I woke up at 8 this morning. Again, spent most of the morning on the computer. I studied a fair bit of Chinese, spent some time looking through travel sites, and some time on math homework.
As to travel sites, I looked up flights and hotels for both a possible trip to inner Mongolia, and for after the program. I found a nice hotel in shanghai for about $75 us / night, and train tickets to shanghai for as little as 20 us, although that’s for a seat on a 12 hour train, and so paying closer to 75 US for a bed probably makes more sense. Trains are way cheaper than planes, but you can only book a week in advance. We’ll have to see if it’s doable.
In the afternoon I decided to take a walk. It was a much nicer day today than yesterday, with very little smog at all. I walked south until I hit the subway line, and then walked northeast for a ways. I ended up in an upper class area a bit south of the computer area I’ve been to before. One of the really cool things I saw was an above ground parking garage. Each stall actually fit what looked to be 4 cars, a car would pull into the stall, and then it would rise up, so that another car could fit underneath. Some stalls still had several cars stacked vertically this way, which was really cool.
I saw a lot of outdoor equipment in the shopping mall, rain jackets and hiking boots were everywhere. I looked around vaguely for skiing or snowboarding gear and didn’t see anything even vaguely related. After getting lost, I found that the place I was in connected to the carrifour I’ve been to previously. I walked out that way, and in the entrance to the supermarket there was a fashion show going on. For whatever reason they’d set up a runway, and had models exhibiting new fashions. I suppose an upper class mall is as good a place as any to do that. Additionally, around the same area there was a photo gallery set up. If I were to choose the title it would be called “Dogs of the SiChuan earthquake”. Each picture had some sort of dog involved with the earthquake; there were dogs with rescue volunteers, rescue dogs in the wreckage, Dogs with firefighters in helicopters. It made for a very strange contrast with the runway models it surrounded, to say the least.
I came back at about 5, and wasted time in my room until people were ready to go out to dinner. Max had found a Mexican restaurant in the expat area of Beijing, and I was up for visiting the area once. The place turned out to be less than a block from the Beijing apple store, so I now know where that is, although we wandered for about 30 minutes trying to find it. It turned out that we had to enter an Italian restaurant, go through it’s back door, and then found our Mexican place along with a cluster of other otherwise inaccessible restaurants. I got a burrito. It wasn’t bad at all, but was an American price. It did have cheese, which is a food item that is not present in Chinese cooking at all, and I haven’t had for the last few weeks.
After dinner we walked around the area a bit. There were a bunch of bars and clubs, mostly with English signs, and appealing to a rich, upscale, European or American clientele. We stopped briefly in a bar that had been recommended, the menus were only in English, the prices were the same as one might expect in America. We caught a subway back to school. It cost 25 cents, instead of the 8 us that it cost to taxi over. Now I know where it is in case my computer ever breaks.
Not much since then, we got off the subway a stop early, because the marking is silly, and the stop marked haidan road is actually on the zhongguancun side of campus and not the haidan side. The walk back to campus was nice, the temperature has cooled down to a balmy but not sweltering level.