I think there’s a small vicious animal in my stomach that keeps rolling around trying to get comfortable. I feel like crap. And crap is what I do. I eat, but the animal is not satisfied. I like to think it looks like a small velociraptor or like alien, from the movie alien. I can do nothing to stop it or satisfy it. Thankfully, sometimes the beast sleeps. And that’s when I can do work. Otherwise, I just sit and wait, in pain.
Wednesday night I went with the guys to the jin jil bahn. It’s like a spa/sauna. It costs 20RMB/$3 to get in. It’s an interesting experience. First stop is the locker room, which is more like a lounge with lockers. Step one, strip down. Everybody is naked (girls have their own ‘locker room’). There were groups of guys sitting around naked, just smoking, playing chess, whatever. There’s a room through a glass wall with a few hot and cold pools, surrounded by open showers. The look and feel is a lot like a grotto. A couple steam rooms and a scrubbing room finish it off. The scrubbing room is where you lay on a massage bed, and naked dudes scrub you down. Interesting.
After you’ve stripped down and left everything in your locker, they give you a pair of shorts and a shirt (everyone wears the same thing) for the communal saunas and massage rooms upstairs. There are a couple sauna caves (they’re literally like caves, lined with rocks on the walls and ceiling) at hot temperatures. There are pebble floors that you lay down on. This part was awesome actually.
The massage room looks like a long theater room, with dim lighting and TVs playing quietly. You order a massage (I got the full body massage for 50 Yuan/$8) and lay down on one of the massage bed/theater seats. My masseuse was about half my size and she giggled and talked about me with the other masseuses the whole time. At one point she measured my feet and compared them to hers. Awesome!
We were there for about 3-4 hours, left at midnight. Slept really well that night and had trouble getting up Thursday (yesterday). I worked more on our marketing plan and materials yesterday and left early with the others for a presentation at YUST (Yanbian University of Science and Technology).
YUST was a university created in the 1990’s to bring together ‘like-minded’ professionals and educators for a similar reason Barnabas Trading exists today. It’s in a prominent location across the city from our office, and you can see it up on the hill from most places in the city. Many ‘like-minded’ PhDs were able to come from all over the world and have made YUST one of the top 100 universities in China in around ten years’ time.
A sister project has been planned and is already built in Pyongyang and is called PUST. Due to global issues in the last year, PUST hasn’t opened yet, but they are planning to open this fall. I will tell you all more about this exciting project when I return.
Tomorrow, we’re planning a service trip to an elderly home in a village outside of Yanji, then, if I feel well enough, I’m going to take the guys climbing up a small but pronounced mountain a little ways from the city. Should be a fun day.
I started feeling pretty gnarly again last night, so I slept from 6pm to 6am today. Not feeling well has definitely affected my patience levels and general happiness, so please pr@y for a quick recovery and for patience.
Lastly, the team returned from their trip inside. All went well, and really could not have gone better! They said they were excited and encouraged to see the factory and the workers and they feel very positive about future opportunities and m work.
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