Day 1

This evening, I found myself pulling keys (that aren’t mine) out of my pocket, to buzz into an apartment I don’t live in, while holding the bony carcass of a duck I had just eaten, in a city nearly 7,000 miles from home.

To give a little context, I had just biked back from a Beijing duck dinner with my host (biking in Beijing is terrifying, by the way). That should explain the duck carcass. Oh wait, you mean you don’t bring home the remains of the animal you’ve just eaten after a nice dinner? That’s too bad for you; apparently duck carcasses help make a lovely soup.

Today was exhausting. I saw the Forbidden City with Ned (who has been studying abroad here), and walked through Tiananmen square—both of which were surreal, for different reasons. Surprisingly there was no memorial for those killed in the massacre, I guess that’s part of pretending it never happened. We chatted about school and life, and then ordered an odd (but delicious) pancake-with-egg-and-cracker thing from a street vender.

After Ned and I parted ways, I took a series of subway rides to get to the Olympic stadiums. You can go anywhere in the city on the metro for a flat fee of 30 cents. Brief tangent: the fare used to be scaled for the distance you travelled, then (for convenience) it was lowered to a flat rate for the Olympics, and since then they haven’t been able to raise it without pissing everyone off. Brief note to Brazil (a loyal reader): it seems that LOWERING your public transport costs before major sporting events is the right move, rather than raising bus fares and inciting riots.

Anyway, I got to the Olympic Green subway stop when it was just starting to get dark, and they were lighting up the Bird’s Nest—a big part of the ’08 Olympic games. While I couldn’t get into any of the stadiums, it was really cool to see them at night. It was also really cold to see them at night, so I pretended I was waiting for someone in the lobby of a huge IBM building to warm up and get on the wifi.

Tomorrow to the great wall!