More pics - treasure

Hey dudes,
there were some crazy museums in the Forbidden City
with all sorts of really awesome treasure.
Here the pictures are:

This is a solid gold sphere with pearls to map all the stars and constellations in the night sky.
It's the only still-existing gold celestial sphere in the world.

A beautiful scene carved out of a single block of very rare blue jade.

From 1720, a Jade figure of an Arhat, whatever that is.

This is a video of some of the Commie guards walking around the forbidden city. There were a bunch of them all over the place. Note the last dude in line holding bananas.

Since the weather was nice we went for a 1am stroll near Tiananmen square, where we saw two green uniformed guards doing straight line back and forth patrol. We were just walking by (nervously) when he stopped and asked us what we were doing. We told him we were just walking (unaware if we were breaking any laws.)

We sat down at a nearby lampost and then he came over and asked us again what we're doing, so we said Just sitting the weather is nice. I asked him if he always works so late at night, and how longs he's been in the guard corps. He responded with surprising friendliness, and a 15 minute discussion later he had insisted on giving me his email address and he'd given me a Chinese name:

李芫龙

So now I'm chinese.

Delicious Red Beijing Duck

BEIJING -- Capital of the People's Republic of China
北京

So yesterday I got back from a trip to Beijing.

We landed and headed to the Great Wall,
the Kotel haMizrahi, as it were.

We went to a less touristy part.
It was long. And had lots of stairs and was very old.

You could imagine lots of horses in the valley below coming to attack you
and pushing down the ladders
while Huns were trying to climb them and invade your country and rape your wife.
I have to describe historic events to myself from a personal view
to convince myself they actually happened.

We partied that night at HouHai, a local bar district,
which was actually a neon loop around a man-made lake
There were live "bands" in every bar (= shitty guitar players and chinese singers karaoke-ing US music)
It kinda hurt my soul a bit.

Much cooler than HouHai was the Forbidden City,
with all those really typical looking China buildings.
I'm pretty sure I recognized one of the huge opening areas from Mulan.
The place was huge, miles in every direction with extremely large buldings
over perfectly flat paved squares.
The place was built in the 1400s,
and was inhabited by an emperor and his concubines advisers and servants up until
1911. Pictures tell the story best.

There were like 5 squares of this size one after the other in a straight line. The central axis of the city is directly lined up with North-South, entrance at the south, you move North and North until you get to the emperor's personal home and garden at the top.

Metal, Jade, and Gold versions of these were all over the place.
This one was about 15-20 feet tall, 10 feet wide, and 1000 ft Bad-Ass.

Thats a young couple taking their wedding photos.

There was also plenty of Communism around,
which was pretty cool as well. Tianmendfc Square (with the tanks and the...you know. ) was big and...uh square.
We wanted to go check out the Mao Zedong Mausoleum, where he lies in state (and formaldehyde), but there was a meeting of important party officials and we weren't allowed in.
They were having a meeting around his body to discuss future Party decisions,
as if he was watching them...crazy.

Statue outside of Mao's resting place. Everyone in the statue is a worker.

That portrait is at least four times as tall as you are.

GO PROLETARIAT!

I also had Peking Duck,
in Peking.
Which was pretty damn tasty.

Those are the highlights, but there is definitely more, and I will be posting again in the next few days with pictures of some of the CRAZY treasure they had in the Forbidden City, the story of how I made friends with a Communist guard (and how he gave me my Chinese name), and a picture of the crazy toilets they use here. TUNE IN NEXT TIME!!!

Chopsticks

I eat with nothing but chopsticks every day.
I just went to a western restaurant and it felt more natural
to turn the for and knife upside down and use them like chopsticks...

Brain Log

Ive decided I think its silly to record only whats actually happening while I'm here in China.
And not what I'm thinking.

Ive been doing lots of ruminating,
since Ive got lots of time to do it,
and I have been having crazy dreams,
which Ive been recording in random notepad files scattered around My Desktop...on my laptop...

So I'm in China and I spent some personal time with a pretty 26 yr old
chinese lady recently, and I'd like to share.

The fact that everyone in this country is an only child really messes with them.
I mean, only children are different, having siblings affects how you develop.
Most of them are doted on as the pride and joy of their parents' lives...
parents just born in the wrong country and generation,
when that was the legally enforced method of
population control. Kinda crazy.

They also tend to be very immature. the on I spoke to as her own job
but lives with her parents. And can't imagine moving out till she's married.
Only child, like everyone else...

Here are some pictures of stuff.

Self-Portrait from the Tallest Building in the World
But you can't tell cause shanghai has bad smog.

This is a tofu dish that's really popular here...
its really squishy and soft tofu, almost like a jelly

My bike is too far from my computer for me to take a picture...
soooooooon.....

Also,
Your body is the oldest thing around you most of the time...
Those first tree-dwelling hunter-gathering Homo sapiens
was, for 99.9% of his DNA, exactly like you.

The only big difference between you and him
are the tools man has built for himself and
the ideas he's invented...

Just one big big tower of a thousand generations of ideas on ideas on ideas on ideas....

THANKS FOR READIN!
And thanks for the comments! please leave more!

The Life Chinese at Twenty-something

SO
Why has it been so long since your last post?
have your forgotten about your loyal readership?

Of course I havent!
Ive just been so busy making blog-worthy stories
that I havent had the time to tell them!

WELL!
Where to start?
I bought a bicycle for 150RMB (=20 bucks)...
Traffic laws are almost nonexistent in this country, and anyone can cut off anyone at any time,
regardless of lights or lines or one-way signs,
ANYWAY there are tons of bicycles out and about, old women and young men and people in suits and everyone... SO
I was going up onto a highway when my bike's chain broke and I almost spilled right in front of a bus.

YAY!!!
So I walked my now useless bike back to the store where I was able to argue in chinese until they fixed it. I made it halfway home before my right pedal fell off. Back to the store.
A week later I was brave enough to take my bike out for a spin one more time...this time the chain broke as I was pulling out of my Uni...they laughed at me when I went back to the store, but I still argued a brand new chain out of them (since I purposely broke the old chain extra badly so they couldnt try to fix it.)

GOOD TIMES!!
Bikes get stolen extremely often here,
but I wouldnt wish this one on my worst enemy. Pic coming soon.

Now I'm going to go have dinner with this chinese girl I met at a club Friday. I'm treating her to KFC, which is a very acceptable date restaurant here in china.... Soooooo more news later!

POLL RESULTS

So it seems like our readership is evenly split between the
passive-aggressive and the self-delusional.

I voted delusional myself.

Convincing yourself your happy is definitely the easiest way to go about things.
You just gotta mean it.

Doodles from class

Well classes have begun.
I've started drawing again.

Here are my latest doodles.

This is what I learned today in Intro to Marketing
And this is what I learned today in Intro to Global Negotiations.
Stern Classes are retarded.


And this is a dream I had where I'm in an aquarium and Chinese people came to watch me.

In other news:
Batman the animated Series is currently blowing my mind.
Its been a while since I've purposely held off on watching episodes
for the first time
just to savor the awesomeness of a series.

And may have found a nice girl who likes me too.
Time will tell...