Summer Palace

06-27-10

7:30 PM

My internet’s been broken for a few days, so I haven’t been able to post or read email at all. Supposedly they’re doing repairs on the system or something, so it’s not just my computer being feisty (or as Katherine would put it, sheisty).

The terror of riding on the back of someone’s bike has officially worn off; in other news, today I did laundry and painted my nails and studied the vocabulary I’ve learned over the past week. But! Lest you think that I’ve become boring:

On Friday (the 25^th), Katherine and I went out to dinner and then browsed Wudakou again; I don’t think we’ll be back for a while (too many wonderful things to buy; very dangerous to our wallets). I don’t remember anything else we did that day, for whatever reason. Oh! I did a good amount of honest work on Friday; Zang and I had loaded the column and were collecting fractions and doing spot testing with TLC as well as drying down fractions and more sample for a later column. Zang was exhausted; she was speaking to me in Mandarin because she had pulled an all-nighter to fix the column the night before and was too tired to use English. When she told me about it, I asked her how to say “work ethic” (gōngzùo rè qĭng).

For lunch that day I had one of the best dishes I’ve had since coming to China: white fish ribs in mala clear broth with mung bean sprouts; I also had some bai cai and rice. I think part of the reason I liked the fish so much might have been because it was the most Cantonese-like food I’ve had since coming here.

Yesterday (Saturday) we had an insane, long day. In the morning we bought Katherine a bike and then biked to the old Summer Palace. Holy cow, it’s huge! You think of Beijing as urban, but it’s really very leafy, lots of trees. The Summer Palace is essentially a park of lakes with ruins, rather than the other way around; it’s gorgeous.

You could purchase cheaper tickets with entry only to the park and lakes, or more expensive tickets with access to the ruins/palaces. I suggested we buy the more expensive tickets because they said (in Chinese) there was two sites that were cool that they allowed access, and so we did. However, after an hour or two of walking, nobody else believed me, so I got teased about my imaginary ruins... until we found them!

Cuningham dropped his ticket in a lake. Out of his supposedly secure money pouch. We played the 'dumb American' card and showed pictures to get him in.

We walked around for as long as we had patience for, then went back home. Drew and I watched 3:10 to Yuma while Cuningham napped and Katherine was at lab, and then we all went out afterwards to a place called Bar Street to watch the game. Keep in mind, the game was scheduled to start at 2:30 AM. The tentative plan was I was going to taxi home with Katherine early… instead we were having such a good time we stayed through overtime. Not only was it sunny out when we were coming home, but the subway started to run again at 5:30-6AMish! Bar Street was pretty rad. We ate grilled meat on a stick, danced and watched the game on a huge rooftop lounge with a London Ghanaian girl, a Ukrainian from Finland, and some Taiwanese guys and a girl who were attending Beiyi medical school. Zeke, one of the Taiwanese guys, did his undergrad in the US at UMich, and was sporting a t-shirt that read “Michigan Taiwanese.” Spiffy!