Wearing a shirt and tie to work does NOT make me a grown up.

What have I been doing? Hell if I know, but it seems like I've been here a lot more than 4 days.

7/1

On Sunday Scot and Catlin and I went to the Zuzhi Park. We didn't really know what to expect, it was just a beautiful day following a day of torrential downpour. The rain got rid of some of the smog, which is nice, but I think the rain itself is pretty insidious. When my clothing from Saturday dried it had these white mineral-like deposits on it, and I don't really care to know what they were But Sunday was gorgeous and we were up early after our 8PM bedtime the previous night. We skipped the Great Wall because it was supposed to get really hot and we ruled out the Summer Palace because it takes an hour and a half to get to, so we picked a random park with a museum near it and went. When we got there we wandered around bamboo gardens for a little bit and went for a boat ride in a pond filled with lotuses, lilies, and dragonflies.

We left when we got hungry and the heat started to get to us and walked across the street to a really casual restaurant. When I say casual I mean there were guys sitting at a table shirtless and others ashing their cigarettes on the floor We got real kung pao chicken (gongbaojiding), which is nothing like its American bastardization, and green beans with hot peppers and bits of meat. Most of the meals I've had here are family style, with everyone eating off of plates in the middle, or at least moving food off of them onto individual rice bowls. After lunch we got yogurt and green tea flavored popsicles next door to the restaurant and sat in the shade on a wall by the river while we planned our next move. (As I read that sentence it sounds very picturesque, but the river is stagnant and filled with algal blooms and it runs parallel to a 10 lane road maybe 100 yards away. It was still nice, but let's be clear that this was a very urban river.)

We decided to go to an art museum behind the park, so we started walking. We tried to get off of the main road and out of the sun, so we took a shortcut through some back roads. That was the end of the art museum plan, because soon we were lost and having loads of fun exploring residential streets and commercial alleys. There were, among hundreds of other vendors, people selling street food like melon slices on sticks or rows of quail eggs fried in little compartments that line them up on sticks (which I'll forever think of as quailsicles). There was a pet dealer with bunnies in cages no bigger than the animal itself and turtles trying to crawl up the sides of rice bowls. I'm pretty sure that was a prostitute that smiled and waved at me and not an actual nail stylist, but I'm not sure. We felt (and were) very conspicuous carrying around high end cameras and wearing relatively nice clothing, but the only place I think we were really unwelcome was one side street where an old shirtless lady smoking a long pipe wordlessly waved us off. That was the first alley we tried to turn onto, so I'm glad we tried again or we would have missed an adventure.

We eventually made it back to the subway to meet up with a second group of 3 MISTI students who were in town for a couple of days. We were going to a dumpling place near Tian'anmen, so I got my first glimpse of the square as we walked over.

Also, now that I'm thinking about it, the car market here is pretty strange. There's one brand, which I'm pretty sure is called Honde and rips of Honda models, with a logo that looks like a Star Trek communicator. Buick's are very popular and seem to be an upper-middle range car. Nissan's are higher end, and have great names like Bluebird and Sunny. The upper reaches of the market seem to be dominated by Audi. I see 10 black Audi A6s for every BMW or Mercedes, so I think that someone at Audi bribed a government official a while back or something, and once the government started using them they became the car to have for business types. I had been told that Beijing is decreasingly a bike city, and I think that's probably true, but they're still everywhere in swarms.

Anyway, Tian'anmen. It was big. There's a huge street running out front. Those were my first impressions. Scot and Catlin and I met up with the other 3, we had dinner at the jiaozi place, then wandered back through the gardens to the square. By that point it was dark and they'd lit the buildings up with little bulbs around the trim, giving the whole place a sort or circus or Broadway feel. That and the CCTV cameras that bristled off the lamp posts were my second round of impressions. We didn't stay for long; after a bit of walking and a lot of waving we finally got cabs to take us to Sanlitun, a bar district.

I was exhausted at that point, but we got a couple of drinks at a place off a side street called Butterfly. It ended up being less than half the price of the main drag joints even though it was only 100 yards away. Despite the fact that at that point my head hurt too much from the sun and dehydration and the long day to deal with haggling I was determined to try some baijiu (Chinese liquor), so Scot handled the negotiation and we drank out of the bottle on the side of the street while we waited for a cab. I did end up chatting with the cabbie, who confirmed that drinking on the street is completely legal, which is cool to find out. We got back and went to sleep. Well, we were about to go to sleep when Scot remembered he'd thrown out the air conditioning filters in the morning, thinking they were disposable, so he went downstairs to dig through the trash for them, then we went to sleep.

7/2

I started work. Catlin and Scot and I got rice porridge, wonton soup, and soy milk for breakfast, then we went our separate ways. I took a cab to work, or at least most of the way. My directions weren't very good, so I still ended up walking like 15 minutes after the cabbie dropped me off. I toured the office, scored zero in the introduction lightning round, then got set up at a desk. I don't think I'm staying in this office very long or I'd post a picture. I didn't do any real or interesting work, just some background reading. It turns out there are some younger people here in the office, at least for now. There's a Harvard sophomore here for the month, a Korean Kennedy School girl here for a fellowship, and a girl who just finished her master's who I think is employed full time. The four of us plus Dimitri, one of the younger UNIDO officials, went out to lunch on the corner, so I got to chat with them a bit. Mercifully, there's a coffee machine in the office. I hate desk jobs; I think I'll probably have a 6 cup a day habit by the end of this.

I took the bus back to Scot and Catlin's after work. Well, actually I took two buses to a corner 10 minutes from their place over the course of about an hour, but I wanted to try out the bus system. It was crowded and hard to navigate, but I think once I figure out some routes I'll take them more often. The fare for each of the buses was 12 cents, and I might have even been able to get a transfer or something that I didn't know about.

Scot and Catlin's Chinese flatmates cooked dinner, which was very tasty, then I packed my bags and moved to my new apartment. I don't really feel like talking about the place now, so I'll put that in a later post. For now I'll just say that it's on Chaoyang Gongyuan Xilu, the Chinese equivalent of Central Park West.