Chipmunk Cheeks & Lots of Baking
I got my wisdom teeth pulled out four days ago and only now do I feel comfortable venturing out into the public. For the past few days, my face has resembled that of a chipmunk with two large walnuts in its mouth. No, I take that back, because that description is eliciting a rather cute pleasing image which really isn’t the image I am trying to convey. How about this: an overweight Russian woman that got clobbered in the face by her abusive husband (I was wearing a bandana around the house for the past few days and my brother commented that I looked like a Babushka lady; not so cute now huh). Anyway, due to my unfortunate predicament, I was in the house practically for all of the past 4 days. So what did I do? I baked and cooked, a lot. I made dumplings, spring rolls, bread, biscotti, and dinner for my family. I also made 3 friendship bracelets, comprehensively researched grad school options, and got lots and lots of sleep. I feel pretty well rested…but also pretty darn restless.
Ridiculous news items:
- Mainland China is trying to enforce mandatory “national education” in all HK public schools.
- The Japanese Prime Minister resigned. He is the 6th PM to resign in the last 5 years. Japan, get some backbone.
- Gaddafi seems to have had a little school boy crush for Condoleeza Rice, but a picture scrap book? Really? That was asking to be found and made a mockery of.
- HKU students held a vigil with candles yesterday at the University of HK campus to protest the excessive and unwarranted police action during the visit by Vice-Premier Li Keqiang. What is ridiculous about this news item? Not the fact that the students are standing up for their rights. Not the fact that the event expresses how threatened we Hong Kong-ers feel about the encroaching Mainland authority. What is ridiculous is that this is so deja vu. Every single time a mainland authority comes to pay a visit, a incident like this takes place where Hong Kongers feel their rights have been slighted. Mainland authority and Hong Kong authority should know better by now and should act with more caution and sensitivity when mainland officials visit, especially if they are visiting a university campus.
- Last but not least, the NK government says it wants to resume six-party talks regarding nuclear disarmament…My ass.
乔治城，加油！
Went to the Gtown basketball game yesterday at the Beijing Olympic Stadium. Gtown beat the Shanxi Zhongyu Brave Dragons, 98-81. It was a good game! Only after I left did I learn that Joe Biden had attended. I had seen him from afar but didn’t realize who he was. Pretty cool.
http://www.georgetown.edu/story/hoyas-china-basketball-game-biden.html
The day before I attended the Georgetown panel discussion, “Global Universities and Diplomacy,” at the Pangu hotel (picture of the hotel; very impressive). The discussion featured Coach Thompson; Anthony Hutchinson, senior cultural affairs officer at the U.S. Embassy in China; Rev. Dennis McNamara, S.J., professor of sociology and Korean Studies and special assistant to the president for China Affairs at Georgetown; and Paul Tagliabue, board of directors chair. After the discussion, there was a reception at the bar called Happiness Lounge on the top floor. The view from the bar was absolutely spectacular! You can kind of see it in this picture here.
Notes from the talk in regards to Gtown’s approach to international affairs, especially in regards to China:
- move from focus on international bilateral relationships to international regional focus
- move from nationalizing institution to a temporary educational institution
- more students want to return to China
- universal platform of sport diplomacy
- 130,000 Chinese exchange students in US and only 15,000 US exchange students in China
- Georgetown has history of international focus; 1760 – 20% student body from abroad
- Exchange of information –> people travel abroad
- People of different perspectives in two-way dialogue –> Exchange of information
- Rather than their differences, the similarities between US & China are often causes for tension
1 Week Left…
Okay, it has finally happened…
1. Some random idiot spit right unto my foot. If you are unaware, people in Beijing like to spit. Everyone does it. They just spit right on the sidewalk or, in my case, my foot. I think this is a sign that my welcome in Beijing has expired.
2. My favorite go-out-shoes have died. They have served me well, ever since freshman year of high school, and passed away in the most honorable way possible, on the dance floor. Tried my best to maintain an air of dignity walking back home barefoot.
Things that amused me in the past week:
There is a coffee shop I pass every morning on the way to the subway. In the past week, the shop has been blasting Christian worship music from its tiny stall. I highly doubt that the owner realizes this little detail.
A French guy mistook me for being French. Me, French??? I asked him why on earth he thought I was French and he said it was something about my eyes…(how very French)…He genuinely seemed disappointed. Poor guy, must have been looking for some French romance…in Beijing….hmmm…
Two people held the door open for me this week. TWO!! The world seems brighter…
I’ve finished writing in my moleskine journal that I got for my birthday from Jen Ko! (Jen, I’m hoping you still randomly read my posts. Miss you!)
Made dumplings with my co-worker Hongmin! Success…
There is sun in Beijing
Took 13 migrant children to 圆明园 park last Saturday with four other Roots & Shoots staff and volunteers from Compassion for Migrant Children (www.cmc-china.org). The park encompasses a large lake adorned with multitudes of lotus flowers and is home to many types of water fowl. In addition to giving the children a tour of the park and introducing them to the sundry of birds and plants present (throwing in some GRE vocab for practice 
), we also organized activities for them, like giving each child a magnifying glass and insect container to go bug scouting. It was a sweet aberration (vocab #2) to my usual Saturday activities. The day was in thrall (#3) to a refulgent (#4) sun that could almost be commensurate (#5) to the radiance in the children’s lit up faces. I must say, I was surprised to see the children filled with such guileless (#6) interest and excitement. I don’t think a trip to a park would have got me that excited as a child. The most rewarding moment of the event was when a child came up to me and said, “Teacher, I’m so grateful that you organized this trip for us!” No joke. I am slightly suspicious of these too-good-to-be-true children…as if God was trying to scam me (“See, the world really is beautiful! Look at these children, just look at them! Click here )…Or maybe the world is kind of beautiful…?
Pictures:
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Random things that amused me in the past week or so:
- Sxephil and Stephen Colbert bring joy to my life
Beijing is not for the faint of heart
“Do you speak English?” The woman asked me in desperation, like an animal about to get slaughtered. I answered that I did, knowing this would open the floodgates to a meaningless conversation outside in Beijing’s meaningless heat. “Oh great. Could you tell me where the entrance to the museum is? Is this the National Museum? We want to see the Louis Vuitton exhibit. What are you doing in Beijing? Oh, you work for a non-profit. Are you a social worker? How do people here stand the heat? How do you like it here? We just arrived yesterday and you know our company didn’t even send a car to pick us up. We had to take the subway all the way to the hotel and the hotel they reserved for us was barely satisfactory…” The large woman kept blabbering in this fashion. Even if the woman wasn’t wearing that grey ARMY shirt that all American moms with a son in the army proudly wears, I could have guessed she was American by just a single glance. It was the way she stuck out like a sore thumb; the way she hobbled around like a lost sheep and branded herself a victim for being jostled by the subway crowd and being subjected to Beijing’s blistering heat. I hate to break it to you sister, but this is Beijing in its purest form. I don’t know what you were expecting but maybe you should have read The Lonely Planet more carefully. I may speak English and I may be happy to help out a fellow foreigner, but I have little sympathy for a woman who unloads all her frustrations and petty complaints about the city to a random girl on the street who just happens to speak the same language and who happens to really love this city. I wish the woman the best of luck. Hopefully she will learn to like the city as much as I do.
(So I’m honestly not this harsh. The post just wouldn’t be as amusing if I was as nice as I actually am now would it?)
A Beautiful Blur
I don’t know where the time has gone. It’s all a blur…I guess I must be having fun. A shoutout to the Chadha family who may end up reading this post because my mom feels my inactive blog is worth attention. I sort of gave up updating this blog but I decided to put up a post in the interest of the possible audience.
So a day in the life of Amy Burns in Beijing starts at 7 AM when she wakes up with the sun and then relapses back to sleep until waking again at 8:15AM when her alarm goes off. She leaves her apartment by 8:40AM and walks to the subway station 5min away to make the 40min commute to the Roots&Shoots office located in the Beijing City International School. At the office, she usually has documents to translate, pamphlets/brochures to design, and projects to help organize, like the trip at the end of this month where we will take fifteen migrant children out to a wetland to learn about this important ecosystem. Everyday we eat a vegetarian lunch in the office made by us interns. We take turns. Lots of tofu. I can’t complain for 10kuai a meal. At 5:30pm I leave the office and either head back to the apartment or to Sanlitun to eat dinner with friends. The day ends with me studying for the GRE. Great strategy to falling asleep.
Highlights since my last post:
- Meeting people from all over the world from all different fields. Have made an amazing group of friends.
- Small world moments…Hong Kongers, especially HKISers are everywhere. I bumped into Justin and Charlotte on the aircraft carrier (see below), Chris on the subway, Bianca in the mall, and met this guy called Quinn in an art gallery who lived in HK for 3 years, has family at Gtown, and turns out to be friends with two of my friends I just recently met here.
- 24/7 convenient stores are everywhere. Amazing. You get pretty hungry when you dance until the sun rises
- Taking a 3hr bus to Tianjin to party on an old soviet aircraft carrier. The so-called “rave” was actually pretty lame but the bus ride there and back was a lot of fun.
- I am a member of Melody KTV. Enough said.
- I can walk & take the subway everywhere. Loving the reduction of my carbon footprint.
- Visiting a landfill for the city of Beijing was an eye-opening experience, although we actually didn’t get to see much of the trash…I think the tour only showed us the nice parts.
- Practicing Mandarin daily in the office。
- Visiting an organic farm and coming back laden with fresh produce.
- Meeting local musicians at the Lohas Green Music Festival where I helped table at and local graffiti artists through Paul. Got to see a guy spray paint a car。Exciting.
- Bird watching in the city. Who would have thought?
Downers:
- You are always sweaty and there’s nothing you can do about it.
- I am getting tired of the taste of boiled water… -_-
- China’s firewall doesn’t like Gmail and with Facebook being banned as well, I feel like I have lost a very essential part of my being…Okay, so I exaggerate, but it’s still pretty annoying.
- A 13 year old boy got killed in the subway last week when an escalator suddenly reversed direction and resulted in 20 people falling atop of each other. Sardines probably have more room in a can than commuters in Beijing trains during rush hour. It can be a bit terrifying.
- I had to go to the visa office 4 times to get my visa renewed. Success after my old visa has been expired for 2 weeks. Not my fault.
- The ATM ate my ATM card.
- Taxi drivers frequently refuse your business and leave you stranded and feeling quite helpless.
- People still litter. But there has been progress! There are recycling bins everywhere (although I don’t think anyone really knows what they’re for…) and signs everywhere promoting a “clean Beijing”. One day.
Pictures (wished I liked taking pictures ><):
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Being Asian with the Umbrella
In China, it is normal for females to carry umbrellas on cloudless sunny days. It is the same in many other Asian countries, like Japan and Thailand, where white skin is considered beautiful and dark skin is a telltale sign of a laborer; of hours toiling under the sun. As a person who wears spf 50 sunblock daily and who spent her spring break in Cancun under the shade of the large umbrellas by the poolside, I greatly appreciate this social custom. I walk more than 5km everyday and having a mobile protection from the sun makes me happy. I mean really, do you want wrinkly ugly skin and skin cancer? No thank you…
Check out this guy’s blog about umbrellas in China. The pictures are awesome!: http://chinesebrock.blogspot.com/2011/02/things-i-am-going-to-love-about-china_09.html
A Weekend in Beijing
Highlights:
- Mom and brother visited me for the weekend
- Went to Wangfujin snack street, and under Paul’s coercion, ate scorpion
- Participated in NGO/Non-profit mixer @ The Bookworm with my fellow Roots and Shoots interns
- Going vegan with the interns
New Zealand – The country of Shrek, the sheep
In New Zealand, sheep are thought to outnumber the human population of 4.3 million people by 10 to 1. That would mean 43 million sheep. According to Wikipedia, that would place it at a population number equivalent to the 31st largest human population in the world which is that of Tanzania. An individual sheep grazes for about 7 hrs a day and eats about 2-3% of their body weight in dry feed. The average sheep weights 150-200 lbs, so 2-3% would mean they eat at least 3 lbs of dry feed everyday…Assuming it’s mostly hay that they eat, the “kcal weight” can’t be that high…But that’s a lot of grazing space to occupy…Goodbye natural landscapes!
I guess it’s no a surprise that their national icon is Shrek the sheep. Unfortunately, Shrek passed away today and his fleece of 27-kilograms is all that is left to remember him by. Click here for more…
雍和宫 – Lama Temple (aka Palace of Harmony and Peace)
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