It's like haze on your wedding day...

Things are getting busier here! I guess that is a good thing. It is a sign of settling in.

This past week was eventful. Last Thursday Chris and I ventured to the Military Museum. As you can guess, it was a bit heavy. The place was huge and we only walked through a very small part of it. We made the mistake of going right after lunch and didn't have another caffeine injection, so we were really dragging in there. We ended up leaving sooner than anticipated. We plan to go back at some point.

Here is a picture of the outside of the museum, complete with show-y tank



Here is a picture of Chris in front of the big Mao sculpture



On Saturday, we went to an event at Tsinghua University, which is described as the MIT of China. The event was about urban sustainability and integration. It was neat to see the school but it was a shame how awful the air quality was that day. Here is a picture looking out on the university:




There were parts of the event that were very interesting, but others that were really boring. I like their idea of a "Panel Discussion", which was a nice way of saying a whole group of people will call "shenanigans" on the presenter's entire project, trying to poke holes in it or show where they are lacking. I am beginning to think this tendency is cultural, because Chris and I have both noticed that our students will take any and every opportunity to point out if we have made a mistake on an email, handout, or PPT slide. A whole society of perfectionists! It's a tough crowd.. Here is some proof of how boring some parts of the conference were... ha!



Sunday we went to the Lama Temple with Leanne. Leanne is the niece of one of Chris's father's clients in NYC. I think she is our first official Chinese friend! We both really like her. Very sweet girl. She had never been to the Lama Temple either. Unfortunately, it was the coldest day of the year plus it was raining. Chilled to the bone! It was just a really cold and dreary day -- not a good day for the Lama Temple, most of which is outdoors. But we braved it! The Lama Temple is all about incense. In one of the pictures you can see a small fire burning where people are supposed to put their incense to show respect.



















Monday, Chris was on TV again! They asked him to go in again on Friday. Plus they called him today to ask him to come in on Thursday. That's three times in one week! More than David Gergen, I bet! =) He is becoming quite the regular on Dialogue. One of the other foreign teachers came up to him in the cafeteria and said he saw him talking about Gadhafi and what a great job he did =) I am just so proud! Check your local listings -- rumor has it they show CCTV all over the world! Here is the link to this week's show from Monday:
http://english.cntv.cn/program/dialogue/20111024/119132.shtml


While Chris was making moves on TV, I went with some CFAU students to check out another burger place. This one, Grandma's Kitchen, was more of an American food diner. I had read about it and heard about it from some people. It was not too bad! It was somewhere between a cafeteria burger and a diner burger back home.






Speaking of food, here are some highlights in the food for the past week...

This is the closest thing to a brownie we have been able to find. On a scale of 1 to Brownie, this was about a 6.5. Tonight, we wandered past a Subway Sandwich place in the hopes of finding one of their DELICIOUS cookies. The cookies looked insulting to any Subway back home, but they had brownies! Well, they LOOKED like brownies. They tasted like they forgot to add the sugar. Here is a picture of the 6.5 brownie (with pecans):




My official favorite food of China so far is this green bean dish, called gan bian dou jiao. It is dry fried green beans with garlic, chilis, minced pork and spices. It is so good!! This place up the road from us does it the BEST. At only 18 RMB for this big bowl, it is such a cheap, amazing meal! 18 RMB plus 2RMB for rice = 20RMB, which is about $3.50! Not bad!



Classes are going well. I am working on building my rapport with my economics students. Last week there was a school-wide sports day. Think "field day" in elementary school. Mandatory for all students, the school canceled classes just to make sure everyone would attend. Two of my students participated in the relay race, which was one of the last events and one of the most exciting. They told me about it and invited me to come watch. Luckily, the weather was not so great so we did not end up doing any sightseeing so I was able to come by and cheer my students on. They came extremely close to breaking the school record -- just missed it by one-hundredth of a second! It's ok though -- THEY are the ones who hold the school record! These boys are FAST. It was neat to get to spend some time mingling with the students outside of class. The last event was the tug-of-war between the law students and the economics students -- quite a rivalry I am seeing! Of course my awesome economics students won =) I am so proud!

I am really trying to get my English students involved in class more. This week one of our topics was music so I brought some songs for us to sing together. I tried to find songs that were easy to understand and that have concrete ideas in them. Many songs are just so abstract that I figured they would have trouble understanding. Since they are going to Canada, I also wanted to try to use a Canadian singer. I settled on Alanis Morissette - Ironic, because the ideas in it are very concrete and I can easily google-image them. I mean, rain on your wedding day? That one is pretty easy, even for a non-English speaker! I rounded it out by also including Imagine by John Lennon. I figured this is an International Affairs school so the message in Imagine is pretty relevant, especially with all the wars going on in the world today. They really liked that one and at the end of class they asked me to play it again for them.

When I left my English class and walked to my Economics class, I realized that our weekly topic in econ was Conflicts. We were going to be talking about Israel & Palestine, and Syria. I thought they might be interested to hear the song Imagine, also. When I asked them, it was an overwhelming "YES!" so I played it for them at the start of the class. They definitely tried to pull an "Encore! Encore!" but I knew they were just trying to prolong class. It was cute, though. They had not heard it before, too, which was somewhat surprising. They knew about the Beatles, though.


That is all to report for now. Here are some random photos to close my post!

I mentioned to some people the signs for holding on to "oldsters" on the escalators. I finally was able to snap a photo of the sign




Tonight the bus we got on was incredibly full. I was literally standing pressed against the windshield. I was very afraid. I tried to take a photo showing the awkward position I was in, but instead I could only capture how crammed the bus was.




Lastly, here is my montage of hideous car colors here in Beijing. I decided to start taking pictures of the hideous cars only about two weeks ago and here is the amazing collection I already have. The reason I wanted to do this is because THESE HIDEOUS CARS ARE EVERYWHERE. Maybe in America you will see one every once in a while. Maybe the bright yellow car. But here, it is like, every block you see at least one. It is OUT OF CONTROL. The pictures here don't even begin to show how many of these cars we have SEEN during the past two weeks -- only those that I was able to whip my camera out and capture, which usually only includes the parked cars. Anyway, enjoy! =)