in my delay to get a new phone (tomorrow, tomorrow!) i’ve had to hijack my mum’s instead, reasoning my selfishness away by figuring that she hardly uses it anyway, her miniscule phonebook plain testament to my clear precedence over her need to use it.

well, i did complain about it at the start, since it’s one of those ancient nokia phones (my mum, always at the bottom of the list of priority users typically inherits our old phones whenever we upgrade). as you can see, its screen is monochrome. it lights up in that harsh, flourescent HELLO I HAVE LIGHTS sort of way. my thumb is completely sore from the stiff, rubbery buttons you have to sort of nail to input stuff. it uses the old nokia OS that i used to be familiar with back in secondary school and JC (think: 1999 - 2001 period). i was surprised to see it even had the dictionary function for texting. and of course, a camera is way out of the question.

strangely though, i’ve found i’ve been more productive with this than my new(er) fangled type ones — the ones with the bells and whistles: cameras, calendars, notebooks, e-wallets, memory cards, 1000 levels of archiving text messages… you’d think all those things were there to increase productivity.

but i find that the ancient phone is removing my dependence on a phone as a security blanket. i’m shaking the habit of compulsively snapping every damned insignificant thing in front of me. or to jot inconsequential (and often difficult-to-jot) stuff in the notebook. or to compulsively check the 1000-levelled hierarchy of archived junk. i’ve stopped being able to send or receive MMS messages so that’s been a huge time saver.

does anyone remember the old ericsson ones? before they became sony ericsson. the black ones with the little antenna and the metal bar running through the side of the phone’s body. i saw a jackie chan film where he used that to bash a guy to death. those were serious weapons, i tell you.

strangely, it’s these phones which seem to last all the way. i’ve broken three then-hightech clamshell phones (one upper shell literally flew off when i opened it), I’ve ruined two others with a little water and had another literally crash because of OS problems. with these old phones you know they aren’t going to break down.

not even if you bludgeon someone to death with them.

one thing i’m going to miss about china is how i’ve become pretty speedy at dividing by 5 to convert the currency, constantly surprising myself by how affordable things are in relation to home standards. take this pretty decent video cam as pictured: very usable at 480X640, comes with a built-in mic, 6 light-detecting bulbs (pretty bright, too!). all for 100 yuan = $20 singapore dollars. that is just friggin’ insane; the cheapest of the cheapie ones back home go for $100 odd. so can you blame me for getting excited?

another thing i’m going to miss are the random water coolers dispensing hot water (ironic, yes) in malls. for a nation of tea drinkers who bring bottles of tea with loose leaves at the bottom for constant refills, it makes absolute sense. it seems they carry those things around like security blankets, too. and now it finally makes sense that people back home in university say my habit of bringing tea around in a bottle to class makes me look like a mainlander. ‘cos i never quite understood the parallel before.

naturally, my auntie (singlish colloquialism: roughly referring to an older lady, carrying connotations of being unfashionable) instincts far overpower expectations, and i not only managed to embrace the local culture — or rather, completely abuse my access to this amenity — and refill at the coolers, but was tempted to abandon my usual lexan bottles for the commonly-seen-in-china glass tea mug things. (i couldn’t find them on froogle.com for a picture; i suspect they’re so ugly they’re virtually unsellable outside of china, let alone online.)

they seemed like such a great idea at the time. i mean, they have handles. and flowery printing on the side. and metal lids. and every cab driver had one by his side. and i don’t know what i was thinking.

if you thought waxing lyrical about ugly chinese tea mugs was a weird enough influence to bring home, i was told that i was speaking in mandarin in my sleep a couple of nights ago. note in point that i frequently do speak in my sleep, so that isn’t the strange part.

also, i was humming a chinesey tune in the chinese scale of 1 2 3 5 6, or do re mi so la. in my sleep, oh yes oh yes.

okay, but what i’m not going to miss are the dusty streets, so unfriendly to one who’s grown accustomed to walking in flip flops. and the extreme elasticity of shop prices, requiring such violent actions as “slashing” or “cutting” to be executed. (and i’m not really the violent sort… … what are you looking at?) and that the foot masseurs made fun of my chinese. all 3 times i went down. which, if you ask me, is highly questionable behaviour from people in the service industry, to say the least.