I imagine everyone can relate to this.  I have recognized a handful of sensations that my body goes through that only happen during very specific situations.  Some of them occur more often than others and some of them have only occurred a few times in my entire life.  I have no clue what triggers these feelings (well what physically triggers them) but they are always the same and I can’t seem to control them when they happen.

Probably the most common feelings of the types I am describing is the feeling of losing something, usually money.  It is at the very point when my brain realizes that I believe I have lost something.  It is simply a feeling I have no idea how to describe in words but I know it very well and it unfortunately happens to me too often.  When I left my wallet on the train a few months back, I remember the feeling quite distinctly.  I had already walked with JJ all the way from one side of this ginormous Shanghai Train Station where the train stopped all the way to the other side where we could pick up Line One of the subway to take back into town and it was at this point when I realized my wallet was missing.  My entire body froze, my hands started patting everything it could possibly pat, all pockets on both sides of my pants, everywhere the backpack could physically hold a wallet.  Then I started dumping everything on the ground, researching my pockets, getting more frantic and more angry.  All the while, my body was going through this sensation of losing money, which is just such a horrible feeling.  (The good news this time was that the wonderful workers at the train station ended up calling me the next day, bright and early, to tell me the cleaners of the train found my wallet, money intact.  Never would have expected that…)

Another feeling, this one a bit better than the ‘losing money’ one, is when I see something that completely takes me by surprise.  This one is kind of weird because it has happened only a few times and it seems to hit me when I see something in public that completely blindsides me.  Today, walking home from dinner, I experienced this.  I was in the Jing An Subway Station and as I was about to take my metro card out of my wallet I noticed this logo on the bottom of the machines that everyone uses to purchase their metro cards:

Notice the logo at the bottom:

For those of you that don’t know (which is everyone minus JJ, Xiao Liang, and Kevin Liu), this was the company I worked for when I came first came to China.  In actuality, this was the super corporate branch of the company I worked for.  I worked for Pubiao, which was officially like a subsidiary but more like a ‘using a famous company to get grow its cliental’ kind of subsidiary.  Apparently they struck a friggin HUGE deal with the Shanghai government to install all the Subway card machines and I think even make the entire technology, including manufacturing the cards.   I would like to link to the Pubiao web site, but apparently I can’t remember it, pubiao.cn and pubiao.com does not exist, and Google & Baidu returns nothing.  SO thumbs down for Pubiao.  Thumbs up though for Potevio! (Although, their link is not currently working with my tunnel proxy (which comes from the US) and is only working from China, so maybe its just one thumb up for now….)