Wo mei yo pijou!

When I was in the middle of Cambodia 2 years ago I was able to blog every day, now that I'm in China one of the most modern cities in the world I can get to a computer once a week. It's not really a matter of available technology but the fact that we are on the run from 6am until about 9pm at night.

For the past week we've been learning Chinese in the classroom for 2 hours each morning followed by a lecture relevant to the afternoon activities. My Chinese is improving slightly, and while the language is grammatically simple, my mouth isn't used to making some of the sounds necessary to convey a message, and my ears aren't trained to pick up on on the sounds others are making. I can order a beer, say cheers, and tell people my name pretty well, and that's done me pretty good so far.

In the past week, we've been to a Buddhist temple where we prayed with monks, waited in a 90 minute line that was no less than 2 miles long to view the body of Chairman Mao, which was slightly eerie but carried a lot of weight as many Chinese see him as a god, met with a Communist policy maker, learned from a woman who works in an adoption clinic, created a new way to kill an afternoon in a foreign city (see "5 Hour Flow" below) met with a female entrepreneur in little Korea, had dinner with intellectuals that were stripped of their occupations during the Cultural Revolution, met with one of China's biggest critics of the Communist Party and it's environmental policy, learned secrets of the Olympic Games, ate on an organic farm that grows it's own food and makes New York style bagels and other delicious dishes, accidentally left a student at a bathroom on the side of the road, spent an afternoon learning to make dumplings from a Chinese librarian who tried to out drink me at lunch and invited me to live with her family if I'd like (we're making her dinner next week), got a massage from a blind masseuse, partied in some clubs on a lake, went out with our Chinese teacher, got caught in the rain, went on a romantic paddle boat ride, ate fish eyes, twisted my knee on a stripper pole (been limping for 4 days) went to a Chinese hospital, got sick for 2 days then got well, and now I'm going to call my mom for mothers day.

5 Hour Flow: We had an afternoon to ourselves where we were free to do whatever we wanted and since I was trying to receive acupuncture I missed some of the groups that went out to explore... never fear, I had an idea.

Grabbed a beer and walked to the bus stop and took the first bus I saw, took it to the end which was somewhere in downtown Beijing, hopped off and found a little news stand that sold the local firewater and some grapefruit to mix it with, headed down some back alley and got lunch for 45 cents which consisted of noodles, spices, tap water, and bacteria, headed into the slums with my iPod blasting, walked into some little shack of a store, bought a beer, the owner set up a table outside and came out and had a drink with me, one drink turned into two, one friend turned into a dozen, and there we were throwing back beer and munching on pickled garlic cloves while the locals laughed at the white boy that had wandered off of the beaten path and into their lives, an hour and a half later I was feeling pretty good, and between the music from my phone and the smiles on their faces which was the only communication we had, I began feeling generous for the experience I was enjoying and tried to pay 100 yuan for the 4 yuan worth of beer I had drank ($16 for $0.75), the owner chased me down and gave me all my change, they refused to accept anything more than what I owed, I thanked them and kept moving, hopped on another bus and ended up at the Beijing Zoo, walked in a back gate and met a tour guide named Joe leading around a group of Filipinos who spoke perfect English, he helped buy me a ticket, and took me on as co-tour guide, I led a family to the restrooms then split for the giant pandas, beer is sold everywhere and the zoo is no exception, took pictures of the giant pandas which is a bit misleading because they're not that giant, watched the little ones play on a jungle gym which pissed me off because there are no tire swings in nature, bought a panda key chain and moved on, saw some monkeys which seemed miserable, sat at a lake for a while where I later found out some friends saw me but I took off so fast they couldn't catch me, grabbed a beer and some giraffe food and satisfied them and myself, left the zoo, hopped in a cab because I had no idea where I was, two minutes later I was back on campus, I was just around the corner after all. 5 hours, no plan, no direction, no rules.

Wan an,
Josh