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Elizabeth: A Vivid Chinese Experience

I was in China for a visit. I assume I was there to play music, but I don't remember much about the circumstances. I was going to be attending an assembly, but before it started, I was dying to use the bathroom. There were several of us who needed to use it, so we walked to an under-construction elementary school to find some toilets. We walked past the kids' toilets to the teachers' lounge area, but there were six or seven women who needed to go and only one full size women's bathroom. I decided to go use the kids' bathroom, even though everything would be small. I walked in and was glad to find the construction was complete. There were many stalls, all with a Chinese style toilet setup. I was barefoot for some reason, which is super nasty in any public bathroom, but especially a Chinese style one. I was wearing tight, light colored jeans. I've never even imagined trying to use a

Chinese toilet in an outfit like that, but now that I think of it, I can't think of anything worse. (I am terrible at using a Chinese toilet - in my several dozen times trying it, there have only been a handful when I didn't get some amount of urine either on the foot rests or on myself. Or both.) I knew those jeans would turn dark if they got wet. I was barefoot. The doors didn't actually conceal the stall, so I knew if anyone walked in they would see me. Also, there was no toilet paper, so I had to be SUPER neat to pull this off without being covered in urine. It took me several minutes to get myself situated in a way that I thought I wouldn't make a mess. I was trying to hold my clothing just right and angle my body parts just right. I used it and I'm not sure how it went, but when I left the stall, the emperor was in the bathroom waiting on me, telling me the assembly was going to start in a few minutes. He left ahead of me and I washed my hands, hoping he hadn't seen any of that or that I hadn't gotten urine all over myself.


I was walking back from using the bathroom and I ran into a boy. I found out that he was the emperor's nine year old son. I hadn't realized that he was married and I wondered if this boy was illegitimate. He was definitely the prince though. I had heard someone call him "My Prince" and he also looked princely: haughty and chubby. I thought that I should take this chance to befriend the prince. I enthusiastically confirmed that he was the prince. His English was very good, he had had tutors from England, and he answered that he was the prince. He told me that he was just coming back from a meeting where he purchased 135 countries, as instructed by his advisers. I told him how interested that was and I asked him which country he was most excited about, it was Malta. He knew I was part of the group visiting from the US, he thought that was cool.


We walked up towards the house where the emperor's meeting was being held. As we approached, he slipped his chubby little hand into mine. The door to the house was totally weird. Instead of a normal porch surrounding the door area, the ground rose all around where the doors and porch should be so a person found themselves army crawling between the ground and the porch ceiling trying to reach a tiny door. We tried the first door but it was too small. I helped the prince down, he was too short and chubby to get down on his own. The second door was the same way. Somehow, we found a third door that we were able to get through.


We were in the foyer and I was trying to silence my phone before we walked into the big assembly room. We walked up an ordinary flight of stairs which opened up into a huge assembly room that was much larger than the house we were in. The side of the room we entered in was mostly for people listening, around the corner was the side for people speaking and the VIPs who were really participating. I walked with the prince to the main side and he took his seat with the royal family. I, sort of embarrassingly, realized I wasn't supposed to sit there with them, so I played it off as if I was just walking him in and continued to my seat near the entrance area. Some of my cousins were there including MD and I asked, "Would you believe me if I told you I had been hanging out with the prince?" He said, "No." I didn't think I could make anyone believe me.




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