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Classmate in China

Last week my friend from UA visited Beijing, as he was able to take some time off work and wanted to see China. Right after that I left for Korea on a vacation of my own! Here first are some pics from China.
Its a flying shrimp! Look out! This was at dinner at Bai Jia Dayuan 白家大院, a fancy place that's in a famous old courtyard house and has a performance during dinner.
Peking Opera.
Look Ma! I'm part of the band!
An artistic photo of the Temple of Heaven with my disembodied hand floating in the upper left.
Clay at the Temple of Heaven park being Asian.

Over the last few weeks

So you see these signs all over the city, but I'm not sure what they're pointing to. I'm pretty sure the Olympic Village isn't particularly close to this sign, and in any case its just indicating an entrance onto a highway. Hopefully their signage for the proper highway exit is just as well marked.

There are a lot of people in China. To get from my house to the subway I take a bus that passes through this intersection, which is always crowded (although this day way particularly bad). This photo was taken from the bus window. Interestingly, Kunming (the city I visited last weekend) has started putting in bus-only express lanes down the middle of their streets to make bus travel more attractive and reliable. If only Beijing would follow suit!

As that last post got spammed...

...I've turned on the word-typey thing for posting comments. Sorry.

Trip to Kunming 到昆明的旅行

Hi everyone! Last weekend I took a quick weekend trip to Kunming, where I lived when I first came to China (four years ago already!). I wanted to see some friends there, and also I found a screaming deal on plane tickets so off I went!Here we have me and a few friends, recently married. That delicious food is courtesy of Yunnan's Dai ethnic group. They've got an interesting spicy-sour thing going on, fabulous!
Look! Blue sky! They still have that in Kunming!
A restaurant with ambiance.
A few more of my friends from my Previous Life in Kunming.
Cat on a roof with friend-in-yellow-shirt's tiny car in the background.

Trip to Huairou 旅行到怀柔去

Last weekend we got out of the city a bit to Huairou where there's an old section of the Great Wall. As it turns out, there is also a canyon with boats, rafts and...a bungee jump...at the bottom. Of course. It was still lovely, and accessible by city bus, so convenient. It was about 11 kuai (less than 2 dollars) for transportation, and I managed to gather four people (including gathering myself) to go, one other American (my classmate from Indiana) and two Chinese (my current roommate and my roommate from the last time I lived in Beijing.



Not bad, eh?

This is the Chinglish jewel of the past few weeks. I didn't know 'almond coolies' were still sold in China, I thought they left when Mao kicked out the foreign imperialist aggressors.

Last Friday a different classmate from Indiana was in Beijing and organized karaoke with almost thirty (yes, 30!) people. She rented out an entire room, all you can sing and all you can drink. It ended up at about 35 kuai a person (around 5 dollars). She's lived in China before, and has sung karaoke a few times, can you tell from the picture?

And as promised, pictures of my shiney new (and as of this typing) not yet stolen bike!
And here's the Chinese-style lock on the back wheel.
And here's what I bike through to get to work. This is part of the road/bike path that goes through my neighborhood and past some of the older buildings, which you can see behind my bike.

Go rbt cafe!

There's a cafe that I'd seen before in China, is symbol is a stylized rabbit and I don't know the characters in its Chinese name (I should look them up. Later.) Its English name is rbt. And, I have discovered, has FREE WIRELESS AT ALL LOCATIONS!!! We are very happy about this. Yes, we are.

Still no internet at home, but I have had some other successes. One, I bought this awesome Hello Kitty keyboard vacuum that's powered through a USB port. Sweet!

I also bought a new electronic dictionary today, very exciting. For about $50 I got a touch-screen dealy where I can write in a character as well as type in, like my old one. I still wish my old one hadn't broken, but this is a good replacement, and wasn't TOO expensive compared to the fancy color-screen-will-practically-do-your-English-homework-for-you variety. And buying it gave me an excuse to go the big electronics super-center down the road from where I live (the one at 中关村 for those of you who know). Wheee, electronic gadgets! Anything you could ever want and more. In triplicate. On the downside, also lots of people trying to sell you things. 'HELLO! HELLO! SONY! I-BEE-EM!'

This morning I also got more pictures of Beijing University to share. This is the lake that's just inside the gate that I walk through. There are pretty pretty coy in it.And often cute children looking in it.

However, Beijing is still dirty. These are my (before coming to Beijing) brand-new shoes after one day of wearing them. They were mostly in the office too! Really its after two walks across campus.

I'm walken, All by myself

Things are going well here in China, or at least as well as can be expected. I have a nasty cold that caused me to text in sick for half a day (that's right, text. Phone calls are so passe here in China, and also quite expensive compared to texting). Being sick coincided with a power outage at my apartment complex. This is not surprising, it happens all the time all over China, but talk about adding insult to injury! Actually, it turned out to be a blessing because without power, the people in the downstairs apartment couldn't continue on their remodeling task which involves jackhammers on the ceiling, it seems like. When I woke up from my morning sick-nap, the power had just come back on and the jackhammers were just getting started. Time for me to go to work!

A few nights ago, though, I took a walk. It was a nice night out, and I needed bobby pins and cough drops, a good challenge for a night's walk in Beijing. I ended up maybe 15 minutes down the road at a Watson's (a British CVS-type place), which was in a shopping corner called 'Left Bank' in Chinese. It had nice statues.

Here's the university gate I walk through every day to get to work. Its across the street from my apartment-park area, and is the most famous gate at the university. Also lots of people taking their pictures in front of it or posing their babies in carriages in front of it. High hopes, you know?

Yesterday a professor from Indiana University came to give a talk, which I attended. I want a copy of the powerpoint he used because someone translated, word for word, everything. Good words like public finance, and capital gains, and federalist system. More importantly, I want to study the grammar patterns they used. I'm no good with formal Chinese.

Last night I went on another walk, this time to get to free wifi. On the way back there was a night market, yay! There were watches, and purses, and clothes, and bowls, and jewelery, and clocks, and....puppies. SO CUTE! All different kinds in one box. I got the impression that whoever brought them here had gotten them from a wholesaler, and purposefully brought them in every shape and size to appeal to more people. Don't like this one, how about that one? I'm pretty sure the guy told a girl looking at the dogs that the beagle she was holding would be about 2/3 the size that beagles actually grow.

Most deliciously, its yangmei 杨梅 season! They were selling them on the streets. I used to get these in Harbin all the time, they're sometimes really sour but always super juicy, and I mean look at those, how could you not want to eat them?

又在中国了 Once again, in China.

Hello everyone! I see that I apparently haven't been anywhere interesting since 2006, according to this blog. Well, I'm back in China, so you get more posts. This time I'm here for an internship with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, which has a 3-odd-year-old office on the Beijing University campus, informally known as BeiDa. This is all very exciting. I, in theory, get to learn about how an international research foundation works, and in any case they research stuff I'm interested in (land policy, sustainable development, tax policy). However...my boss wasn't in when I went to work last Friday so I got put in an office and told 'ok, get to work' and then left by myself, haha. I acted like a good Chinese worker and browsed the internet to appear busy, and then acted like a good American worker and left early because I was jetlagged. SO: I still don't know what I should be doing exactly. Hopefully my boss will be in on Monday!

My flight here was uneventful: I didn't sleep, as usual, but Korean Air was super nice and had good food. Middle seat between two Korean businessmen, but I survived. The worst part was getting to Beijing and a) forgetting my debit card pin so I couldn't get money and b) getting the only cab driver in Beijing who doesn't know where BeiDa is. Let me explain. A) It's not that I didn't remember my code, its that I have it memorized by the letters, and Chinese ATMs both don't have letters AND they switch the keypad order (the 7 is in the upper-left corner instead of the 1). I know this. Its been this way every time. But for the life of me after this long trip I just couldn't get the code switched properly in my head. In the end, I desperately exchanged what US cash I had (like $30) for an exorbitant fee, hoping that this would be enough to make it to BeiDa. B) I get in the cab, and say I want to go to BeiDa. This is like showing up in NYC and saying you want to go to Columbia. Common and famous. The cab driver starts off, slowly, much slower than your usual cutting-through-traffic Chinese cab driver. Halfway there he pulls to the side of the road and gets out a map, saying he's not sure where BeiDa is. No, he doesn't want to call anyone. Could I also read the map? His eyes aren't good and can't see it. GAH! I end up looking all over the map for the tiny characters that say 'BaiDa' and then give the driver directions to where I *think* the east gate of the university must be (where I'm supposed to meet my people).

气死我了.

In the end, everything was fine. I met my people, I was taken to my home for the next three months, and met my roommate, who is from Inner Mongolia and very sweet. Also about five feet tall and tiny, its really funny when we stand next to each other. Funny things that have happened: the day after I got there, I took a shower and got dressed as usual, and she said 'wow! you look so stylish! yesterday when you got off the plane you just looked like a graduate student.' Also, 'your hair is NATURALLY that curly? no! really? no! I just couldn't figure out before why foreigners always permed their hair so much! you mean you guys really just have hair like that? many of you? wow!'

Here is where I'm living:This is what you see when you first walk in. I'm on the third floor of a 40-year-old apartment complex. The university owns it and many professors used to live there, I'm told. Since the people who the university gave the apartments to can't sell them (since the U still owns the rights, even though the people have the right to 'use' them, and I think pay for that right), all they can do is move and then rent out their old spots, which many do.
The kitchen is to the left once you walk in, and looks like this. The whole apartment setup is very, very similar to the ones my teachers had in Harbin and Kunming.
This is the other side of the kitchen. The box above the sink is the hot water heater for the house--yay! 24 hour hot water!
Here's the bathroom. Yes, that's the shower-head above the washing machine on the left. We cover the washing machine with plastic bags to help keep it from getting trashed. I don't think it helps. Also, the machine's not attached to the water line so we have to fill it with a hose from the sink before we start it. BUT...there's a washing machine to begin with, so I'm happy!
This is my room. HUGE!
And perhaps the best part, this is the view! That's right, its GREEN in Beijing! Amazing. The birds are loud in the morning, and there's this one type that I see everywhere--it's black with a blue head, very pretty and fairly large. I had no idea Beijing anywhere still had animals besides tiny dogs, bats and pigeons.