Back again

Weeks and weeks later, I'm back on Blogger. I haven't been able to access my account for weeks and weeks, which was especially weird after one of my posts disappeared from the page. Lots of water under the bridge.

John and I are sitting in Time Zone 8, a cafe in Dashanzi, working and typing this morning. Our program finished officially on the 22nd, and then we spent a few days in Beijing and then went to Xian for the weekend with my sister and her family, which was fun. We arrived back here on a sleeper train on Monday and have been floating around here so far this week, gearing up to leave for a trip to Yunnan Province tomorrow.

Its strange to be here - by which I mean to say that this is a strange place. I remember that every now and again - we were walking up through the back entrance to 798 a few weeks ago to get some dinner...I think it was a Sunday...we had to walk through the back entrance because the side entrances closest to our apartment are often closed (on Sundays, after 7 PM). We were walking past a factory and there's a spot in the road where there is a chimney giving off steam really loudly, so much so that for the twenty or thirty feet that we were walking near it we couldn't hear anything. In this moment of no sound a boy rode by on his bike - I recognized him as one of the people that works at the restaurant near base and we waved at each other...the steam and the noise made the whole thing seem like it was in slow motion.

Another one of my favorite things happened when we rode our bikes to Vanguard, a big grocery store nearby, one afternoon. I had left an empty water bottle in my bike basket and accidentally left a cardigan there too. When I came out of the store, the bottle was gone, probably taken by one of the pensioners who collect them around here, and the sweater was neatly folded. It was a little bit funny to have had someone inside of the basket but mostly it felt really nice - it was so nice of whoever that was to fold the sweater it made the rest of the day a bit brighter.

If Blogspot continues to work, I will post pictures soon of where we've been and what we've been working on - we've been working on a Rhino model of a house for a lot next to John's parents' house in Presque Isle that we're both really excited about.