Cell Phone Issues

today i attempted to buy recharge minutes for my cell phone (in china, most plans are prepaid). unfortunately, i don't yet know much cell phone policy vocabulary, so when my phone failed to work after recharging i had about an hour long confusing discussion with the salesman. from my understanding, a long distance conversation i had with my dad on his birthday had actually racked up a debt (i didn't know this was possible), which i either had to pay off or avoid by switching numbers. he convinced me to buy a new number from him because it would be cheaper than settling the debt - i don't yet know if he did me a favor or duped me. he works at the university's store, so i'm going to hope for the the former; i get tricked enough as it is.

Tiananmen Square

This is actually an old one, but it's from a really fun night we spent at Tiananmen Square. We got there just before sunset and saw the lowering of the flag with a huge mass of other people. We walked around and got to see all of the standard Beijing sites. As usual, us foreigners were quite the spectacle - at one point, a pair of Chinese twins asked to take a picture with me and a friend of mine (these strange requests have actually been repeated a few times in various places). I can't imagine how weird we must look that people ask to take pictures with us; or, more commonly, furtively take pictures when we don't appear to be looking. A friend of mine named Lei Zhen (Thunder Earthquake... a.k.a. John) has it worse - several Chinese children upon seeing him have run away or began crying. He doesn't seem too bothered by it, saying seeing us must be like how an American child would feel seeing an alien right out of Independence Day.

Datong

This picture is taken from the courtyard of a Buddhist Monastery in the middle of Datong. I think at the time, the Backstreet boys were playing at an outdoor fashion show nearby (we actually convinced them to let one of our friends walk down the aisle). you run into a lot of similar bizarre contrasts - especially in the ways that the west and east combine.

a chinese sunday afternoon

for various reasons, studying in beijing means being in a state of perpetual exhaustion. i think my closest friends on the trip and i all went to sleep at about 9p last night and slept 13-14 hours each. this afternoon we went to "Panjiayuan" which is an enormous flea market filled Mao-memorabilia and dubiously "ancient" pieces of art. most of us didn't buy much - i think we mainly wanted to hone our haggling skills and people watch a little. we took a rather long taxi back (maybe about the length of a 40-50 dollar taxi in America) and i think i had my best Chinese speaking experience. The cab driver and I talked about the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the respective GDP's and populations of America and China, the difficulties of studying English and Chinese, and even American politics (the driver was particularly fond of Hillary Clinton or, in Chinese, He-La-Li.