Grounded – Sprained wrist injury

Finally another update- mostly because now I’m grounded and off my bike for a while after taking a nasty fall two days ago during a huge rain storm here in Beijing. I decided that it would be a clever move to practice my skid-stopping in the rain since the roads would be a bit easier to skid on; I just didn’t realize how slippery the roads had gotten though, and one of my attempted skids resulted in my back wheel kicking out to the side, which sent me to the ground on my left arm (which was actually quite fortunate, since that took most of the shock). Somehow I also landed on my right wrist- which I’d already been having problems with, and I started to feel a dull pain and a loss of movement in the joint.

Here’s a short clip of the rain storm on Friday- it was pouring down.

The aftermath of my arm.

Initially I thought that it was just a sprain, but the first night I couldn’t find a good resting position for my wrist that wouldn’t hurt, and the next morning I felt stiffness in my fingers- reason enough to want to get an X-Ray (X-光 X-guang1 as I learned to say in Chinese; also, 扭伤 niu3shang1 is also how you say, sprain, in Chinese) of my wrist. I was trying to decide whether to go to a local clinic/hospital, knowing that the X-Ray and consultation fees would be a lot cheaper there, but then figured that I would try to claim the checkup fees anyways, so I decided that I’d be a spoiled expat and headed over to Visa Clinic (which I assumed would be cheaper than going to Beijing United Family Hospital). Long story short, I ended up not having to get an X-Ray, and the doc diagnosed it as just a sprain. He prescribed me a  bag of pain killers and sleep aids, but I haven’t taken any yet. I don’t really like the idea of popping pain meds- I’ll stay off the narcotics until I’m really writhing in pain.

Anyhow, the actual reason for the lack of updates is because I’ve started up my daily classes at 1on1Mandarin so my schedule’s gotten quite a bit tighter. But, apart from that update- here’s a random dump of images from the past few weeks in Beijng.

I got a printer from Phebe’s friend. It’s missing a power cord, but whatevs. I’ll pick one up soon. I thought it would be post-worthy because I was trying to figure out how to bring it back to my apartment, and, well, good thing I got the Chrome citizen-sized messenger bag, which actually fit the printer! Plus 1 for biking with a printer in your bag!

The previous trip to the computer-district in 中关村 to look for the underground Apple distributor- speaking of which, that reminds me that I need to follow up with them. They were supposed to call me back about the casing for my MacBook Pro 15″.

I was a bit nervous going in here because my local friend had advised me not to leave my MacBook Pro overnight for any repairs, and that I should even ask to watch the repair, lest I run the possibility of having parts stolen/swapped out in my Mac.

I thought it was pretty amusing to see iPads on sale here. They’re currently not being sold in the official Apple Beijing store yet.

Beijing is a biker’s city…

And to close this post-
This delivery guy didn’t have an apartment number to deliver to (actually, my apartment complex doesn’t have assigned unit numbers for each apartment), so he just started yelling the person’s name. It’s a pretty tight knit community though- some of the neighbors downstairs started to direct the delivery guy where to find that person. China is an interesting place… =p

-Duncan