2-29-04

Last night I spent my first night in our new apartment. The place is extremely nice. Wooden floors, 3 bedrooms, 130sq meters, two bathrooms (one with a sort of SPA and music in the shower), a kitchen, big living room, washing machine, a little balcony. It came al furnished including a huge flat screen TV with a 7 speaker surround sound home theater system. Pretty amazing actually, we were very lucky to find this place, but I'm sure it will make our stay in Beijing more comfortable. I am very happy with it, we all are.

Yesterday, I bought a cell phone, since it is actually important to have one here. Although it might sound stupid or maybe a little big headed, the fact is english speaking westerners are in a high demand. You don't really need to work for a job if you have a western face and can speak english. People, agencies, professors, recruiters will come to you and offer jobs. So the cell phone is very important in the way that it is all they have to get in touch with you.

Today, saturday morning that is, I had my first shooting. In brief....I HATE ACTING! I just don't think I'm made for that, or the conditions were just horrible. I don't think my acting was really that bad, but the situation made it very stressful for all 4 of us acting in this part. We were in a very small, very hot room, filled with the entire production crew staring at us while we kept making mistakes which meant we had to repeat the scenes over and over and over again. I realize this is normal when shooting videos I suppose, but these guys didn't make it easy on us. They kept telling us to relax and to be natural. How can we relax when 20 people are giving us bad looks and when we have to speak at a 50 word per minute rate?? It was quite challenging let me tell you. But anyways, it's over and I don't think I'll be doing a lot more of those anytime soon.

After that we just went out to some salsa club for a while, danced, then went to another club, then came back home. It's been a long day, I will post some pictures I took at the recording later on tomorrow. Nite all.

2-26-04

WeIl I am glad to announce that I have got a place to live. Agustin (Madrid, Spain), Rob (UK/Kenya) and I are moving into a 130 sq. meter appartment like a couple hundred meters away from campus, a two minute bike ride. My bicycle by the way is starting to fall appart. No wonder it was 10 dollars. I'll make it last as long as I can though, then I'll get one for 20 dollars, those are the good ones.

I haven't taken any pictures lately since I have been kind of stressed out because of the whole "I don't have a place to live" situation, but that has all come to an end. Now I can focus on my Mandarin and going out and taking pictures.

2-25-04

I had my first real class today. What a mess. The teacher speaks only chinese, which is good in a way, but on the other hand, there's just no way to understand what's coming out of her mouth. We learned how to write some characters. This is the hardest thing you could possibly think of. My class is like 95 percent koreans and japanese people, which means they already have a sense of how to write characters since they share a lot of them. The remaining 5 percent is a guy from Israel, one from Mexico, another from Ecuador and myself. Out of 20 hispanics in the entire school, 3 of us are together.

Anyhow, I just got the script for my first shooting this saturday. They said I had to be there early for make-up...hehe. This should be interesting. Now I must continue my quest for a new appartment.

2-24-04

Today was my first day of class. Usually they will be from 8am to noon, but today we only did an introduction which started an 9am and ended at about an hour later. Tomorrow will be the real first day. We got our books however and to be quite honest this just doesn't look simple. Some people talk about studying more than five hours a day after class and still failing. I guess we'll see what happens, but I'm really anxious to start learning.

Also today I spent like 4 and a half hours with a very nice guy from the US who has been here for a year and a half now and speaks very good mandarin. He helped me out with my living situation. We went around his appartment complex and asked around for appartments. We found a very nice 3 bedroom with kitchen, and a western bathroom (believe it or not, we have it pretty nice in the west). I'll post some pictures of the place if we finally get it. It comes with a very big flat screen TV and a 5 speaker home theater. Wooden floor and a little balcony. Washing machine, but not dryer. This is normal however. We just hang stuff around. Tomorrow we are going back there to straighten things out. Right now I am living in my Australian and French friend's appartment, sleeping on the living room floor in my sleeping bag. It's been good for now, but I want a bed.

I managed to get a number to an ISP, with a pirated username and password. The latino community here got it somehow and they all use it. So now I have it as well, but hopefully I'll be at my new place before next monday and will have a good broadband connection. Oh, also, this saturday is my first shooting for the TV show!! I have to be there at 8am for make-up. Hehe, this just sounds too weird, but I'll give it a shot, they pay pretty well.

Alright, time for bed now.

2-22-04

Today we went to the Temple of Heaven. Pictures are posted on PG4. The day was beautiful. The pollution level has gone down considerably since it rained a couple of nights ago, and apparently that makes it set down. This means the visibility was great and you could actually see past 2 or 3 blocks away!! it was pretty bad the first couple of days.

Temperatures are cold in the morning but are now getting up to the low 50's in the afternoon which is quite pleasant. Strong winds however manage to make it very chilly when walking around.

In the afternoon we went to this place which was like a "San Andresito" (for all the Colombian audience). Basically, when you are at home, and look at any object whether it is a hair dryer, a set of binoculars, cell phone covers...and it says "made in china" in the back, well all those things you could find here. No item has a price tag on it. I should have taken pictures but didn't really want to take my camera out since it was so crowded. How it works is you walk up to the sales person and ask for a price. They give you an exorbitant number that wouldn't even make sense to pay in dollars, and then you just chop that number in half and start from there. You bargain absolutely everything. For instance I bought an extra battery for my camera which originally she priced for 450 yuans (8.2 RMB = $1US). I ended up getting it for 180 yuans, roughly 20 bucks! Sound systems go for 20 bucks as well, speakers, cameras, you name it. It's crazy. DVD's, now thats another story. You can buy them on the street, for 5 yuans (this is about 55 US cents) but you take the risk since sometimes they can be of bad quality. You can go to a store and buy a very decent quality DVD for 10 yuan, a little over a dollar, or get the good quality for 20 yuans....you do the math.

After spending like an hour and a half in this place, we ate then came back home and watched Kill Bill which I had bought earlier. By the way, Return of the King is already out. Any orders? hehe.

2-20-04

It started raining late afternoon so we decided to come back to campus early after becoming members of the local "Costco" called PriceMart. The annual fee was only 15 bucks and we split it in three, so it wasn't a bad deal no matter how you look at it. After returning to campus, we decided to go eat the famous Pekin Duck at a restaurant only minutes from campus. One thing I want to say is that I love eating here. Not only the food is good and different, but the whole aspect of eating is even better. For a party of 8 people, ordering three or four plates is usually more than enough, which means everyone shares the food. This makes eating a very social and fun event. Also, the fact that I am not the biggest expert at using chopsticks yet, makes it harder to just sit down and eat like a pig. You just can't do it. I've been eating a whole lot less here.

After the restaurant we went into a bar called "Foreign Bar" located only steps away. There we chatted, argued, people drank, (I had water for a change), and we heard live chinese music (although he did perform 'Hey Jude'). At the right is a picture that I thought came out pretty cool. The picture that you see is exactly the way I took it, I didn't manipulate it or changed it over with Photoshop or any other software of this kind. No filters used.

This other picture doesn't really tell a lot. Just thought it was nice. However it is funny how they back up the fact that they are a "Foreign Bar". All over the walls are random neon signs that read random things making no sense at all. Here you can see two of these signs I am talking about: one saying 'Merry Christmas', and the other says 'Crazy Pains'.

This is the guy who sang for us tonight.

2-12-04

Alejandro Gomez hits the waves in Costa Rica. He's also single.

Photo:Andrea Guetti.

2-09-04

Here is a list of what I thought was very funny.  I left it in the form that I found it.

	If you yelled for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee.(Hardly seems worth it.)
	If you farted consistently for 6 years and 9 months, enough gas is produced  to create the energy of an atomic bomb. (Now that's more like it!)
	The human heart creates enough pressure when it pumps out to the body to  squirt blood 30 feet. (O.M.G.!)
	A pig's orgasm lasts 30 minutes. (In my next life, I want to be a pig.)
	A cockroach will live nine days without its head before it starves to death. (Creepy.) (I'm still not over the pig.)
	Banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories an hour. (Do not try this at home...... maybe at work.)
	The male praying mantis cannot copulate while its head is attached to its  body. The female initiates sex by ripping the male's head off. ("Honey, I'm   home. What the....?!")
	The flea can jump 350 times its body length.  For a human, that would be  equivalent to jumping the length of a football field. (30 minutes...lucky pig... can you imagine??)
	The catfish has over 27,000 taste buds. (What could be so tasty on the bottom of a pond?)
	Some lions mate over 50 times a day. (I still want to be a pig in my next life...quality over quantity)
	Butterflies taste with their feet. (Something I always wanted to know.)
	The strongest muscle in the body is the tongue.  (Hmmmmmm........won't go there.)
	Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed  people. (If you're ambidextrous, do you split the difference?)
	Elephants are the only animals that cannot jump. (OK, so that would be a  good thing....)
	A cat's urine glows under a black light. (I wonder who was paid to figure that out.)
	An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain. (I know some people like that.)
	Starfish have no brains. (I know some people like that too.)
	Polar bears are left-handed. (If they switch, they'll live a lot longer.)
	Humans and dolphins are the only species that have sex for pleasure. (What about that pig??)

2-07-04

This is the mistake that should never be made when talking about COLOMBIAN coffee.

2-05-04

In NYC for a while with my mother and sister. Visited the metropolitan's china exhibit. Other pictures coming soon.