Watched a live kungfu show about how Chinese patriots vanquished Japanese invaders. The English parts voiced over by Mr Vagina no less. Mr Vagina insisted we add a rap  part to Molihua, a famous Chinese folk song. We keep doing it with varying levels of audience appreciation.

Card's playing session each day to pass the time. My addition to this is to play Chinese-language jumbo at which the point for everyone else is to beat me. For now its still a long stretch for all of them. After they learned the Ugandan version of poker, a.k.a amatatu, the shemales joined the team of elimination.

One day our boatman Chou Ge (Smelly Brother) forgot to tell you about him.
Traded scare stories of anacondas, and of over sexed ghosts that walk the night, sexually molesting those they meet. After considering that sex with a ghost would not have issues of AIDS, pregnancy, jealousy and mama-drama, for 2 hours I waited, half-hoping and half-scared it would show, for the female ghost to come molest me. It turned out to be a moon-bathing session if there ever was a literal antonym for sun-bathing.

"This music is not African", said the Chinese Reverend XP when I sent her a combination of Mory Kante's Guineen Nou and the opening vocals from that Lion King soundtrack that says asivenyo-something for a TV show in Shandong on September 20th . And thus began another of our usual discussions.

In a 6th floor room at the Foreign Trade Hotel in Xiamen, I knuckle down to rid myself of some angst. Why? Because three hours earlier, an event that may cost me a salary come 15th happened, part of it difference of principle, part of it bad employer communication.

The first one involved painting our faces for the performance, something I've repeatedly riled against for its own sake if we are not doing a dance that authentically demands it. This time the reason given to me was that everyone else has done it, so what about you two (me and another guy who had another reason altogether for declining).

I replied that in Nazi Germany if any practical Christians ever lived, they too would have had to make  a stand against the killings they knew were wrong even though the government made sure everyone else was doing it.

Last week I went AWOL because for three days we were in Urumqi in Xinjiang, the province which in July of 2009 officially caused the official closure of Facebook and other like-themed networking sites after ethnic riots there caused negative PR.

Shortly after, we flew to Xiamen for the China International Foreign Investment Trade Fair Closing Gala, and both towns provided these brief and thus all-the-more-precious moments of re-discovering life's simple pleasures.

Urumqi: I found a swing a.k.a Kyesuubo and not since I was a tree-climbing holiday-maker in Kajjansi had I been on the traditional variety. In the Happy Valley where we worked for most of last year there was access to electric versions of the same, but finding it at a place I almost failed to wake up to go to was a treat.  

The last man publicly found drinking before sundown was immortalized as Taata Mukiibi on one episode of Vvumbula with Drake Ssekeba. Here he would have been normal, beer is available as part of breakfast, and, for most men in a hurry, lunch of a beer and a large sausage is sufficient.

2. Long pinkies in Uganda are the preserve of ill-mannered witches who hide poison under them to inject it later in food. In folklore they are called ba muwabutwa (Givers of Poison). Chinese men by contrast deliberately grow them to act as mobile tooth-picks, calibration pens for touch screens, and as ear-picks when the itch comes.