Last nights dream that I gotta write about.

Ok so here goes. My dad is alive and he is in a small room with my mom, brother, and myself. My dad sits us down and tells us that he and our mom had a terminal illness and that they were going to die in the next 10 minutes. He says "Look! your mom doesn't even have a face!" then he proceeds to take the front of her face off and there is only a cavity left. He puts the wooden face replacement back on my moms head. My mom says something and I ask her how her mouth is moving, she says that she doesn't know. Then my mom and dad lay down in bed and put a white sheet over themselves as if they are going to sleep and then the pull the sheet over their faces. They are still alive, just laying there waiting. I leave the room.
I take Cooper and walk down to the river where my sick mom was said to be found. I get there and there are allot of people there as a tribute to her or something. I walk back to where I came from and Coop almost gets hit by a couple cars. Next thing I know I walk onto a houseboat. Billy D. Williams is there and tells me that he is sorry to hear about my parents. All of a sudden a hoard of zombies starts coming onto the boat. They aren't the really tough zombies, these were pretty easily subdued. I hit them, push them overboard, slam doors on them, and make my way off the boat when I realize that I'm late for high school. I get on my bike and ride it to my hometown high school. In the back of my mind I know that I haven't been going to any of my classes so I'm probably failing them. I sit with the principal and he says that my grades aren't looking too good and that a 30 year old junior in high school should have a stronger work ethic. I ask him why my old diploma didn't work and why I had to go through all of this over again and he says " Oh yeah, your old diploma does work! My bad".
After that I go to buy a certain illegal plant from a certain friend (who will remain nameless) and he is selling it out of a candy stand at a market. All of the buds are on skewers like kabaabs about to be put into a grill. He tells me the prices and I think they are too much so I walk away.

Hospital visit/ "Tomb Sweeping" festival

So this past week in China has been the "Tomb Sweeping" festival. I don't know too much about this festival besides it is to honor people that died in a certain battle that took place around the time of WWII. It is also a time to remember loved ones who have died. There is a "mountain"(large hill) close by where the soldiers of this battle were buried and the people of Jinzhou would walk up there and pay their respects. The would also do this by burning fake paper money in the streets to send to their passed on loved ones in the next life. Its a really amazing site, walking down a main street and seeing 15-30 fires going on. Ricky (new Irish teacher/ roomie) and I bought some of the fake money and along with Neve we burned some. I went off on my own to have a personal money burn and sent some cash to Zac and my dad. Im sure they are both very thirsty and could use a cold one. This festival also gave us a slight break in our teaching schedule. It wasn't a day off or anything but one of our 10 hour ultra busy days was turned into a 6 hour pretty boring day. That was a nice change. I have been feeling like I have been getting sick for about a week now and on Sunday I realized that I really was. It felt like I had jello in my lungs and every time I breathed it sounded like you were slurping the last bit if soda out of a cup. Every time I coughed if felt like my lungs were being ripped apart. I have never felt this before, especially without a sore throat or anything else really wrong with me besides a drippy nose. I called my Chinese teacher Jessie and asked her to take me to the hospital, because there is no way I would have been able to deal with that on my own. We went and it was a very odd experience. People everywhere, lots of them smoking(inside the building). We went to one counter to fill out a piece of paper, then went to another counter to hand them the piece of paper we just filled out. I gave them 8 yuan registration fee and they sent us upstairs to the respiratory medicine lady's room. I walked in to her room which was about the size of a good sized bathroom and there she was sitting in her coat and mask behind a desk. She asks questions and Jessie translates for us. She puts a stethoscope to my chest and listens to me breath. I tell Jessie to tell her that there has been some blood and green stuff in what I've been coughing up and she recommends a CT scan. I say okay. We go back downstairs to the original counter with the order for a CT scan and I pay them 330 yuan fee for the CT (about 50 USD). We walk around and find the signs for x-ray/CT and find where I'm supposed to be. I gotta throw in that during this whole ordeal I am being stared at by literally every single person in this hospital. I mean people even tap their friends on the shoulder and point at me. "Look! A foreigner!" Ok, lets continue. We eventually find the area where they CT scans take place and the doors look like the sliding ones that Leatherface pops out of. The nurse says that here is a person ahead of me but when she looks up to see that I am a foreigner she puts me at the front of the line and I walk on in. I get scanned and go back to the waiting area. I sit beside a nice lady who is an English teacher at one of the local middle schools and she says that CT results take 2 hours. I've been sitting for one minute and they tell Jessie that I can see my results now. Jessie says that the hospital wants to take good care of their foreign clients. Pretty awesome. So I get up, pass the lady who has just arrived for a scan who's face is laying in a pool of blood, swallow the vomit that just came up, and go to the room where they look at the scan results. The woman in there says that everything looks normal and they send us back upstairs to the respiratory lady. The Dr. gives me a prescription for an anti-biotic and also some bottles of this TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) liquid (a bunch of herbs mixed together) that is supposed to clear out my lungs of all the gunk in there. It was an amazing cough suppressant by the way. So here I am, about 50% better. I am not teaching high school today because moving around and yelling for 4 hours will for sure exacerbate my health situation. So I got another Irish roommate last week and his name is Ricky. He is 23 and seems like a pretty cool guy so far. Not to much to report thus far. All is well