Happy Birthday to Steven, Catherine, and America

The workday Friday went by relatively quickly; I had a few things to edit, but I actually spent a while chatting with Fiona about differences between the U.S., Great Britain and China, and chatting with Stephen and Brian about random goings-on in the office. It was a pleasant workday; even though I didn't have much work to do, I also didn't have to spend the day surfing the Web to entertain myself.

After work, Brian, P.A. and Stephen were planning to play basketball with some of Stephen's Chinese friends. Celine gave us information last week about a photo contest, which is supposed to show Beijing through tourists eyes, and one of the topics within the contest is showing "The harmonious and peaceful Beijing with the new aspects of residents' life." I thought the basketball game would be a good way to show this, so I asked to come along. I took about 300 photos, and some are really good, but I just learned today that the photos for the competition are to be taken during a tour of Beijing this coming Thursday.

We went out to dinner, Brian, Stephen, his friend Wang and I, to a place nearby I hadn't been before. This place will probably now officially be known as "The Noodle Place," because they had at least six different lists of noodles, with about 10 different options each. I got "Fried Rice Noodles with Egg," which were really thin noodles cooked with egg and cabbage. Pretty tasty, and quite cheap (8 Yuan, slightly more than a dollar), but way too much food. I barely ate half, took the rest home and wasn't able to finish the other half for lunch the next day.

Saturday I woke up pretty early because we had to meet Celine and Dr. Tuggle at the Zoo! I was really excited to see the pandas in China!

Unfortunately, my day at the zoo was very disappointing. After very confusing problems with not arriving at the correct entrance (I didn't even know there was more than one!), we started the day with a pretty long trip through the aquarium. Apart from elevators and the subway, this was the first time I've ever really felt like there are too many people in Beijing. Our group would be walking in a line, and I would leave acceptable personal space between me and whoever was in front of me, but that space would almost always be filled by other people.

We walked through a few rooms, and it was almost impossible to see what was in the tanks because people were crowded around them so tightly. Many parents had their children climbing on the barriers so they could photograph them in front of the fish (despite the "No climbing" and "No photos" signs everywhere). After a few disappointing minutes there, we moved on to the performance space for the Dolphin show. We were at least 20 minutes early, and we found a decent seat, although there was a bar in the way.

By the time the show started, all the seats were full and plenty of people were standing. First there was a sea lion show, with all the tricks and silly stunts you'd expect from a sea lion show. They were cute, though, and I enjoyed it.

Then the dolphin show began. About that time, a mother brought her son up to stand right in front of me, so I barely saw the rest of the show. Her decision sparked several other people to come down as well; one man had no child and was just photographing the show. I appreciate that the children couldn’t see, but I had two problems with the situation. One was that the parents could have let their kids stand by the front while they sat on the steps behind. There was no sense of shame or any recognition at all that they might be inconveniencing other people. The second was that we were sitting for 20 minutes before the show started, and we paid for a show that I wasn’t able to see. The aquarium should do a better job of regulating how many people come in, which would prevent this situation.

Anyway, after that we went through more very very crowded rooms in the aquarium, we finally headed outside to the pandas! But the pandas were also a disappointment. It wasn’t that the bears weren’t awesome—they were. It was their facilities that I found disappointing. I expected that the pandas, a Chinese national icon, would have had the best care in the world. Instead they were dirty, and some of them lived in areas that are smaller than my apartment in Chapel Hill. They were cute, nonetheless, but I was sad for them.

The pandas were by no means the saddest animals of the day. I stopped taking photos after a while because I was sad. It’s quite possible that my thoughts about the zoo were just me attributing human characteristics to the animals, but the monkeys were all hiding in their little huts and they seemed either terrified or exhausted. It should be noted that Saturday was about 5 degrees hotter than the hottest day in July last year, so the heat might have caused some of the reactions we saw.

When I tried to take a photo of some monkeys, the end of my lens touched the glass and scared the monkeys, and they retreated even farther into their home. The rhinos were the saddest, I think. Again, this is probably me reading human emotions into emotionless animals, but the three rhinos were each in their own cement-enclosed circles, open to the elements. There was only a little shade, and each of them was scrunched into it as much as possible, plopped on the ground. It would have been difficult to fit three of them in one of enclosures, so while they weren’t cramped inside, there wasn’t a lot of moving room. They looked so hot and bored and lonely.

The strangest thing I saw all day was really what I didn’t see. Aside from the dolphin show hosts, I can’t remember seeing a zookeeper all day; it didn’t appear that anyone was taking care of the animals, although all of them had food and water.

It was so very hot, we spent much less time outside than we did in. We headed back to the apartment about an hour after the pandas, and knowing that it was too late and too hot to do much else, I took a nap for a while after eating some ramen and reading a chapter of Atlas Shrugged.

That night, because Dan went off to work on a story and Annie went with him, I went with Brian and P.A. to a billiard room next to the gym. It was pretty nice, but we were really surprised when we got there and the woman said we had to give her 100 Yuan. We handed it over with a little anger, but we wanted to play. Now, I don’t claim to be a pool player, but I’ve played enough to know what I’m doing. However, the first game took us so long that the tables next to us played almost three games. After a bit we realized that the pockets are actually narrower than the pockets in the U.S. This photo is the best one I have of the pockets.

We got better over time, but it sure looked pathetic. It was nice, though, when we left and learned that the 100 was just a deposit, and the cost is 20 Yuan per hour. We played for 2 hours and paid roughly $5. Good deal.

Yesterday morning—July 4th!—I got up early and went to the gym first thing, for which I was proud of myself. I came up to the office a little later to check email and looked for 4th of July happenings in Beijing. I didn’t really find anything interesting, so I went back to the apartment and ate and read a little more, because it was still very hot outside. I started drifting off while reading, so I took a brief nap. About the time I woke up, Brian showed up and said he found a few bars with some Independence Day specials. We went to Lush, where they had huge burgers for 20 Yuan ($2.95) and Budweiser for 10 ($1.50). Good deal, good food. By the time we left, Lush was jam-packed full of Americans. Around 8 p.m., one guy stood up on a table and started singing the national anthem. After the second line, everyone else joined in. It was amazing. Happy Birthday, America.

On that note, Steven and Catherine both have birthdays today, July 5! Happy Birthday!

Today was just another workday. I had little to do up until right before lunch when I was finally given an opinion piece to edit. And boy, did I need to edit it. As I told Steven earlier, I can’t imagine that anyone actually has an 850-word opinion about renewable energy industries’ potential to generate jobs for the EU. The second sentence was 79 words, AND it was missing a few words. It was quite a challenge, digging through the jargon to pull out what the columnist’s opinion really was. In the end I cut 250 words. I wanted to cut more, because I felt the reporter tried to include too many detailed facts for a column, but we aren’t supposed to make too many changes to the base content. The story actually seemed to be more of a research paper than an opinion column.

I couldn’t really sleep last night. For some reason I kept waking up, perhaps because I was so hot. Annie and I usually don’t keep the A/C on at night because we’re comfortable without it, but I needed it last night. I don’t think it was the weather, because she kept waking up and asking me to turn it off because she was too cold. Whatever the reason, I’ve been exhausted today. I avoided the cafeteria today, and went home to fix eggs for lunch, which I think was a great decision.

On the bright side, that story took me three and a half hours to fix, so the afternoon flew by. I spent a little bit of time on Facebook this afternoon, and after looking at some photos of what people were doing back home, I felt really homesick for the first time. This week is the halfway point, so I think I've done pretty well.