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