The First Post

Well, these first few days have kept me pretty busy. I’ve been doing a lot of boring stuff involving school registration, banking, etc. Fortunately, even the most mundane errands seem adventurous in an unfamiliar place. I’ve had plenty of opportunities to practice Mandarin.
I can’t upload video right now because YouTube seems to be blocked by the Great Firewall of China. I’ll try to figure something else later. Here is a list of some interesting things I’ve seen in Beijing:
-A woman using her finger to clean the earwax out of her boyfriend’s (?) ear on a very crowded sidewalk.
-A Jesus-fish magnet on the back of a Chinese person’s car
-Haidian district of Beijing seems to have a lot more westerners and a lot more Chinese hipster-types (ie. long hair, tight jeans and Converse All-Stars)
-A student at Renmin University English Corner gave me a short speech about where to find the “hot and sexy” girls in China. Hahaha, it was pretty funny/awkward. I don’t know how he knows so much slang. He probably listens to a lot of hip-hop or something.
-I went to a pretty good punk rock concert a couple nights ago. It seems like there are a thousand bands in Beijing now.
The plane ride over was great because I knew someone on both parts of the flight. From Phoenix to San Fran I sat right across from someone I went to high school with. It was so crazy because I haven’t even seen him for over a year. From San Fran to Beijing there was an ASU grad student on my flight. I had met him at the beginning of this school year. He is Chinese so he was flying back home for the summer. I slept for much of the flight. The best part was waking up and realizing we were flying over Siberia. There were beautiful snow-covered mountains as far as we could see. It was quite a breathtaking view. I thought of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and wondered if there was still a Russian Gulag hidden inside some freezing cave below me.