from my cold. still, a weekend feels wasted if i'm not doing something special, and i already promised lihui, and told a few other people i'm going, so the show must go on. but probably the whole time i'll be thinking about how good it'll feel once i return home, so i can rest for a few hours before going to bed and going back to work on monday.

* lunch w/lihui
* lunch w/yuya
* getting paid for coach bags

afterwards i was all ready to walk shirley home - the first time tonight we'd get a chance to chat - but guo and fengya decided they would take a stroll to ancient changshou and guo invited us to come with them. my first instinct was to refuse, since i don't hang out with frenemies, but shirley was excited to go with them, so i followed her. i've never felt a stranger mix of emotions before, simultaneously feeling happy and sad, wanting to run away but also to stay. i was pretty quiet for most of the walk, either walking in front of everyone or behind. fengya never once spoke to me but guo was quite talkative, maybe because he was drunk. and there was shirley, blissfully ignorant of the shared history i have with guo and fengya, nor of our secret war. it was only when we parted ways did i finally break out of my defensive shell and became more talkative as i walked shirley home.