Today's Mission

listening to: Some Chinese music
mood: excellent

Yesterday morning I arrived in Beijing. It’s my first visit in this city in over 15 years, so you can imagine that it changed a lot. But since I can’t remember much of the Beijing 16 or so years ago it doesn’t really matter. Beijing is HUGE! I can’t say much more about it now, cuz at my first day I didn’t do too much. My friend Britta, who has been living here for about 2 years now, picked me up from the airport, helped me get my tickets to Shanghai, which I bought online from an Chinese agency in order to not more than actually needed and off we went to my hotel. I had a quick shower, cleaned myself up and then we were off to town. I have to say my hotel is gorgeous! It really does look like an old Chinese Palace and is in a pretty green surrounding between the third and the second ringroad. I will upload some pictures later. The room is gorgeous, too and I really like it here.
Britta took me to town to get something to eat and a prepaid phone card. Normally in China it’s the same as in the US you have to pay when somebody calls you, too, but you can easily get around that if you pay 10 kuai a month, cuz if you do that, you don’t have to pay when somebody calls you, which is important to me, in case my mom wants to call me, you know. So yeah, I’m hooked with a new phone number now, wicked, eh?
As an important notice to all those of you, who use to write to my normal e-mail account, remember you have eto write to my hotmail one, while I am in China, cuz I can’t get into my normal one from here.
What else did we do, we went for a walk in a little park and then Britta was off to meet some friends, she is leaving China tomorrow and won’t come back to live here for while so it’s hello for me and good bye for her, which sucks, cuz I would have loved to have her here. I went back to my hotel, slept for about an hour, got ready for dinner and off I was to the other side of the town to meet up with her and her fiance. A friend of theirs joined us and we had really great all vegetarian tofu kitchen. It was hard core yummy. Afterwards we went for drinks, which was a lot of fun, too, cuz soon we began to play drinking games. It makes communication in a not familiar language so much easier. I suck at Chinese, but I hope I will be getting better at it soon!
I think I was home around 3 a.m. or something like that and then fell into bed. Watched a bit TV and had a nice tight sleep for about 9 hours. I will get ready now to hit down town for some essential shopping and stuff like that, and I still have to find an apartment.
So much for now, see ya guys