the Chinese inquisition and modern torture techniques

The boat ride was an inquisition directed at Jordan and I, set on the deck of the ship with coal flakes from the smokestack raining down around us all. The ship was big, bigger than any of the ferries I've taken in the past around Washington, and we were crammed into fairly small seats in the bowls of the boat. Luckily the weather was nice, so we abandoned the dark stuffy insides of the boat and took to the deck. We were planning on relaxing it was impossible. There is nothing relaxing about a throng of Chinese faces throwing endless questions at you...you're foreign and you can talk?...where are you from?...America is super developed, right?...are you used to the food yet?...what do Americans think of us? At that point the new people show up and it's back to, you're foreign and you can talk? It was a battle to pick out a single question from the babbling crowd, since they were talkign amongst themselves and at us all at once. Then, if we were lucky, they were speaking clearly with a decently standard accent using the vocabulary words we knew. We endured the barrage for at least a few hours, and I don't think the Chinese language has exhausted me so much since my first few weeks of classes. There were a few passengers that were with us the whole time, and by the end of it they were laughing out loud when someone new would come by and be all surprised we could talk and re-ask the basic questions. They were realizing how they themselves had come off to us a few hours before.

After a night in an extremely sketchy room in Yantai (based on a hand gesture and suggestive look made at one point, I'm pretty sure the guy at the front desk thought that Jordan and I were renting the room for purposes other than sleeping) we made the four hour bus ride to Qingdao. We found ourselves in the back of a small bus with our knees held skyward by the seat back in front of us, essentially an upright fetal position. I used those four hours to think about the mechanics of that posture, and came up with this: In a normal sitting position, the upper legs are parallel with the ground and seat bottom, thus distributing force evenly across the buttocks and perhaps even thigh region. Pressure is force divided by surface area, so this scenario prevents excessive pressure in any single region. In the back of the bus, force was increased by the weight of my legs hanging above the seat instead of parallel with it. Surface area was decreased, reduced to only the rear-most bony region of the buttocks. The seat cushion was mostly nice and fluffy, but had a well-defined valley in the exact spot my butt came in contact with the seat. I guess a few previous passengers had the same problem I did. After estimating values and dividing Newtons by meters squared for a few hours, I decided to be more careful choosing a seat next time.