Burning bushels

Taxi drivers in Shanghai are bloody awful. Scratch that, I can't find words bad enough to describe how bad they are. Well, I could, but on a family-orientated blog such as this one I doubt I could use them...I mean, won't someone think of the children? Sure, they're cheap enough, but they take so long to find wherever you're going it's hardly worth the bother. There hasn't really been much to blog about in the past couple of days. Bought myself a new sweater as a birthday gift to myself, going out for birthday drinks later with some colleagues, trying to splice 'birthday' into every sentence to get the point across that I'm whoring for attention here, birthday greetings and expensive gifts wouldn't go amiss either. Oh yeah, now I remember what I was going to write. Fuck modesty. Seriously, just fuck it. I've tried to be modest in an attempt to integrate into Chinese society, what with it being one of the supposed cultural traits of the Chinese...ha ha, only serious. The problem is (I think) that since most foreigners here aren't quite as modest as I am (not that there's anything wrong with that), so the Chinese tend to think I'm not hiding my light under a bushel, but am, in fact, being truthful about my abilities. All this time I've been saying things like "yeah, I've been studying Chinese for about five years, but really I'm not very good." People's typical reaction is not, as I expected, "what a nice young man, so charming and modest. let's try to marry off our beautiful daughter to him," but is in fact "he's studied for five years and still sucks? What a retard." In short, that's the end of modesty for me. No longer will anyone have to suffer my overbearing humility and the silence of my trumpet. Dear oh dear, China isn't going to know what's hit it once my arrogance gets into full swing. They ain't seen nothing yet... Well, so much for "the children."