Saturday, September 1, 2007

a night owl in beijing

After about 3 days here in the city where the sun shines but you just can't see it I've spent more time awake in the wee hours than during the day. That is to say, I broke the cardinal rule of waiting until the evening hours to go to sleep and thus avoid major jet lag. My first day here I was silly enough to think I could take a "nap" at 2:30 in the afternoon and the next thing I know it's 1am and I'm wide awake.

So I've made good use of the early morning hours unpacking, cleaning, reading, and attempting to re-learn Chinese characters. Re-learn because at CU we were taught traditional characters, which are used in Taiwan and Hong Kong but not in China, so I now have to go through the tedious process of re-learning characters in their simplified form. I suppose I could rant a bit more about just how tedious it is but the truth is I do get a weird kick out of learning characters. They have a term for that here -- "shu daizi" (book nerd).

I found out that classes don't actually start for me until the 13th so now I've got a couple weeks to explore. I bought a new bike yesterday on the street. Actually, my roommate B and another friend J haggled for it while I watched and tried to follow along. It turned out to be 215 kuai, lock included (less than $30). Not too bad. Also I just have to mention it because I still can't get over it -- yesterday at lunch I had a big bowl (more than enough for lunch and dinner) of noodley soup with egg and tomato that was 5 kuai, which is like 60 cents. !!

Had a chance this morning to upload more recent photos from home. Hope you enjoy looking at them because I can't. For some reason (perhaps the same reason that I can post on my blog but can't seem to look at it?) I can upload photos and organize them but can't look at them.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Prince looks great, although I don't remember him being in Ohio on my couch. I guess this apt. counts as home. Are you sleeping at night time now?

AmyG said...

NYC is my second home, which includes you and prince :)

I am back on a normal sleeping routine, although still getting up relatively early. Which actually is a good thing I think -- I like being up early so hopefully this routine will last.