Nothing is Interesting

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We had yet another Lazy Suzan dinner that night.  This time it was Peking duck, which was the first time I’ve ever had duck and it was actually pretty good.  Same drinks as usual.  I also discovered I love soy sauce, kind of.  It always falls to the bottom and pools there so the concentration is never perfect.  Oh well.

 

I went to Starbucks that night to take care of some long emails I’d received and some long ones that I wanted to write as well.  I was still wearing the five layers that I had been wearing all day because it was freezing in Beijing and even the bus didn’t have a heating system.  Well Starbucks did and I was seriously sweating just from sitting in there.  I stripped off a couple layers but the bottom layer was my underarmour so there wasn’t really anything I could do about that.  I was working on my Penn State schedule, which will be happening soon, and it wasn’t going as well as I had hoped.  I don’t think I’ll be taking quite the classes I had planned to take in the fall, which is okay.

 

There’s a black thing like a fruit in all the pastries.  Well actually, there’s one like a fruit and one like a jam.  I don’t like either and I always had to pick them out or spoon them out.  I don’t understand, why can’t everyone just have icing filling?!

 

I almost finished The Alchemist that night after I finished at Starbucks and came back to play some piano, but had ten pages left when Justin came back to go to sleep, so I turned the lights off and went to bed ten pages before finding out what the treasure near the pyramids was.

 

The next day we woke up and went to a kung fu school after breakfast in the hotel, where I always just had corn flakes or chocolate crispies or whatever – which turn milk WAY more chocolatey than I thought.  Oh, also orange juice.  Anyway, they did a kung fu performance which was pretty impressive.  The place was freezing though.  They were dressed in bright orange.  I took pictures of the silhouette figures in the back of the place while they ‘taught’ everyone else some simple moves.  I thought of the time that PSU Drumline tried to teach a clinic at the Mifflinburg show and just felt sorry for the performers.  I would have much rather just said Good Show to them, but didn’t know how.  A lot of people took pictures with them as well.  Benny got in on a little of the action as well.  At this point he was wearing his awesome brown and yellow horizontal striped sweater which we all dug.  Kids were rollerblading outside. I talked to Dani about how I wasn’t digging the partying people were doing too much or how much touristy stuff we’d been doing.  She talked to me before about her conversation about similar things with Rob Abowitz and how he said there’s a very steep learning curve as to how to get the most out of travel.  I think I made her depressed.  Oh well.

 

There was this lady on our bus.  She might read this.  It’s okay.  She’s a professor.  Benny said that we were going to the school and we’d pass the Olympic village on the way.  She asked if we could stop there for five minutes to take pictures – even when the handbook on all trips EXPLICITY STATES you are to NEVER ask for special stops.  He said that we would drive by.  She said something very very close to, “Come on, we keep doing all these uninteresting things.  Can’t we do something interesting for five minutes?”  Everyone that was in earshot was seriously floored and for the most part totally embarrassed.  We absolutely could not believe she just said that to our tour guide.  She continued that “It’s all my students know about.  It’s the symbol of China now.  We don’t know about the Great Wall or Tiananmen Square anymore, it’s the Bird’s Nest.”  That’s totally not true, she just has a skewed perspective because she’s an architect.

 

Suffice to say, we did not stop at the village, thank god, because it would have been boring as all hell.  The drive-by was fun enough though.

 

But seriously.

 

I chewed a lot of gum those days because I was afraid for developing cavities and stuff.  We got water bottles on the bus and always handed them back hand-over-head down the line.