... back to Beijing! How fast five weeks fly by. I noticed while I was packing tonight that, sometime somehow, I have become a much-gadgeted girl.

Packed in my bags are:

1) Laptop. (I realize this technically isn't packed yet because if it was, I wouldn't be typing this right now. But the point is that it WILL be packed in due course.)
2) Digital camera
3) Cell phone
4) Ipod

and my latest acquisition

5) Palm Pilot.

All this for a girl who, 5 years ago, swore up and down that she wouldn't get a cell phone! I caved into getting a phone my junior year when all my friends moved out of res while I was stuck mothering freshmen in dorms on the opposite side of campus, rending telecommunication the only way to retain a social life.

Anyway, I eBay-ed the Palm about 2 weeks ago. Not to organize my life into neatly scheduled segments mind you but so I could get a kick ass Chinese-English dictionary. Sad to realize I bought a gadget for the software. Actually what really convinced me to get the Palm was noticing that the program had a flashcard function... and seeing the stack of 857 flashcards I made last semester. Something that eliminates toting fragments of cardboard around? Sold!

Back to packing. While I've long resigned myself to the inevitability of carting electronic bits and bobs from place to place, what's really annoying is the need to pack cables, chargers, and other devices necessary to keep everything singing and dancing. Throw in a couple of converters and adapters too if you're travelling to a country with different voltage and sockets... like China.

From the amount of space devoted to packing gizmos and their accessories, I conclude that I'm way too wired. And not in the happy, caffeinated way.

With classmates at Lao She Teahouse (and me being uncharacteristically Asian-cutesy)

I just read Chris's latest post about returning to Beijing and how very strange it is to realize that such a crazy/wonderful/awful city has been home for the past five months. I'm experiencing a twinge of mixed feelings about going back:

On one hand I wonder how I'm going to put up with Beijing for five more months: the hordes of people, the shoving to get on and off the subway, the suffocating smog, the bureaucracy, having to bargain for bloody everything, the squat toilets, the terror of speaking an unfamiliar language and the frustrations of being unable to communicate...

On the other hand I can't believe that I'm going to be in Beijing ONLY for five more months: being in the presence of great history (the Great Wall, the Summer Palace), international classmates (Japan, Turkey, and North Korea anyone?), bicycling everywhere, Muslim bread, the hub-bub of markets, the exhilaration of being understood - and actually having conversations in Mandarin.

When I told my Cornell mandarin teacher I was going to Beijing for a year, she remarked that spending time in China will be one of my best decisions ever. It's certainly been that way so far. And with many goals left to tackle (such as apartment-hunting part deux and more travelling), I'm sure the next few months will be just as challenging and rewarding... bring it on!

After over a year of tripping over and meandering around stacks of books on my floor, I finally got fed up enough to buy another bookcase. I have a weird organizing/cleaning quirk where I start on one thing and inevitably end up juggling several tasks. In this case: shelving books --> reorganizing CDs --> cleaning out crap from underneath my bed.

I'm only in Toronto for about 2-3 months per year for the past six years, so I tend to(re)discover weird and wonderful things whenever I sort my stuff. Random thoughts during the process:

- Why do I have a book on Java (computer not coffee)?

- I own a lot of Michael Crichton books.

- Ditto for plays and Canadian authors.

- Aww... Sweet Valley High, The Babysitters Club, and a handful of Archie comics.

- I have a book on penguins!?

- Ace of Base still sounds awesome.

- Whatever happened to Aqua, Jewel, and Eagle Eye Cherry?

Yesterday I went to the Ontario Science Center to see Body Worlds 2, the controversial show featuring plastinated bodies... and one of the most amazing science exhibits I've ever seen.

It was a bit surreal to realize that we were seeing actual human bodies but I didn't find the show creepy or sensationalist at all. It was fascinating to see the human body literally exposed in all its glory, and to see the beauty in the intricate knit of muscle, nerves, tissue, and bone that makes up our insides. Did you know that networks of blood vessels resemble silhouettes of leafless tree branches?

No wonder learning anatomy is so difficult. I have more respect than ever before for anyone who is a doctor or studying to be a one. Especially surgeons. Especially surgeons who are brilliant and/or crazy enough to able to fathom procedures like this.

ps. I am never taking up smoking. Ever. The sight of a beautiful large white lung transformed into a shriveled grey-black organ is disgusting!

Me, me! On the Great Wall

I've been tagged to fill out a meme.

Sidenote: Even though the word meme is pronounced "meem" (rhymes with steam), I always mentally read it as "me-me" because they usually ask about things concerning ME! Anyway...

Four jobs I've had:
Resident Advisor
Head Resident - basically being a Hall Director
Research Assistant (another RA acronym)
Hostel front desk staff

Four Movies I can watch over and over:
Amelie
School of Rock
Love Actually
Zoolander

Four Places I've Lived:
Hong Kong
Toronto
Washington DC
Ithaca

Four TV shows I love:
South Park
HBO's Rome
Friends
Law and Order: SVU

Four places I've vacationed:
England
Japan
South Africa
China

Four of my favorite dishes:
Tiramisu
Scrambled eggs
Charsiu rice (叉烧饭)
Spaghetti Carbonara

Four sites I visit daily:
New York Times
Chinese-forums.com
Fark
Gmail

Four places I would rather be right now:
Anywhere Craig happens to be, but ideally the Haunted House ride in Disneyworld.
In a quiet snowglobe, meaning a room with a view of falling snow
Ithaca in the summer
Washington DC

Four people I'm tagging to do this too/slightly alienating:
Chris because I want him to highlight what he likes to eat!
Heather who may be a big important accountant but is still up for filling out frivolous things like this.
Chrissy because she enjoys procrastinating
Craig who should reply in the comments of this post because he has no blog.

Pizza Hut, an immensely popular dining institution in Beijing.

This post is the first of a series which I'm calling "Backlogs" because they refer to incidents which were never written about, due to a mixture of exams and illness, seasoned with a good dose of laziness.

But now that I'm home with all this lovely free empty time, I can finally recall things that happened between the Christmas and now.

This first refers to one of my, and Chris's for that matter, favourite pastimes: eating. Now if I could only eat one cuisine for the rest of my life, Chinese food would be it. But by the end of the semester, all of us were 馕-ed, 担担面-ed, and 肉串-ed out and craved non-Chinese food, specifically "American food" (I use this term loosely in the culinary sense).

So we finally caved in and resorted to trying out a couple of American chain restaurants in Beijing. Hey, to our credit, we didn't go to KFC.


The crowd waiting to be seated at Pizza Hut. Note the santa claus hat on the staff.

1) Pizza Hut. Did you know Pizza Hut is an It place to eat for Beijing's middle-class, complete with really nice, spiffy decor? Every Pizza Hut I've seen is packed with people - especially on weekends and holidays. We went to one Hut in Wudaokou on Christmas Day; there were so many people the staff would take roll every 10 minutes or so to see who had abandoned the wait and who remained in line. We switched gears to takeout after waiting 20 minutes with still no chance of being seated soon... at which point we did our good deed of the day and gave our seating ticket to a couple who just entered the restaurant.

2) McDonalds. I have a secret: I really enjoy visiting McDonalds in other countries. Not for the burgers but to see the regional variations of the American menu. And the Beijing McDonald's did not disappoint. You can get hot taro pie in addition to apple pie! While the chocolate fudge sundae is sadly absent (strawberry remains available) you can substitute a pineapple sundae or red bean sundae instead. French fries taste as good as they do back home. Small sizes are actually small and the concept of super-sizing doesn't exist.


Chris, meet Bloomin' Onion. Bloomin' Onion, meet Chris.

3) Outback. Ahhh globalization. It's the reason why we could consume steak and Wallaby Darneds in the middle of China. Between the wood panelling decor and the country music playing in the background, we could nearly imagine we were back in the USA. Except for the Chinese waitstaff. And the view out the window of a neon sign advertising "foot massages". I bet Chris didn't think he'd eat his very first Bloomin' Onion in Beijing.

Also off the top of my head, here's a list of random foods I missed while in Beijing (they were either, unavailable, very hard to find, and/or relatively expensive): chocolate pudding, bagels, cream cheese, donuts, tim hortons coffee, Mexican food, Pepperidge Farm cookies: goldfish, Milanos, chocolate chunk cookies, whole grain bread, non-sweetened cereal.