five days!!!

so this weekend...

friday night we watched toy story three and i cried. soo good! saturday i came into work for a while and we watched the next karate kid. i'm going to watch that with my family sometime when i get home because it is sooooo close to what it is like living in beijing. not kidding. except for the whole being beat up, meeting jackie chan, and winning the kung fu tournament thing.

saturday night we went out to eat with quite the group: us four girls, 1 chinese girl, 2 american guys, 1 german guy, 1 australian guy, and 1 russian guy. they talked politics ahh!!

sunday i came into work again and we watched high school musical 3. i literally burst out laughing at the beginning of every song. we also went to a restaurant called grandma's place for dinner. i had chicken cordon blue and it was really good! but nothing beats real home cooking :)

last weekend means work! this morning i woke up to a text from a friend saying i was missed by people and it made my day :) we had a rehearsal of our final presentation at 9am. so i had to be at work early and then our presentation which is supposed to be 20 minutes long lasted 28 minutes. ahh!!! we give our final presentation on wednesday and turn in our final report on thursday.

sorry i didn't blog this weekend...

six weeks down, two to go. actually it is more like 12 days :)

saturday we went to xidan which is a famous commercial area in beijing. we walked through this ridiculously large mall with all kinds of stores i've never heard of plus a few i recognized. we mall walked for a few hours but didn't buy anything because it was so expensive.

jasmin's sister has a chinese friend from grad school that is back in china visiting her cousins for the summer. all that to say, we met them for dinner. it was a different hotpot restaurant, still very delicious!

sunday we slept in and watched toy story 3 in the afternoon. of course, i cried. it is such a good movie! then i finished reading the percy jackson series which i recommend.

we have a pet panda(bunny).

today was one of the chinese students' birthday so we went out to dinner. when i say we i mean me and eight guys. apparently none of the other girls decided to go. so me and the guys went to this german restaurant where it is buffet style. you go get any kind of raw meat you want and then cook it yourself on the grill in the middle of your table. so for two hours i ate meat and fruit (they had excellent fruit).

when i got back to my room and came in, i asked my roomie why she hadn't come and she just looked at me funny. eventually i noticed the bunny sitting on the floor eating a cucumber. A BABBY BUNNY! so adorable! don't ask me what she is going to do with it in two weeks, but its name is panda and she paid 30 RMB. now we have a pet in our room. did i mention it is ADORABLE?!

five weeks down, three to go.

saturday we went to the temple of heaven, pearl market, and pizza hut. the temple of heaven was pretty cool... but just like a lot of places we visit: a big pretty park with old chinese buildings. this park is kind of an arts center because they have dancing, ribbon twirling, chinese hackysack, karaoke, and opera going on all the time inside.

i dropped a shameful about of money at the market, but i don't regret it yet :)  the lady i bought pearls from actually complemented my bargaining skills.

pizza hut is a really nice sit-down restaurant here. and it was soooo good! we got stuffed crust hawaiian.

i also got a package from my awesome family in the mail!! sunday i stayed in my pjs and read. a lot. like two whole books.

this week we have to be writing our final report, running simulations, and still coming up with ideas. woohoo! when there is so much to do and the deadline gets closer, time flies.

i need a hug.

today i realized  the last time i hugged someone was 37 days ago. the most human contact i have here is a handshake. i'm normally not a touchy-feely person (ask kathryn or allison) but that might change due to this drought. watch out... i might become a hugger :) then again, maybe not.

the power in our room went out while we were sleeping last night. i got a chinese girl at microsoft to call the apartments and they said "the electricity of your room ran out." are we on a quota or something? anyway, it should be back on by the time we get of off work.

we had our fourth weekly meeting with our mentor today and he actually used the words "clever" and "interesting" to describe our ideas!! do you even know how exciting that is?!? awesome. so maybe we will do something worthwhile.

another good thing that i found out today: anberlin is playing in atlanta on november 4th. who's with me?

tonight we (the girls) are having another movie night. we had one on sunday night and watched remember me. i knew the ending already thanks to lindsay, but the others didn't and i didn't tell them what was going to happen. wow. rob pat's acting is awful, but the story is pretty good and it is a good reminder of what we need to remember. can't say more about it without ruining the ending for you :) i don't know what we are going to watch tonight, but it will be a comedy. britni's mom sent us popcorn in the mail (among other things) for our movie nights!

tomorrow (saturday) we are planning on going to the temple of heaven, the pearl market (again), and pizza hut. hope that all works out.

sidenote: if you have time, my friend andy is in a band called Polar War and that band is in a contest. Go here and check out @polarwarmusic: http://tinyurl.com/25r9dyh - then go here and vote for them: http://www.scenesc.com/next-big-thing/  thanks :)

four weeks down, four to go.

so we have reached the halfway point. friday we had our weekly meeting with our mentor and he reminded us that research is coming up with new ideas to contribute to the literature, not just reading other people's solutions and applying them to your problem, that's engineering. so we are going to try to come up with something completely original in the next three weeks. i had skipped lunch and was super hungry when we got off of work so we (the girls) went back to little sheep restaurant (hotpot) for dinner. went to bed early cause we (the girls, sean, and ryan) had big plans for saturday.


on saturday we woke up at 4 and met downstairs at 5. while we were waiting on people, i called my cousin rebekah who was getting married the next day. it was still friday her time, so she was getting married saturday. she did get married saturday. yay! time differences make things confusing. i also called allison and she had just gotten back from her first non-sports camp! and she loved it as much as i knew she would :) i can't wait to hear more about it! 1,000+ kids from one youth group, 100+ salvations, 245+ baptisms all in daytona beach. i have to go next year, or at least that is what she told me.

so we took taxis to the train station because the subway wasn't running yet. the train station was pretty impressive. i think this was the first real train i've ever taken. our train is called "green-skinned" because it is green and also the oldest type of train still running in china (aka no air conditioning). so we sweat for 2.5 hours and then we were there! "there" instantly reminded me of the dominican republic. we took a taxi to the gorge and it was so nice to ride through the countryside. pretty flowers, orchards, corn fields, things you never see in the city. the air was so much cleaner, but still cloudy. there was a huge dam in the valley and of course we had to climb stairs to get over it. let me remind you, it isn't a weekend in beijing without climbing something. britni and jasmine bungee jumped and then we all zip-lined across the gorge. AWESOME.



so we spent the entire morning there and then found some food and took a taxi back to the lake area. our plan was to find a place to stay the night and then check out the park around the lake and maybe go swimming. we found a room for all of us to stay in for 150 RMB. there were some reasons it was so cheap. but i can sleep anywhere for just one night, right?

so we changed in to our swimsuits and walked to the park around the lake. and guess what, NO SWIMMING IN THE LAKE ALLOWED. what?!?! apparently chinese people don't know how to swim and keep drowning in the lake, so they outlawed it. umm so what were we going to do? we rented a paddle boat, paddled out there, and then britni, jasmine, and sean jumped in. yeah we got in a little trouble, but at least they got wet. i stuck my feet in. the main result of that trip was to make me miss living on lake murray.

we decided to not spend the night and go back to beijing late that night since there wasn't much left to do on sunday. so we walked the mile back to our "room" and changed. we took a taxi back to the train station area and found a restaurant that looked crowded with locals. when we walked in, they took us straight back to a little room with just one table in it. yay special treatment. the food was SO GOOD. and super cheap! six of us ate for 103 RMB. crazy.

after eating we still had two hours to burn before our train got there, so we walked around a little. still having flashbacks to the dominican. then i decided to get a haircut. yeah you read that right. so three of the four girls got our hair cut. this is the shortest i have had my hair in a while. it always takes me a while to get used to any haircut. the salon was pretty nice and it only cost 15 RMB to get a wash and cut. two bucks. the funny thing was they kept my hair that she cut off and put it on the table. i guess they don't see very many blondes.

we finally got on the train (this one newer and air conditioned) and got back to the apartment around midnight. now that is what i call a full day! today (sunday) we are taking it easy and finding that american food heaven again. the salad bar at sizzler is calling our names. hope we can find it again :)

surprise!!

this week has gone by pretty quickly so far... just goes to show time flies when you have a deadline. we gave our mid-term presentation yesterday (wednesday). it went pretty well! i didn't stutter or freeze too badly. and it made monday and tuesday fly by because we were preparing and rehearsing.


monday was fu's birthday but we didn't really know about it or celebrate it, so we threw him a surprise party yesterday right after work. since he is in my group, i had to tell him we had a meeting at six and make sure he showed up. he wanted to leave at 5:20! so i reminded him about our meeting and suggested we play ping pong for 30 minutes. it worked :) he didn't leave and was thoroughly surprised. britni and jasmine did an awesome job getting the cakes and organizing the whole thing.

today (thursday) it is back to the research... if you really want to know what my day is like, here are the titles of the papers i read today. feel free to look them up and read them.
1 A solver for the network testbed mapping problem
2 Rethinking virtual network embedding Substrate support for path splitting and migration
3 Virtual network embedding with coordinated node and link mapping
sounds fun, right?

this weekend we are planning on taking a trip to Yanqi Lake and Qinglong Gorge. hopefully it will all work out! we might be bungee jumping :/