On this the 28th of August

On this the 28th of August I bid you hello. My phone is, how shall we say, dead, deceased, no longer functioning, and so forth. Therefore you should call me at home after 3.30pm today. I am happy you have invited our comrade to this little writing party, and I think it a wise choice as the triangle formed by the three of us is a very stable shape.
How are your family? All of them are well I hope. Please send them my regards and express my wishes for their health and happiness, as well as my thanks for them letting me stay with them. Please give Alex a cracker for me and then let him jump on you repeatedly. You are of course welcome in Cleveland at any time. Seriously, even if you want to come when I'm not hear, that's cool also.
Ehem...I don't really do very much. My days are pretty boring. About three days a week I work in the office, not the fun one in Scranton with John Krasinski that is filled with wit and humor, no the law one where I file things and research things. The other days I attempt to purchase things for my forthcoming journey and spend time with my very loving family. I also watch Koong.
I opened a bank account and applied for my first credit card. It was very exciting and I get 50 free checks. Why this is important, I do not know but the woman that opened the account seemed adamant that this was a good thing. I think perhaps she was trying to induce my purchase of some more. I, however, don't use checks and will be out of the country and consequently unable to use them, so I evaded her skillful trap. My checks with be a tanish sort of color and my debit card will be yellow, I did not receive information on the color of my credit card; it will however be a visa. I am so overcome with excitement that I need to pause here.
[pause]
Today I am going to pick my father up from the airport as he has been in New York visiting my step-mother who is in a new play which is opening this weekend. I must therefore clean the car which gets very dirty in his absence as I am comfortable with a certain level of clothing and various objects floating around that he finds appalling. This will take several minutes for me to do. However, before I go there, I think I will go to the gym to which I apparently have a one month membership, therefore I will need to charge my iPod so that I will not have to speak to anyone. I find myself missing Les Miz music, you are to blame for this.
Oh, goodness! I forgot to tell you. I am writing a piano piece. It is in g-minor and then moves into D-major and then d-minor and then back into g-minor. However, I have only written half of it a present. The first part apparently sounds like Chopin and the second like Beethoven- this probably is caused by the fact I was playing Fur Elise and Nocturne in E flat before I began it. I also think I will start working on a new Chopin piece and freshen up some other things. This is slightly difficult as my mother and sister find my playing annoying. This may be because I do it for multiple hours without ceasing but I find their objections quite hurtful.
I am hoping to come visit you in Strasbourg soon and have been attemting to find a cheep airfare. If you hear of any rumors of mysterious cargo planes flying in and out, let me know so I can steal aboard. That is all, Eleanor

Public Service Announcement

YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE. I have invited that dearest comrade of ours SHELLY to join in our writing escapades. She shall be our base in DC, and provide us with many amusing anecdotes of travels in foreign countries and foreign neighborhoods.

Were returning as ...

Ell(i)e,

My last days in China ended rather abruptly, I'm inclined to think. Exams, the farewell banquet, a blowout at an expensive roast duck restaurant for the last dinner, furiously purchasing things I had held off until the last minute, hours in airports in transpacific transit...

My second day home now. Atlanta is unbearably hot, but the air is fresh. I have imbibed much milk and sweet tea since my return, and Mexican food (you will recall that charming restaurant I took you to, yes?). My traveling is not quite finished, as I leave for DC tomorrow to plead with French bureaucrats for entrance into their fair country.

Currently I have stocked with me plenty of good Chinese treats to hold off my cravings for a week or so yet. I know not when, if ever, I shall return to the Far East, specifically Beijing, that feng shui capital of my heart. Certainly not before the Olympics transform the city into an unrecognizable metropolis. This is a rather sad and unfortunate thought, but unlike other students of Chinese, I had no future of Chinese business or international affairs in mind when I chose the bleak road of this language's study.

I tried to call your phone today to assuage my sudden and uneventful days; I am vexed that it was turned off. Remedy this for me.

Your friend, the worn and weary traveler,
Alison

I shouldn't be writing this...

Dear Friend,
I am at work. Hence the title of this communication. I am very glad that you were able to see said member of legislative body and that your forbidden adventures were some what rewarding. You should break the rules more often. I mean no, don't ever break the rules. More later. Eleanor, your comrad in arms.

Hooky happenings.

Eleanor, as I told you yesterday in our all-too-brief phone conversation, I skipped class today to go to Tian'anmen Square and the Forbidden City (definitely not worth the 60 kuai I payed and the four liters of water I sweated out, sadly; but the day was worth the hour I slept in. Also, spell check is telling me that 'sweated' is not a word; I must further look in to this). And instead of scurrying back to campus, we joined Jenn for a last hurrah (she is leaving the country tomorrow) by going to the Silk Market after lunch in Wangfujin.

And there, my friend, we saw a Joe Lieberman-look-alike. We stalked him throughout Silk Alley, as he was surrounded by government-looking-cohorts, and none of us was brave enough to approach and ask him to verify our suspicions. Instead, I returned back to Beida, only to read this which PROVES that he is IN CHINA. And I have pictures, awkwardly taken over Jenn's shoulder, that place him within our proximity.

Most random place you will ever meet an American congressman? In the Silk Market in Beijing as you skip class and look around for t-shirts with pandas on them.

That is all I have to say to you today. Happy Wednesday, though I suppose for you it is only just beginning.

Alison

我是谁?!

亲爱的朋友，

Today I took the bus to a nearby neighborhood, 五道口, to meet Jenn for lunch. I would like to think that this bus ride was like oh-so many I have had in Beijing. That is, it was so crowded--an overwhelming mass of bodies--that I simply had to fight my way just to get inside of the bus doors threatening to close on me. Then I had to elbow, shove and slide my way past people to get to the woman in the middle of the bus who sells tickets for those, like myself, who have not the handy-dandy public transportation card (much similar to DC's SmartTrip card). Just watch this video I took another day in a similar situation, where Kenina and I were pressed up against the front window of the bus, giving us a spectacular and dizzying view of the road, as well as a close bond with our bus driver: a Beijing commute.

But there is only so much I can say about public transportation: simply, it is always crowded and rarely sufficiently air-conditioned (I have a scarring story to tell about being pressed up against a Human Sponge). Instead, I shall discuss last Friday, when I went to 大山子, the so-called "SoHo of Beijing." Like many things advertised to me in China, this was not true. However, I still enjoyed it greatly. It was a small neighborhood of old warehouses full of modern art galleries; half of the area was rubble as buildings were being demolished. As Alathea put it, "It's cool 'cause you don't know what's trash and what's art."

(Here was my welcoming first glimpse of 大山子.)

As such, having appreciated artwork I didn't understand and read about existential dilemmas in Chinese (as represented by a giant pen spilling red ink), I am feeling very cultured. Now I have a list of things I absolutely must do before I leave in two weeks (I am absolutely dreading my 15-hour flight, but the prospect of a glass of teeth-shattering-freezing-cold skim milk keeps my hopes alive). I shall resolve to make a schedule, although most likely I shall lose it somewhere between the crowd of people on the bus and the door that I must violently push myself towards (through slippery, sweaty people) to make it out at the correct stop on time (assuming I understood the announcer and it is the correct stop), thus rendering my fruitful work useless. To guard myself against such loss, I shall simply not write it after all. Yes. Good plan.

Your slightly squished friend,

Alison

Charleston formerly Charles Town

Dear Friend,

I have no idea how I am going to function in Europe, so don't worry about the plane ticket thing... yet. I have to feed myself for nine months and learn stuff; I'm up the Thames without a teaspoon as it were.

Your cultural insights into Chinese culture are very anthropological and I will be sure to keep them in mind. Also, I kind of want to visit China so I think you should go back sometime, with me, and hopefully Zhao will be there also. We should work on this plan.

Charleston is absolutely beautiful. I love it. It was not as warm as Savannah, rather it was not as humid and the breezes off the water were very pleasant. It was much cleaner also, and as I am OCD that is a major plus. It had a quaint charm and was filled with a rich history that I loved learning more about. What did we do now. Sadly my mind forgets things. I know we took a city tour. The other people on the bus with us were deeply involved with motorcycles. The spend any free moments in between important historical commentary informing us about their various bikes, how expensive they are, how you have to make sure to keep recites so that you can get the proper amount of insurance because otherwise the insurance dealers will just not believe how much you pay7 for things and you can't get the proper amount of insurance. Also how much a new Harley will cost. Mind you, that neither my mother, nor I, nor our driver, who is a former navy submarine dive master type person, were interested in what they were saying and had to sit there and try took look like we cared so they wouldn't kill us but not that interested so that they continues talking; a dangerous dilemma if ever you face it. What do I remember about this tour historically speaking- where fort Sumner is, the role that the south played in the revolutionary war, why homes in charleston have front porches, who had a lot of money 150 years ago, where rainbow row is, where to get green shrimp and grits on St. Patrick's day, you know, important stuff. We went for dinner one night a restaurant a few blocks from our hotel and there I had shrimp and grits per your order. It was very good, oh, apparently there is bacon grease in it and when people move to the south you tell them to save their bacon grease, this is what our tour guide told us and what our biker friends confirmed as being very important.

Another day we drove out of town and went to Drayton Hall which is like three hundred years old. It is 11000 sq ft and has two bed rooms and now bath rooms. It was not burnt by Sherman during the recent unpleasantness- aka the civil war- because the owners claimed that it was a polio hospital. However the family no longer owns the house, but they do have the right to come and measure their children on a door frame where there ancestors have recorded their family members heights for like 10 generations. Pretty cool if you ask me.

We were there for the fourth of july so we wandered out of our hotel around nine and made our way over to the waterfront to watch the illuminations. Interestingly enough it was a member of the Drayton family that suggested that we use fireworks aka circa 1777 illumations to celebrate our independence; the other suggestion involved going to church and sitting around and being quite- awkward. There were a bazillion people where we first wanted to watch them, around 500 hundred sitting on the customs house's steeps, so we walked further down past girls pushing hot dog carts to a park. This was also packed but we negotiated our war forward and got a fairly good view. There was a family that had a young daughter and son in front of me and the father kept lifting up the children in shifts so the could see better.

The other night we went to a restaurant about five blocks from our hotel again, but a different restaurant, this one was nearer the water. It was really really overpriced. I got like a scallops apatizer that had three scallops and it was 12 dollars and a salad that was very very small and that was 10 more dollars. If I can remember the name I will tell you so you don't eat there because it was beyond being not worth it, i wanted my money back darn the.

I wanted to go riding at this other plantation but we didn't end up having time, but I did see the horses. They were very sweaty. I went shopping for like an hour the day we left. I didn't buy anything though. I wandered all about the city which was fun for me in spite of the heat as I think you only really get to know a city when you leave the comfort of an air-conditioned bus and explore it on foot where you are subject to the fickleness of the weather and harassment of strangers on the street.

I hope you are very well, spending your money wisely, being polite to your elders and shirking off the advances of strange men. As always, Eleanor.