Hi everybody! It's been quite a while since my last post, so I'll try to fill you in on some stuff that's happened recently.
A couple of weeks ago (prior to the weekend of April 21st), Anna Rose - my pseudo little sister - came to visit. If you read her mass emails then you can skip this section, because it will be repeat info. While she was here, both of our schedules were packed with stuff to do. Mine was full of work, going to the bars, showing Anna around various spots in Beijing, and volunteering for the Special Olympics Sneaker Ball (a charity dinner and dance to raise money for the Special Olympics in Asia), while hers was full of massages, going to the bars, being shown around Beijing and volunteering. In addition to that business, that weekend was my friend Ralph's last weekend in Beijing. So we had to give him a nice set of goodbye celebrations, which basically consisted of watching South Park, going to the bars, and carrying him home :-P. It was a lot of fun though, even though I was very sad to see him go.
The following week marked the beginning of May Holiday. In case you haven't heard about the oddities of Chinese holidays, the rule is that you get the same dates off each year and you can't have more than 7 days in a row off. For example, May holiday lasts from May 1-7 of every year. Since May 1 fell on a Tuesday, we had to work an 8 day work week the preceding week (yes, we had to work Saturday, Sunday and Monday leading up to the break). Then we took our vacation from May 1-7, and I have a 4 day work week this week. It's all very illogical, just like many other things in China.
So how did I fill my break? Well there was a lot of relaxing that went on; I needed some time to recharge from all of the work that I had been doing.
However, on the 2nd of May, Mike and Jamie (two college friends) came up to visit me from Shanghai after Jamie arrived from New York. They arrived around 11 pm on Wednesday and we immediately went out drinking and dancing. We stayed out until about 4, came home, went to sleep, and woke up at 8 am for our trip to the Great Wall at JinShanLing. As you can imagine, we were all very tired, but naps in the car while traveling around helped to take the edge off of that, and we had an absolutely beautiful day to visit the great wall. It was sunny, clear and comfortable (maybe even a little bit hot at some points). After spending a couple of hours on the wall and Jamie and another of Mike's friends, named Coline, almost getting sick from the previous night's activities, we took the trip back to Beijing.
Once we returned to Beijing, we had some dinner and went out again! This time we started with some KTV (karaoke) and then proceeded to the bars. Didn't stay out quite as long as the night before, but we still had a good time.
The next day Mike and Jamie were going to do all of the touristy stuff (Forbidden City, Tiananmen, etc.) so I decided to sleep in and they left. About 2 hours after they left, they showed up back at my apartment and I was a little confused (it's pretty much impossible to see the tourist spots in Beijing that quickly). Turns out that there was some food trouble . . . probably from the previous night's shrimp ball consumption, and the kids wanted to make sure that their systems were ok before they went out for the sight seeing. As a result, I was fully awake by the time they started feeling better and we went out to all of the wonderful, heavily touristed historical sites together. While we were there we did awesome hippie dances to "Love Generation" and took video of it (which I hope to make into a large video if I ever get the raw footage from Mike), and it was awesome.
After making wonderful videos, we took a hike around Beijing and made our way to Houhai (a nice lake area that I've probably mentioned in previous posts), had some dinner there at Hutong Pizza (to settle the kids' stomachs with some western food) and then made our way back to my apartment. At this point, everybody was so tired from the previous two days that we spent Mike and Jamie's last hours in Beijing watching House M.D. and lapsing into and out of REM cycles.
The next morning the others woke up bright and early and headed back to Shanghai, and I was left to my normal life of parting with one small exception: I played golf.
Golf in China is like golf in the U.S. except that you are automatically given a caddy. Even the Chinese words for golfing terms are just phonetic rip-offs of English (with the exception of common words like "Ball" and "Hole"). But "tee" is called a "ti" and a "green" is a "ga-ling" so I got those words down pretty quickly. I played with my friend Sophie who I met several months prior at a friend's bar. I had to rent clubs so it took a little while to get used to them. As a result, the front nine sucked and the back nine was pretty good (57 and 49 were my scores for anybody who is a golfer). All in all, though, I had a good time.
After that, Sophie and I went to a BBQ at the friend's bar, ate some good food, played some Chinese drinking games (though I stuck with water), and then I went home and slept.
Life since then has been pretty much as usual. Friends have been coming and going (Saturday was the last night in Beijing for one of my friends named Rene), so we had a nice little set of going-away festivities for her in the previous days. Work continues as usual; I work a lot, rest on weekends (most of the time), etc. And that's about it.
As far as plans go, there's one thing worth mentioning, I guess. Mike and I are planning a trip to Qingdao coming up at the start of June. For those of you who don't know, Qingdao is an old German port city in the east of China and home to wonderful seafood, Haier refrigerators, and most notably the TsingTao Brewery! It promises to be good times!
That's it for now! Hope life is well for everybody!
