Chinese people and pets

As usual I'm pretty awful at naming my blogs so if anyone has any suggestions for any of them please let me know.

Lately I've been having a bit of trouble with my name. You see I hardly ever use my first name here in China, in fact they call me "Dar Hua", a combination of my middle name and my Chinese name 罗美花. Let me know if you can see that, I don't know if some of you can. The pinyin (English phonetics) for that would be Luo MeiHua. For those of you keeping any tabs my Chinese name has changed. My old name was 李美花 (Li MeiHua) but when I got married my husband decided that even though Chinese people don't usually change their names when they get married I should change mine. So now I'm part of his family, the 罗 (Luo) family. So recently the trouble I've been having is remembering to sign my first name, after all the people that call me by that name are in the USA and most of them I haven't seen in a long time now.

So I have two rants for today. One is my mother-in-law and the other is Chinese people and pets. First of all my mother-in-law. I really love being with the woman, she's a great person but I find it extremely hard to be around her sometimes. Especially when she wants to talk to me. I don't mean that in a rude way it's just that there's barely anything for me to talk to her about and what she does complain about are things that I, by FAR don't need to be worrying about. First of all she complains about what I eat, as I've said before, she's constantly telling me how I should make my snacks. "This popcorn has too much salt, you should put sugar in it." "These grits would be much better with sugar." She also must feed me, at every meal. If she doesn't feed me she gets a bit cranky. Every morning she asks me "Do you want me to make you something to eat?" "I don't have time to eat." "Oh" she says dejectedly. And also every evening when I come home at 9pm she insists that I should eat a meal, which I don't want to do cause I'm not that hungry. The second thing she always complains about is money. Now I'm the type of person who has money and doesn't spend it at all from some kind of hidden fear. I don't need someone who is even more money-thrifty than I am telling me not to spend money. I need someone like my husband to help me loosen up on my spending a little bit but just enough to stay normal. This week I've stayed home every day, took buses (for 1 kuai) everywhere, and had a total of 20 kuai in my pocket every day and when I came home today she was complaining about my rent. Talk about a bit stressful for me!

Chinese people and pets are absolutely insane. Put it this way, I have two cats. The number of Chinese people I've seen do stupid things with my cats is a bit nutty. First of all they'll lock the cats outside of their kitty litter box and then get upset with them when they go to the bathroom on something. Obviously if you were locked out of your bathroom for a long time you'd have to go to the bathroom on something! Second they love to play with things and see the cats follow whatever they're playing with with their eyes. For example they'll play with a piece of string just to watch the cat's reaction. But then when the cat pounces on the string (a normal reaction for a cat) they'll complain that the cat pounced on them! My friend just bought a Golden Python Snake, everyone's been begging him not to. It's his first ever snake. When they take it out of the cage my friend squirms, he freaked out the first time they had to feed it and absolutely refuses to touch it half the time. The snake is currently 1.5 meters and it's a baby. It's supposed to grow to be 6 meters long. But don't worry folks, this snake doesn't bite. Oh, no, it constricts. So if it's pissed off all it has to do is wrap it's body around your neck and ... bye bye! Smart snake for a first, right? I was told in Australia if you have a snake that's that big you're supposed to sign up for classes on how to take care of the pet and it's definitely not supposed to be your first snake. The biggest thing that my friend didn't understand was why we were trying to talk him out of it when he first brought up the snake. "Are you scared of it?" he asked us. Um, no, I've spent enough time around snakes not to be scared of them. "But I have the money for it." That's completely besides the point but that's the most common answer with Chinese people. What in the world does money have to do with knowing how to bring up a snake properly besides having enough money to feed and house it? Also, unlike many snake owners in the US who may even have their own room dedicated to snakes, this guy has an apartment the size of my living room and 2 dogs (a German Shephard and a Saint Bernard)!