Beautiful, Breezy, Beijing..: Megapixel Redemption

This post will be picture-heavy so I will keep the text to a minimum. Otherwise this will take me all night…

This week was eventful! Last weekend was Halloween! Friday night we met up with a woman introduced to me by a friend of a friend. She is American but has been living in Singapore for a very long time and is fluent in Chinese. We went out for (none other than..) Sichuan food! Good find, too, right near our school. We had a good time with her, hearing about her work at a hedge fund. She focuses on regulatory issues in finance so I may be doing some side work for her in the coming weeks since that is something I am personally interested in.

Saturday night was the unofficial celebration of Halloween. We spent it with our friends, Ethan and Wun (expat friend from NYC and the woman director of the film we were extras in). They took us to a Halloween party at this German girl's house it was a pretty good time! Minus the 8th floor walk up aspect… Not even kidding. Here we are dressed up before going out, a witch, vampire, security guard, and some kind of rocker chick -- her t-shirt is battery powered and LIGHTS up! Really cool =)

Before we left to go out to the Halloween party, we were messing around on the computer and after seeing our business cards, Ethan wanted to see what the Chinese characters they put for our names translated to EXACTLY in Chinese. Check it out! LOL!

These arrived from my mom ON Halloween. Thanks, Mom!!! =) =) =)

Tuesday in class I had my English students pair up and ask each other questions about their families and turn them in to me. Man, I should do this more often because some of these responses are AMAZING. I am including some of the best ones here:

This girl is very modest about her parents...

This kid has very good English and this definitely shows his sense of humor

Nothing specific here. Just your average Joes.

I don't really understand this one...

For some reason, the kids' answers to this one were so varied. They made me laugh..

And this is one of those answers that makes you appreciate both how sweet and how much pressure these kids are under to succeed and send those successes back home

Wednesday the school organized a trip for the teachers to the Great Wall at Mutianyu! I know we already went but it was free, and legitimate DOOR TO DOOR service. Plus free lunch. We had a good time but I just wish we had spent more time at the actual wall. The bus took an hour and a half to get there then we got up on the wall and had another hour and a half to walk around then had to meet to head back. All that time getting there, I would have liked it better had we took a break and ate lunch ON the wall and then continued walking around it or something. Anyway, these pictures came out FANTASTICALLY since I triple checked my megapixel count before leaving the house =) It's a shame the weather wasn't as good as it was for us at Jinshanling. We were lucky in that it was supposed to rain but it ended up just being cloudy, not hazy though. So we were able to see far into the distance, but the sun was not out. It could have been much worse. Here are some pictures from the day, some with nice foliage:

These Chinese characters say, "Be Honest to Chairman Mao"

Ok, so matching shirts for couples here is totally a "thing". Couples walk around town wearing matching shirts or hoodies. It's really corny. Here is our homage to that:

Here is "The Gauntlet of Commerce". The only corridor leading up and down to the entrance to the wall was lined with souvenir stands, all with very pushy salespeople. The people here knew some English, too, mostly just "You like T Shirt? One dollar!" I was so skeptical if they would actually accept dollars, though. I kept thinking about my "lucky" $2 in my wallet and how far that would have gotten me with the souvenirs =)