Holiday Inn Express Beijing Guangshun

... in such a small space, with so many bodies, I decide to look out the windows, only to see the street-lines painted on the side of the road. Even with the best of my squirming, the most I can view is grass on the median beside streetlines. After five minutes of riding like this I begin to feel nauseous, so I decide to count people. Keep in mind this bus is three seats wide; two on one side, one on the other. The aisles are meant for ONE person to walk through… I counted 17 ...

... been a bad day. The evening meal that day was in a restaurant that doesn't get many Westerners, so as a celebration they gave us a free fruit salad - or so we thought. It was apple and cherry tomoatoes in a sauce which some people were saying was yoghurt. Rob tried it and discovered it was actually salad cream!! Soooo weird. After dinner we visited the night market, which sold all kinds of creatures, including scorpians - large and small ones that get ...

... take over for awhile to descrbe our second trip to the Great Wall, which we did yesterday (Sunday) before coming back into town, meeting up with Jamel...who was late ...again and going for some good Kung Pao Chicken and fried rice. Most of my musings about Chinese culture, politics and hip hop were discussed over that dinner with Jamel and his buddies John, who's from Boston, and Jerome, who's from Cinncinati but now lives in Nanjing and went ...

Sup Blog-Dogs. On Wednesday in Beijing it was smoggy and warm; on Thursday it was clear and bitingly cold. Never before had we experienced such a dramatic change in the temperature, not even in Canada, and I cursed myself for deciding to not pack my gloves. And yet, on this nippy day, we struck out towards Tiananmen square with all intentions of romping around outside through the Forbidden City. It was called the Forbidden city because ...

... emphasis on the Confucian concept of "harmony." However, while a harmonious society can be a wonderful thing, harmony, if advanced too narrowly, can be manipulated to justify social repression. An over-emphasis on getting along harmoniously, doing one's duty for community, family or country, is being used by Chinese leaders to repress individuality and freedom. (Chinese officials' focus on harmony is one reason they are having their universities promote Anglo-American ...

... ingrained in our minds for many years. when one gets into a culture that does not operate this way, it can be very difficult to get used to and very offensive to one's psyche at an inner child on the swing set level. oriental cultures are deemed to be very polite. but one must remember that polite is a relative term and is measured by the culture in question. in the states, cutting the line is considered rude. as is staring. here, these things are not considered rude and ...

... Way leading up to the Ming Tombs. Although I am not so knowledgeable on my aircraft terminology, I appreciated this museum because it was Mao's secret air base. All the planes were kept inside of a mountain (yes, a mountain), and the runway was just a bit larger than an average road here. Pretty amazing. There were lots of planes inside. It was interesting to see the planes with stars - ones that fought against the US. They also had machinery that was open for visitors ...

... materials (no LP Tibet or China guidebooks carried however...shocker). If we don't continuously read English our skills noticeably decline on a weekly basis! This is due to the fact that we have to speak slow and simplify every sentence spoken in the classroom in order for the students to somewhat understand what we are trying to get across. Dinner consisted of visiting the night-market with all the crazy exotic ...

... We had about two hours to kill before the train back so we went out for hot pot, to supposedly the best hot pot place in Xi'an. It was good, but extremely spicy. We asked for the water with spicy stuff in it, but this stuff was incredible. Even my roommate, who is from Sichuan, a place known for their spicy food, thought it was spicy. We met back with the rest of the students and took another night train back to Beijing. Now its back to studying, four more weeks!

... headed straight for McDonalds (the only thing close by that was open) for breakfast (ahh those western conveniences). Ryan then headed off to stay at a mate's house & Rich and I put our ever improving Chinese to the test once more and bused it ...