Ted in Asia #1

This will probably be the first in a series of stories from my Term in Asia trip in college. For five months, I went to Japan, China, Thailand & Vietnam. It was a life changing experience. However, most of the "life changing" aspects were also "emotionally scarring". This first pic is basically my entire experience in China. I weighed at least 300 pounds at the time and was very self-conscious about my weight thanks to the 12+ years of verbal abuse given to me in school. Wasn't high school awesome? Anyways, once I got to college people weren't OPENLY hostile anymore (instead they just made lots of assumptions about my intelligence based on my weight). Then I went to China.

In China, people are different. Now that probably sounds obvious but let me elaborate with an example. I was walking around China with some friends of mine and a woman came up to me and said something in Chinese. She asked me how old I was. "21" I replied. The woman laughed, then moved her hands up to her face as if to say "I caught a fish THIS big!" only she was actually saying "You are VERY fat! Good job!"

Needless to say I didn't enjoy China.

So this picture is something I doctored up fairly quickly last night. Tori Amos has a song called "China" which is why she makes a cameo in this blog entry. Enjoy it! There will be more traumatic stories from my childhood and Asia trip to come!