"Stop White Pollution"

I saw this on some lady’s bag yesterday walking back from lunch. I think it’s referring to the bad smog here, but I found it amusing nonetheless.

Some notable events of the last couple of days:

- Hardrock Café Beijing. I got my t-shirt :).

- My bike breaking on the way to the subway – yes, this would be the bike I rented the night before, meaning it made it a grand total of oh, 700 yards before the chain snapped. Yeah, made in China! I guess that’s what you get when you pay $15 to rent it for a year.

- Getting on the wrong subway to go to work

- Getting on the wrong bus on the way back from work … in a thunderstorm.

- Almost experiencing death by taxi. It was close. Like 4 feet close going about 45 miles an hour as I was trying to cross a street on foot (the little green walking man was lit, but that means nothing here).

- Attending a meeting the company had which was some sort of orientation for a new product they were selling. Except the meeting was in Chinese, so I didn’t learn much.

- My lunch experience yesterday in a crazy packed-with-Chinese-people cafeteria:

My friend Pato to my supervisor lady: “What’s that?”

Supervisor: “Pork”

Pato: “Does it have a bunch of bones in it?” (He basically had bones for lunch the day before)

Supervisor: “No bones.”

Pato: “Ok, I’ll have that.”

Me: “Me too”

…a few minutes later when sitting at the table:

Supervisor: “What do you call this in America?”

Me: “Um, pork. Right?”

Supervisor: “No that no pork”

Pato: “I thought you said it was pork”

Supervisor: “That no pork”

Awesome. Apparently it was some type of fungus. So I had tomatoes for lunch. Other than the food, lunches are actually really fun. They all try and teach us Chinese and then laugh at us as we try to repeat what they said.

- Getting an offer to come live with my co-worker at her house after knowing her for literally 20 minutes the first day.

- Drifting off to sleep every night to the sounds of heinous singing attempts wafting up into our room from the KTV (karaoke) bar housed on the floor below us. (No one is exactly sure what goes on on the second floor of this hotel, but we have some guesses, and we’re pretty sure it’s in defiance of the second stipulation of this sign, which is posted in and outside of the elevator.)