Asian popcorn! Yes there are pink, blue, and purple pieces in there.

I am skipping class (again) this Friday morning - Craig says I am taking a 'mental health day' to recuperate from the stress of the past two weeks. Whenever I have a string of bad luck, I try to remember when a friend told me that some Buddhists believe that "when a lot of things are going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born - and that this something needs for you to be distracted so that it can be born as perfectly as possible."

This started when I was bedridden last week with the evil Chinese 感冒 ganmao (flu) for an entire day. Fever, nausea, the works. As soon as I was well, it up and off looking at apartments. Craig and I wanted to move out of the dorms, partly because my roomate is dodgy and I miss having a kitchen, and largely because we should be able to find a nice apartment for the same amount (or much less in Craig's case) we pay for the dorms. Our deadline was today, since I'd have to relocate this week anyway to a new dorm (since the old one is being renovated) and Craig needs to pay another month of housing.

It's stressful finding a place to live under normal circumstances, but try doing it under a deadline of less than 2 weeks with an agent that speaks absolutely no English. I now know lots of new vocab terms such as: landlord, utilities, rent, contract, maintenance fees, and deposit, and have insight into how things like utilities and such are handled in Beijing.

We also discovered that rent in Beijing is paid in cash. Now this isn't a problem except rent is around 5500 RMB per month. The largest bill denomination is 100 RMB. And we'd have to pay in 3 month installments. This reminds me of the beginning of the semester when students were literally carrying shoeboxes of cash to pay for tuition. And since neither Craig nor I have accounts at a local Beijing bank, the only way to withdraw that much cash from a foreign account is to phase it over several days.

Unbelievably, after lots of biking back and forth to look at apartments, we found a really cozy place with a nice old couple as landlords last Friday. I even had a month of deposit, all fifty-five 100 RMB bills in a little envelope, ready to fork over. Unfortunately, we lost the apartment this Monday. They decided at the last minute to rent to their daughter who was returning home from the Netherlands.

So we lost our apartment, we're stuck in our current housing situtation, and I have more cash than I know what to do with (plus due to money transfer boo-boos, I ended up overdrafting my chequeing account and got hit with a 90 USD overdraft charge).

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To counter all the above negativity, here are two little bits of optimism:

1) I moved into new dorm and it is ridiculously nice. I no longer have a bathroom that looks like it's from a crackhouse. Also, there is a possibility I will be getting a new roommate. Hopefully this one will not watch Korean TV all the time and smell up the room with kimchi and cooking onions.

2) We saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire! English showing with chinese subtitles. We were the only ones laughing at the English funny bits, like when Professor McGonagall called someone a "blithering, babbling, bumbling baboon" or something (hey alliteration is funny). Chinese for Harry Potter is 哈利波特 pronounced hah-lee-bwoh-tuh. I also ate the sweet, coloured, movie popcorn of my Hong Kong youth - can't find the stuff anywhere in the US.

3) I have an internship in China: I am now officially doing research as an intern with the Beijing office of the UNHCR! :)