unintended consequences

And while I’m rambling on incoherently when I should be getting lunch:

We’ve somehow managed to cause the mosquitoes in our place to mutate.

One of lzh’s more serious problems is that she’s a mosquito magnet. Seriously, if you ever need mosquitoes, just stand near lzh, you’ll get plenty of them. This means that over the warmer, mosquito-friendlier months, much 蚊å­?香 (mosquito-repelling incense) is burnt.

The result? We’re more likely to see mosquitoes flying around our apartment in the daytime.

About the Author

wangbo

A Kiwi teaching English to oil workers in Beijing, studying Chinese in my spare time, married to a beautiful Beijing lass, consuming vast quantities of green tea (usually Xihu Longjing/西湖龙井, if that means anything to you), eating good food (except for when I cook), missing good Kiwi ale, breathing smog, generally living as best I can outside Godzone and having a good time of it.

4 thoughts on “unintended consequences

  1. Oddly enough my use of the same sort of thing here has been much less common this year than it was in Beijing or Jiangsu Province. I’ve seen fewer mosquitoes here than anywhere else. I wonder whether it’s something to do with the climate. My guess would be that when it gets hot, it’s too hot for them. Mind you, when it stops raining and warms up a little, they might be out in force for a time.

    Like lzh, I’m a mossie magnet. I wanted to be a babe magnet, but I suspect there’s some Buddhist karmic thing behind this misattraction.

  2. Yep, you got bad karma.

    But no, it seems to be a lot cooler down your way than it has been up here. Maybe the rain is keeping the mozzies down.That’s how I remember things being in Norway- rain=no mozzies, no rain=mozzies that were biting through clothes thick enough for a Wellington winter. There’s no way I’d take either you or lzh to the Norwegian forest in the summer, neither of you would last 10 seconds. Or maybe it’s got something to do with being by the sea. I’ve never taken lzh or any other mosquito magnet to Hong Kong or Auckland, and May Day in Dalian is too early for mozzies, so I can’t compare.

    Anyway, enjoy it while it lasts.

  3. Love the mozzies. Being closer to the missing link than most in terms of body hair, in the past I’ve always been immune to their dubious charms, but Shanghai seems to be breeding an army of mutants that are capable of getting through and biting me. A lot. And on the ankles and shins too – why the shins? I’m no biologist, but surely there’s nothing there to eat. Bizarre.

  4. In my experience, there is always somewhere in the world where the mozzies will get you, even if you’re normally immune. For me, the Norwegian forest and the small garden outside our building are the only two places in the world where the mozzies pay me any attention, and it’s very much a case of going from one extreme to the other, meaning even though in the rest of the world the mozzies ignore me, in those two places they eat me alive and cause me to write really long sentences.

    I guess you met your match down in Shanghai.

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