10/22 Sunday

Today I was very surprised to wake up and see, out the window, the blue sky above me. When I was here in 2005 I saw the sky approximately 6 times in 2 months. I knew it would be a great day to take pictures.

While exploring to take pictures, I bought a bag, which has a Mao Ze Dong quote on it, Wei Ren Min Fu Wu, which means do good service for the people (serve the people!). It has a large red Chinese military star on it. The starting price was 75 yuan, but I managed to bargain it down to 20 (<$3.00). Near the stalls selling the bags and other trinkets, there were some food stalls with kebab sticks with skewered starfish, larvae, bugs, and still-moving scorpions. I don't think that any of those will ever be on my menu.

I was able to take some really cool pictures of a crew demolishing an old apartment building, as well as many pictures down central Beijing's many but diminishing hutongs (narrow alleyways). They are destroying many of them in favor of new apartment buildings. I also came across a few dogs in the hutongs and got some pictures of them.

I met Colm's cleaning lady today (called Ayi, or aunt) and we talked a lot while she was tidying things up in the apartment. She doesn't know much English so we spoke in Chinese. I told her it was alright to leave some of my clothes how they were (in a heap) but she scolded me about it and folded them anyways. I showed her some pictures of the things I had seen during the day, and we talked about what I was doing the next couple of days. I told her that I was going to the technology sector, Zhong Guan Cun, tomorrow, and that was going to bring my laptop along to see if anyone would be able to fix it. One of the fans inside (I think the video card fan) makes a terrible amount of noise when it spins up and makes it so that I cannot fall asleep with it on. It is also really annoying when I am trying to do something nearby. I opened it about a month ago and tried to access the fan, but found that I could access all the fans except for the one that was making noise. Ayi told me that her son used to work for an electronics company and that he had some friends in Zhong Guan Cun who might be able to help me out when I went there. She called her son and had him speak to me and then she wrote down directions to get to one of his friend's shops in Zhong Guan Cun.

In the evening Colm came back with a couple of bags from Ikea containing candles and seat covers for the floor. He had invited a bunch of people (~8) over for a dinner party, so we set up the apartment, moved the furniture a little, set up candles, laid the seat covers on the floors for sitting, and went shopping for food and drinks. I got to meet a few interns at Cummins, who are more near my age than Colm's colleagues I met at the Xin Jian restaurant, and found that they were all really nice. We had pizza delivered to the apartment and watched King of Gamblers, a classic Hong Kongese movie, while eating.

After the movie, we walked to Tian An Men and past it, talking the entire way. We took some pictures at Tian An Men (Colm's the other other white guy in the picture), and finally got back to the apartment at around 10:30.