I've come to the conclusion that biking in Beijing is like playing chicken. Puja nearly got caught between a minivan and a taxi and I was nearly in the way of a bus pulling out from the bike lane into the road. This adventure took place when we took Craig back to the bicycle street so he could buy a bicycle too and were heading back to the university along Xue Yuan Road and Cheng Fu Road.

Other things that have been happening:

- Eating at Subway. There is a 塞百味 in Wudoukou and Craig, Chris (2 Americans), and I went there for dinner the other night to see whether it tastes similar to Subway back home. Verdict: it's not quite the same. the bread is softer and the guys say the meat is spicier. Scarily, the smell in the place remains the same as back in North America. Chris also brought along his Japanese roommate and we ended up sitting in Subway for 2 hours talking and translating between mandarin (for the roommate's benefit) and English (for Craig's benefit) about everything from earthquakes, palindromes, a floating renminbi, and Peace Corp. Yes, it was interesting trying to translate conversation about Peace Corp and palindromes into mandarin. The electronic dictionaries were used several times.

- Visiting Beijing University campus. Sitting and talking by a lake in one of the campus gardens for several hours.

- Beginning a South-Park-a-thon, starting from Season 1, Episode 1. Craig bought an entire 5 season DVD set for 200 kuai or about 24 USD. I don't remember there were this many dirty jokes or double-ententres! Or maybe it's because I was 15 years old when I started watching South Park so everything flew right over my head. Incidentally, the title is literally translated as 南方公园.

- Lunch with Beijing Uncle Liu and my real 舅父 uncle who's visiting from Hong Kong. He's in town on a business trip (he's a big cheese for the Hong Kong Fire Department) so several of his HKFD colleagues and someone from the Beijing Fire Department were (unexpectedly) also there. So lunch was more formal, fancy, and took much more time than expected - 4 hours with many courses and 白酒 baijiu. It was fun but I was out of my social depth, especially since conversation was mostly in mandarin. At least I managed to follow most of the conversation and avoided making a fool of myself when addressed to in mandarin.