Last Week of Hangzhou Class

My elbow has been continuing to bother me, and since I'd rather have elbow pain than lift less than 300 pounds, I've gone on a quest to find Icy Hot. Bob has jumped on board with me as he needs something to take out the pain in his dislocated shoulder. He dislocated it a week or two ago during the basketball game, but he claims it isn't as serious as the times before when he has had to have surgery to repair it, and is thus working out still and doing less weight. It was fantastic, for the first week he just had his arm in a sling and did squats on the smith press using one arm to stabilize it. In any case, the two of us who apparently can't listen to the obvious signs are bodies are giving us have been dragging JJ with us in search of stores with medicines to offer us. The first thing Bob found was some type of Tiger Balm, which smells terrible and doesn't seem to have much effect on his shoulder. I opted not to use it. Today, in a moment of desperation, I decided to wander into a Chinese pharmacy since our bus was taking a while to arrive. I explained my problem, and the pharmacist showed me to two items. The first was something she insisted was the perfect fit for my problem, and the other was something else that might help and have the same basic function. I looked at the first one, not really understanding the Chinese or English list of ingredients, and thus moved on to examining the second. What was the second one? Lidocaine, 利多卡因. I may be mistaken, but I was fairly certain that lidocaine required a prescription. Needless to say we bought the spray on lidocaine, and Bob is trying it on his shoulder tonight. This country is fantastic, maybe if this doesn't work we can find horse steroids or something.

Everyone around me is getting so excited and talking about the last week of class and how they are almost ready to go home, and I am having trouble relating to them. I still have months to go, so I feel kind of weird being the only one continuing. On a related note, I need to decide if I want to take a plane or train to Beijing. I originally wanted to do the train, but I realized that with a train ride that long I'm destined to end up sitting next to 'that guy' who wants to talk to the American the entire ride. We had voting last week for "Most likely to...", and while I don't think anyone voted for me as "most likely to kill a Chinese person" before, if they saw me on a train after a few hours in that environment I might be the winning candidate. I am not sure how much trouble it is getting a plane ticket though, so I am still trying to decide.