HELLO and welcome to my travel blog! I don't really have anything exciting to say yet, except that I'm in Beijing and it's sort of cold (but don't worry mom, the jacket I brought is enough) but it should get hotter soon. Well okay I guess I could think of more things to say. Hm.

1. The other kids in my program (I think there are 19 of us) are all very nice. My roommate's name is Natalie, and she's great; we actually lived in the same dorm fall quarter.

2. The food I've had so far hasn't been bad. I've only eaten at the Beida canteens so far, and it's great because the food is so cheap! And we get 2000 rmb/month for food, so I think I will be just fine, unless I decide to be super luxurious and eat out every day.

3. Our rooms are SO nice! They're two-room doubles, with a bathroom and shower included. Oh, and MAID SERVICE comes to take out our trash and change our sheets. Isn't that ridiculous?! Regular Beida students do not live like this.

4. Today we went on a tour of Beida. It seems really really big to me now, but that might just be because everything looks so new to me. The campus doesn't really look like a campus, it looks sort of like a quiet little city. I haven't gone into Beijing yet, but I might go tonight with the rest of the group for dinner.

5. This is really boring, isn't it? This is what happens when I try and think of things to say, even when I don't really have anything to say.

ON TO THE PICTURES (but don't get too excited because the pictures aren't that interesting either. that is, not YET!)

the beijing capital international airport! all bright and shiny.


































i'm really bad at taking pictures of entire rooms. this is part of the common room (in my room), and on the other side of the room there's a tv

the open door is my room, and the closed door is natalie's room, cause she hadn't gotten there yet

the bathroom, another bad picture, sorry! one thing about the bathroom--i guess it's common in china to have no separation between the shower and the rest of the bathroom...so when you take a shower, the water spreads across the whole bathroom floor and then drains out through the two drains (placed different parts of the bathroom) after you're done. but that means no one else can be in the bathroom while someone is showering, unless they feel like being in a lake of someone else's shower water...

here, you can see the mirror and the toilet! i don't know who that girl is though

inside my room

inside my room pt. 2

my desk

my big ol' window. you know, before coming here i kept getting a mental picture of what my room would look like, and it actually wasn't very different from how it really looks. except the bed was on the other side, and there was no desk. but the room was narrow, with a window at the end. oh, you can see natalia's fragrant and prophetic oil jar too :] now my room smells like cinnamon apple oatmeal all time!

this is inside wu mei (物美), the convenience store right by our dorm. so far, i've gotten a crate of bottled water (you know how i do! this is how everyone do here in china because you can't drink the tap water!), some hand soap, toilet paper, tissues, an ethernet cord, a SIM card, a green plastic cup for my toothbrush, and a weird milk tea "wheat" drink that i wanted to try but didn't finish because it was weird. all for under 100 rmb! oh but actually the SIM card itself was 120.
n e wayz, wu mei is important.

all of us in front of the beida library! (except "richard lee," the mysterious kid who never showed up...i hope he's okay.) yes, that is a scooter in my possession. the story behind that is, we have this lounge for the stanford students, and i'll post pictures of that later, i guess, but past stanford students always leave the things they bought in china but don't want anymore at the end of the quarter. like scooters WITH LIGHT-UP WHEELS! and a skateboard with LIGHT UP WHEELS! and more! anyway, i decided to take one of them on our tour of beida today, because i heard we'd be walking a lot. turns out, the scooter wasn't that helpful because then i'd go way faster than everyone else, and sometimes we had to go up stairs and over bumpy rock/cobblestone paths so i just had to carry it. BUT IT WAS WORTH IT! i stand by my decision!

the lake at beida, with the first water tower in china in the background! but it looks like a pagoda because the chinese people thought it was too ugly, so they covered it up with decorations. such a chinese thing to do.

on the tour

i think this statue was outside an engineering building? and i don't know what it is or what it stands for, other than flying like a fairy.

again, outside the engineering building. this statue is called "mongol standing" or something. as you can see, it's a mongol, and he's standing, but he has no clothes on, so he's mad.

sorry, this entry is like pg-13 now...

inside the economics school, which used to be the home of some guy. i sort of stopped paying attention to the tour because i was too tired!

also, i saw so many houses like these when i was in china over the summer that they quickly became boring to me. but when shen laoshi explained some of the symbolism behind the decorations, it was interesting. for example, you can't see it from here, but there are little squares beneath the gold reverse-swastika squares, and they have vegatables and flowers painted on them, and that's because this is a residential building. you know, cause families eat vegetables and have flowers and stuff. also, there were these upside-down bats, for dao fu, which is good because it means something like "fortune has come." or some word related to "fortune" or "money."

that's all for now! tomorrow morning we're having an academic orientation, and then classes sort of start on monday (meaning, only chinese class starts on monday, and the rest of our classes start tuesday). YIPPEE.