The Right to Bear Arms
In the weekly English lesson/discussion with my coworkers, I’ve introduce the game of Taboo. (If you don’t know the game, look it up, it’s pretty fun.) One of the cards was “shoot.” The hint that the person used was “this can be used to kill somebody.” My brain quickly went to gun, but everyone else, being Chinese, said knife. The reason for this is not that China is stuck in the past but because guns are illegal to own. It’s got me thinking, what would the United States be like today if guns were illegal?
Who knew not having a single native English speaker to talk to regularly would start to get to me after four months. The twelve hour time difference and seventeen hour travel time are also having similar effects. To remedy the situation, I’ve decided to return to the United States for Thanksgiving. Not quite ready to return home for good, I’ll enjoy some good food, friends, and family and then return to China to finish my two months of work and one month of travel in Russia or South East Asia.
The Autumn Festival is one of the few Chinese holidays I got a chance to take a part in. The holiday revolves around moon cakes, which you can see to the side. The whole family will get together and eat these tasty little cakes. They come in lots of different flavors with some wildly different than the rest. I tried coconut, red bean, and one which had a hard boiled egg inside. Each moon cake also has the hidden surprise of being 800 calories for a cake roughly three inches in diameter and an inch tall. And that’s it, that’s the holiday. In the spirit of not being so close-minded I decided to ponder this thought some more. This led to me thinking about American holidays. How exactly do you explain Halloween to someone who has never celebrated it?
Lesson Learned: Keep an open mind, you’re beliefs and ideas may look just as silly as the person you’re guing with.
