Ni-hao!

This was written on Saturday evening and not posted until Monday...I plan on updating again this evening (which apparently is the morning for all of you....)


Ni-hao!  That is one of the very few things I now know how to say in Chinese, and it means “hello”.  I’ve also learned how to count to 5, which is quite the accomplishment, yes?  Eee, arr, san, suh, wuh.  That’s how you say one through five in Chinese, phonetically.  But actually, 4 and 5, or “suh” and “wuh”, sound somewhat different…”suh” is like how you say the first part of “surprise”, and “wuh” I think is more like “woo” but not exactly like saying “woo”.  So as long as I only have to greet people and deal with 5 or fewer items, I should be able to communicate effectively with everyone in this country! 

I am still having a wonderful time, and for the most part, I have overcome my jet lag.  I am trying to fully adjust my schedule to be more normal, but the last few nights I have had to go to bed before 10:00 PM and end up waking up around 4 or 5 AM.  On Friday, I was just very tired overall and was starting to wonder when I had last felt so tired.  But I had a very fun dinner that evening and that pepped me up quite a bit.
Some more comments about the food here…on Friday we went to a Szechuan-specialty restaurant, and the three Emerson Beijing engineers who took Dave and I there said that Szechuan is the best type of Chinese food.  Apparently there are eight different types, and Beijing Chinese food is another one of them.  I’m not quite sure what the other six are.  I think I mentioned this last time, but the norm appears to be to order tons and tons of food and not eat it all because there’s just way too much food to eat.  The eating process also lasts at least 30 minutes and usually about 45 minutes, but when you’re using chopsticks, you eat a lot less food so it’s not like we’re just packing in tons of food at these places.  There were maybe five or six things that were ordered for five people on Friday, and the craziest thing was definitely the fish which was served on top of the fish itself.  Like, the whole fish was there, head and all, but all of his insides were removed, cooked, and sitting on top of him, but the fish itself was there on the plate too. 

Saturday was spent sightseeing, and I can now say that I have walked on the Great Wall of China, which was SPECTACULAR.  The scenery from where we were is just amazing, and I’ll be sure to post plenty of pictures of it when I get the chance.  There are some very steep inclines and treacherous steps all over the place.  For the most part, it is in decent condition, though I noticed that the less-traveled parts of the wall are now overgrown with weeds and vegetation and what not.  In order to get up to the wall (which is always built on the tops of mountains wherever it is built), we took a big chair lift to get there, and to get down, we went down this awesome toboggan chute which was like going down a big metal luge.  It was somewhat freaky, obviously, but still really cool.

Before the Great Wall, we visited this place called the Silver Pagodas which consisted of some cool ancient Chinese structures in the middle of a forest.  There’s also a huge path you can climb to get a nice view of the area, and we made it about 2/3 of the way before we decided that the view was good enough, haha. 
There are so many people in Beijing…I bet if you were standing in any part of the city, you would see at least 10 apartment or condominium buildings that are at least 20 stories tall.  They are absolutely everywhere.  25 million people live in this city!  That means that the traffic is ridiculous too, and seriously, people drive like maniacs here.  They also honk at people all the time, way more than we would in the US.  But they also don’t really seem to get upset on the road…if someone is in their way at all, the drivers just honk until someone is out of the way and then just keep going about their business.

Let’s see what other random things I can think of…we ate at a Subway when we went to the Great Wall, and apparently Subway is very popular in China.  I also told my coworker Dave that if we heard any American music in China, it would definitely be U2, and sure enough they were playing through a bunch of U2 albums at this Subway at the great wall.  Oh and another bit about driving…when we ate at this Subway, our driver parked the minivan on the sidewalk leading up to the place and even got out of the car to move the traffic cones blocking off the way to the sidewalk out of the way so that he could park there.  And while we were eating, an employee of Subway came out and yelled something, and the driver got up and was laughing, and the employee just laughed too and didn’t seem to care.  It was about the fact that he was obviously parking illegally, like, ridiculously illegally in my opinion since I’ve never seen anyone just up and park their vehicle on the sidewalk of a restaurant, but they all just sort of laughed it off and went about their business. 

Tomorrow I am going to see the Summer Palace in Beijing, hopefully followed by some shopping.  Should be fun!