A Plug for Miles Grimshaw

Also: my friend Miles, who is also doing the Yale-PKU program here in Beijing, has his own incredible blog going at milesawayinchina.blogspot.com. You can also see if he's posted something new by glancing at the column on the right of my blog.

Miles also claims that he's going to get back to blogging every day. He currently has three more blog posts than me. Now, as a prolific summer blogger who was glad to keep people back home so updated, I can't let this challenge go unanswered. Miles Grimshaw, I will blog more than you by semester's end. You've been forewarned.

But anyway, check out the awesome video he made (I helped!) of him working out on the Beijing subway. Pay particular attention to the reactions of people around him. It's hilarious.

This is Miles (and Liz):

hehehe

新疆: Part 1

As one of my previous posts stated, I spent my first day in Beijing in preparation to leave the next. During orientation, we Yale students were surprised with a pre-commencement trip to 新疆 Xīnjiāng (Xinjiang Province) on the complete opposite side of the country. Now I knew next to nothing about Xinjiang, and our internet wasn't working in the dorm, so I didn't have the chance that evening to do some quick research. All I did was pack for a Nebraska fall (ready for heat or cold) and hope that would get me through the five days. What little I gleaned as I prepared for the trip with the other seven Yale students was this:

• Xinjiang has been host to some serious ethnic tensions in recent years between one of the minority groups, the Muslim Uighers, and the majority Han Chinese who had been moving in to "modernize" the area.
• Its principal city, Urumqi, was pretty large with a couple million people.
• Since it was Ramadan, a lot of people wouldn't be eating during the day.
• The cities we'd be visiting bordered some serious desert and mountains. We'd be going to the hottest spot in China. We would also be eating lots of grapes, which were apparently a specialty of the region.
• Xinjiang would feel a lot like Inner Mongolia since they're so close and share a lot of customs. Great.

Shopping in Beijing

You thought this post was going to be about clothes, didn't you? Next post. Hope the suspense isn't too much. This post, though, is all about my shopping period experience at Peking University.

For those who aren't familiar with the phrase, shopping period is the first two weeks of a semester at Yale when students can freely attend any and all classes they are interested in. Based on the classes they have "shopped," they decide on a final schedule and hand in their decisions at the end of the period. Now if I were back at Yale, I'd be picking from hundreds of classes. But here at PKU, I was given the opportunity to choose from 10.

Mooncakes and Drama Queens

Let's get down to business (to defeat the Huns - sorry, couldn't resist). I'm way behind on my blogging, but the life here at 北京大学 Běijīng Dàxué (Peking University) is so much more fast-paced than I anticipated. This might turn into a regressive blog for a while as I try to play catch-up, so here we go.

Today was the famous and much-celebrated Mid-Autumn Festival. That is to say, 中秋节 Zhōngqiūjié. Celebrated on the 15th day of the 8th month on the lunar calendar, the festival coincides with the autumnal equinox, when the moon is supposedly at its fullest and brightest. The traditional way to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival is by hanging out with your family and eating mooncakes under the moon. However, since Mid-Autumn Festival falls on a Wednesday this year, and our roommates have American "guests," of sorts, they elected to stay on campus and be our stand-in "family."

Adios America, Bonjour Beijing

Two weeks of American relaxation came and went, and before I knew it, I was leaving my home for the longest period of time in my life. Since I wasn't leaving for Beijing until Sunday evening, we decided to make a weekend excursion of our trip to Omaha. We also had to pick up Alina, who had returned from her little camp at Stanford :) It was also Ricky's first time out of Kearney, as he flew straight into our little airport from Europe.

The weekend was just what I needed before departing to Beijing again. We spent some time shopping at the mall, getting a few things here and there, including a great book that I read on the flight, Empress Orchid. At Natalia's insistence, we also went to an exhibit currently in Omaha called "Bodies." It was actually incredibly fascinating. The exhibit showed human bodies de-fleshed, preserved, and dissected in ways that one could see just how we work. It's just incredible how complex we really are, and all that develops from the joining of two tiny cells and a few strands of coding.

One month later...

... I'm back on the blogoshpere. Apologies to those who actually follow my blog for letting my laziness and China's dislike of Blogger keep me down. A lot has happened in the past month, so it might take a few posts for me to catch up. Please bear with me.

Now, let's go back to August 14th, the day of my departure from Beijing and the last effort I have at blog posting, right before my flight was called...