Weekend is already over

I really don't like having to think of titles for each post. Each post is about lots of random shite so an "overarching" title is a little hard to come by unless you work making advertising slogans and are good at catchy taglines for useless crap.

Now reading: War and Peace, Larissa Volokhonsky & Richard Pevear translation. I should say continue reading since I read a few hundred pages in SF before I left for china but the book was too heavy and big to put in my checked luggage. This is supposed to be the best translation, and so far it is much better than the last copy I read which was a really old translation that probably missed the eloquence of Tolstoy's style. I also read Anna K by them, and it was fantabulous, so I'm very excited for this translation.

Last night I went to Kro's Nest with the Iveys and had real pizza for the first time in a month - it was amazing. I had pepperoni and then got to do my customary explanation of why I eat pepperoni and bacon. I need to coin a new phrase for my dietary habits because its really an annoying five minute explanation that I and kinda sick of repeating.

Afterwards I had a tug of war between going home and not spending money since I really don't have any until I get paid on the China side, or going to an ATM, running my US side dry and going out with Em, whose plan for the evening includes white rabbit, which only gets good after 4 in the morning. I decided that you only have saturday every six days so the right decision was to go. Most of the night was uneventful and even boring since I was sober and didn't like the music they were playing at White Rabbit later, but the Hip Hop concert we went to first at Star Live was AWESOMEEEEEE!!!

There were two acts and it was all in chinese so I understood nothing, but the crowd was really into it so we were too. The fist group was three guys who just rapped to beats by a DJ, a lot of which were pulled from US songs, and then the second group had a backup band and sang over that. T he frontman for that one puzzled me for a long time because I could tell he wasn't entirely chinese but couldn't figure out what he was, later we learned that he was half Chinese half Swedish. Strange combo. They also freestyled for a while and beatboxed... all in all it was wickedly tight / off the hook. I wonder what they are rapping about though since they can't criticize the government at all. A lot of Hip Hop comes out of criticism for the system and the man, so I feel like it must be tough to be so limited is your lyrics.

Rest of the night was blah, the only highlights were onion rings at Nashville and watching Gossip Girl at 6AM when I got home.

This morning I woke up and met the Iveys again at PangJiaYuan market where we shopped for a few hours. I got an awesome ring.

trapeezing tortugas take flight

This was a subject line I got on an email yesterday. 

I saw white people in my apt complex yesterday!! I did a huge double take, a very noticeable one.. it was a group of five really good looking guys so I'm sure they thought I was blatantly checking them out or something - great - maybe this complex isn't so bad after all, I need to start reading outside more so I can meet some of these elusive attractive white men without chinese girlfriends. 

link for the day : Cool Beans

ok.. damage to the phone from last night, which was epic: someone named Yalf, who thinks I am going to an open bar BBQ with him tonight, and Mari, which is my drunk shorthand for Mariel.  

I experienced one of the most morally questionable points in my life though last night.  I realized I was pre-gaming, by myself, while watching Schindler's List. 

Went to Saddle in SanLiTuar again, drinks were half off. woot. On the way there the cabbie in the car next to me stated singing my darling Clementine at the top of his lungs, probably for my benefit, and was really excited when I rolled down my window and joined in.  After Saddle there is a long progression of bars, and an attempt to go to Vicks, only to get there and then be too cheap to pay the 50 Kuai ($6) cover.  Instead we headed across the street to Alpha for 80s night.. and the night gets a bit blurry....Kebab Stand...my only jean skirt rips all the way to the top while climbing onto a stage w Mari....get convinced to stay despite said ripped skirt because luckily the rip is right over the pocket so I was still somewhat clothed....all decide to wake up early in the morning and go to a pool party... somehow get home. 

Really though, so far Beijing is like college, just with way more traffic and pollution (I know, I know, LA is pretty bad in these two categories too)

Woke up, have done nothing all day except for discover that adding bacon grease to eggs makes them 10 times better.  I bet bacon grease makes everything better, I should make a book: Cooking With Bacon Grease - Gourmet Adventures of a Vegetarian

Toodles

Friday has come..woot

Watch This: Daily Show - Palin (if you watch the daily show you have already seen it. John Stewart is indeed a national treasure.

Just finished reading The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz. It was an amazing story. I would definitely recommend it; their journey was of the same caliber as Endurance, (Ernest Shakleton) - the epic journey their crew made from the antarctic to South Georgia Island.. think Eight Below but the dogs become food....

I Survived my first entire week back in the office after working from home for three weeks. It might almost be better not to work from home because i'm so much more excited for the weekend now, and waking up at 7 every day definitely curtailed my expenditure on alcohol.. which is a good thing because I spend far too much money on that. I am keeping a spreadsheet of my accounts, so I know. I think the need to put everything in spreadsheet form and analyze it with in-sheet equations may be the mark of a CMC student. I also learned other useful things too, like the economic effects of overdeterrence for cannibalism etc..

Speaking of cannibalism, I watched an awesome episode of the IT crowd a few days ago where Moss thinks he is signing up for a german cooking class but really he has answered some german dude's add looking for someone to eat. Great show, I highly reccomend it... but I think you can only get it in the UK or off of youtube.

I was supposed to leave for the beach today, but I have way to much work this weekend, so I had to cancel. Hopefully I can go next weekend. Im going to go to the pool with Alicia sometime this weekend though hopefully to tan.

I want to live in a Hutong

Although my apartment complex is supposedly one of the nicest in the city, and has a patch of greenery, and there are ferraris in the parking garage I still fucking hate the place. It is a soulless russian compound and I am planning on escaping as soon as I possibly can.

I realized just how much I hate it last night when I went to an apartment warming party at this awesome Hutong up in the north section of the city. This place was SO cool. It was a traditional Hutong, so one story, with a central courtyard surrounded by rooms (I will post pics shortly). The central courtyard had a little table to sit at and a BBQ for grilling and the whole thing was very cozy and authentic chinese, unlike my apartment complex. It was in a traditional Hutong area; a labrynth of narrow alleys connecting the different houses, usually crisscrossed with laundry and overgrown with vines. It is also a better area of people my age because you can bike to all of the major bar streets. They had decorated the place really well and had hung up prayer flags, which their neighbors were angry about because it could be a sign of them supporting Tibet, heaven forbid.

They have an extra room that I could move into right now, but I paid my rent through october and It would be an extremely low move to ditch out on Adam and Shobhit without warning.

Back to the night:
Veronica met up with me at Dongjiamen station and then we went together to try and find his apt.
I think we must have gone through at least 50 large beers, which are each only two kuai, so it didn't set them back too much I think. We played some classy card games, also known as Kings Cup and Indian Poker.. the later was an awesome game requiring even less mental capacity than Kings Cup if that is possible. All you do is draw a card, stick it to your forehead while making indian war sounds, and then bet sips of beer on whether you think your card is the highest or not.

We also played Wii for Baijio (I spelled that wrong) shots for a while... but that was nasty. I won a free breakfast at Rickshaw off of Jeff so I need to claim that pronto... since I have a love affair with rickshaw food.

At 2 in the morning we went for Tuar (things on sticks) (I was supposed to be asleep at this point), eggplant on a stick, bread on a stick, chicken feet on a stick - you can really get anything on a stick in china. I left in the middle of the meal since I was so exhausted and had quite the interesting cab ride home. Kind of on the scary side in a funny way actually, but not as bad as when we hit that pedestrian in SF. My cab driver kept saying I was Hen Piaoliang (means pretty) the whole way home ... all thirty minutes of it, and then when I went to get out of the car in my parking garage at Pinguo, he grabbed my arm and said I love you like 8 times in english and wouldn't let me go.. it was annoying since I was already in a bad mood from being tired and knowing I had to get up in 6 hours. I think I just made an indiscriminate angry noise, yanked my arm away and marched off.

Michael is my boss

I thought it would be time to honor you with some choice quotes from my office life. Keep in mind these are all from my boss.

From email response:

"It won't bring them any consequence if their decision blocks our
mission critical cheese from outside access for a few days, of
`coz they won't care."

he then goes on to quote a chinese proverb:

It seems more likely we are a victim of
certain subnet blocking, just as a old Chinese saying, when the
city gate catches fire, the disaster extends even to the fish in
the moat

From weekly memo:

It is a great challenge to many of us. However, we can imagine how a client would choose someone to work with them who can't build an effective communication with them?! What if we are the client, can we hire someone who can only speak some dialect from a remote African area?

It gets worse:

And I certainly do not want to get that feeling again, because we, the XX team, is a far better team than any of those so called great software companies. We have talents, we have passion, and mostly importantly we are a team. No one should have the privilege to look down on us.

Then, here is a fun excerpt from an MSN conversation in which he asked me to test a jewelry website we are working on:

Me: I don't know how to buy diamonds either since I've never bought one, but I can check for bugs
Boss: After this, u will know, it is something you will have to know in the future
Me: haha.. we will see. It depends on how much money I make
Boss: well not ur money, ur future husband's money
Me: WTF?? hahah (I did not actually say that)

Further proof that my office is the office: we have a weekend outing to watch the mummy 3, even though 3 engineers already replied to the thread saying it was so boring they fell asleep. We also get a "present" at the movie... which I have no doubt will be popcorn.

Now that we are on the subject of quotes, I will share a few of my all time favorites from my all time favorite movie. If anyone can guess the movie you get a prize -and it won't be popcorn, I promise. I don't know what yet, but it will be shiny. This contest excludes all of the people I know who also love this movie (Jess).

"Stop talking Mika or i'll put you back in the trunk"

"What are you going to do?" "What I do"

"Get in the trunk" "Aaaa i'm not getting in there, there's a dead man in there"

Here is another ridiculous one from Three Musketeers:

"Athos it is your wife I tell you" repeated D'Artagnan. "Do you not remember how the two marks agree?"
Athos: "And yet I should have thought the other was dead - I had hanged her so thoroughly!"

My favorite part of the book is pages 250- 253, where Athos locks himself in a innkeeper's cellar and drinks and eats his way through the entire thing. I'f I could reproduce the entire three page section here I would, but that would be a lot of typing.

I'm going to the beach in two days! i'm going to get bronzed!

Reflections on the First Month (coming soon)

I guess I never filled this in and now it is reflection on the first month and a few weeks.  

When I first got here I was pretty dubious about whether I would like China or not.  It was a actually very different than what I had been expecting.  It did not feel like a foreign country to me, but more like I was living in chinatown and knew the rest of the city was somewhere, but couldn't find my way back there. I think this is because there are so many american restaurants here, like Pizza Hut and KFC, that I still feel like I am somehow in the US. I really didn't like that at first, although on the flip side it is very fortunate because I can get any food I need, even cheetos, but not in-n-out. Another reason for this is that the architecture is not vastly different than it is in the US. Because industrial China has been built in the fast 30 years, it could be any city in the US. Once you start looking at the cultural sites this is clearly not true, but if you stay downtown you tend to forget this. It is very different from in a european city, where the architecture is so different that you are constantly reminded you are in a culturally different place.

I was also a little homesick, which I expected since in Prague I missed people for the first month. My parents are out sailing in BC (British Colombia for those of you who don't know Canadian lingo) and I would LOVE to be out there with them despite all the alternator and engine problems they are having. I haven't been able to spend a whole summer on the boat in years - the past summers its been a few weeks here and there between jobs and traveling. There in nothing better in the world that packing a bag and casting off from civilization* for a month or two. I had a completely different set of clothes that I would take with me, summer hippie clothes, but most of the time I just wore a swimsuit anyway, and no shoes, there is nothing better than dock planks and bare feet. I would pack a obscene quantity of books or just bank on the "take a book, leave a book" at Refuge Cove having something good and devour them at an alarming rate over the course of the trip, I would be Palin's nightmare. Actually, my whole family would be Palin's nightmare. I bet my sister, a librarian, my mom, an ex-Planned Parenthood volunteer, or my dad, a generally ridiculously well informed farmer (ha), would kill her with vicious rhetoric. Anyway, this is supposed to be about China, not about how I miss Desolation Sound, and hate Palin so i'll shut up.

* our boat is not roughing it, I have a door on my cabin, and we have two heads. BUT it still is a sailboat, so much better than all you noisy pig boaters with your trailer park dogs and outboard dingy motors that are larger than our engine.

I also miss everyone from CMC, and had a great flashback session looking at the 6:01 pictures people have already posted from last night. Some people I miss more than others, and strangely I miss a lot of people I didn't think I would, and the some people, who I was really tight with, I don't miss at all. Then there are all the outside CMC people that I know from home, abroad and SF. I miss all you guys too, luckily i'm coming back to The Rock for xmas so i'll get to see everyone; I'm pretty fucking excited for that.

Enough sap, unless you know me really well you probably didn't think I was capable of it. haha. I remember from freshman year I told Chels I was nervous since a bunch of the guys were coming to the dance show we were having, and she looked at me in shock and said: "Mundty... you have emotions???" haha, I guess I've changed a lot since then though. Many thanks to everyone who made me better at that..

Now that I have a bunch of friends here its much more fun. The pollution is back, so now the city isn't quite as nice as it was during the olympics, but the fact that I know my way around more now makes up for that. I could see myself spending definitely a year here, and maybe two, who knows, it all depends on the people I meet.

So I think that is a pretty good summary for now. My parents will be pleased at this post, as they said that they thought my blog was to party-heavy.

Anyone who wants to come visit, I would be ridiculously ecstatic to show you around my new home, maybe make sure you are one of the people I actually miss though first. (I'm kidding, I love everyone who flies across and ocean to see me). I know most of you are Ibanking and so won't have vacation until you die from muscle atrophy in your cubicle.... but if you ever do get vacation... asia is awesome, and cheap. I recommend it.

Peace

September!

Just finished reading: The Three Musketeers by Dumas. This book is great as long as you love action movies or are a guy. I think the Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas is better though.

Starting to read: The Long Walk, true story about two Polish men who escaped from a Soviet labor camp in Siberia and walked all the way to India across the Himalayas. So far so good, but last night it made me dream that I was a French POW in WWII.

Anyway, back to life;

I'm going to Vietnam in 3 weeks!!!

The weather has been spectacular here for the past three days...I had forgotten what the sun looked like when it was not obscured by a layer of smog. Although to be fair, I have had it pretty easy the past month because of the Olympics: In August this year there were 16 days of "excellent" air quality, last year there was 1.

I finally made it to the llama temple on Sunday, but only lasted there an hour or so because it was so hot outside. Llama temple is a fully functional Buddhist temple, so it was packed with chinese people praying and burning incense. It was really cool to see them pray because it was much more interesting that watching catholics sit in their pews, but I felt very awkward being there since it was so obvious I did not fit in. Since I am atheist I am a tourist to all religions, but I felt much more like a disrespectful foreigner here than in the cathedrals in europe.

It was such a nice day out that I asked Alicia, who grew up in Beijing, where a good swimming pool was. I guess I probably should have specified a good tanning pool. She gave me the name of one and I set off on the subway to find it. I had no idea where I was when I got off the subway so I asked a woman on the street, and luckily enough she was going there with her daughter, so I just waled with them. I payed my 30 kuai, changed, and then armed with my tanning oil, sunglasses and a book went to to what I thought was an outdoor pool. I was sadly mistaken... It was a indoor, lap swim pool. I must have looked so funny standing there dejectedly in my sunglasses and bikini while everyone else was in swim caps and goggles.

Came back to the apt very hot, sweaty and not tan, and crashed on my bed for a while until Adam came home and I could grill him about his third date with the chinese girl he's been seeing (I am living vicariously through him since there are no men in beijing). Apparently he agreed to work at her school teaching english on the weekends.... its really ridiculous the things guys will do for girls, like one time when someone created an entire pool party just because he wanted to hang out with a girl..... it was an awesome pool party though.

Anyyyyway... i'm already getting excited to eat in-n-out over xmas break.... its going to be a long three months of anticipation.

Caio