11/12 Sunday

I am getting tons of responses for my online post at schools all over the city already.

I went out with my Malaysian friend, Jason, from the music school to a place called Xue Yuan Lu, or University Street, where tons of students from nearby colleges go to hang out and shop. The trip was four quick stops on the bus, and cost only 1 yuan. The food selection there is pretty good, with multinational restaurants, and the main shopping building on the 4th ring road has hundreds of stalls selling all sorts of clothes and accessories.

On the way out of the shopping center we stopped to try some food from a stall, picking out some small egg-sandwiches for 2 yuan a piece, and a couple sweet rice balls for 1 yuan. The egg sandwiches were good, but the rice balls were pretty bland. We asked the woman about the rice balls but she said she didn’t make them and had gotten them somewhere else; she was only responsible for the egg sandwiches.

In my apartment, I sat down with all my teacher advertisement responses in my email mailbox and sorted them out, sending my resume and picture or my phone number to some of the places.

At night I decided to take a walk with my camera, and headed over towards the Olympic construction zone where they are building the main stadium, the Bird’s Nest, and also an indoor stadium that is enclosed by something that looks like bubble wrap. The construction site is about a 10 minute walk from the gates of the music school.

I walked down the main street dividing the zone after slipping through a security checkpoint with a crowd of Chinese people. About a third of the way across the site, I took a right hand turn down a smaller street that headed towards the bubble wrap building. The street was lined with temporary dormitories for the construction site workers. I think that the construction workers usually do not own their own homes, and move with the housing provided by the construction company. The rooms looked small, and several people were bunked up in each room. I saw bands of the workers heading out into the streets around the site, and more returning to their beds. The street became dirt, and soon I was standing 75 yards away from the bubble wrap building. I stopped to take some pictures, and turned to the bird’s nest stadium which was farther away. There were still people working on the Bird’s Nest, and erratic flashes from torches and sparks lit up the side of the metal structure. I continued down the main street and turned off again, this time closer to the bird’s nest. I was able to get up pretty close to the nest and take some pictures of it. There were constantly dump trucks and construction pieces barreling up and down the street, kicking up tons of dust that got into my eyes.

On one of the curbs I saw something really gruesome: a dead mouse with blood coming out of its mouth. There were no marks on it as though it had come to this end from some disease.

I left the construction site and returned home to work on the pictures I had just taken.