SKYFALL

Here is anther funny experience in Xian China. About a month into my trip.

I wake up at about 4:30 every morning to exercise on my roller blades and play basketball. This morning was the same. I woke up, did my ten minutes of yoga and went outside to roller blade. I stopped going around in circles at about 5:30 and began to practice basketball.

Many people are up at about that time and so I thought it would be harmless to make some noise with my ball, but it seemed that one person did not like what I was doing at all. From at least 10 floors high, this person spilled about 5 gallons of water where I was standing and had barley missed me. They had gotten my back pack wet and had luckily missed my very expensive roller blades. I thought nothing of it and assumed some old lady was done washing her clothes, but a few minutes later, a flower pot fell from the sky right next to where I was standing. It shattered and some of the pieces hit me on my ankle. I felt discouraged and partly mad at this person. Since I never saw him, I simply ignored the pot and continued to bounce my ball up and down. A few seconds later, two empty cans dropped from the unknown as well, and so I pretended I did not see this occur also. Stupidly, I would occasionally go in the area where the things were dropping, just to see if I was actually a target, or maybe part of me wanted to mock this person, but nothing fell on me, it was always just a close call. I played after that for about 10 more minutes, than as I walked off the court, I kicked one of the cans away as if nothing had ever happened. As I walked back to the main entrance, I pictured the face of the person. I couldn't figure out if I was being threatened, if he was actually trying to hit me, or if it was just some dumb teenager playing a joke. But when I walked away, I felt I had won the game.

I went back later that day to see where the pot had fallen and there was still a little puddle of water. I also knew exactly where the two empty cans had fallen, but someone had cleaned everything up by then. The crime had been committed but not solved.

I found out later that this was just a simple spring cleaning style... no one was after me.