Up to Wednesday

I'm off of school this week. Its a national holiday, National
Day was October 1st.

On Monday I met up with Michael Corina, Mrs. Schuler's cousin's
son. He was going to a modern music festival with some friends near
where I live so I walked there. When I got there it was really loud
hardcore thrashing metal music that everyone seemed to like. Not
really my thing. When that band finished, Michael called me and met
up with me, it turns out he was at the foot of the stage with all the
crazy people jumping around. Later on I heard a good band that laid
down some quality jams featuring a violin and a string bass. One of
Michael's friend's sister goes to UVA.

Tuesday I went to lunch with two ladies that are I met through
Worldlink, they go to my school. My language partner Lindsay came
along as well. We went to the city and ate, tons of people are in
downtown Beijing for the national holiday week. I bought some insoles
for my dying cleats at a store.

Wednesday I woke up at 6 am and met up with Lindsay and her
roommates and one of their language partner's, also a guy named Greg,
except that he is part latino. We rode a bus out to a place called
Yun Meng Shan. It was about a two hour bus ride from Beijing. It is a
very mountainous area, and we were at a park with this trail. We
hiked around, the trail was mainly these stone steps, which were
annoying. This one girl wanted to leave the main trail so we followed
some trail almost directly up a hill and some rocks and ended up at a
nice overlook, which you can see in some pictures.

From there we hiked to a large stream that flowed through rocks.



There were a lot of people at this park, thats just how China is. It
is always funny when someone who knows some English sees you, they
try to talk to you. A five year old kid said "how are you?" and I
said "good, how are you?" and he said " yes sir". The girls had
packed a lunch and we ate that. The girls told me that it was very
cold at these mountains, so I packed a large backpack with a jacket
and extra clothes, hats, gloves, etc as well as lots of water and
some green oranges. I had no clue what things would be like,
mountains 2 hours from Beijing? They could have snow for all I knew.
But it was warm.
I took a zipline down from the mountain, that was fun. So far, every
mountainous attraction I've been to in China has an exciting method
of descending from the mountain.

After spending a whole day with 3 chinese speakers, I was
feeling pretty good about my skills. I keep a small notebook and
write down phrases or two word combos etc. I can throw those into my
speech and it makes me feel pretty sweet. I'm especially proud of
learning how to say, "go away, I'm mad" to people that shove stuff in
your face to sell you things, how to say "patience" for all the
people that try to bum rush the subway and buses, and how to say "it
is pointless/useless" regarding our bus driver constantly beeping his
horn and trying to pass cars on a one lane each direction road out in
the country, when there is medium traffic. It gets on my nerves. They
just honk constantly and the passing gets them nowhere.

Anyways, the mountains were cool looking.
I'm thinking about spending $25 so that I can upload an unlimited number of pictures to my Flickr website, which is http://www.flickr.com/photos/gregericksen if you didn't know. Anybody want to chip in?