Sunday

I went to bed at 5 AM last night. I can just see my mother wagging her finger at me.

However, all went well. I woke up early (too much light in my room I guess) and kept waking up and thinking about what I would do with my students in class until my alarm went off at 10 AM and I finally got up.

I cleaned my bathroom. Very important. I swept the floor. So much dust.

I met up with my wushu instructor, Zou Chuan Jun (Jun for short, remember?), at 11:30 and we went for a wonderful bike ride out east. Neither one of us had been so far east. We had lunch together and then I had to meet Wang Xin Yu's uncle (do you remember WXY is the friend who lives in Beijing that I saw during my first week here, but who studies engineering in Halifax so I never saw him again) at 3 PM.

I was super duper tired at this point. I was fighting with myself not to fall asleep in the car.

Did I mention traffic is terrible in Beijing? What takes 10 minutes by subway took us half an hour by car (at least). Drivers are crazy here. And there are no seatbelts in the back of the car. Oh well. We all survived.

We went to the uncle's wife's family apartment where I got to meet two of their dogs - super cute! It was so nice to be around dogs again. They were seven and six months old. And then it was dinner time - I had just finished lunch!!!

We went for Peking duck and I'm sorry, I cannot refuse such delicious food. We had liver pate (which I like!) and lotus flower stuffed with sticky rice (okay-tasting) and chrysamthemum tea (my favourite!) and broccoli with garlic. The Peking duck was fantastic. I never want to see food again! So "uncle" proposed to take me to the Great Wall this Saturday. Yay! We'll have a fish pic-nic (maybe not so "yay"?!).

He's a government businessman (works for the CAAC - something Aviation Administration of China) who does a lot of traveling. For example he's leaving for Munich this Wednesday and coming back Friday and then taking me to Badaling (Great Wall) on Saturday. His wife (they've been married a year and a half) is an air stewardess and is leaving for Osaka tomorrow.

Jun got me to taste this dessert snack that I've seen outside North Gate for three months now and have never had the courage to try (maybe not super sanitary?). It's made with this small round fruit that's a mix between a strawberry and an apple. It's very sweet and has hard seeds in the middle that could break your teeth. The snack consists of skewering a bunch of these fruit on a stick and enveloping them all with caramel. It's much too sweet but certainly worth a try.

Gaetan dancing beside the night club we went to last night. We were waiting for Katia's taxi to arrive (the taxi driver got lost). The 5 Frenchies and two Chinese girls (Emily and Rita - classmates of Gaetan's and Katia's) went. We left the club around 4 AM and had baoze at the traditional post-clubbing baoze hang-out just outside North Gate.

It was a crazy idea to go clubbing since I had prepared none of my classes for the week and I had a full day today. But everything got done in the end.

Et maman, je me suis bien amusee! Ca valait la peine!

The view of construction from the uncle's wife's apartment that I visited today (where I saw the dogs). The shacks on the bottom left are where the workers live. Usually they live in tents, like the one you can see on the right. All of Beijing is under construction. There's an Eiffel-tower look-alike in the background to the right. Don't know what that is...

Jun outside the foreign experts' building entrance. He doesn't like to be taken in photo because he wears braces. He fell off of his mother's bike (he was riding just behind the handle bars - he was a kid) when she braked too hard and his teeth went through the skin of his lower lip and he lost some teeth which created gaps which he now wishes to close.