I also got this little guy at a flea market in Yulin.
Zoe also found this hidden little film camera shop down the street from our apartment. I got my most recent roll developed and scanned for only 9.9RMB! It costs another 36rmb for prints, I think, but I don’t have space for that…
Afterwards, we also discovered a really gorgeous riverside park. There were a lot of owners walking their dogs, and old men fishing in the shrubs. The leaves are just now changing colors here, I wonder when they’ll be bare?
There’s a lot coming up! We have our friend Jonni visiting in a couple weeks, then we go to Malaysia to spend Christmas with our friend Kabir’s family! We’re gonna bring him back to Chengdu with us, where our other friend Liz is gonna meet us for New Years Eve… then SHE’S bringing US to Korea for a week! We’re meeting up with even more friends there, then bringing them back to Chengdu afterwards. It’s complicated!
Even just this weekend, I got tickets to a rave literally down the street from my apartment (less than 1km! I’ll be walking…), and made plans with a new friend to go to a Cambodian Indie Rock night. AND a new Noah Baumbach movie is out?! I’m so grateful for it all!!!
My friend Hazel said once that LA is like a toxic ex. It really feels like that recently… maybe it’s because I’m watching the Rachel Sennott show, but I have this sense in my gut that I’ll be living there again one day. It’s fun to imagine, too, maybe what I’d do differently. I’d go out on my own more, talk to more strangers, make friends who work in different fields, use WAYMO even though it’s evil. It’s easy for me to get caught up thinking “maybe I just wasn’t being brave enough, putting myself out there enough, etc” when I try to think of why LA made me so damn depressed. But also…maybe I just didn’t have enough money or confidence to make it not suck.
I think I just miss specific things. My friend’s couch I’d crash on in Echo Park, our little walkable NoHo neighborhood where I’d walk to see movies every week, the exact formula of my every day life that I know will never exist again. And at the time, I was really really really sad, and hated a lot of it too. Idk! Everything is so much easier to miss.
It’s okay though, I’ll be seeing my friends soon, hopefully taking more film photos now that we’ve got the plug, hopefully finishing reading this damn book just so i can say that i saw it through, so much to come!