10/30 Monday

I was supposed to start work today, but because of all the impending political activity (the Africa Summit), the traffic would be extremely bad getting out to Kai Fa Qu early in the morning and it wasn’t worth it.

I slept in, and then went out with Terry to help guide the mayor of Columbus around the Forbidden City. It was his last full day in Beijing, and he was taking a quick tour of some of the sights.

When I arrived at the entrance to the Forbidden City, I didn’t have enough money to get into the city (the group was already inside) but a random man outside of the ticket office lent me 10 yuan so I could afford to get in. He must have seen me trying to get a student discount with my Choate I.D. card (“Chinese students only!”), and heard that I didn’t have enough to pay for the full ticket. I was extremely impressed by his generosity, and when asked how I could repay him, he jokingly said, “Send it in the post!”

After the Forbidden City, we took the Mayor to Silk Alley. I told a girl at a tie shop there, on the ‘Silk’ floor, that the mayor was my father, and saying that helped him get a better price on a bunch of silk ties. The people running the shops always appear to appreciate when someone knows how to speak Chinese.

I went with Terry to see where she and the other intern live. The apartment is conveniently located right behind the Cummins office building. Her apartment was pretty nice and very large, complete with a full kitchen and laundry room. The only problem she had encountered was that brown water was coming out of her sink when I visited her, and sometimes she has no water at all. Also, the windows seem to leak a lot, and she has to sleep on the couch, away from her bed next to the window, in order to keep warm.

I went to a nearby dumpling restaurant with her and ordered 60 dumplings with various fillings. We finished them all. After walking that off for a bit we went to a nice dessert place called Bellagios which is Taiwanese. There we shared an enormous strawberry-yoghurt smoothie.