Alfred goes mental, I decline an invite to a 'Chinese Valentine's Day' party and Frank Zappa nights

Yesterday was Chinese Valentine's Day, and you guessed it, Alfred called and invited me to a party with his work. (I find this amusing for 2 reasons..first, they also celebrate our valentines day on Feb 14th, and also because I've never seen a Chinese public display of affection. Suffice it to say they are a pretty cold race and do not exhibit physical acts of affection...with family or lovers. Its weird.) Anyhoo, I politely declined his invitation. Oh yeah, and this is rich, when he invited me he told me that I should wear "perfume and a dress." Really? I asked him why and he says to me, "because then you will be so popular there!" Interesting. But seeing that I have a 10 pm curfew and he invited me at 7, it just wasn't happening. Never mind the fact that we would have been taken to the party via a 'party bus' with 70 other people. This cracked me up because the Chinese do not party. I mean, one beer and they're sh*t canned. They just don't party. But hey, that's cool, a party bus for party people. Two and a half hours pass and I get a facebook friend request from him. Had I not blocked him on facebook, I literally would have been his only friend on there. Who goes to the trouble of creating a facebook account (in china!) to have 1 single friend on it? So 3 hours pass and I start receiving text messages from him.  (I'm just going to type them all in a row)  "...so sad :( / so sad, so dispointing. it only take 10 minutes by taxi/ i have red wine waiting for you/ ur school rule sucks. i wish u were here/ everyone so disappointed with me because you didnt come..." One thing I should clarify is that if there is one thing the Chinese hate more than anything in the world, its losing face. Safe to say Alfred lost some face last night with his co-workers by me not showing up. One more hour passes, and then the obsessive instant messages on QQ start. I'm talking like 20-30 messages within 30 minutes. I eventually block him. I actually thought that would help. Nope. He then proceeds to friend me back on QQ using (and I counted the exact number) 23 fake names. Every time a new one pops up, I block and delete...block and delete...block and delete, again. To bring this story to an end I will wrap it up by saying that I awoke this morning to 2 of the cruelest, creepiest and coldest emails I have ever received in my life. From Alfred. No need for me to go into what they were about, but lets just say that they scared the shit out of me and the security guard at my school has been told to never let him in. Today I only received 5 'fake friend' requests from him on QQ. Things are looking up, yay!

Tonight I had 2 knocks on my door. The first was because John the Brit sent a link to me on facebook that made me laugh so hard I almost pissed my pants (yes, people actually came and knocked on my door to see if I was 'ok'. Apparently I have inherited my father's robust laugh).  I will copy the link below, because its just that good. Very typical China. The second knock came about 50 minutes later (mind you, its only 11:10 pm here right now).  This time I'm pretty sure the knock was in response to the music I was playing. I had "Willie The Pimp" by Frank Zappa playing. Loudly. However this time, I knew the person knocking on my door. It was my friend Anna, a Chinese teacher who lives down the hall. In her best broken English she says something to the likes of "Oh, I didn't realize you awake. Heard music. Oh. Ok. Ok. goodnight. Ok." Haha! The only thing I did throughout the duration of this 'conversation' was nod my head and smile. Fair enough. So as for now, I've traded my speakers for headphones, Frank Zappa for a mobster documentary on youtube and my cup of cabernet for a cup of green tea. And hopefully before too long, I'll drift into a blissful stage of REM that is free of Alfred and full of rock and roll.

A must see:  http://www.buzzfeed.com/nataliemorin/chinese-signs-that-got-seriously-lost-in-tranlsation