A Week That Went By Too Fast

I spent a lot of time this week recovering from last weekend's No-Sleep-Fest, wasting my days napping almost constantly and then not being able to sleep at night until unreasonable hours. It's a vicious cycle. I don't remember much from Monday-Wednesday...I went to Metro (think German Sam's Club) on one of those days and got a humongous container of peach juice (which I finished in about 1 day) and prepackaged sliced Gouda cheese(!) and chocolate and a fan to supplement my apartment's air conditioning, which unfortunately is only in the living room and doesn't affect my room very much. I had a heck of a time buying the fan, because I kept wanting other types of fans that were on display, but then they wouldn't have any more in stock, and they wouldn't sell me the display model, so the salesladies were trying to dance around the issue by directing my attention to fans that weren't out of stock (because like 2/3 of them seemed to be), commenting on how pretty they were so of course I wanted that kind. I found this to be at the same time delightfully evasive and also very silly, because a fan's prettiness is really not its important asset, and I told the salesladies as much. The fan I got in the end was decent, but it was probably my 4th- or 5th-choice fan after the ones I wanted more were sold out. Oh, China.

I decided to go on a quest to eat at all the sketchy little restaurants on my street, and with the help of my trusty pal Richard we discovered that the one right outside my gate is rather superb and a little more cleanish than it looks from the outside. A fly landed in our fish-smelling pork when we were almost done, and the waiter brought us a whole new dish of it which we were too full to eat, so I got a nice box of leftovers that made me very happy the next day at lunch. And dinner. Today we tried another little restaurant with Pei, and it seemed like the food was probably usually pretty good except the particular things we ordered. Everybody's else's food looked so tasty and ours was so sad! Oh well.

Thursday night was the big fundraiser party for Zigen Fund, which is the organization behind the migrant school that I volunteer at on weekends. The venue was really nice and the whole thing came off quite well, I thought. I was assigned a station at the welcome table, where my duty was basically to schmooze with people who came in. It was pretty fun, and a good outlet for my vast reservoirs of personal charm, of course. I think we netted about 10,000 RMB, which isn't so bad for an event run by extreme amateurs. Also our little informal choir did a short performance, which was fun. Go team! Feichang hao!

Friday night was Julie's last night in town, so we went out to the most ridiculous buffet everywhere. For 180 RMB (about $23 US), you get unlimited amounts of basically any kind of food you can think of. Sushi, sashimi, all kinds of seafood, dim sum, Taiwanese food, colorful salads, ox-penis soup, beef stomach, roast duck pizza, all sorts of crazy stuff, plus various juices, slushies, milkshakes, wine, etc, all included, not to mention a wild variety of fruits and desserts. It was insane. If I had known what a buffet it was going to be I wouldn't have eaten for like 2 days just so I could have room for one of everything. Seriously, it was ridiculous. Wooooo!

On Saturday I spent my afternoon volunteering at the migrant school. The school that a lot of students/teachers come from was having a field trip, so it was a small class. The woman I usually work with wasn't there, which was too bad, because I love her! Instead I was working with some young dude who apparently felt compelled to practice his English by relentlessly hitting on me, which was a little bit annoying. We didn't have much of a scheduled activity for the kids for a change, so we just took them outside and organized games for them. We played a little bit of Red Light, Green Light and then some of that kind of tag where only one person can move and if they tag you then you can tag people too but you can't move your feet, and I totally won a round despite my impractical shoes, so I felt super nimble because I'm pretty much a geezer compared to these kids. At night we went out to what is ostensibly the only Vietnamese restaurant in Beijing, which also happened to be slightly expensive, with rather small portions of completely unauthentic Vietnamese food (not that I know a lot about Vietnamese food but this is what my compatriots informed me) and the slowest service ever in the entire world. It was a silly time, but the rest of the night was good. We hung out around Houhai and rented a boat to go rowing on the lake. When we were waiting around debating boat rentals, a bird pooped on me. Eww. Actually it wasn't that bad...at least it didn't get in my hair. I thought it was kind of funny, really.

Rowing was super! It was me, Pei, and Richard, but there were only 2 oars and somehow the 2 people operating them could never go at the same speed as each other, so we were always going in circles, but oh well. Pei and I amused ourselves by singing loudly and not very well, to the great confusion of the Chinese people on other boats. There were a couple of times when Richard looked like he wanted to throw himself overboard, but fortunately this is China and no humiliating friends are as bad as the sketchy, sketchy waters of a Beijing lake.

Today the little international choir that I sang with at the fundraiser had a picnic at Beihai Park (to hang out together before most of the choir leaves China in the next month or so), and we all brought food and drinks and Christian brought a guitar and we sat on the grass and picnicked and sang and occasionally danced as well. This got a lot of looks as well as some Chinese people taking pictures of us, particularly because you're not really supposed to walk or sit on the grass in Chinese parks as far as I can tell, and there was even a little rope around the grassy area, but nobody yelled at us so whatever. Some people had brought music, so we sang all sorts of random songs until it was dark, when we marched out of the park singing the choir's arrangement of Goodnight Sweetheart in the most harmonious fashion. It was all kinds of fabulous.

That reminds me a little bit of some other time this week when I was walking down the sidewalk just outside campus listening to something really catchy on my iPod, and I was dancing a little bit as I walked and a man rode by on a bicycle and turned completely around to stare at the crazy waiguoren for a really long time and I was sure he was going to crash into a tree but he didn't. Which reminds me of another time when I was riding in a cab along the same road and I saw a man and a woman fighting next to a parked car with another man in it, and the woman was pushing the man and they were yelling at each other until the man got tired of being pushed, I guess, and went and laid down in front of the car so it couldn't go anywhere. I was quite curious as to what sort of situation it was, but unfortunately I couldn't hear/understand the contents of the argument. China is such a silly place.