Time with friends

So, it is Sunday morning here in Beijing, and my weekend has been really awesome so far. I'll give you the play by play breakdown.

Friday, after my Chinese test was over, I arranged to meet a friend, Zhang Qiang, from fall quarter (she has been the roommate of another CET student) over at ShouShiDa. ShouShiDa is where I lived and had class during the fall semester, but I have moved away to a different part of the city now, so I haven't seen Zhang Qiang in a while. Before I headed out to meet her though, I had a mini-adventure of my own: my first Chinese haircut. I was a little scared, because I don't know how to talk about volume, cleaning up the curly and shaggy part in the back and on the sides. Furthermore, a friend of mine had recently gotten a haircut and she came out with the typical Chinese young-girl hairstyle: bangs. Intense bangs. So I was a little worried that when I walked in and told them I don't want too much of a change, just 'clean it up' a bit, that I would walk out with some punk-rocker hairstyle that is popular with the young hipsters guys of Beijing this year. It probably wasn't made any easier by the fact that I don't know vocabulary specific to cutting hair, so when I told him to clean it up I actually used the word that I would use if I was talking about sweeping the floor, 打扫, dǎ sǎo. However, when I said that I didn't want too big of a change, I think that put me into the safe zone. No matter what my hair-cutter did, it wouldn't be much. All in all it came out good. Just what I wanted: a little clean up and trim so that I didn't look so shaggy.

Hair trimmed (and washed!), I hopped on the bus to go see Zhang Qiang. We met at the front gate of the campus, and walked to, of all places, a KFC to get lunch. (If you want to know about the cultural differences in the percepton of fast food places, check out the book Golden Arches East. McDonalds and KFC are viewed very differently in China than they are in the US. We munched on (mediocre tasting) chicken burger thingies, and gossiped about the latest stuff, her messed up roommate, my new girlfriend, out buddy Jamie that left Beijing for the freezing north. She had a gym class that afternoon, so eventually we walked back to campus, but her gym class just happened to be a badminton class. Badminton is super popular in China, and you see people playing it outside in parks or in the street all the time. I didn't have anything planned for the afternoon, and I am actually getting more into badminton and other popular Chinese past times, so I stuck around for her gym class. Zhang Qiang and her class mates had to run for 10 minutes to warm up, and when the came back Zhang Qiang and I just started hitting the birdie back and forth. It was pretty awesome that I was allowed to just jump in on a Chinese gym class. When the class was over, Zhang Qiang and I wandered around and talked some more. It feels good to have a fairly close friend like this. Before that day Zhang Qiang just felt like a regular casual friend, but now I really feel like we are 好朋友 (hǎo péng you, good friends). But that was not the last of cementing good friendships that day!

I actually had an appointment to meet Fan Rong that evening up in the North Eastern part of the city, so after bidding Zhang Qiang goodbye I got on the bus, which took my to the subway, which took my strait to Fan Rong's part of town. We had dinner, she complained about her co-workers that didn't like her, and I did my best to convince her that she is not cursed. She has had a bit of a rough month though. She was robbed on the street, so she had to get a new phone, new ID cards, the works. She also happened to her her co-workers trash talking her behind her back, so I think it is a bit understandable that she hadn't quite been on top of the world lately. He headed back to her place for tea, and hung out for a while. I helped her with her English a little bit, and when we were exchanging vocabulary that you wouldn't learn from a classroom or a textbook, I made a horrific discovery: Chinese has no phrase for 'making out.' That has to be put up on the list with the other human rights abuses over here. I asked Fan Rong and the friends that she shared her apartment with what Chinese people call what they do between holding hands and having sex, and they replied that there really isn't anything between holding hands and having sex. Wow. Talk about cultural differences. In the US, a high school or college student CAN'T HAVE a romantic relationship without knowing what making out is. But I guess they are kind of all-or-nothing here. After this kind of 'language exchange' (she taught me how to say the Chinese equivalent of "so fucking cute" or "so fucking fast", basically the use of a curse word as an adverb) we headed out to another friends place. This was a French lady that was a friend of Fan Rong, and she was having a house party (er... apartment party, I guess). It was mostly standing around and talking, drinking, and munching on crackers. I still don't like the taste of alcohol, despite having tried sips on multiple occasions, so I ate a lot of crackers and drank a lot of the orange juice that was there, assumable as a mixer. However, I am not as much of a late night person as Fan Rong, so I ended up bidder her goodnight and leaving earlier, maybe around one or so. End Friday.

Saturday morning can mainly be described by productivity. I studied, wrote my required essay (we have one every weekend, getting progressively longer), and happily watched the latest two episodes of heroes. Early that afternoon, lǐ xuān, the guy I share an apartment with (he lives in the room next door) came into my room and said that he and some other folks were going to Jing Shan park that afternoon. Being one of the places in Beijing that I hadn't been to yet, and one that I really wanted to see, I jumped in on the group, and we were soon on the bus to Jing Shan Park. We didn't spend too much time at the park, but there was a great view of the Forbidden City from the top of the park. (Jing Shan Park is just to the north of the Forbidden City)
I also got to see the tree where an emperor hung himself. That was the end of the Ming dynasty. There was a rebel army of peasants converging on the capital, and there was an army of Manchu barbarians at the North-Eastern frontier about to break through, so the emperor was just like "Crap. This sucks. I don't wanna be hear when that crazy rebel leader arrives." So he hung himself. Dinner time rolled around, and lǐ xuān said that he knew of a vegetarian restaurant. One of the people in our group was a veggie, so she was very pleased, and the rest of us had no objection. The restaurant was very Buddhist-y, and the ambiance and atmosphere was really cool. And the foo d was really tasty, and lǐ xuān was happy to show his joy.

I had planned to go to a local bar for to see the monthly break dancing/hip-hop party/competition, but my buddy that was gonna go with me had to back out due to an upcoming test, so I decided just to check it out next month instead. Arriving back at the dorm/apartment, lǐ xuān recommended that we three who lived together hang out some more and watch a movie, which we did. By the time the film was over we were all 好困 （hǎo kùn, so sleepy), so it was straight to bed.