Humbled

Olympic non sequitur and undeniable falsehood of the week: "Because of the Olympics, there aren't really any parties in Beijing for awhile." (A clueless art student's response to Angela's inquiry upon leaving the Public Enemy performance at the Beijing Pop Festival as to whether there were an after party.)

On this the first day of class, my teachers sent me home to learn 78 new words in one evening, apparently a relatively light load, compared to what's to come. Considering that some "words" are actually four word phrases, I am slated either to be absolutely numb to the world, or else a veritable dictionary, come next June. In (separate) class (es) tomorrow, we are discussing both roast duck and the gradual evolution of social institutions.

Recent observations:

-Cardamom in my beef noodle soup at a campus dining hall. Exquisite!

-A car making a left turn from the right-most of five lanes of traffic at a four way intersection, on a red light.

While watching last year's Chinese blockbuster "The Postmodern Life of My Aunt" at my apartment last Tuesday night, I had an unexpected visitor. No sooner did I answer the door to notice a short woman with a red "Beijing Municipality" armband than she swiftly kicked off her shoes, slipped her feet into a pair of booties, and disappeared under the kitchen sink. After some confusion, I realized that she was not about to reveal a passageway to the missing 14th floor, and she eventually made it known that I owed her for 2 months of water usage. When I protested that I had just moved in, she offered herself a seat at the dining room table and helpfully suggested that I ask the landlord to pay the bill. After several inquiries as to whether the Beijing Water Bureau would so be so kind as to give me a receipt to facilitate such reimbursement (answer: no), she finally clued me in that she would return with an invoice in a few days time. Problem solved, surreal encounter concluded.

Eclectic pop fans:

Private security guards (barely out of junior high school) nearly outnumbered spectators at the Festival. Marky Ramone's wry comment: "This here is just like Woodstock." It's relatively unclear just what the guards would do in the event of an actual security event, since even when crowdsurfers succeeded in stealing the guards' hats during Cui Jian's performance (a rare event, as his music became the anthem for some of the Tiananmen protesters in 1989), the lads solemnly stood by. At the conclusion of the performance, they dispersed into their respective work units and lined up in formation for some sort of debriefing. (Note: this is also standard practice for restaurant wait staff at the beginning and end of each shift.)