Just a week?

Hmm, already a week has passed in one of my favorite cities in the world and at the same time I feel like an eternity has passed.....hmmm 'like sand through an hour glass, these are the days of our lives'. It seems as if it were forever ago that I was in Dallas feeling moreose over the loss of a particular piece of brown luggage. That was about a week and a half ago. I've got about a week and a half left in Beijing before the south of China beckons me to my home of the next year.

Today was my fake Saturday (ie. it is Friday, but I didn't have to work). To make this seem more logical...I teach Sunday-Thursday here at Beida. My students truly made the week completely pleasant and made me not fear that I am going to be a crummy teacher. They took my teaching partner and I out to lunch on Wednesday for hotpot. For any of you who have never had it....it's amazing Chinese food. We each had little cooking pots filled with water and spices and seasonings. Then a fire was lit under the pot and we cooked a wide range of raw meats and mushrooms and greens. Then once you cook your meats to your liking you take them out and dip them in a heavenly sauce...mine was chive and peanut sauce; quite quite tasty really. Our students seemed to have a great time. They liked teaching us drinking and toasting protocol...really I think it was just an excuse to get drunk at noon on a wednesday. I think one of the funniest parts of lunch was my teaching partner Tom getting suckered into eating garlic cloves. One of our students was popping them in his mouth like candy (there was a plate of them on our table's lazy susan) and I made some comment like "Gump! are you eating garlic....you'll have stinky breath!" and he responded by saying in Chinese that it was in fact sweet and good. So Tom tried it....it was pickled garlic indeed. No worries though; after some truly interesting facial expressions, I had his back and gave him some gum....no need for me to suffer the afternoon through just b/c he chomped garlic.

I think this is the first time in my life that I have experienced 100% humidity without it actually raining. Yesterday walking around Beida it was like going swimming. Jenny and Jess and I ended up feigning idiocy and ate lunch on the air conditioned steps of the mini-mart even though no one is supposed to sit there, b/c it was toooo hot to be sitting anywhere outside.

Oh, the other day we had to get visa photos taken. No one in America has grounds to ever complain to me about passport photos, b/c in the US, you only get 4. Here in China we had to get 12 photos for our work permit. That translates into 12 photos of me with a frozen look of heat exhaustion (100 of us had to wait in a line outside the photo shop in order to get the photos taken). Lord have mercy for all who must gaze upon that look once, or twelve times for that matter. Haha, only in China.

Last night, since it was 'friday' for us, we went out to Houhai and took a stroll around the tropical-like manmade lake that is this bar-laden tourist attraction. Don't get me wrong though, I do like it. Some of the people I was with were having trouble spending 4 dollars US on a drink since we've been living on about a dollar or two a day total for food thus far. I maintain the mindset that if i'm pleasantly frugal during the week, the weekend can include a justifiable splurge....hopefully everyone else will figure that out b/c there are only a limited number of nights where I can stand outside fun bars and drink 30cent liters of Tsingdao whose bottles are washed in fermaldehyde, yuck while others inside enjoy yummy beverages and comfy seats

Today was a day akin to fun days of Beijing summers past (read: last summer). I met up with Tammy and her Swiss friend Ziggy in Wudaoko for lunch at a cafe. We were also joined by some random American businessman who was doing his own laptop thing in the corner of the cafe (it's got wireless) until we got our lunch and then he inquired as to whether we'd be okay with some company b/c he'd been working away all morning. Of course we said it was fine and he never actually gave us his name...just kinda chatted, but that's just fine too. We jetted down to Sanlitunr afterwards to do a little perusing of the markets....we watched with moderate humor in our eyes as foreigners got royally ripped off buying just about every kind of knock-off and junky object known to man. Ziggy bought a couple of things and tammy and I bargained for her. It was nice speaking Chinglish and Chinese with Tammy....I haven't gotten to do a whole lot of that here as yet.

The most 'harrowing' part of the day involved the cab ride back to Haidian following our stop for gelatto. After waiting almost ten minutes for an empty taxi to roll by (yesterday was chinese valentine's day and i think some fellas forgot or something so they were taking their ladies out for dinner and dancing etc. tonight and so every every taxi was filled with tanlianai ren (lovers, daters etc.)) and finally this crummy blue taxi rolls by, but he's going the opposite direction. I start to make a comment about the shabby condition of it...ok, really I was mocking it, and sure enough it turns around and stops for us. We get in b/c it's rush hour and we'd been waiting a long time. Well as soon as we get in and he goes tammy and I notce that of course he's not a licenced taxi driver b/c he doesn't have his beijing permit on the dashboard like he should. Then comes the shadiest part.....as soon as we get near the highway, he puts his hand on the top of the car and peels off the lighted "TAXI" sign on top of the car! He must have done so that the police wouldn't pick him up for illegal taxing. He weaved in and out of traffic like nobody's businesss. Yeesh! But eventually I got home, and in one piece.