¡Fotografias!

I have finally loaded up all the pictures I've taken over the last 3 months. Don't get too excited, there aren't that many, but in case you forgot what I look like, here's a taste:

(I'm the one on the left)

To view the rest of em, go here:

PICTUREMANIA!

Happy late Thanksgiving to Y'all. I hope it was good'n. I was pretty bummed to miss it for the second year in a row. Last year I was (coincidentally) at two of the locations that got terrorized this week in Bombay on Thanksgiving. So I guess, given the choice between here and there, I'd rather be here. But even more so, I would've rather been at home. Thanksgiving has evolved into perhaps my favorite holiday since it represents being happy and eating food until you want to vomit. Even though I like receiving things, Thanksgiving represents (in my mind at least) every other holiday without all the bullspit. No presents, no religion, just family, friends and food (and booze if you're over 21, or have a cool family). So even though I got to spend it with new friends eating roast duck at a Chinese restaurant and topped it off with a few drinks after, I missed my fam. So I hope each and everyone of you who could took advantage of being closer to home.

Other than thanksgiving, there isn't much to speak of from last week. It was really nice to have a couple days off. I started my health students on a project to come up with their own anti-smoking advertisement and I'm anticipating some pretty awesome results. I spent most of the weekend reading No Country for Old Men (which is a fantastic book as well as a great movie), and bumming around town. My front wheel crapped out on me last weekend after the long ride and I ended up having to buy a new one, so I was bikeless for a week and I hope that never happens again.

Once I got my bike back, bumming around was much easier and I made to Sanlitun (the tourist shopping area). Notable notes from this:

I got stopped by a photographer who took my picture because he liked my street fashion and wanted to put it in a fashion webzine. I gave him my email address so you can expect a good chuckle coming at you soon when you check my fashion stance.

I got bitten by a Panda. His name was Anders

I went to the Beijing American Apparel store. This was and may remain perhaps the most bizarre experience of my whole stay here. It was completely empty and staffed by two female Chinese hipsters in training. Their english was quite good, but the retro-new wave-sparkly spandex-lack of hipsters/people vibe of the store was almost haunting. Plus a plain t shirt cost around 30 dollars. F that.

I had a Rogue Dead Guy Ale. It was so delicious. It cost 5 dollars. But it was so delicious.

I rode my bike somewhere around 40 miles yesterday. The middle 7-10 miles of that was a cyclocross race. I did much better this week than last week. Last week the race started while I was still pinning my number to my jersey. This meant that I had about 30 seconds to make up on the very last person so I spent most of my time passing people. This time around I started around the middle of the pack, but didn't start aggressively enough and lost a lot of time on the leaders. I was also riding in my clip in road shoes, and since you have to unclip-carry your bike-and clip back in at least 6 times on every lap I was not happy about that decision. I failed to unclip completely a number of times and almost fell, I had trouble clipping back in and lost a lot of time a number of times. That plus a couple of spills and a really loose stem (my handlebars could move freely without turning the wheel) gave me some trouble but in the end I think I made it into the top 10 in a field of around 40 or 50. Next week is the last race I hear and I want to shoot for top 5.

On a musical note, we're up into the double digits (11) for people who downloaded my last podcast! That's up almost 900 percent from the last podcast. Since we're seeing such a spike in podcast interest I'm working on a another one, as well as that victory themed podcast I talked about back around election time. Expect one or both in a couple days. I'm also going to look into figuring out how to set up an RSS feed so that you can put my podcast into iTunes and have it just download whenever I post a new one (thanks for the suggestion Tits).

I'm thankful for everyone who reads this blog. Unless your name is Brian Kehoe.

- Ben

*gabe herrick shout out*

What it DO do?

What it do do indeed. Hello sports fans and friends of your friend in China (that's me). I suppose I'm long overdue for an update. I'll let you know that I've THOUGHT about providing you all (y'all) with an update almost daily for the last few weeks, but lets face it, I'm one lazy hunk of awesome. I've also been slightly busy since last week marked the end of the first quarter so we had midterms and grades to submit. As you can imagine, I left plenty of my grading until the last second and, with my procrastination skillz, managed to put all that grading off until the very last second. So here's an update of some of the things I've done over the last month or so:

1. I participated in our schools' Sports Day, a day in which I played 2 soccer matches, 3 basketball games, played some tug of war, many-legged raced, and 100meter dashed. My basketball team won the Bball tournament, my soccer team got second in the Fball tournament, and I sprinted to a second place finish in the 100m dash. And to think, we only sent 2 kids to the hospital that whole day! Jacob only needed 23 stitches on his face! Take that concrete flag-pole-display! All in all, I'd say the day was a huge success for everyone (except Jacob).

2. I started Chinese lessons with an individual tutor. The Chinese is going much better now AND I have more free time. My feelings on this are: yay.

3. I stayed out way too late on halloween, but it was because I now have friends to hang out with. Also, I was dressed as Abe Lincoln, wearing a stove-pipe hat I crafted from a trashcan, a toilet seat cover, and a magic marker. Move over McGyver, there's a new mastercraftsman in town (McGyver lives in Beijing, right?)

4. Last weekend I rode my bike to the Badaling section of the Great Wall. It's about 50km (about 30 miles) away, and while the first 45km only took me about an hour and a half, the last 15 or so took roughly 2 hours with breaks because it climbs about 1,500ft in the last 15km. That's a lot more feet up than I've ever ridden on my bike before, and that shiz hurt. The plus side though was that the Great Wall was pretty neat and the ride back down the mountain was fun as heeeeyyyaaaall. To give you an idea, I CAUGHT UP to a bus, and then couldn't get around it because it was too windey. But (if you're too dense to pick up on it) that means I was going faster than the bus. Go me. In retrospect, tailing a bus in a bicycle seems fairly dangerous, but it was fun and I'm alive. So back off mom.

5. I saw DJ Shadow a couple weekends ago. Shit was dope. I really shouldn't have to say anything else. If you don't understand how cool it probably was, then i don't want to explain to you why it was (unless you're my mom, which only one of you is).

So those are the highlights. Here are a few things I'm doing this weekend:

1.I found a group of amateur cyclists here in Beijing and I'm going for about a 100km ride with them tomorrow. This will be my first ride with them, but they ride every saturday all winter and I plan on joining them every weekend.

2. I'm going to a birthday party tonight, in which I hope not to stay out too late so that I can make it to that ride tomorrow morning.

3. Tomorrow night I'm going to a tour of the Tsingtao Beer brewery with my roomate and another of our co-workers. Tsingtao is one of the 2 most popular beers in China. I'd say it's about on par with any mid level light beer in the states, but it should be fun. it's 50 Yuan (about 7 bucks) for all you can drink beer. So this saturday night in order to to understand my life here, buy a 6-pack of Tsingdao at your local liquor store and try speaking Chinese. I promise it'll be more fun than you expect.

4. The amateur riders have been putting on cyclocross races in conjunction with the Trek store here in Beijing and they invited me to come race this Sunday in their fourth cross race. I'm pretty excited since I've never done a cross race before.

That's about all I got planned for now. I've got more to say, but it isn't pertinent info, so I'll save it for a future post. For now, here's a new podcast (I'm not sure why I keep making these, since none of you seem to download them, but I guess they're a fun timewaster occasionally).

download it here:

Made in China Vol.2

Lastly, I found this video the other day. The song rocks pretty f-ing hard. Plus, the whole Adult-Freaks-&-Geeks theme makes for a very enjoyable video. Not for the faint of heart. Let the face melting commence.



Hugs & Kisses

Dig and ye shall receive

Wow. P-Funk called it decades previous, but Dr. Funkenstein upped the ante in 93 with this video featuring Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and more. ONly 15 years ago this seemed like such a ridiculous premise. Looks like Obama got his hands on one of those Bop Guns. Watch out.

Bootsy Called It

Did no one else think of this song in the last week? P-Funk knew this day would come. Get up for the down stroke. I take my funk uncut.

Bill & Ted's hellacious halloween party

What happens when a 59 year old teacher drinks too much soda?

Enter: Abe Lincoln.

Electoin Smelection

Here's the real reason why the O to the B to the A-M-A is soon to be in the Oval Office: Dude's got skillz.




Seriously though, apparently there was actual expectation for me to post things about the election and my opinion, perhaps even provide some sort of anecdote about witnessing this historical event from half way around the world.

Really though, I don't have much. I paid about $20 USD top make sure my vote arrived on time in Ramsey County. It did (the UPS tracking site told me so, even though the address apparently changed and it didn't make it to the right place initially). It was kind of funny though trying to press the importance of this election on a bunch of Korean, Chinese, Mongolian, and Philipino kids. It was also really interesting to try to explain the electoral college to 5 different groups of students. In fact, I was quite taken aback when I used my brilliant powers of deduction to figure out that there must be about 540 votes in the electoral college if it took 270 to win. However as I announced this to my 3rd period health class, Parker Park (a Korean student (and yes that is his real name)) immediately corrected me by saying very matter-of-factly "Actually there are 538." Stunned, I turned around, narrowed my eyes and asked him how he knew that, to which he replied that he had learned it the class before from another teacher. "Thank goodness." I said. "I kind of hoped that some 16 year old Korean kid didn't know more about my own country than I do." Ok, there's your anecdote.

Also, rather than going out and drinking in celebration at lunch time with some of the university students I now know, I instead celebrated our newly elected Muslim president by eating at a Chinese Muslim restaurant for lunch. Victory tasted delicious.

My Mom forwarded me an email from my Dad in which he admitted that the morning after the election, while he was alone in the house, he put on Hey Ya by Outkast and danced around in celebration (sorry dad). My point in all this is that I'm sure you all celebrated in some way (unless you're a Republican, OOPS! However, if you are I'm not sure why you're reading my blog). For instance, I celebrated the next morning by playing the first two tracks off of the album Phantom Power by Super Furry Animals ( A Welsh band) which are titled "Hello Sunshine" and "Liberty Bell". Also, to give my dad credit (probably more than he deserves), my dad didn't just pick up on the Outkast phenom with Hey Ya. It's entirely possible/probable that my copy of Stankonia at home was in fact purchased by my father, not for me but for himself. He has also seen Outkast in concert before. So there, to give credit where it's due, my dad isn't some 40-something dad, dancing around in his living room to some upbeat sell out song, he was there years before. Anywho, there's yet one more anecdote.

I'm thinking about putting together an "Election Victory" Podcast. Expect the two super furry animal tracks, as well as "Changes" by Tupac, and any other blatantly hopeful/inspirational/obvious songs I can think off. Now as I leave you, I jab my fist in the air and give you a loud and hearty "Yes we can!" and I encourage you to do the same (seriously. do it now dammit). Now, if Minnesota could only elect a Senator....

-Ben