I fell in a hole.

Yeah, that’s what happened. Now let me explain further.

The part of Xiangyang that I live in really can’t be regarded as what you and I know to be a city. We are at one of the furthest points away from the city center, in an area that’s even more rural than suburbia. If it was any more rural than it currently is, it would be regarded as the 农村 (nong cun), the countryside…aka the boondocks.

As I believe I’ve mentioned before, we live in the bed of a few mountains, nearby lots of farmland and pretty scenery. Every day I see chickens and cows and pigs and hear the crowing of roosters. Often I can see the farmers burning parts of their fields, or just burning trash. I’ve got another interesting story of my life in this area, but that’s for next entry.

Anyway, one of the things that comes with living in rural China is the lack of certain things that are necessary but you hardly think about in America. Things like simple driving rules that should be enforced by police officers to prevent a multitude of accidents. Things like having adequate lighting on the commonly-used roads at night…or anywhere people need to be walking in the middle of the night.

The latter issue was the thing that caused the title of this entry. Where I live, there is maybe one street light every maybe 300-400 meters, which creates huge patches of dark on the streets. There are places where you have absolutely no idea where you’re walking and are just floundering around in the dark. Now, on the final stretch to my apartment, on a small road, I discovered an opening in the sidewalk earlier that day. It was about 3 feet deep and inside there was some sort of faucet, so I assume the opening was there for hoses to attach to. Anyway, the hole was big and deep and I made a mental note to myself to not go walking on the sidewalk when it got dark at night.

So that night I was in a bit of a hurry to get to where I was going, so I walked out of my apartment rather quickly and made my way down the road. When I got near to the end of that stretch I realized I had left my key back in my apartment. Now, it was raining and it was cold, and all I was focused on doing was turning back and going to get the spare key so I could open my apartment and get my own. So I turned around quickly and began walking fast down the sidewalk back to my apartment.

I was walking…and then all of a sudden I was SO not.

I didn’t understand how I was on the ground, all scratched up, and then I realized that I had fallen into the very hole I had warned myself about earlier. Ow.

I’m really lucky, because if I hadn’t fallen the way I’d fallen, with my arms in front of me protecting my face, my mouth would have gone straight into the corner of the top of the hole and that would’ve been disastrous. And if my legs had fallen in any stranger a way, rather than pretty much straight down, bones would’ve been broken. Yikes.

So I pulled myself up out of the hole, and I had hurt my hip a little so it was a little hard. I then took a moment then got up from the ground and proceeded to go back to my apartment in the rain. I didn’t even see the hole coming. The street was completely dark and even after I knew it was there and looked again, I still couldn’t see it. Talk about dangerous. So that’s my story.