Meditation, movies, and meandering. Ok, so meandering's a stretch.

This weekend was quiet.

7/26
On Thursday I went out to dinner with Fan Xie (Bobby, my flatmate, but I think Bobby is a silly name and am going to try to stop using it) and a couple of his friends. The friends showed up at our apartment before he did, by about 45 minutes, and we couldn't reach Fan on his cell. So I met these people, a husband and wife that arrived separately, and chatted for a while. The husband works in advertisement directing TV spots and the wife does PR. As far as I can tell they're the classic upwardly-mobile young Beijingers. They drive a car (Nissan Bluebird) and 'own' a house (which I think means that they have a 99 year lease from the Chinese government, which is as close as you can get here), they're educated and in their mid-20s, and they seem pretty liberal. We went out to eat at a hot pot place nearby, then to meet a couple of their other friends at the Black Sun near my house. The evening was good, despite my $3 bottle of Guinness that was mostly disappointing. It was my first night out with all Chinese speakers, so I struggled to keep up with the language, often failing. I need to be doing a lot more of that or I'm never going to get any good.

7/27
After work I went to yoga and watched DVDs. It was a pretty quiet night. I accomplished my goal of going to yoga 5 times this week.

7/28

Pictures of today's wanderings, plus last week at Panjiayuan. I also started 2 new albums, one for random photos I take and the other documenting Beijing construction. I'll try to keep adding to them.

Workers started tearing down a wall right outside my window at about 7AM. I managed to stay in bed until about 12, but I'm sure those hours of sleep were completely unproductive, as every few minutes they'd start cutting through some rebar or sledge-hammering something solid and my whole bed would shake.

It had rained heavily the night before and the sky was a little bit clearer than normal, so I decided to go sightseeing. Because things close pretty early I booked it out the door as soon as I could. I took a couple of buses over to Dongcheng and my first stop, the Drum Tower and the Bell Tower (Gulou and Zhonglou). They're maybe 50m tall, and in the past were used to tell time. While I was there the guys in the Drum Tower played the drums to mark the hour, but other than the fact that they're cool old buildings with decent views of the hutong area around them there wasn't much to see.

After the towers I got porridge and pot stickers at a small restaurant nearby. I didn't realize how close the towers were to another place I'd been already. Mentally linking these different, distinct areas I'd visited was neat; I like it when cities start to click into place. I walked to the next place I was going to visit, on the way passing Mao Livehouse. I'd never heard of it, but the exterior was rusty bolts and sheet metal and white stenciled writing, so I noted the name and looked it up when I got home. It turns out it's a new bar/music venue that's well regarded. They're doing a Ramones tribute on Friday by local bands that I think I'll try to go to.

My next stop was going to be the Lama Temple, but they closed soon and they wouldn't give me a student discount, so I walked across the street to the Imperial College (Guozijian) and its attached Confucian temple (Kong Miao). The Imperial College was China's premier university for about 600 years, and is where the emperor would give an annual address to the elites on Confucian values. The Confucian temple houses a forest of 190 stela on which are carved the 13 classics of Confucianism. The main hall was closed for construction, which doesn't surprise me.

When the tourist sites closed I found a bus that took me straight home from the Imperial College. I was going to try to meet up with Scot and Catlin, but the logistics didn't work out and I ended up hanging out and watching more movies.

7/29

Reading, yoga, and movies. It was a relaxing weekend, but next week I'm going to a bar even if I have to go alone.