[Aug. 17th, 2006|11:50 pm]
Fying home, random walks through the backstreets of the Tokyo/Narita airport in search of the New USA, single serving friends, single serving Japanese culture, lack of sleep and feeling indignant that there was no seemless, wireless internet access in our hotel or airport. The laptop is being charged as we speak so the wireless internet can be utilized in flight.

The last several days have consisted of not much sleep and lots of people. The all-nighter in the internet bar was followed by our graduation ceremony. I won the photo contest and recieved $100. I don't think anyone else even applied, which I don't understand. I was one of three people who got prizes for following the language pledge so well – Posie and I both got 400yuan, or about $50 so I treated about 16 of us to dinner, spending a total of about 180yuan. HJ and I went to see our roommates dorms. 8 guys sleep in a room which only has space for 3 desks and small lockers squeezed inbetween the four double bunks. It was cramped, somewhat cozy but nightmares ran through my head of getting stuck with a really bad roommate. But it didn't look that bad, kind of like a summer camp. However, as we were getting ready to leave, HJ's roommate suddenly got fairly serious and said, 'you guys are going back to your single rooms in America, so you think this is cute and cozy. We're living here in this prison for the next two years and there's nothing we can do about it.' How much has living here with our roomates bridged the huge gap of income and opportun ity? How much has that even been the goal?

The farewell at the train platform was wrenching, but more because it was so prolonged. We all did our hugs, farewells, etc even though the train wasn't leaving yet, we got on just to avoid the awkwardness of continuing talking to someone you've already said your last goodbye to (maybe forever?). But when we got on the train there was only a thick, soundproof window between us and them, so we stood there for a good 10 minutes waving, smiling, making faces before an eternity had passed and the train started to move. We stayed up late talking, unwinding. Sunday Posie and I went up to ACC to see 张老师, my ACC professor, and Chris from last summer where we had a great 2 hour talk over a Peking Duck lunch. It seemed dinner wasn't far off, and we were soon back in a different restaraunt eating a second Peking Duck meal – hey, local characteristics are important in an internationalized city.

We went out to bars with Chris, first to the foreigners bar street of san-li-tuanr and then off to a street with 7 disco clubs back to back. The clubs were all brand new, less than a year old, but on a Sunday night they were packed. Not only were the clubs new, but the people in them were the New Beijing. They dressed much more like Americans, they were much more at home in the comfortable but sexy clothes. They danced differently than they had a year ago, again much more open and fun loving than I had remembered at all from last year.

I'm still amazed at how much Beijing has changed in a year. The taxi drivers want to speak English with you know. The street improvements have been made and there is less and less of the city that looks like a city of third world sidewalk and alley life; it has simply been erased fromt the map and bulldozed under the ground. I passed by Qianmen bus stop where there had been a tourist oriented set of little shops where the owners lived upstairs and behind the shops the alleys of a much older Beijing continued on in an endless maze. That was gone, a pile of rubble which was poorly concealed by several large red billboards carrying slogans of development and modernity. The one that struck me called on Chinese to respect their history and look towards a new cultural history. The accompanying picture was a canal that might have been in Venice or Beijing, bordered by a Chinese lion, a Starbucks shop and a Pizza hut sign. It was so blatant, even if I'm not quite sure what it was blatantly doing.

I'm going to wrap up this long and largely incoherent post and get some sleep.
-morgan-