BEIJING

pictures:
1. Olympic Stadium: I took that picture, I've seen it in real life.
Part of a long wander about the city on Saturday.
2. An example of what the modernized, revamped areas of Beijing look
like. Another part of our wander around th city. It was Saturday
evening in a business district, which explains why there are so few
people in the picture. Usually, there are a lot, lot more people
around.
3. Eating tasty food: favorite pastime. :)

Unfortunately, I used my lack of internet access as an excuse not to write.

It will not happen again (as I now have internet access.)

I'm pretty busy right now, but I could certainly put in practice a few
simple time management strategies and I will definitely have time to
write and correspond with people and keep a better account of my life.

The short story - which I will hopefully expand:

I've settled into Beijing some; class has started and it appears to be
a decent amount of work. Whether that will change to "way too much" or
"not a lot" I'm still not sure yet. On Saturday, we didn't have
anything scheduled, so I went to explore the city with some friends.
There were many, many small adventures - most of which were based
around being rather lost. The process of asking directions, receiving
and following them was always a new and interesting episode.
Thankfully, we had a fairly veteran Chinese speaker with us, although
she was nearly as often confused by the answers we received as
everyone else was. In fact, our journey was likened to Pokemon - which
was described to me as a process of continually asking new characters
for directions.

The best vignette from this, although there were many worth retelling,
was when we were looking for a particular park we had heard about. It
had recently gotten dark - not just dusk, but truly dark. Given that
we were a group of five young people, albeit we aren't fluent in the
language, we are all pretty strong and healthy - we weren't too
concerned. However, our
attempt-to-ask-directions-and-then-follow-the-response: "nei bianr
zou, ranhou nei bianr zou"-plus-hand-gestures ("go that way, then go
that way") method had led us down some pretty dark streets. We had
asked at least 4 people already (some of whom had literally
unintelligible Beijing accents) and yet to find it. We were reaching a
pretty dark and pretty shady looking street and our best Chinese
speaker decided we had better ask someone again and find this place
quick.

She walked over to an elderly, somewhat unkempt in either an
old-man/poor-man/both-manner and asked him politely, "How do you get
to ____ park?" I didn't hear his response, but after a short exchange,
the man got up and started walking towards the building behind him. It
was even darker as we walked away from the street lamps - I don't have
any recollection of what the building even looked like. My friend
followed him hesitantly, still listening to him speaking and watching
him gesture. "Apparently, the park is right...through there?" she said
to the rest of us pointing to the dark, extremely narrow alleyway that
the man had led her to.

The minute of walking through that dark, narrow, crooked alley that
some undecipherable man told us was the way to the park was possibly
one the scariest minutes of my life.

And then we emerged into the park, as promised.

At the park, we found an adult playground. I promise to write more on
these. They're fairly awesome.
Alright - waking up at six tomorrow and I still haven't finished my
homework or preparations. Only the first day of classes, too. Oops.