¡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*