DIMINISHED THOUGHT

Jen missed her flight. I woke up this morning to "Scott wake up! It's 7:47 am!" I don't fly out till Wednesday. I got up helped her drag all her stuff downstairs to the bus and threw her on it. I decided that I was going to go get breakfast and turned my back on Nathan Rd and made for Hankow were there is a grocery store in the basement of one the large buildings. Along the way I noticed a woman buying breakfast from a streetvendor and I stopped and asked for whatever she was having. What I got was a styrofoam container packed with noodles and a lemon tea in a juicebox container. The noodles had that sort of greasy goodness that makes you warm and happy on the inside when you eat them and guilty when your trying to wipe your mouth and considering what you've just eaten. They had little bits of meat and vegetables in them and the woman asked whether I wanted any sauce....well of course. It ended up being a thick, spicy chili sauce that was remeniscent of that found in Thai food. Oh so good!

I grabbed the plastic bag and went down to the harbor behind the Hong Kong cultural center to eat my food and enjoy the view. While there I did something very un-Chinese...I sat down. The Chinese do not like to sit on the ground. The detest it and consider it filthy. The few times they will do it they tear up sheets of newspaper and spread it out on the ground. Rather than sitting they sport what the London guys I was traveling with referred to as "mad squatting skillz" (yes with the Z). They can do this for a really long time. I've been practicing but I'm not anywhere up to par with those guys. Anyway the harbor walk was fairly deserted considering it was 8:10 in the morning and I sat there and had my breakfast with one of the best views in Hong Kong.

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Yesterday I climbed to the top of Victoria Peak, the mountain which overlooks Hong Kong. Ok, so I didn't climb it. I took the tram but I would have climbed it given the option. The view is breathtaking and you can see the entire harbor. It makes you wonder what was going through the Brits heads during the finally of the first opium war when they decided that they wanted to build their city here. I figure that they recognized the value of the harbor and being Brits they were well aware of the benefits of having a channel of water between you and your enemy but so much of the island is not really habitable. There's not really any arrable land to speak of. The Chinese must have thought them insane.

Now from Victoria Peak the financial district with some of the tallest buildings in Asia strecth out in front of you. You can see the buildings of Kowloon and the ever present backdrop of mountains. They're building a monstrosity of archetecture up on the top that they call Peak Tower. It' s going to be finished here in a few monthes. Hopefully it'll provide a good viewing platform becasue right now it's in the way. Not to mention it's just ugly as sin.

This is the first time I've been able to see my blog since I left home. China is weird in that you can post to your blog all you want but you can't see it. Go figure. I guess it says something for the quality of writing that you can access xanga from China but Blogger....that's a negative.

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Right now I'm kicking around Hong Kong. I'm in the Chungking Mansions (actually read this link...it gives a decent description) on the 17th and top floor. Pray there is no fire. This place is a post apocalyptic nightmare. There are at least three seperate tenant blocks only easily accessible by elevator although you can use the stairs as I found out earlier today. Primarily the population consists of Africans, Indians, and Pakistani's who hassle you to go eat in their restaurant or if you need a cheap tailor as you come through the bottom floor's front doors. From that point on you realize you're inside an immense and living creature. The bottom floor is a honeycomb or stalls and shops that sell knockoff clothing, bollywood DVDs, food, bags, electronics, phonecards and anything else you can probably think off.

The smell of curry and cumin blasts over you from the numerous Pakistani and Indian restuarants that reside in C block. Jen and I got brave the first night we were here and tried one on the fourth floor. The inside was decorated with pictures of the Haj and we were the only customers ...not a really good sign. There were several pieces of art on the walls inscribed with illegible arabic script. The food was actually suprisingly good and cheap for Hong Kong. We had Rogan Josh and a chicken curry dish. I didn't get sick.

During peak times the two elevators that lead to the numerous hostels and guesthouses in A block are crowded with people pushing and fighting to get on board. To solve this they've hired a guard who regulates the elevators on the ground floor. If too many people get on the elevator alarm will sound and it won't move. This morning I took the stairwell and decided to never do it at night, or ever again for that matter. It makes no sense. You head down the stairway and every window is broken out. The floor looks like it hasn't been swept in years. As you approach the ground floor it gets worse. Only in the center of the staircase can you see the floor. Along the edges dirt has accumulated over the years. Wires, pipes and conduits ran exposed throughout the staircase. On the third floor the staircase ends and you follow small yellow laminated signs in Chinese and English that say "Exit to ground floor -->". You walk the length of the floor to another staircase and continue the downward journey. At the bottom you don't finish in the building but rather it spits you out into an alley next to a man selling bags and another washing off the pavement with a bucket of water in the early morning.

I'm surrounded by computer nerds. I hear the heavy clack clack of keyboards as someone, somewhere trys to kill a seventh level mage in the nether regions of Hibiscia or something like that. I'm sitting in an internet cafe in Shanghai that seems to be used primarily for games.

Shanghai is cool if not a bit more expensive than Beijing. Tall buildings rise up out of the ground putting my hometowns skyline to shame (it doesn't really have one in retrospect) and each building is capped with a unique structure. It reminds me of a normal city in which each building had an alien space ship land on top of it. The other night Jen, some guys from England, and some fellow American travelers tried to go to the top of Jin Mao to loiter and drink beer in the classiest hotel bar in Shanghai with a view overlooking the colonial architecture along river bank which locals refer to as the Bund. The laughed us out of there. Apparently we can't wear shorts, sneakers, sandals (they call them slippers for some reason) up to the top. So pretty much we were shut out. We ended up drinking at a roof top bar across the way with a pool table and two american dollar beers (pretty good for Shanghai)...

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Right now we're meshing out rules for a fun drinking game involving Suntory, rolexes, skates, foam mice, panhandling children, and the Bund... Look forward to it!

Hostel computers are expensive. I'm alive and in Shanghai relatively disaster free. No worries. Hope to see you all soon.

This will probably be short...I'm about to teach class. Yesterday I realized that my students hadn't understood the movie I had shown them the day before (The Recruit) so I asked them if they would like to go play football (soccer) in the afternoon. They jumped at the opportunity. We met in the room at 2:40 and biked over to the pitch. These kids were all really good. I mean scary good. I wasn't about to be able to keep up. I did have a few advantages though. I outweigh many of them by about twenty to thirty pounds and when they come barreling into me they loose their footing.

Since being in China I haven't seen anyone take off their shirt for any reason, even sports so I was hoping that I wouldn't offend my students by peeling my off by the time I got to the pitch. To my surprise they were already dividing into shirts and skins when I got there. Other teachers have told me they couldn't get their kids to do that but mine did it on their own.

I'm going to play football with my students. This is an opportunity for them to see how pitiful I truly am....

Yesterday I decided I wanted to do something nice for my kids so we went out and bought fruit. It's kind of funny...in China, while sweets exist, they're not really big on them. The closest thing to dessert that the dining hall has is watermelon and they eat alot of fruit. I had an hour to kill in the afternoon so I decided on Friday that Monday we were going to have, as one of my students put it, "a melon party".

Throughout the campus they have fruit stalls set up with men sitting on the side of the road with fruit set out to sell. Many of the things that they sell are familiar...peaches, watermelons, apples but they also sell things a bit more exotic such as leechys. Leechys are these bumpy little fruits that are somewhat maroon or pink on the outside with a sweet pearl like flesh on the inside once you peel away the thick skin. I've seen them but never eaten them in the states. Too expensive. Here they're not so bad. I actually was in a bar and they were selling leechy daquiris so I had to buy one to try it. Not bad actually.

Anyway we went down to the market and bought about seven watermelons. About four guys came with me from the class and it was fun to watch them pick through the watermelons trying to select ones that they thought were ripe. They do it the same way we do in the states by thumping them. When they selected one they would throw it across the stall to the woman whose husband would put it on a scale and weigh it. All in all I paid about a dollar a melon. We also got about 25 peaches. We got less because not everyone might like peaches. We then loaded up the watermelon in bags which we hung from the handlebars as we pedaled our way across campus on our bikes.

Originally I had been planning on doing this in the class room but then realized what a really bad idea that was. I asked my students where we should go and they recommended the dining hall. As a result we all met outside the dining hall at 2:30 pm and proceeded in side to cut the melons up. It was a mess. Juice went everywhere. The staff who was cleaning the hall just worked around us. I thought that at any moment they would approach us and ask us what we were doing and why we were making such a large mess. They did not. I told my students that if we had done the same thing in the United States we would probably be in a lot of trouble at that point.

I think the difference may be in dining hall construction. Chinese dining halls are not terribly cheerful places and have an industrial air about them. They are dimly lit primarily from florescent lights although there is some natural light coming in through the windows. Tables are plastic and the chairs are bolted to the tables and cannot be moved. The ground is tile of some sort. I think this construction may make clean up very easy. The Chinese tend to spit alot on the tables and the way they're made makes it very easy to just wipe the tables off.

So my kids tore apart the watermelon. I was amazed. I wasn't planning on eating any of the peaches because they had skins and hadn't been adequately washed in my mind and I don't want to get sick. The Chinese idea of washing fruit is to run a little water over it. No soap seems to be involved. Anyway I turned my back and when I turned back around there wasn't a peach in sight. I saw a bunch of them eating them but I don' t know if they ate them all or they dissapeared into bags or what. It's easy to dissapear a peach but much harder to do it with a watermelon.

I cut the first one but I did such a piss poor job that they took over almost immediately. I wasn't paying attention but they consumed four watermelons before I started counting. We ended up with a few left over which was ok because I would rather have too many than not enough. They would spit the seeds and throw the rinds on the tables. I reminded them to be neat because I felt bad for the cleaning staff. I have pictures of kids with huge piles of rinds in front of them. It was so much fun.

I'm back from Datong.... I'm really glad that I went. I feel that I got to see another side of China than that which I've observed here in Beijing. Where as Beijing feels like a mirror world...a twisted and distorted version of the West moving into smaller cities at times feels like you're on another planet. The first thing that struck me about Datong was all the trash. I know that neighbor hoods around train stations usually aren't the most classy but this was exceptionally bad. Just in the streets ...everywhere. Two men took a leak on the side of a building as we walked by. Food rotted on the ground. There seemed to be a general lack of concern for hygeine. That being said when I finally did get to central Datong it was much cleaner but leaving the main thorough fare led you back to streets that would need a lot of work to be considered clean.

In order to get to the Hanging Monastery and the caves we had to take a tour (100 yuan or about 12 bucks) and we lucked out and were put into a cab as opposed to the tour bus. Essentially we had our own cabbie for the day. He was kind of funny. He had this Michael Jackson greatest hits tape that he would play when we were awake. As soon as he thought we were all asleep he'd yank it out and replace it with a radio program in Chinese. Still no seatbelts in the back seat. In Datong, they drive crazier than in Beijing if that's possible. Furthermore, if you sit in the front seat and move to put on your seatbelt they will indicate that it's not needed. Several times I was wondering whether we were going to hit on coming traffic as our driver passed at high speeds. Datong drivers sole solution to oncoming traffic is to try to go faster than the person in lane next to you and beat the oncoming traffic. Other traffic obstacles consisted of donkey carts, bicylists, people, foxhole size potholes, and anything that might have been thrown into the road. Closing your eyes and sleeping was really the only way to deal with it.

Up in the moutain they stopped the tour for the obligatory guilt trip with people selling small mobiles by the side of the road. The local people were shrewd enough to bring up their small children and to teach them to thrust the mobiles into the faces of the tourists. It was pretty sad but I don't respond well to intentional manipulation. Ostensibly, the purpose for the stop had been to look at the old traditional village that had been their for over a 100 years. I don't know about you but in China 100 years doesn't seem like that long.

Finally, we got to the hanging temple or "temple in the void". Originally the valley had flooded frequently so the people built their temple high into a mountain side to avoid the sun, rain, wind and flood waters. The natural contour of the rock provides protection from all the elements. As years passed flooding has filled in the valley so while the temple used to 100 meters above the ground it's now only about 50. During construction they climbed down from the top, drilled holes for beams and sunk the beams into the mountain side. Vertical poles are for aesthetics as opposed to structural support. I thought that the temple was really cool because of all the painted wood and staircases. It was like something out of fairytale, with random stairways and strange rooms. Overall the complex was extremely large but it was impressive both in aesthetics and in design.

Next we went to the Yuangang caves. I really wish that we could have spent more time here. Large stone buddhas are carved into the man made caves and each cave is intricately carved in it's own right. This is one of the most interesting things I've ever seen. Each of the buddhas was carved to look like an emperor and would have been covered in painted plaster if the caves were still upkept as in ancient days. Some caves still have bits of plaster clinging to the walls and buddhas and you can see how brightly painted they would have appeared. Each cave had two openings a top and a bottom one. The reason for this was so that they would have light as they worked. They would start at the top carve their way down and then make a doorway.

Going dark for a few days...nobody panic. I'm heading to Datong this weekend to see the caves and the hanging monastery. Tonight I take my first night train in China (and I'm not talking about fortified wine).

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Last night we went to dinner with some of my professors from Purdue who happened to be Beijing for some sort of conference, some Chinese Purdue graduate students, and some new Chinese friends. The restaurant was very nice but there were a few problems. For example, I was seated all the way at the end of the table making it very difficult for me to get enough to eat. In China all dishes are put in the middle of the table and people pick out the food they want directly from the platter with their chopsticks. Perhaps not the most sanitary custom but I haven't gotten sick yet. A small plate is provided to spit out bones, wraps, or to put a few pieces of food on but this is generally no larger than a large saucer. As a result of being at the end of the table only a few dishes were accessible to me and I had to ask to be passed several dishes that contained meat. Then again I didn't end up paying for it so who am I to complain. Overall it was a really positive experience and I have pictures that I'll post as soon as I get the opportunity.

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So Jen and I bought this bottle of Chinese rice wine that we really haven't touched. The stuff is rough. My chinese friend Jim took a big swig of it and I did the same. Tastes like someone put a few shots of pure grain alcohol into a bottle of sake. I checked the label and it's 80 proof...ugh.... Last night at dinner we did actually end up with a nice bottle of Tibetan wine. Very delicate without much of a bite. The stuff was excellent and was what we would think of as wine in the United States and Europe. A lot time when you order wine here you end up with something made from fruit that slightly resembles port or brandy.

The taxi cabs have no seat belts and are dirt cheap. It's a dollar to go three kilometers and then 15 cents for each additional mile. Originally we were biking down to some of the bars around campus but one night when we were coming back from something further in town our cab drove by a mangled bicycle in the middle of the road and police taking pictures. Later we learned that an American student from William and Mary's who was studying Mandarin had been hit by a motorcyclist and had fractured his skull and punctured his lungs. He was experiencing Chinese medicine first hand. Jen and I decided it was worth the freaking dollar to ride down to Wudaeku. Somethings you shouldn't cheap out on.....

More Random things about China:

Little kids stare at me when I ride around campus like they've never seen a white person before. The brave one's like to shout out hello.

People are constantly amazed that a westerner can use chopsticks. Somehow that stereotype has survived to current day.

My student's have all been asking me for English names...I guess because it's easier to pronounce for English speakers. So fair's fair, I told them if I gave them English names they were going to have to give me a Chinese name. We had a contest in class to come up with the best names and then the class as a whole voted on it. My new name is Shi Kai. Shi is a common family name like Smith and Kai means victory. They said I could shorten it to Sky. Just to make sure they weren't pulling my leg I asked a few Chinese folks what it meant without telling them what my kids had said and they confirmed that they weren't playing some horrible joke on me. They originally tried to phonetically spell my name in Chinese but it just wouldn't work...

Oh, and yesterday some of them told me I wasn't really white but my face was more of a yellow color. More on that later.

So I barely have time to eat. As some of you might know I've been trying to do research on cell phone usage among young, urban Chinese while here in Beijing and have been conducting interviews. On Monday night a new friend of mine posted a solicitation for participants on a bulletin board system on the Tsinghua campus. All of a sudden I'm the most popular man in Beijing. Everybody wants to come and be interviewed and I guess practice their English with a native speaker. I've even had participants ask if they could sit in on my classes...As a result I've been juggling phone calls, text messages, emails and walk ins for the past to days at a level that's just obscene. I'm using my pocket pc scheduler and I'm still having trouble keeping things straight. My day doesn't end until 9.30 this evening ...I might have time to eat.

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So something really bizarre happened a few nights ago. I needed to talk to someone because I forgot my key in the room and I went downstairs to talk to the desk staff who pretty much speak exclusively Chinese. I was trying to communicate when I vaguely remembered someone mentioning that one of the guys downstairs spoke some Spanish. So low and behold I tried and it worked.

Last night one of the other guys, a Brit named Michael, lost his bike key and was trying in vain to tell the staff what had happened. I wandered in and was able to impress upon them what had occurred by speaking Spanish. Halfway around the world I find the one guy who speaks Spanish. Go figure. I guess that's meeting halfway...

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I taught a lesson on Black English, or Ebonics, today. It's extremely amusing to see Chinese kids acting out skits talking about their "Bling Bling" and "pulling gats" on their "homeys" while trying to stay one step ahead of the "po-po". I'll give everyone the "411" on teaching when I get back stateside.
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I'm going to Datong this weekend. Apparently they've got some Buddhist caves out their filled with statues of Buddha carved into the walls, stalagtites, and ceiling. It's supposed to be incredibly impressive and all my students have heard of it. Also, I'm going to check out the Hanging Monastery which was built up the sides of a cliff. It ought to be really interesting. I'll tell you more once I've been.

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Finally, I'm sorry to everyone for not having the time to write. I feel really guilty but I figure that each of you would rather that I be productive in Beijing and use what little free time I have to enjoy the experience and get more from being in China rather than being chained to a keyboard banging out emails for everyone. Then again some of you ....

This is what happens when you try to get someone to write you a short note in Chinese for train reservations....

"That will be impossible..." That's what the girl behind the front desk of my dorm told me when I told her that I wanted to go to Datong this weekend. Michael, a quarter Chinese American, stood there translating for me.
"Ask her why?" I told him. Incomprehensible sounds issued forth from both their mouths until it came to a perfunctory conclusion.
"Because you don't speak Chinese."
"Tell her that I've been in other countries where I didn't speak the language."
Again with the sound. I felt like Charlie Brown listening to his teacher.
"This is different she says. This is their country and China is different. What do you want me to tell them?"
"Tell them I'm a crazy American and I'm going to do it anyway." He turns to tell them. "No, tell them thank you and that I'll be fine."

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Yesterday I went to the Dirt Market, which is a large knick knack/ antique market...most everything there is one form of trash or another. The vendors there are not nearly so pushy as at the Pearl Market and less inclined to bargain as well. Still it's a buyers market. I bought a large caligraphy print that I'm still not sure how I'm going to get home, some chopsticks, and my favorite thing I bought are some old buddist chimes (at least I think they're old). There's a lot of stuff there that one can tell is genuinely old and alot of stuff that just wants to look it. My favorite is all the blue and white vases with dirt all over them as if they had been freshly extracted from the ground. I also like the polished rocks, proving at least in my mind, that you can sell anything to someone.

So the big news is that I have new pictures up from the Great Wall on my Flickr account....

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So today we hired a private minivan to take us out to Mutianyu, a section of the Great Wall that while having a comercial prescence is less crowded and comercial than Badaling (at least according to the guidebooks and the locals...we'll just have to trust them... I have no inclination to go out to Badaling). I sat on a jump seat in the seat beltless van as it sped through Beijing traffic when it could and ground to a halt when it couldn't. Getting around in a car in Beijing is just about the most frustrating thing on the planet. It makes me feel like the things should be banned altogether. Just about every driver has a massive red tassel and stone/glass good luck charm hanging from the dashboard mirror and with the way they drive they probably need it. Likely serves a duel purpose of keeping them from having to look at oncoming traffic the thing is so big.

Anyway, we made our way out to the wall which is up in the mountains a bit. It was quite pretty but there was a fog that really obstructed the view. I'm actually quite pleased with how the pictures all came out. The wall stretched out like a giant, writhing snake that curled it's way along mountain ridges. Walking up to the wall they have steps that go straight up the mountain side it's quite a climb but the entire mountain has tree cover. Up on top you walk along the granite wall with large watchtowers that over look the surronding valleys. In the past when invading armies approached they would light fires along the wall to signal their approach. Now it's just for the tourists. I was actually surprised by how steep the wall itself became. You could tumble down if you weren't careful and I dropped a bottle of water which went a good twenty five yards before finally stopping. The whole experience with all the steps made me wish that I had had the foresight to bring a slinky with me. If I ever come back I will. I imagine it could go forever....

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So my brother Paul thinks it's important to know how to piss off people of all nations and creeds when you travel. You just need to know. It's a people skill (mind you not a good one). So we have a bunch of folks from Britain with us teaching English and I've come up with something that really gets their knickers in a bunch. I've been telling them, "Brits are just Americans that we refused to let in..." They just stand their kind of flabbergasted.

So yesterday evening we went out to eat and after finishing dinner we decided to wander around the streets for a bit just to see what we could find. On a lark Jen and Erica decided to go into a little tea shop and I followed them in. I'm glad I did. I turned out to be one of the better experiences of the night. A man set in this small shop surrounded by elaborately decorated canisters of tea behind a small table which held a sturdy but austere wooden grate, a glass goblet, a small glass pitcher, several porcelin cups, a few tea strainers. The only English that he spoke was the names of the different types of the teas but he managed to convince us to sit and began to make us tea. He would heat the water on a small burner and then put a bit of the tea leaves into the goblet when the water was hot he would fill the goblet with water and allow the tea leaves to steep. He would pour the excess hot water over a small ceramic frog with a coin in his mouth that sat on the edge of the grate. At first we were confused as to why he would do this and guessed that perhaps it was about luck but we later decided that it had more to do with making sure the water was cool prior to hitting the wood. Anyway he would filter the tea into the pitcher and then serve it to you in the small porcelain cups. He kept repeating this process with different sorts of tea until we told him to stop. Over all in this tiny shop just off a busy Beijing street I found myself relaxed.

So last night I Jen and I decided to go out and celebrate the fourth of July so we headed down to Wudaeku (sp.?) to some of the local bars. Along the way we happened to bump into a few people from our program that convinced us to follow them around the corner to the Pepper Farm, a bar they had visited the night before. Walking up the bar looked wholy unimpressive with a large Jack Daniels billboard-like sign above the glass front doors but upon entering the entire place was bathed in a crimson red light and was actually very posh. There were massive boothes in which you could fit 10 people with deep maroon upholstery and the wait staff was curt but courteous. The bar had red brick walls and small tea candles were placed on the tables Best of all Martinis were about 2.50 american (but that's still very expensive for the Chinese).

As we were sitting there lights came on in the other room above the bar and the guys we were with told us that we had to go watch this. It was amazing. These guys could twirl the bottles and catch them on the backs of there hands. They would juggle two bottles with one hand and use the other hand to wave a bottle in between the juggled ones. They spit fire. They flipped the drinks so that the bottles landed pouring into the shaker. On and on to the beat of Techno music as a live DJ next to the bar went at it. Like nothing I've ever seen. Incredible. Made Tom Cruise in "Cocktail" look autistic...

So Chinese table manners leave a lot to be desired... apparently when one has something in one's mouth that shouldn't be there it's ok to spit it out on the table. Drinking soup or gruel from a bowl is OK. You can pick up your plate to shovel in rice with chopsticks. I ate lunch with one of my students today (English name is Phillips...don't know the Chinese one) and he spoke with the entire time with food in his mouth. No worries though. I'm willing to let a lot slide. They asked me how long I'd been studying to use chopsticks and I told them I'd been using them on a semi-regular basis for the past two years or so....

Other funny things about China:

- When it's hot the men roll their shirts up past there bellys and stand there with them hanging out.

- The air is so polluted that you can't see more than a mile or so. It's like looking through Gauze. Blue skys? What's that?

- Wine here tastes a little bit like cognac...it's really thick and very strong.

So I've finished my second morning of classes. This is so much fun. I love it. My kids started off really shy but I think I've come a long way to breaking them down. In the last day I've sung a song at the top of my lungs, danced, juggled, said tongue twisters as fast as I could, blared rock music, invited myself to sit with them in the dining, and showed them how to call the hogs, oh they're so caving.... As a culture I think that it's really hard for them to get up in front of the class and say anything. They might lose face. I told them right off that this wasn't going to be a normal class and by showing them I'm not afraid to be a bit silly I think I'm coming across well.

At the end of my morning lecture this morning I taught them how to call the hogs. Imagine 90 chinese students going "Woooooo Pig Sooie!" They laughed...thought it was a riot. Another thing that went over better than I thought was when I had them whisper in one another ears down the row like the game telephone they play in preschool. The point was to show them how important pronunciation was and how it was difficult to do so at a whisper (ie. speak up). They just died laughing when it got to the end. It was like it was the most hilarious thing they'd ever seen.

Yesterday I told them some about myself and showed them pictures. Coincidently the pictures I had for the most part were from Christmas and Halloween and they were fascinated by them. I hadn't thought about that as a stereotypical holiday in the US. They celebrate Christmas here but in a secular way.

I told them they could ask me any question they like as long as they are willing to answer the same question in return. So the first question I got was from a girl that wanted to know if I had a girlfriend...the second from the same girl was when I'd be going back to the US...later it was whether I'd be coming back....

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This morning I gave a lecture on western campus culture and mentioned facebook. My class went nuts when I put a screen shot up on the screen. Apparently they have a cloned site that they use for this. Facebook ...even in China.

So...I have a few pictures up from China....go to my flickr account to see!

Yesterday I went to the Forbidden Palace, Tianenmen Square, Temple of Heaven Park, and the Pearl Market...more to follow later.

Yesterday I bought a bike from a used bike shop that really was nothing more than a run down liitle shack on the side of the road. The guys had a handfull of bikes and would do repairs for he most part. I ended up paying about 90 Yuan for both the bike and the lock...that's about 11 dollars. This thing is pretty old and beat up, but I did that on purpose. Lots of the instructors were buying new bikes and I want someone to steal their bike first. No ones going to take my bike!!!

I ended up wandering through some of the hutong yesterday. Hutong are little stone/brick buildings that have a very ramshackle appearance to them. They are the homes for about a quarter of beijings residencts. Some of the things I've seen have been really cool in this stereotypical sort of way...like for instance the old man outside practicing tai chi. Everyone is also selling watermelons... I'm going to buy one soon and invite a bunch of people to eat it with me.

Last night we went to the night market, which is really for tourists...essentially. It has lots of really weird foods running the gamut from the tame lamb to starfish and cicadas. I got adventurousand bought a skewer of scorpions. Overall it didn't have much taste. They were crunchy like tempura and tasted heavily of the oil in which they had been fried. I also had some glazed candied grapes that were on a skewer. They had a hard sugar shell and while really good were actually too sweet for me. I gave the skewer to Jen after eating about a quarter and she didn't even finish it.

Today the Forbidden Palace....