Beijing, here I come!

  Beijing, Beijing, China
Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Henry Kerins (SayJ and Will's younger brother who is in school in Beijing) picks me up at the airport along with his girlfriend, Dan-Dan (Chinese girl from Beijing), and his buddy from Princeton, Josh (who I somehow don't know). 


It's nice to see a familiar face again but I'm appalled as they started off by playing a joke on me.  Dan-Dan pretended to not speak English and while I didn't say anything bad, they got me good until she decided that the joke had run its course because I had stopped trying to talk to her all together after maybe ten minutes.

The next few days proved to be right up there in terms of the level of fun, quality of sight-seeing, and enjoyment of the company I was with.  We did a brief driving tour of the city and it wasn't an hour before I had my first Peking duck experience.  Next we headed back to Henry's apartment which is in the middle of a college neighborhood.  There are somewhere near 2 million students living in Henry's neighborhood, a statistic which is mindboggling when you consider that not even 25% of that live in the largest college town in the US (Boston?).  Naturally we headed down to the park for a game of pick-up basketball and while we may not be the best players back in the states, we were stars out there.  We ran the court for a while and even attracted a decent crowd.

Nicky (from Thailand, teaching English, well British, in Beijing for a few months) joined up with us and we went to dinner which turned out to be some sick stuff. 


We ate with a bunch of Henry's Chinese friends at a hot pot restaurant that would be very similar to a fondu restaurant in the States.  If I thought the joke at the airport was cruel, it was nothing compared to his next stunt!  He prepared us for some disgusting sounding food and told us about the brain we were going to eat, if we were brave enough (and I was), but then said another dish was "starfish".  Yeah, well after eating a bit of the extremely chewy substance we were informed that we had just consumed Cow penis!  I tried a few more pieces after I knew what it was and only gagged once.  I actually enjoyed the brain, although I'm not sure which animal's knowledge I consumed!  (Side note: the first word I learned was dog and I'm making sure I don't get fed any "goe" although I'm up for trying just about anything else...)

The crew decides to hit the clubs and winds up at a place called Vixx which looked like it was in Miami or Vegas, but not Beijing.  The music was good, the dance floor was packed and the table service was just like it is back home.  Josh fell asleep on the couch and after Dan-Dan gave him a less than appropriate Chinese tattoo we decided to call it a night.