Ringing in the New Year a.k.a. Back to the Future!

New Year's Eve Day was a day of returns.  We had accumulated enough unwanted merchandise in China that we planned to go out and return it all in one fell swoop, so after breakfast, we took the subway to the first and furthest stop and decided to work our way back home from there.  The first item to return was a pair of boots that Muir had ordered for me from a Chinese e-shop specializing in large shoes which unfortunately turned out to be too small.  (I think I've written previously about how my feet are apparently gigantic.)  The store's return location was on the east side of Beijing close to where I work, and also like where I work, it was using residential space as the base of their operation.  Real estate space zoned for commercial use is prohibitively expensive if you are not a large company, and I hear that this kind of reappropriation is fairly common.  Anyway, the woman inside was very nice and soon we were out the door with a receipt and instructions to request the refund via the website.  Hopefully all goes well.  The second stop was at a little DVD shop near Walmart.  No less than half of the DVDs we purchased did not play in Muir's computer, and we wanted to exchange them for different copies to see if those would work.  The shop owner was suspiciously absent when we arrived, and we spoke with his stall neighbor (co-conspirator?) about exchanging the DVDs.  With new DVDs in hand, we headed home.

In the evening we enjoyed a bottle of prosecco and watched The Change Up, a raunchy bromance  starring Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman who play...two friends who are the same age!  (Ha!  Jason Bateman looks so much older than Ryan Reynolds.  Just kidding Jason Bateman!  Loved you in Arrested Development.  Can't wait for the movie, but I'm not holding my breath.)  Anyway, The Change Up is actually a raunchy bromance where two friends who lead completely different lives magically switch bodies one night and learn lessons about life, love, and themselves through their star-crossed misadventures.  The movie was good, but I don't think we managed to stay awake until midnight.

But getting "back to the future"...I haven't made new year's resolutions for many years now, and this year I just have one:  To repatriate as soon as possible!

To all my friends and family:  Miss you, love you.  See you next year!

Merry Christmas from Beijing!

Well, this is it.  Our first married Christmas.  Not exactly where I imagined we would spend it, but we are together, and I am therefore content.

My Christmas present to Muir was dinner reservations at Nobu.  We have a tradition of dining at Nobu restaurants when we have the chance.  For Muir's birthday many years ago, we went to Nobu 57 in NYC and later ate at Nobu in Las Vegas during a long weekend after we had both moved out to California.  I have also had the pleasure of dining at Nobu in Miami back when I lived in New York and was traveling for work.  Anyway, Nobu is a fantastic Japanese fusion restaurant and their food is just sublime--perfectly seasoned and super flavorful.  This year, our dinner was extra special because my co-worker's husband also happens to be the head chef!

Muir, Jason, me

He really spoiled us.  We ordered the set Christmas menu which was already like 7 courses, and we got free glass of champagne, free cocktail, and a free sashimi appetizer.

Drinks!

Tuna tartar

Yellowtail?

Lobster and salmon sashimi salad

Miso blackened cod - a signature dish

Australian sirloin with salsa and mushrooms

Miso soup with fois gras dumpling

Black truffle risotto

Chocolate panna cotta on gingerbread with
strawberry sugar cone filled with lychee foam

Ice cream mochi 

On Christmas morning, we opened the cardboard box full of presents Mary (Muir's mother) sent and arranged them around our mini-Christmas tree.  Lots of fun things were included--light up slippers, nail polish, fake moustaches, a box of brownie mix.  The rest of the afternoon, we took the subway down to Sanlitun and went shopping for a few new clothes at Esprit.  Muir's favorite purchase was a new "cool" pair of sweat pants, and mine was a gray pleated skirt which I'll have to save until the weather gets warmer.

Looks like we've been very good this year! :)

Beijing Body Art

Muir and I noticed this tattoo and body piercing van parked near the Wudaokou subway station over the weekend.  We are, of course, avoiding this invitation-for-hepatitis-on-wheels and can only wonder 'What the heck are people thinking?'  I really don't think you'll find battery-operated autoclaves in there...

Quick, Batman, to the tattoo-mobile!

More Peking Duck, please!

On Friday, we had dinner at a Peking Duck restaurant in Wudaokou with Aruba's head technical writer who was visiting from Sunnyvale.  We had Peking Duck, of course, and several other tasty dishes--braised beef, Chinese broccoli, a black fungus dish, and Yan Jing beers all around.  After dinner we got some dessert at a new Taiwanese dessert place that opened on the corner.  They specialize in dessert soups, so that's what we tried.

The first soup had taro root, large tapioca pearls, and red beans. The second soup had more taro and red beans, and two kinds of gelatinous balls.  I don't remember what they were.  I imagine it was what eating muppets would be like.  Squishy.  Very squishy.  And not very sweet.

Saturday we spent most of the day reading and relaxing, and Sunday was a glorious 50 degrees, so we took the subway to Walmart bought some boot leg DVDs, an comforter to help pad our rock-hard mattress, and a yoga mat (yay!) and generally did a little more walking around that day.

Long, long ago in a country far, far away...

...Muir threw a Star Wars viewing party!  He chose to show Episode IV, the first movie to the uninitiated, after he and his co-workers came across a test string that read 'Luke, I am your father' in some of the testing code repository.  And yes, I know that line does not appear in Episode IV, but that movie the classic Star Wars jumping off point.  Take it up with Muir.

Anyway, he did a great job organizing the entire thing.  While he was working from India, Muir emailed the invitations and then delegated the task of downloading the movie with Chinese subtitles and testing the AV hookups in a conference room to a co-worker and the task of getting snacks and beverages to me.  On Sunday everyone who RSVP'ed arrived, which made for a merry band of eight of us--Muir and me, five of Muir's male co-workers and one co-worker's nine year-old son.  The only hitch was that the framerate of the first movie was too slow, and all six of the engineers spent a good 45 minutes trying different computers, media players, and movie versions.  Eventually, they converged on the optimal combination and we got to kick back and geek out.

Well, now I guess we know how many
engineers it takes to show Star Wars

First Snowfall!

I woke up this morning to lightly falling snow.  You can see the dusting of snowflakes resting on the remaining deciduous leaves in the photo below.

By the time I left work it had all melted, and the commute home was just wet and muddy.  We're not expecting any more precipitation until next week, so no more snow in the immediate forecast.  Whether or not we'll have a white Christmas remains to be seen.

Christmas Surprise

Since Muir is in India this week, I thought it would be a happy idea if I suprised him by decorating the apartment for Christmas.  So this little elf got to work and made her very own Christmas tree!  

This is one of my favorite craft projects.  All you need is masking tape, six wire coat hangers, garland, and a string of lights.  At Lotus, these supplies cost about $30 USD.

1.  Arrange two coat hangers into a chevron and secure with tape.  Repeat with the remaining four coat hangers so that you have three chevrons altogether.

2.  Slide one pair of hangers through the center of another pair to make an "X."  Add the third pair along the radial axis and secure with tape.  You could only use two pairs of coat hangers for an "X" frame, but the tree will end up looking a little square-ish.

3.  Starting at the top, secure one end of a garland strand with tape and wrap/weave the garland around the frame in a downward spiral.  Secure the ends to the frame as well.

4.  Repeat with the lights.

5.  Plug in the lights, and voila--instant Christmas!

Our Christmas corner.  Not exactly a fireplace, but it does heat the apartment!

I cheated and bought the stockings.  (I left my glue gun at home!)

It's beginning to look a lot like...Christmas?

It seems that no matter how far one travels, you cannot escape the over-commercialization of Christmas.  I went to the grocery store on Saturday (November 26th, two days after Thanksgiving) for my weekly comestibles, and this is what greeted me inside:

But where's the Menorah?

The Christmas display was especially surprising because China is primarily atheist, but locals I've talked to have said that more and more young people are starting to give gifts to each other to celebrate Christmas, even though they have no idea why the holiday exists.  The gifts that they commonly give are also quite unusual.  Similar to gifts given during the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year), they include things like traditional white alcohol, money (from adults to children) in red envelopes, and meat.  Yes, meat.  I commonly see roast ducks and pieces of dried beef in vacuum sealed bags and packaged in red paper shopping bags ready for gift-giving.  Apparently nothing says "Merry Christmas/Happy New Year" like a bag of jerky.  I think Muir would probaby approve of this tradition.

Speaking of Muir, he is spending the week in India working in the Bangalore office, so this weekend has been especially low-key.

The Thanksgiving Post

You'd think that it would be impossible to get a Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings in China, but not so!  Luckily for us, The Bridge Cafe (one of our favorite coffee shops) was hosting a by-reservation-only Thanksgiving dinner for about $30 USD per person.  I don't remember the entire menu, but the meal included roasted turkey, honey-baked ham, scalloped corn, mashed potatoes and turkey gravy, stuffing, chef salad, fruit salad, cranberry sauce, red wine, garlic bread, green beans, candied sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie, apple pie, coffee and tea.  Ok, maybe I do remember the entire menu.  :)  I'm also happy to report that the food was all very tasty.  Here's how Beijing does Thanksgiving:

Red table cloths, just like the ones the Pilgrims had

Table for two

Me and Cyclops

First glass of wine in three months!

Volunteering, Trip to Hou Hai

On Saturday afternoon, I volunteered to conduct informational interviews with prospective Cornell students for the Cornell Alumni Admissions Ambassador Network (CAAAN).  Part of the purpose is to recruit good students and part of it is to report back to the admissions office about how our meetings went.  I spoke with three applicants about what they were interested in studying and answered their questions about Cornell.  All three of them were early decision candidates, but I only felt that one of them should be offered admission.  The official party line regarding the reports is that they do not affect the students' admission offers, but they also say that the reports are extremely "helpful," so I suspect that they actually do count in the admission committee's decision to offer an applicant admission or not.  Regardless, I just didn't tell the students I spoke with that I was even writing a report so that they wouldn't get worked up about it.

Saturday night, we met Muir's friend Hannah (from PiB), Hannah's sister Rachel, and Rachel's boyfriend for pizza in Hou Hai.  Hou Hai is a lake near the center of Beijing surrounded by bars and restaurants nestled in hu tongs.  There are cute bridges crossing the water, lights and paper lanters, alleyways to walk through, music blaring from store fronts, and delicious smells wafting in the air.  It's pretty cute, and theme-parkesque.

Definitely hat and scarf weather

View of Hou Hai

At Hutong Pizza with Jan, Rachel, Muir, and Hannah.
Everyone looks like they've had laser vision correction except for me!

Heat at last!

The central heat turned on sometime last weekend, and since then, the apartment has been nice and warm.  For this, I am very thankful.  We may just survive the winter.

Trip to the Summer Palace

Last weekend, Muir's boss Carl arrived in Beijing for a few days and on Sunday, the three of us ventured out to visit the Summer Palace.  The Summer Palace was the occasional residence of Beijing's emperors and empresses, from well, Wikipedia says 1750, but since different parts were built/incorporated at different times, it's hard for me to say exactly.

Anyway, the site is basically a very large, walled park interspersed with buildings, pavillions, gates, statues, etc.  The main geographic features of the Summer Palace are Kunming Lake and Longevity Hill.  We started at the North Gate of the Summer palace, and walked south to the top of Longevity Hill, and then descended the east side of the hill and continued walking south along Kunming Lake so that we could cross Seventeen-Arch Bridge and visit the South Lake Island.  There were lots of fun things to look at and the foot paths within the Summer Palace were fun to walk through.  It was kind of like trekking through unexplored wilderness, with lots of hills to climb and trees obscuring views of the outside world.  It was easy to imagine being in China a few hundred years ago.  Enough jibber jabber.  Here are the pictures!

Early morning sunlight

On the bridge over Suzhou Street, a cute canal with shops
on either side below the bridge

Striking a post in a round doorway

In front of the Tower of Buddhist Incense
which was recently renovated before the
2008 Olympics in Beijing

Decorative detail of the Tower of Buddhist Incense

View from the top of Longevity Hill looking down on
the most concentrated collection of buildings in the
Summer Palace, Kunming Lake, Seventeen-Arch Bridge, and
South Lake Island in the distance

Man practicing calligraphy using
a bucket of water and a long brush

Man preparing to fly a kite on Seventeen-Arch Bridge;
Tower of Buddhist Incense in the background

Show me the money!

Today was a good day at work.  It was a good day at work because--duh-du-du-dah!--I got paid.

My first paycheck in China.

Muir and I celebrated by going out for the second cheapest dinner we've found so far in Beijing, which was two big bowls of wonton soup in the cafeteria basement of the Hua Lian supermarket.  This past Monday, the boss and I finally signed my contract, so that's why I was especially happy that the company honored their promise to pay me for the past few weeks of work.

On Wednesday I had a substitute Chinese teacher because my usual teacher was sick and had gone to the hospital.  I'm not sure exactly what was wrong, but I'm guessing something to do with his upper respiratory system.  Don't worry, I feel fine.  I was mostly disappointed with the substitute's teaching style and am looking forward to my usual teacher's return.

R2-D2.0

Beijing is infamous for its poor air quality.  And every time after I climb the six flights of stairs to our apartment and feel especially winded, I can't help but feel like my reduced lung capacity is not just a figment of my imagination.  (Those of you who saw the video tour of our apartment also got a nice view of the smog hovering outside our windows.)  In fact, it's probably not just my imagination.

The US Embassy monitors the concentration of particles less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter (PM2.5) and posts their results about once an hour on their live Twitter feed.  The EPA characterizes PM2.5 as "fine particles," and they are the most dangerous since they are so small that they can enter the blood stream through the lungs.  Particles this small come from things like burning diesel fuel and coal.  Gross.  So to help protect our health at least a little bit, this week we ordered an air filter.  Meet R2-D2.0.

Boop boop beep boop!

He filters out particles > 20 nanometers (.02 micrometers), so at least while we're at home, we'll breathe a little easier.

Sanlitun, Sanlitun, Sanlitun

Well, this past week has been very busy for me.  I had several client deliverables this week which kept me late at work.  I'm working with a graphic design intern who is sweet, but terribly terribly slow.  At any rate, between the commute, evenings at work, and Muir's language partner meetings, I just haven't seen him that much. :(

We managed to spend Tuesday evening together at a Cornell/USC alumni mixer in Sanlitun.  It was held at a bar called Punk in a boutique hotel called The Opposite House which itself was very trendy and modern.  Luckily, I had gone out Monday night and purchased a few nicer things to wear to work from ESPRIT and didn't feel underdressed.  Does anyone else remember that brand?  It seems like they practically disappeared after 1995.  More about that later.  We were mostly outnumbered by USC grads at the mixer, but still collected a lot of business cards.  Exchanging business cards is, as one attendee phrased it, "the Beijing handshake."

On Wednesday afternoon I had my first Chinese lesson at the new school, called Capital Mandarin, which is conveniently located on the 10th floor of the building where I work.  :)  My teacher is a 13th generation Beijinger and is great.  He makes me talk a lot, corrects my mistakes, and then has me repeat the correct sentences several times for practice.  I think it will help speed along my speaking ability significantly.

Muir's new favorite store

The weather has turned quite chilly here rather quickly.  Even though the high is probably still around 60F, it's 35F when Muir and I leave for work in the morning, and the sun has long since set by the time I leave work in the evening.  For this reason, we decided to go out and purchase some warmer clothes and headed back to Sanlitun for some serious shopping.  We found a few good go-to stores.  The first one is called Uniqglo, which I think is Japanese.  It's basically like the GAP and a great place to buy affordable basics.  Next, I took Muir to the ESPRIT store, and I think he fell in love.  It had an entire floor devoted to men's clothes and many many jackets and blazers. On Sunday, we went out to the smaller mall in our neighborhood and picked up a few more things.  I have a new hat, which I love, and Muir has a smart new black felt jacket with a hood and fancy toggles.  We both got several pairs of long underwear and warm pajamas.  Sadly, I couldn't buy any new boots because they just don't carry my size.  My feet are officially too big for Beijing.  :P

Enjoying big bowls of wonton soup for
less than $2USD each!

Wining, Dining, and Web Wednesday

Just a quick post about our socializing this past week.

On Wednesday, Muir and I traveled to a trendy shopping area close to the area where I work called Sanlitun.  Muir's language partner, Nora, had invited us to attend a presentation (in English) hosted by an international common interest group under the moniker of "Web Wednesday."  The group has a small chapter in Beijing and last Wednesday they met at a Belgian-owned bar called Nearby Tree.  The topic was group buying (think Groupon) and the speaker was the Korean CEO of a group buying aggregator who extolled the potential profitability of the future of group buying services in China.  Neither Muir nor I were impressed with the speaker's argument.  As the moderator noted, the explosive growth the speaker talked about could also describe the increase in China's consumption in general, not just with regard to group buying.  We met a few characters after the presentation, and will probably attend the next Web Wednesday.  Hopefully, it will be more compelling.

On Friday, Muir and I had dinner with some Aruba employees since a few folks from the Sunnyvale office had been in town during the past week.  We again ventured to Sanlitun and dined at a Mexican restaurant called the Saddle Cantina.  Everyone had appetizers and frozen margaritas.  Unfortunately, the drinks proved too much for the Chinese HR woman who fell ill and had to leave early.

On Saturday night, Muir came with me to Flow's offices while Gontran (Flow's CEO and my boss) and I met with an Australian client.  Afterwards, the four of us went out for dinner at a Malaysian restaurant near HouHai called Cafe Sambal.  The restaurant was located in an unpretentious hutong and the food was expensive and only of fair quality.  Muir did a great job socializing and I was glad that he was there to meet my new boss.

Making Friends: Cherry

Not that I disagree with him, but Muir thought I needed a Chinese friend here in Beijing, so after work on Tuesday I agreed to meet a young woman named Cherry.  (The Chinese often pick their own English names, sometimes with hilarious results.  Watch this video about Beijingers picking English names if you have the chance.)  I haven't asked her why she chose that name yet.  I guess I'm saving the question for our second meeting.  Anyway, Muir's Chinese language partner, Nora, introduced us and suggested that we could be language partners since I need someone with whom to practice my Chinese and Cherry recently started her own English school and wants to further her English skills.  She is about my age, super cute, and likes to watch American TV shows like Desperate Housewives, Sex and the City, and that new show on the CW "The Secret Circle."  It's about witches I think, although I haven't seen it.  How she manages to find it, I have no idea.  And that's where the similarities end.  I guess we'll see if language exchange is enough to make a friendship.

Shanghai-ed!

Early Saturday morning, Muir and I flew (of our own free will) from Beijing to Shanghai for the weekend  and to watch the final round of the Shanghai Rolex Masters!  It was a much smoother trip than the one to Xi'An.  We didn't get lost or stranded, and we successfully rode our first bus in China, which I think we were both dreading...probably because riding the bus in the US can be such a confusing disaster.  But no, the buses were clean and modern, with an electronic marquee and automated stop announcements.  Anyway, back to the trip.  I'm sorry to write that Muir took some photos on his phone which are now lost because he recently upgraded to iOS5, which now makes my job harder because I have to be twice as funny.

After landing at the domestic Shanghai airport, we decided to tour around the city before heading to our hotel later in the day to check-in.  I was still wary from the Xi'An taxi fiasco and had picked a hotel mid-way between the airport and the tennis center, but that meant it was unfortunately located outside downtown Shanghai to the west.  We decided to take the subway all the way to the far (east) bank of the Huangpu River and work our way back west.  In the first few hours, I noticed a few differences between Beijing and Shanghai:

1. Shanghai is a lot more modern than Beijing.  It just is.
2. And better maintained.  You just don't see the piles of dirt and construction detritus that you do in Beijing.
3. And there's less smog.  We saw blue sky both days while we were there.
4. And the women are prettier.

I realize that last point is rather subjective, so you'll just have to take my word for it.  There were a lot of pretty laides riding the subway that Saturday.  I can't imagine it was just a coincidence.

On the east bank of the river we sort of went hog wild on some of our modern creature comforts.  We walked through the (old) Apple store (insert missing photos here), drank a latte at Starbucks, ate a doughnut at Donut King (I don't even think you can get a good donut in Beijing), and ate Burger King at the food court in a big shopping mall.

Heaven, with sprinkles.

After lunch we walked to the Oriental Pearl TV Tower.  It's 88 stories tall, but we didn't pay to ride the elevator to the top.  

No, it's not a ride in Tomorrowland, it's
the Oriental Pearl TV Tower.

After that we walked along the river bank and took some great photos (sorry!) of the famous historic riverfront street in Shanghai called The Bund.  Although we didn't pay to ride the elevator to the top of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower, we did waste--I mean spend--our money to take the Bund Sightseeing Tunnel back to the west back of the Hung Pu river.  Oh my goodness, how can I describe it?  It's completely cheesy.  Exhibit A.  Exhibit B.

After that we rode the subway to the end of one of the southwest lines and took that bus I mentioned to our hotel, the Fortune Forever Hotel.  It wasn't as nice as the one in Xi'An, but still a good one.  We had dinner at a local Chinese restaurant near the hotel, and had a quiet evening reading on our iPads.

On Sunday we are the buffet breakfast at the hotel, and spent pretty much the whole day at the Qizhong Forest Sports City Arena (insert missing photos here).  I wasn't familiar with the team that won the men's doubles final, but it was pretty cool being able to watch Andy Murray trounce David Ferrer in the men's singles final.  We flew back to Beijing on the first flight out Monday morning and went straight to work.  It's been sort of non-stop ever since.  Anyway, I guess I'll end this post by saying that I would definitely visit Shanghai again.  It offers everything you could want from a modern city.

A Room with a View (sort of)

Well, it only took me 27 years, but I finally got my own office!  Unfortunately, on Monday I also got an office-mate, so it's no longer just mine.  Ah, well.  My business cards officially say "Project Director," and so far I've met at least five or six different clients, updated some wireframes, sourced stock photos and vector images, edited some English content, and bumbled through some meetings with my Chinese graphic design co-workers.  My Chinese classes will start back up next week, but I'll be going once a week for four hours instead of two hours every day.  I'm looking forward to it, though.  I can tell that I'm not learning new things as quickly without a structured class.  My boss is great.  He's from Belgium and speaks French natively, but his English is also excellent, so that's what we use to communicate.  He's 30 years old, oh, and his favorite color is fuschia.  Love it.

My desk and south-facing window

Haagen Dazs

 Hello blogstalkers.  I found a picture of a trip to Haagen Dazs Muir and I took while in Xi'An.  Sorry for not posting it earlier. The Haagen Dazs shops here are decorated like the Mad Hatter's tea party.  You sit at a tiny table in easy chairs and order from an elaborate menu of coffee drinks and ice cream drinks and sundaes, and then when you reach the end and decide that all you really want is one scoop of ice cream, they give you this golf ball-sized scoop for USD $5.  Ridiculous.

Our (somewhat annoyingly) cute table

Big News

It's the moment we've all been waiting for...I got a job today!  A real job!  Hooray!  I will be doing product management/project management/some business development/and wireframing for a web design agency in the financial district of Beijing called Flow.  It is pretty much the perfect job for me, the perfect combination for my skills and interests.  And, possibly the best part is that I'll be working with foriegn clients in English and my employer wants me to continue with my Chinese lessons, so I'll still get one half-day a week to practice with a teacher.  Here's their website:  http://www.flow-communications.com

I start this Thursday. :)

Xi'an and the Terracotta Soldiers

Since Muir already did a great job typing up a summary of our trip to Xi'an, I'll add additional details and a few photos.

Many thanks to my mother who reminded me to double-check the terminal from which our outbound flight departed.  They are not close together and could easily cause a hapless traveler to miss his/her flight.  But we knew where we were going and arrived two hours before departure.  As Muir mentioned, airport security was a breeze relative to the US.  We didn't even have to take our shoes off!

A bridge in the lobby. Fancy!

 We stayed at the Kempinski hotel.  It's listed as a five star hotel in China, and it was quite nice.  The service was fantastic and even the hallways were clean.  Most of the staff spoke at least some English.  It had three in-house restaurants:  a buffet, a Chinese restaurant featuring the local cuisine, and a German brew pub.

Um, do the pony?

Local specialty--mutton and bread soup

We ate dinner the first night at a famous restaurant in Xi'an, 同盛祥 (Tong sheng xiang).  The Muslim dish we wanted to try was a mutton soup with unleavened bread that kind of turns into dumplings in the broth.  There are also some meng bean noodles in the soup and you can add pickled garlic and cilantro to your liking.  It reminded me a lot of Vietnamese pho, except that the mutton was already cooked.  It was terrific!

Drum Tower

Bell Tower

We were really close to both Xi'an's drum tower and bell tower, so we snapped some quick photos of them.  You can't really tell from the photos, but the weather was drizzly the entire time we were in Xi'an.  Getting back to the hotel was a nightmare.

Ok, here come the pictures from the Terracotta soldiers.  Besides what Muir already described, we decided that it was not worth it to get the audio guides sold at these kind of big tourist attractions.   They're expensive and of rather poor quality and hard to hear with all the other visitors around, and the point is really to be able to see the site for yourself.  If you want to learn about the site, you can find better narratives and detailed photos and maps online or in documentaries.

One small part of the shopping area around the Terracotta
Soldiers

A partially excavated pit showing the rafters
of some of the buried chambers.

Restored terracotta horse and cavalryman

The famous kneeling archer.  His bow
had long since rotted away.

Another pit with more horses and cavalrymen

The last and probably most famous pit
containing row after row of excavated
soldiers.

Eating lunch of noodles, the province's specialty.

This dish is biang biang noodles.  It's sort of "a little bit of everything" noodles.  It has onion, celery, potato, choice of meat, green pepper, and a tomato sauce.  "Biang" is written with a new character that has about 57 strokes and hasn't yet been encoded so that one could type it with a keyboard.

That evening we just stayed in the hotel and read for the rest of the afternoon.  We had dinner at the German brew pub (not bad), and went swimming in the swimming pool.  Oh, I almost forgot!  The bed was my favorite part of the hotel.  It actually had a pillow-top mattress like in the US, and not just a stiff box spring.  I slept like a baby both nights.  It was heaven.

Wednesday morning we took a taxi back to the airport to fly home and encountered the thickest fog I've ever seen in my life.  Everyone started driving slow and flicked on their hazard lights.  I kid you not, we couldn't even see the huge toll plaza until we met up with the concrete barriers that separated cars into the different lanes twelve feet before the booth.  Good thing the driver knew it was somewhere around there.  Oh, and we also arrived at the airport so early that we couldn't use the e-ticket kiosk to check-in.  We had to wait until 90 minutes before our flight's departure.

On Wednesday night, we met up with Mark Dieters and his family at a fancy pants Chinese restaurant near Wangfujing shopping district and had a sumptuous dinner of peking duck.  Several other people joined us, including Mr. Chen, the new assistant facilities manager in Beijing, Jenny (Mark's furniture vendor), Jenny's mother, and Jenny's month-old daughter, and lastly, Dave Peterson the Beijing office general manager.  We had some wine (a first since being in China because the wine is known for being made with fake alcohol (?) and generally not a good idea), several good Chinese dishes, the peking duck (so good!), and traditional Beijing desserts like green pea ice cream.