Honeydew Milkshake was on hiatus… I’m in the process of re-updating it with new info… stay tuned…

I saw this water station at a sandwich shop in London. I like it because as someone who regularly carries around my reusable water bottle there’s nothing worse than not being able to refill it. Additionally I think it’s great that a place which could make money off of selling more plastic bottles of water, is encouraging you to bring your own…

Heading back to San Francisco…

As Kyle and I said goodbye at the airport he reminded me that it wouldn’t be China if it weren’t screwed up and stressful on the way out…

We woke up super early to finish packing all of our bags. Our driver was supposed to come get us at 6:30am, and at 7:00 he still wasn’t there. We gave up and got a taxi. I watched the sunrise over the smoke stack filled skyline as our cab weaved between the cars on the Beijing freeway where the lines painted on the road are mere suggestions on where to go. By the time we got to the airport I had to run to the check in desk where 1 person took my passport and another person took me and my luggage. The security check was the biggest joke I’d ever seen and only reconfirmed that things just need to look right. They opened my bag, looked at it for 2 seconds and closed it back up. (what if I had something in there?) Meanwhile the man who took my passport was way down at the other end of the counter mixing up my reservation where they claimed I was confirmed but not ticketed for my flight. (which doesn’t make any sense?) So after arguing for 10 minutes that that didn’t make any sense and that I was not going to pay them more money, they finally checked me in and I was on my way… wouldn’t be China any other way…

So Kyle and I said good bye and met again in the San Francisco airport 15 hours later. (we were on separate flights). By the time I got on the plane I was ready to go home. This trip was amazing, eye-opening, at times toxic, and such a learning experience!

• With the extra day in Beijing Kyle and I decided to make the most of it and got up early to go to the Summer Palace, something we had wanted to do but never did. In a way it was good because it was beautiful in the snow, which we wouldn’t have seen had we gone earlier.
     
• Kaiping (Kyle’s adviser at Berkeley) met us for lunch and we got to exchange stories of the craziness and randomness that is China.
• I spent the afternoon doing a little bit of work (as I had planned on being home doing work) and catching the last little bit of CCTV.
• Out of pure convenience we ended up at the pizza place down the street from us yet again. As we both are leaving in the morning it kind of felt like we were just waiting around killing time. So we packed up the last few things we had around the place and said goodnight in Beijing for the last time (or as Kyle says, the last time this trip…)

• Today was spent packing, cleaning, sorting, packing, cleaning, sorting…
• I went out to take pictures of everyday things around where we live as sometimes those are the things we forget to take pictures of but the things we see the most.  At one point a man on the street started yelling at me and waving his arms at me and of course I had no idea what he was saying but figured he didn’t want his picture taken…
• Kyle and I went to the Indian place that he found over the summer but we’d never been too.  It tasted so good!   We walked home for what we thought would be the last time, enjoying the long walk.
• Thinking I would leave the next morning, through a strange turn of events, and I’m not sure I even understand, but after a phone call to Northwest to inquire about baggage limits, I was offered a full business class ticket if I flew out on Thursday instead of Wednesday.  So just as I thought I’d be going to sleep for the last time in Beijing, I got an extra day…

• SNOW!!!
  
  We woke up to the first snow fall in Beijing and white flurries throughout the day. Despite counting down the days to fresh air and Western food we were both happy to see the snow!
• The day was spent doing a lot of miscellaneous things to get things finished up. Bittersweet walks around the area doing this and that - sad this trip has come to an end but anxious to get home… Thinking about what it will be like to go back home and no longer in a place where 90% of the time I don’t understand what people are saying. I feel like I’m going to rude as I’ve become accustom to pushing and shoving and never saying “excuse me”… Then we started packing, soring things into suitcases to go back to the US or shipping off to meet me in the UK in January. Trying to figure out how to fit everything back into our bags. The big purchase has been a lot of books… And for the last time we went to the pizza place just down the street from us.

• Today we once again set out to do things we still hadn’t done yet and also do some shopping.  So we wandered around the “Antique Market”.  There were people selling fossils and ancient items with flashlights and toe nail clippers.  It was though different from the other markets we’d been to and did find some things…
  
• Our search for our designer tea pot once again resulted in a long cab ride and no luck as the dealer who I’d been in contact with said she couldn’t show me the studio (after I called twice to confirm) Disappointed and frustrated we treated ourselves to a nice dinner of Western food and then found some different ceramics we got instead.
• Back at home we’ve been sitting in our apartment looking at everything and wondering how it will all fit into our suitcases and how to even start packing.

• With just a few more days here in Beijing and the holidays approaching we went out to do some Christmas shopping. The problem is a) everything comes from here anyways. b) everything here you can get in Chinatown at home. c) everything here is junk. None the less we set out to find some unique treasures. (and we did)
• We went to the older markets where you can still see the Hutongs and people doing calligraphy on the side of the street. If nothing else they were just interesting to look at. We saw people with piles of coal on the back of their bikes riding through old tiny narrow streets. Again, more juxtapositions in this city of massive old and new.
  
• We went to the Beijing Planning Center. They really do like these planning centers here in China. It seems the major cities all have them – a place with giant scale models of the city and what the city will look like in 20 years. The guidebooks warned us that Beijing’s was bizarre – are it was. (We watched a movie that predicted Beijing having flying cars in 2065). Despite the cheesiness and utopic-ness of it, I enjoyed all of the models of the buildings for the Olympics. We also looked at the giant model of the city. And I found where we live.
  
  But to give you an idea of the scale of Beijing – this picture doesn’t even get the whole model which isn’t even the whole city:
  
• Our last stop was to the toy market!!!
  

• Kyle’s adviser from Berkeley is back in Beijing for a few days so we went to meet with him this morning.  He was so impressed by how much we had done, the fact that I got some work done, and learned a little Chinese.  He said the first time anyone comes to China it’s hard to get any work done because it takes so long to just try and figure things out.  It made me feel good to hear that it’s normal to be completely overwhelmed here.  It’s also just interesting to talk to someone about Beijing who grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution and is now a US citizen.
• The rest of the day we both spent working on things - getting finished up.  We went to Kyle’s favorite Japanese restaurant for lunch where for some reason I decided to order cheese sticks.  After being here for 2 months I should have known better than to order cheese sticks from a Japanese place in China.
• Tonight we watched 2 documentaries we’d bought when we first got here and haven’t gotten to.  “Outside” was a beautiful documentary about walls, people, lines, order/disorder in Beijing.  And also a documentary about IM Pei.  He is one of my favorite architects ever since I did a report on him in the 8th grade.  Again an interesting story of someone born in China and then becoming a US citizen.