Five weeks left in Beijing!

Hard to believe, but I've been here for a month already, and I only have five weeks left!

Monday after work was uneventful. I went home hoping to take a nap after not sleeping much Sunday, but I wasn't able to fall asleep.

Instead I read Atlas Shrugged for a little while, and then Brian said he was going to get dinner at the noodle place after going to the grocery store, so I decided to meet him there. I ordered "Strips of pork in hot sauce," which sounded fantastic but didn't meet my expectation.

From this meal I learned two things: I need to stop expecting meals to look or taste a certain way, and I need to stop ordering pork. I was expecting just meat, rice and sauce, but what I was given was green peppers, onion, and about 4 pieces of what would be the equivalent of extremely thick strips of bacon, only the bacon is 90% fat. Just about every time I've had pork in this country, it's mostly fat. There was nothing wrong with the meal (except the lack of meat), it just wasn't what I expected, and therefore not what I wanted. The sauce was really good, and I ate most of the rice covered in it.

I spent the rest of the night up at the office playing on the computer. Brian said last week that he thinks it's good the way we're pacing things. There's no rush to see everything there is to see quickly, so we aren't trying to go all the way across town every night. For several of us to go across town, it costs between 30 and 80 Yuan, depending on the number of people. Granted at $12 total, this cost might not be much per person, but it adds up. So working, going to the gym, trying new foods and relaxing Monday through Thursday nights seems to be a good way to spend the week nights.

Yesterday at the office, I was given one story to edit in the morning about the future of electric cars, which was cool. But there was nothing to do in the afternoon, so I talked with Fiona for a while about interesting things about China. We talked about how there aren't public cemeteries in China, and we talked a little but about the differences between Chinese and American weddings.

Fiona was confused by the concept of the runaway bride, because in China you're actually legally married before the ceremony, so running away doesn't get you out of the marriage. You'd have to get a divorce by that point.

After work I pumped myself up enough to go to the gym, where I took a Pilates class. Now, I've never done that in the States, so I wasn't sure how it would go trying something new in a different language. For this class at least, I seemed to be okay with just watching and mimicking. My neck is hurting today because I was straining to stretch and watch the instructor at the same time, but I felt fantastic after my mini-adventure, both for trying something new and for having a great exercise.

After class I went over to the shop that's part of the gym, where they sell clothes and such along with drinks and ice cream (yes, the gym has ice cream). They've been having a sale on some clothes, and the only shorts I brought with me are long Bermuda-length Dance Design crop pants, which are comfortable but not great for active exercising. A few weeks ago I looked through the sale bin, and the shorts were 80 Yuan I think. Only about $12, but I didn't need them that badly. Yesterday those same shorts were 40 Yuan, so I splurged--Can I say that when I only spend $6 on clothes?--and now I have some cooler shorts for the gym. AND they're Carolina Blue!

On the way back to the apartment, I ran into Annie, and I joined her for dinner. She and Dan have been raving about this vendor meal, which they descriptively called "egg thing." It's 3 Yuan for quite a bit of food, so I thought I ought to try it. The stand has a round turntable, about 18 inches in diameter, that is the grill. The cook plops a ladle full of batter on top, and starts spinning the grill while smoothing the batter with the equivalent of a rolling pin. It's not a rolling pin, but I can't come up with any better way to describe it, and it serves the same purpose.

Then he breaks one egg over it and smooths that onto the batter. After about a minute, it's done. He then takes out an ice scraper and gently lifts the paper-thin product off the grill and passes it to his partner. She folds the sheet into a rectangle, paints on a little bit of mystery brown sauce , and sprinkles in lettuce, cilantro, onion and some other vegetable I couldn't identify. Then she inserts a crunchy chip-like sheet and folds the whole thing up like a burrito.

I have to say it didn't live up to the rave reviews I kept hearing from Dan and Annie. It wasn't bad by any means; in fact I probably would have liked it if it didn't have raw onion in it. I ate about half of it--which was enough for me to be full--and Annie took the rest for leftovers.

Then we got some ice cream and walked back home. That was about it for the night. After that I came back up to the office to play around on the Internet a while.

I was given a story to edit today at 9 a.m.--perhaps the earliest I've been given work since I got here. I thought it might be promising for the rest of the day. The story, about a a secluded painter in Beijing, was actually very well written, and most of what I changed was to improve the sentences rather than correct them or rewrite them. So that was done after about 15 minutes, and I wasn't given anything else in the morning.

This afternoon I attended another of Dr. Tuggle's lectures. He gave us a crossword puzzle with broadcast journalism terms that were mostly way over our heads, but it will make a nice reference. We also took some footage from a story some of the girls in the office are working on and put together a mock-story. We didn't actually make the video, but we walked through the process, which was kind of cool.

Tomorrow I will be out of the office because we are being taken on a tour of Beijing to take photos for the "Beijing in the eyes of foreign friends" photo contest. That should be exciting, and I plan to have some cool pictures when I get back. Hopefully I'll remember to charge up my camera tonight!