thoughts from fast phil...

Well, I'm in Beijing (and have no clue where to start). I have got to say, for literally being halfway around the world and in a country who's language is about as different from English as it gets, I'm oddly at home. Upon first arriving, a few things really stuck out: on the highways they have a ton of flowers in almost all of the medians and tall trees along most of the road; there are huge, 30-story apartment buildings in clusters scattered all throughout Beijing, in just about every part of town; the city doesn't have very much litter at all and people are out in the streets cleaning in the wee hours of the night (I heard from a student they started making efforts to pick up trash a couple years ago).

Overall, the Chinese I have encountered have been very friendly (if they can speak English). It seems like they are used just going from point A to point B without any interaction with each other. For the most part, people are just walking (lots and lots of people) with this solemn, emotionless look on their face. Whenever we say hi or interact with somebody, their face lights up, especially if they can speak English. It is really, really easy to talk to people here, too. Obviously, because we're from America is part of it, but people seem really happy to engage and talk, just randomly on the street. I think that the people like to be out and about, compared to Omaha where my friends generally hang out with each other at homes, in private places. It has been very interesting trying to interact with the Chinese, especially those that don't speak English.

Gabe is a people magnet with his fro. At least once an hour, we'll see some Chinese women either staring at his hair or just cracking up. They all wonder if it's real. I wonder if they've seen an afro before.

Yesterday we had our first cultural exchange at Peking University. There were about 20 students there, and they all had a million questions, as did we. There's probably about 10 coming with us today to the Temple of Heaven. Yesterday we had some awesome dialogue, a lot of conversations going into more than just the shallow, surface level stuff. They seemed pretty curious, and I'm very curious to see where the conversations go today. It's really awesome to get to know Chinese college students--they speak English really well and are really, really friendly. I'm very excited to see where our new friendships lead today. We having stuff planned for every day, but then at night we can build relationships and hang out with the people we met. Tonight we may go with some to a coffee shop or maybe a gym and play some sort of sport.

Overall, Beijing is a very dark place. There is good news though--there is some light and some very curious people. I'm very optimistic about Beijing's and China's future.
-Phil

p.s. this blog entry doesn't flow at all, I sat down 4 different times to write it