Say, where did that building go?


And here's a graph of the air quality levels since I got here. You can see where it rained. The data is from the Chinese version of the PRC Ministry of Environmental Protection website.

Beijing air today: 176. The buildings I had mentally marked from the window earlier as being the farthest I could see are just barely visible today. I'll take a comparison picture of the can-opener building this afternoon when I walk to the gym.

Among any number of other issues, China is not know for its healthy environment. Polluted air, polluted water, lack of water, increasing car ownership, functionally unregulated industry -- you name it and there's probably a damning news article about its manifestation in China somewhere.

I had been living in the Emerald City, in a blue-green state, where recycling is matter of fact and if you can't see the tops of the skyscrapers downtown, it is raining. Now I'm in Beijing, and buildings are obscured by pollution regularly. On Saturday, Beijing checked in at 72 on the Air Pollution Index. Last weekend it rained for two days and has been fairly windy, so the particulate matter has been knocked down, and the smog blown away. This morning, though, the wind has died down and the haze is closing in again.

72. What does the number mean, exactly? The API is calculated from reports on air quality from different stations around the city and the region, and considers levels of inhalable particulates, sulfur dioxide and nitrous dioxide, plus carbon monoxide and ozone in miligrams per cubic meter. The World Health Organization considers 50 to be a safe number. For Beijing, an API number below 100 makes it a 'Blue Sky Day,' and it isn't until 101 that the State Environmental Protection Agency recommends that "the cardiac and respiratory system patients should reduce strength draining and outdoor activities." Up to 200 is still only "light pollution." With a sandstorm, the API can reportedly go to 300 or higher, as it did in mid-March, before we arrived. Or, in December, 2006, it was over 500.

Beijing has a target number of 'Blue Sky Days,' 70% in 2008. To meet the targets, there is a multi-layered approach: nearly the entire taxi fleet has been replaced with Hyundai Elantras, the city's environmental agency has been encouraging drivers to give up one day of driving a month, factories have shut down (more will be shut down in July, and remain out until the Olympics are done), and monitoring stations in the places with consistently bad air ratings have been taken offline (or not?). Maybe it is simplest, and cynicalest, to simply consider the number an indicator of how likely you are to get cancer, or have decreased life expectancy due to prolonged exposure. Though, really, who am I to comment? Is criticizing China's environment racist? I think I'd place myself alongside James Fallows, on that one.

When we visited the Great Wall last weekend, the haze was very much in evidence. On the way back, I asked Alex's colleague, who had very kindly taken us out there, what his opinion was on the environmental problems, and the more recent moves to rein in industry and improve environmental quality. His answer was simple -- the Communists might not be very good, but they don't want to kill everyone, so therefore they will take real action on the environmental problems. This seemed logical, and I hope it is true. The same fellow, though, is soon to be a father, and asked Alex to buy some cans of baby formula while he was in San Francisco, as he is mistrustful of the domestic options.

For myself, I don't think there's any way to get around the large portion of responsibility that the West should bear, in regards to the Chinese environment. Though the domestic factors are not small, a lot of the pollution is industrial in origin. And everyone knows what Chinese industry produces -- cheap goods for Western markets. They make all the things we used to produce domestically, until we devised our own environmental regulations, and our own workers started requiring health plans and such. So we outsourced our environmental problems, and cleaned up our own environment, but at the cost of other places on the globe.

That's my Great White Guilt.

In consideration of all the above -- green lifestyle in the US, awareness of environmental issues here (and I didn't even go into water), and Great White Guilt, one of the things I think about here is how to live best and greenest. The most concrete thing I can think of is taking fewer, shorter showers. And the grocery store (really a French chain, soon to be boycotted in relation to the Olympic torch debacle) has an understated campaign about reusable bags, so Alex got one of those.

But how to balance other aspects? Is it better to eat street food (little infrastructure involved in its preparation, but probably contains all the tasty things from the air and street) or restaurant food (bought and cooked in bulk, but eaten with disposable chopsticks?) or to cook and eat at home (my US solution, but I have a limited kitchen, and a limited ability to identify or find necessary ingredients)? Better to walk, or to bike, or to take a taxi (is the air inside a taxi somewhat filtered, compared to outside? is it supporting the local economy?) Is it better to buy food from the grocery store, with some presumable quality control, or to buy it on the street and practice language skills? Should I let Alex try to take his button-up work shirts to a dry-cleaner, or should one of us figure out how to iron them? Is there any way to recycle bottles? Does someone down the line pick through the hotel trash and glean out the reusable bits? What about composting? What can I say or do when I see people littering in the streets? Do the air filter masks that many people on the street wear have a positive health benefit?

What can one foreign white girl do in a city of nearly 18 million?

I spent some time today reading 'Oracle Bones,' one of the books on China that Alex read, enjoyed, respected, and handed to me. The author was first a Peace Corps Volunteer, teaching English in a province, and then slowly clawed his way into a successful journalism career. (I say 'clawed' because both of my parents were journalists at one time, and I have no romantic illusions about the lucrative or steady qualities of the work.) Starting out in a province and being the main source of English language for those around you, I think must be an awfully good way to learn a lot of language in a hurry. It's pretty much how I learned Finnish -- by being in the middle of it all the time.

I will have to try harder to learn Mandarin, though, as my daily life is easily removed from the surroundings. I am working through the same English-language channels, on the internet, as I would be at home in Seattle. I am listening to my usual mish-mash of English, Russian, and occasionally Spanish, music while I work.

Today I looked out the window, from my position on the tenth floor (which is really the ninth -- floors four and fourteen are skipped in the numbering, because the word for 'four' also sounds like the word for 'death') and saw the image of a crane at a nearby construction site reflected in the windows of the high rise building across the street. There is another building between me and the construction; the only way I could see it was in the reflection. The crane-image moved liquidly across the glass, surrounded by blue sky, the China Mobile offices behind the windows tinted and obscured. A bundle of something was let down, the cables swaying, rippling on the glass like a heat mirage. The body of the crane swiveled and glided through the reflected the sky.

Several stories down, on the street level, the wind whipped back and forth a few flags in front of the China Mobile building, a blue one with the company logo, a white one I could only see part of, and the gold-spangled, red flag of the People's Republic of China. The red silk crumpled sinuously, now hugging the flag pole tightly, now leaping away with a visible snap, displaying its stars.

That's what I saw, watching from my English-language bubble, floating along the surface of this great sea of Chinese language and culture. I have quite a bit of Mandarin to learn before I can stick my head completely underwater.

Yesterday I took the subway towards the center city, and got off at the northeastern corner, near the embassy district. I saw the Russian embassy, and several stores with Russian signs. I wound my way south and east and eventually got to one of the big shopping streets, Wangfujing, quite close to Tian'anmen Square and the Forbidden City. The only thing I bought was some street food -- fried dough balls so sticky on the inside that at first I thought they had banana inside.

In an offshoot of the alley with food, I also walked through an alley full of stalls hawking things for tourists -- chopsticks, fans, bronze figurines, opera masks, geisha dolls, teacups, saddam husein playing cards. In Russia, the same places sold matryoshka dolls painted with everything from traditional female faces to US presidents, to Simpsons characters, fur hats, lacquer boxes, and any amount of chachki emblazoned with Soviet insignia. There I could bargain with the sellers, chat them up; here the hawkers plucked at my sleeve and addressed me in rudimentary English: "Lay-dee! Looka looka!"

In Chinese, there are no syllables ending in hard consonants - k, p, t, d. Thus the sellers implore you to looka and buy a mapa, a booka, a postacard, which are invariably gooda. When I visited last year, one the phrases Alex taught me on my first day, when we visited Tian'anmen Square, was 'bu yao' -- don't want. It's a useful one in that part of town, where foreign and domestic tourists alike are lured by the promise of spectacular cultural relics.

My strategy is the same here as it would be at home in Seattle, or anywhere. I keep walking, I act as if I didn't hear, as if they were talking to someone else. More as an exercise than anything, I wandered through a store selling chopsticks and studiously ignored the salesgirl who stood attentively at my shoulder the whole time, waiting for me to show particular interest in anything. A couple times I nearly laughed out loud, as she literally followed me step for step. I kept waiting for her to say something, to try to sell me on a set, so I could use one of the phrases I do know -- "wo kan-kan." I'm looking with the connotation of 'I'm thinking about it, but have not decided.'

I did get to use it later, in a bookstore, where I was approached by a salesgirl while looking through the 'Chinese learning texts for foreign devils' section. When I didn't respond to her Mandarin queries, she held up a book and asked in English, 'You want to learn Chinese?' 'Wo kan-kan,' didn't make her go away, though, it set off another round of Mandarin address, forcing me to come up with an additional phrase: 'Bu mai, kan-kan.' Not buying, just looking. On a different floor, though, I did buy an exercise book to practice writing characters in, and a thing of note paper to make flashcards with. I have plenty of studying to do!

Odd items of clothing seen today:

1) A girl wearing a sequined hat that in the US would say 'HOT' or 'Princess' or some such, but here said 'Rape'.

2) A guy with a tshirt that said 'Surfer dreams are wet'

Yesterday afternoon I finally kicked myself out the door at about two in the afternoon, and headed west, toward the mountains and the green patch of the map marked Haidian Park, not far from our place.

A new direction is always exciting, and I hadn't gone too far when I found a spectacle -- a crew of men removing trees in a narrow street. This was a four-story tree, with a guy in a leather harness clinging to the top and using a handsaw to saw off boughs. I stayed and took pictures, deciding it was curious enough that I shouldn't worry about being a random laowai with a camera. When all the limbs were off, the man in the tree shimmied down ten feet and they sent him up a chainsaw on a rope, and he cut off the top section. Below, a group of men on a rope pulled so it landed in an appropriate spot in the street. The same for a second section, which shook the ground as it hit. The guy came down the rest of the way and had a smoke while some of the others were cutting the logs into sections. It seemed they only had one chainsaw amongst the group -- there were maybe half a dozen men -- and they were in no great hurry to get to the last twenty feet of tree still standing, so I kept going.

I came upon a canal, empty despite the recent rain, followed it up, then continued west on what turned out to be the fourth ring road, a large highway, where I was going against traffic and didn't seem to be getting any closer to a way into the park, though I could see fenced in greenery. Eventually I came to an entrance -- for a gold course. I turned back and went up a smaller road, again following a fence and despairing of a way in. This time, though, I was rewarded after a bit with a sign saying ENTRANCE, and a very obvious entrance next to it, with a young uniformed fellow standing at attention.

I had no idea if there was an entrance fee, and I also no idea how to ask, but I didn't see anything obvious saying you needed to pay, so I put on my best impassive laowai who knows exactly where to go face and walked in, ignoring the guard completely. He didn't say anything, and I discovered a large and lovely park worth the effort of finding it (which really was minimal, so I didn't get lost of anything).

After I walked around for a while, I was approached by two teenage boys, one of whom asked me something. I gave him a blank look, and he said "picture?", gesturing with his cell phone. So I let his friend take a picture of us standing next to each other.

This happened last year in Harbin -- people finding me so odd and exotic looking that they wanted their photo with me. I imagine it is like when you drive across the country in the US, and you take your picture next to a giant egg, or a statue of James Dean, or with the really big fish you caught, except in this case the remarkable object comes to you.

Or maybe this guy will try to tell his friends he has a laowai girlfriend -- see, photographic evidence! Or maybe, the way that all Asians look very much alike to Westerners, perhaps they think I look like some particular white female celebrity. Who knows? In both cases -- and I'm sure there will be others -- there has been no conversation, no small talk, "Are you American?", just the photo, and goodbye.

Today's adventure: As I was getting ready to leave in the afternoon, I picked up a bag off the table and knocked the hanging lamp above it. The glass plate in the bottom of the lamp came out, hit the table, and shattered into a million little pieces, with great sound effects. Glass scattered across the room.

I stood and stared for a bit, as it was probably one of the largest items I have been party to the shattering of, then found a dictionary and looked up the word for broken, got up my courage, and went out into the hall. A few doors down, I could see a cart for the housekeepers, so I approached and said, 'Duibuqi, wo de dian deng sui de. Sorry, my light broke.' (Awfully proud of myself for being able to complete the sentence.) They asked me a question which I didn't understand, but which I presumed to be 'What room are you?' and so ushered one of them with me and showed him to what I was referring. Glass piled on the table, shards on the floor, a few outliers on the couch, in the sink. He surveyed, then picked up the phone and made a call, and went away. After a bit, he returned with a woman who brought a vacuum and began to pick up the large pieces.

'Duibuqi,' I said. Sorry. Her reply, of course, I did not understand. The man came back and asked another incomprehensible question, and I understood through sign language that they wanted to make sure I hadn't cut myself. I had not.

There didn't seem to be much I could do, other than apologize and not understand anything they said, so I finished gathering up my things and left, to meet Alex, and visit a gym with him after work. It was a nice walk today, since it was raining all day yesterday and most of this morning. The air has cleared up considerably, and I was even able to see the mountains in the west, as well as the building by which Alex judges air quality -- the tallest of the buildings in the Olympic complex, shaped somewhat like a can-opener.

The gym was your typical, internationally recognizable setup: weight machines (and most of the men) on one side, cardio machines (and most of the women) on the other. Alex pointed out the rowing machine, and I spent some time on it reflecting how long it has been since I did any erging.

I also learned that Chinese women don't wear shorts at the gym. I pointed that out the Alex, and he said, 'Yeah, and they don't do what you're doing, either.'

'What, sweat?' I asked.

'No, wipe their face with their shirt.'

I'm kind of coming to the conclusion that if people will stare at me no matter what I do (on account of being white and blond), then I might as well do whatever I want...

Yesterday was a good long day, with an early start to meet a friend and co-worker of Alex's, who took us out for an excursion on the Great Wall. We went to a section 120 km from Beijing, less popular with tourists than other spots, but still subject to a sizable number of people, and not far enough out to escape the persistent haze.
It took two or three hours for us to get out of the city and then wind our way up through a place called 'Rainbow Trout Valley' to our destination, called Jian Kou. It is a particular tower on the wall which is lower than the towers on either side, so making a shape like the string of bow when drawn back with an arrow -- 'Jian' 箭 means arrow, while 'kou' 扣 means held back. (Etymology of the 扣 character: a hand over a mouth.) We parked along with many other cars on the side of the road in the village and paid a couple kwai to a picturesque old man in a Mao jacket -- a standard practice, in return for which the farmers keep an eye on the cars. The trail went up through fields still bare, past dry corn stalks piled up on the side, then up through then trees beginning to bud out. The view, which would surely have been striking, was obscured by the omnipresent white haze, but everyone on the trail was in high spirits. Occasionally someone would start whooping, and answering yells would greet them from further up the hillside. There were even a few rounds of song, with one group starting a verse, and another group finishing it.

I got ahead of the guys for a while and got a lot of pretty surprised looks -- a white girl, climbing up to the wall by herself? One young woman, also looking surprised, said 'Hello' to me as we passed; I said 'Hello' back and kept going, wondering what exactly went through her head.

As they say, we aren't in Kansas anymore, and what's more, it's a long way from REI. Many of those climbing were young, but most were outfitted more for street-walking than for hiking. I saw a lot of men in slacks and leather shoes, and, though I didn't see any women in heels, I wouldn't have been terribly surprised. It seemed that about half of those making the climb up to the wall stopped at that point, had some food, and went back down.

We continued to the north, through various towers, and up a stretch that was, according to Alex's friend, rated as 'two stars' for steepness, which brought to mind the Angel's Landing trail in Zion National Park, though with a shorter fall awaiting. That and there were brick stairs, but no chains to hold on to.

A bit later there was a 'three stars' section, where the stairs had entirely disintegrated, leaving an irregularly surfaced rock wall, which we clambered up one at a time. We had to wait for quite a while as the people before us went up, and then a group coming back made their way down. First a man came down, then a young woman started coming down, then stopped and tossed down her backpack and then her gloves to the man, who then climbed partway back up to help direct her where to put her feet. Those waiting at the bottom where all talking amongst each other, and began laughing -- Alex's friend translated for us: 'First the backpack, then the gloves fell from heaven -- next will be the girl!'

I made sure not to look down on my way up; on the way back we took a side trail that circumvented the wall and both steep sections. We ended up turning around before we reached a section that would have been 'five stars' steep -- I can't think what it would have been like!

Today has been a quiet one, particularly because it is raining, an unusual occurrence for Beijing, which has caused umbrellas to sprout like multi-colored mushrooms, and all the taxis to be taken. We went out this afternoon anyway, to a cafe near several of the universities, which turned out to be almost exclusively filled with white people studying Chinese, which, of course, was what we spent the afternoon there doing. We had dinner with another friend of Alex's, who showed a Yunnan (southern province) restaurant, an unassuming hole in the wall with cheap plastic tablecloths and delicious food. We had some sautéed greens, fried banana, potato balls, fried chicken, pineapple rice, and a mixed dish of bell peppers and ground meat and something that may have been a mushroom or root vegetable, I'm really not sure. The pineapple rice actually came in a pineapple, which was super tasty, and I want to try making it sometime. I'm still kicking myself for not taking a photo, but we took a business card for the place, and I'm sure we'll be back.

So here I am in Beijing. Day one in China. It is sunny, although due to the general haze of pollution, the sky is a flat white. If I look straight up, I can see the barest hint of blue, and the suggestion that there a few shreds of actual cloud above.

Alex and I got up early, around 7:30, had a shower and breakfast composed of a medley of fruits and yogurt from China, with the addition of bagels from Grateful Bread in Seattle. From the Western perspective, China is severely lacking in decent bread products and chocolate. I also brought a pile of chocolate bars with me.

I spent some time on Alex's computer to do some work email, and then walked with him to work, about half an hour from our "serviced residence," aka hotel room. Microsoft has four floors in the top of one tower in a four building set of highrise technology office buldings. Sun is in one of the other towers, the Google building is also just next door.

The bottom has a plaza, with some cafes and such. I stopped in one to get a drink -- a Starbucks-like place called 'SPR coffee' where I pointed on a bilingual menu to indicate that I wanted an iced pineapple drink. It came with an oreo on top, because, why the hell not?

"Why the hell not?" is the only explanation for a lot of things here. I'm sure examples will accumulate.

On the backside of the four towers is a spot which is labeled TSINGHUA SCIENCE PARK. Tsinghua is one of the universities, and is located next door. The science park is made up of a tile plaza surrounded by a fountain-filled moat, and further ringed by terraces of paving stones and bushes, the uppermost level of which is blooming with yellow flowers.

I spent some time sitting in the park, took a walk around part of the Tsinghua campus, and had lunch with Alex and two of his co-workers in a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant (even saw a monk) before walking back home, feeling very white and freckled and blond on account of the people who stare unabashedly at me.

I detoured a couple times to walk through alleys full of street vendors -- fruits and vegetables spread out on cloths on the side of the alleyway. Most of the vendors stared at me, and I wished I knew how to say 'how much?', or that I had a better handle on numbers, so I could try and buy some strawberries, or an egg. But I'm still pretty mute, and too shy to just pull out my camera and start taking pictures of people and their stuff, so I'll just have to provide word pictures instead.

I saw an intense looking poker game amongst several sellers, all sitting under a big umbrella, hunched over their cards and smoking furiously. I saw a cucumber with a six-inch circumference. It looked like you could by slices of it. I also saw a few vendors with live seafood -- plastic tubs with fish or shrimp, with bubbling air hoses frothing the water. There were women selling brown eggs, which were piled up in great towers, with cardboard molding between each layer.

I'll get cracking on my Chinese, and hopefully go back soon with a little more gumption.

Just when I was starting to feel completely sick of being on an airplane -- and coming to terms with the fact that I am not yet half done -- the flight attendants appeared with the one redeeming factor for an eleven hour trans-Pacific flight: ice cream sandwiches. I saw them coming down the aisle and tried to communicate the fact to my neighbour, a middle-aged Chinese guy who I tried a little of my pitiful (so far!) Chinese on.

"Bing <ice>! Bing<ice>... bing<ice>... niunai<milk>... bing<ice>... tang<sweet>, bing<ice>."

The crucial word I was missing (and have since looked up) was jiling - cream. Ice milk, sweet, probably all with the wrong tones, didn't seem to get the point across, and I'm not sure he knew what I was trying to say even after they gave us the ice cream. I still, obviously, have a lot of learning to do, and pronunciation of tones to practice, too.

Things I did manage to communicate, though: I have studied Chinese for two months. I will be in Beijing for two months. I can answer affirmatively when asked if I will travel. Things I learned from him: He lives in Seattle, and has for three years -- showed me his driver's license and green card. He is a dim sum cook in Chinatown. He might even have told me what restaurant, but that I didn't understand. With the addition of my visual dictionary (which is so awesome and I love it even though I've only owned it for three days) he indicated that he is going to Gongzhou for -- lots of interpretation of sign language -- something like the funeral for his parents, which will involve going to a temple and praying a bunch.

But in general, the flight is simply long, and uneventful and monotonous, the way eleven hours of wait for anything has to be. And next week, Alex, lucky soul plagued by government regulations regarding foreign workers that he is, will get the glorious opportunity to fly to San Francisco, get his work permit stamped in his passport, turn around, and fly right back to Beijing. So he will be doubly run through the wringer of international travel, and I will be quickly thrust, at least for a few days, into experiencing Beijing on my lonesome. Well, perhaps not entirely lonesome, as I have high hopes for language partners. We'll see!

I'm big on using the power of the internet to learn Chinese. Actually, the power of the internet is the main reason I'm able to go in the first place -- thanks, Al Gore!

The magic of the internet got me signed up for the Chinese class I was taking, provided me with podcast Chinese lessons, and with a great online dictionary, and looks to have helped me find a language partner (the catalytic power of Facebook!).

And then, there's the power of Youtube. Not only does it provide Chinese lessons with Benny, but there is a crazy video-song of pinyin pronunciation. I'll need that to counteract what I suspect may be a mish-mash of pronunciation in pop-song music videos. I found a bunch which are subtitled in both pinyin (not all with tone marks, unfortunately) and English, so I can listen and tell what vocab I know enough to hear and understand, and I can pick up some new words, like the fact that one of the words for 'happy' is the same as the word for 'quick.' Same character, even. And, of course, all those super important pop-song phrases, like 'You and I', 'I love you' and 'open your heart'!

I've been working on packing today -- I'm on round two. First I made a pile of all the clothes I wanted to take, and stuffed them in a suitcase to see how much it was. Then I went through it all again and considered what I really wanted to take with me, and added some books and toiletries and shoes and a coat.

The suitcase(s) I'll be using are lent from a friend at work, and her cat is apparently fond of napping in them, which would explain Pippa-cat's fascination with them. Either that, or she's hoping to come with me. I could probably bring her along, I just wouldn't be able to bring her back...

All told, I have slightly less than one full suitcase worth of things. And that's excluding things like the cat, or my laptop, and camping gear. I will be bringing some hiking boots, and a rain jacket. With all my clothing in neat little piles around the living room, I took a moment to ask myself what outfit would I be able to pull together if we did manage to get somewhere mountainous and more chilly? And how many skirts do I think I'm going to wear in Beijing, given that I very, very rarely wear skirts in the States? More importantly, what sort of American am I, if so far I'm not planning on taking a pair of jeans with me?

I started out looking at posts at Global Voices on reactions to the protests tangling together Tibet and the Olympic torch. A vocal portion of Chinese are concerned that Western media shows only the anti-Chinese protests, and not pro-Chinese demonstrations. There are also various reactions to the Dalai Lama's recent statement. The BBC prints reactions from Chinese individuals to the protests.

I can't justify the violence on either side, but seeing as the historical Olympics in Greece were a time of truce, when all put down their weapons and thought of athletic competition, rather than violence, I think it is particularly sad for the two issues to have been linked this way.

I did find it interesting to compare the Xinhua [English-language PRC media] backgrounder with a somewhat longer history from friends-of-tibet.org.nz. Theoretically, wikipedia's version is more balanced, and I'm not sure what to make of Lonely Planet's story.

Also, we'll see if this post is visible when I get to China. Alex's office internet connect is reportedly outside the net, but certainly from the hotel I may not find much online about certain T- topics.

Bragging: I had a comment on a word included in the weekly compendium of comments on the week's words from A Word A Day. I know they don't include every comment sent in, because I have previously commented and not had it show up in the compendium message.

I've been running around with various errands this week, mostly related to getting as much grad school related paperwork in order as possible before I leave. I have the assumption that something due on May 1st will arrive shortly after I leave, and I won't find out about it until mid-June, when I get back. I'm mailing them copies of my tax return for financial aid. Got blood drawn on Tuesday to be titered for measles immunity, as I have moved around enough to have no idea where my immunity records are. Still need to register for the online statistics course I hope to be taking from China, which, of course, I can't simply register online for if I want to pay with my Americorps award.

With less than a week to go, I'm starting to have 'last's.

Yesterday was my last session with my Chinese teacher (who has a very thorough website). He gave me a hug and a list of a couple things he'd like me to look for in China, that he hasn't been able to find here. One DVD or VCD of a particular opera or lecture on an opera, a book on dialects in China, and a book on rhododendrons. As far as I can tell, the selection encapsulizes his main interests in life.

Today is my last staff meeting, tomorrow my last class for kajukenbo. Tonight is a last girl's night out with a bunch of us from work. I'm going to China, another woman is leaving to hike the Pacific Crest Trail.

Alex has arrived safely in Beijing, and is gearing up life there as I am gearing down here. I'm trying to use up all my food in the fridge, time my last load of laundry just right, finish projects at work. He is acquiring a new card for his cell phone, getting a gym membership, a bike. He is learning what places to go to hang out, I am saying goodbye to hangouts.

One week, and I'll be on the ground, and worrying about readjusting my sleeping schedule. Beijing is fifteen hours ahead in the future. Alex always points that out when he calls -- that he is in the future. The flying cars he describes failed to materialize last time I visited, but there's a lot of technological innovation of there, so who knows. It would be an awesome thing to reveal for the Olympics!

Alex is leaving tomorrow morning, and I will follow in another ten days. His last stop at my house, Pippa-cat was in a wompus mood and hissed at him instead of bidding a fond farewell. Today, though, she's been following me around and coming to talk frequently. Little does she know that we're both abandoning her for months!

On my part, the imminence of Alex's departure is making mine more clear. Not that I haven't lived abroad before, but this is a new situation, going with Alex to face our first experiment in cohabitation longer than a ten-day vacation. I fully expect it to work out, but all the same it is a momentous thing to be doing. Plus the whole 'oh, crap, I'm leaving the country in ten days - how many things am I forgetting to do?' thought train, follow closely by 'what the hell am I going to do in Beijing?'

I'm sure I will have my own stories actually from China soon enough, but in the meantime, I found a fun list of things not to say in China...