New Year's

On New Years a bunch of my friends went to a place called Hutong
Pizza (Alley Pizza) Its way back in this Hutong area where the old
style Beijing houses are. It was really cool inside and was good pizza.

Later we went to a party at this place called Embassy House which is
a large apartment building that looks like a hotel. On the first few
floors it has a gym, a pool, a library, some party rooms and a
kitchen. A lot of foreign diplomat types live there. There are two
students at my school from the country of Tonga and about 20 or so
Tongans in Beijing. The two students are the kids of the Ambassador
and military advisor from Tonga here. They had a Halloween party at
this place and it was fun, so a lot of people came to their new years
party. It was all students, a ton from BLCU and since we paid a bit
of money to get in, we exercised our right to drink alcohol in China.
But not too much. It was fun, we had two countdowns 5 minutes apart,
I thought one came early so maybe that was a false start. Later that
night a few of the parents came back and I talked to this one older
guy from Manhattan in a pin stripe suit and another dad that I met at
the Halloween party. They are a fun group.

We had two days off from school so me and some friends went into the
city. First we went to Tiananmen to try to see Mao at his mausoleum.
But it was a holiday so it was closed. Then we went to the National
Museum. Before we went in some girls started talking to us, all
friendly like, with decent english etc. Then they said they would
take us through the museum and that the museum was free. So we walked
to the museum but go past the ticket window and into this side
entrance that says China National Museum Gallery. This is all in the
same building as the museum. It was these two rooms full of pieces of
art, obviously for sale, and the girls were telling us about the art
and saying we "could add it to our collection". Anyways I sent my
friend a text message that said "do you want to go to the real museum
now?"

So we paid 30 RMB (<4$), foreign students don't get a discount but
Chinese do. We went in and walked around. I was really not impressed.
It was a huge building but there were only 3 small exhibits. One of a
famous mariner from China who sailed to places as far as Madagascar.
That was cool. There was some other exhibit of arts and crafts but
the Shanghai museum was infinitely better. Then there was a wax
figure display of all these national figures, guys from ancient time
periods, all the dynasties, etc, and then some famous people from
recent history, like David Beckham, Michael Jordan next to Yao Ming,
Einstein, Karl Marx and Engels etc. I figure about 15% of the space
in this museum building had exhibits. The National Museum, next to
Tiananmen square.

Then we walked looking for a street that was supposedly an arts and
crafts street. I wanted to get some calligraphy written to scan into
my computer to use for thank you cards. It turns out to be a
calligraphist is like being a trained artist, every place I went had
all this calligraphy and when I was like I want some written, they
were like uhhhh, I'll call the artist but he sleeps during the day.
So I found a Japanese guy in my school who will do it for me.
While looking for this street we wandered through some hutongs, a
network of alleys that have doors on the outside leading to housing
on the inside. Some pictures will be up soon.