pantsfarm

I borrowed a camera and so I have some pictures that I’ve just uploaded to a flickr set.

Last weekend was my first weekend after having gotten sick for about a week and on top of that it was amazing weather AND it was a long weekend. It was also a pretty good weekend. I started out on Saturday morning kind of early and decided I was going to bike out a little ways towards the NE part of town, my main destinations being some places in 798 (ultimately skipped because I went and ate food instead) and the 3 Shadows gallery in Caochangdi Village.

I had heard it would be difficult to find and it would be really far away but actually neither of those things turned out to be true. I guess my notion of far away is a little further out from the center of Beijing than the people I’d been asking. It only took me maybe 45-50 minutes to get there and I’d never been there before. If I had known where I was going, it probably could have been less, but not by much since I never actually got lost. I only had to stop next to this one highway and walk over it to the other side which I thought to do because I remembered a map from before.

If I had missed that though it might have been a loooong time before I found another way there. Ultimately though, I should have taken the advice of one of the people I asked about how to get there, because then I would have avoided this little sign:

Oh well, so I wandered around in alleys for a while, which was not really that exciting but whatever. I got a snack, walked around a bit, and decided to head back into town. There was some weird graffiti, too.

At this point me and the camera parted ways for a while so there are no pictures of what followed. I am not 100% clear on the details but first I went to a housewarming/birthday party where I was refreshingly surrounded by people who I didn’t have lots of friends-of-friends with. After that, I stopped by home, met up with my sister and we headed to this goodbye party. It was ok, I met some people I had seen before but never really met, said hello to some people who I hadn’t seen for a while, and then eventually I think I was going to go to McDonalds but ate chuanr instead and then went to McDonalds or something? Whatever, it was late and I remember meeting some artist guy who I got a bad first impression from because of a misunderstanding about something being 50% by weight vs. 50% by volume.

The next day I was pretty hungover and didn’t really get out of bed until pretty late. When I finally did, I dragged myself out to eat some food followed by… more drinking. Possibly not the best plan but it was a more relaxed setting and we were just chilling. The weather was still beautiful so later I headed home and did some reading on the roof while drinking water and trying to get back to baseline. At some point I thought to myself, “hey, I have a bunch of old chocolate sitting in a bag in my room I better use that up.” In the process, I ran out of water and since there was none to be found anywhere in my apartment I went and bought some for me and my roommates as well. In short I am the best roommate ever. I have some faults, no doubt, but come on, I get drunk and bake stuff.



It’s just kind of a shame I suck at using a camera in our poorly lit dining room. The chocolate chip cookies were a new recipe that I got from my sister in Cali which she got from one of her friends and I don’t really know the whole history but it’s pretty much amazingly delicious and I will probably have to use it more often. It calls for a kind of ridiculous amount of vanilla extract which is (in my opinion) not necessary to use anywhere near that quantity, especially considering how outrageous the price is here.

So that was all the weekend of the 4th. Last weekend, that is, the last couple days, were also very good, but I don’t really have photos.

There was a party (alas, a farewell), a few hours spent lost near the SE corner of 4th ring road, and then drunken kickball (I never did make it on base.) The only photo I’ve got is from when I was lost and biking around and I ended up on this overpass that was closed so I just sat there and ate a sweet potato.
Unfortunately this lifestyle has caught up with me and seems to have left me once again fighting off illness, so, time to take it slow for a while, or, at least for the week. Next weekend I kind of want to go on this Great Wall retreat but I still need to resolve scheduling issues.