Hello Bingjiakou Hutong!!!

So i moved to a new apartment. i have chinese roomate now. i basically have two roomates now because her boyfriend is there all the time. he doesnt work and i haven't seen him go to school yet either so he is there when i go to bed, there when i wake up. he grew up around the corner from there so he knows everything about the area. he still lives around the corner, except he lives at my house basically now. this place is way better than the place i was going to live in. we each pay about $260 a month. it is 1 stop away from the gulou subway station (drumtower) so its in an older part of beijing, not hutong style but still old and better than living in the business district. i've been eating tons of street food


i finally rode in one of those pedicab things. i didn not die or have my legs amputated

these hotdogs were not bad. not like american hot dogs though. they used egg bread buns which were a good improvement.


Zizzo is my roomates boyfriends name. he loves these donkey meat things. and they did'nt taste too bad. me and bob probably ate this and didnt know it before or other kinds of mystery meat.

i finally played ping pong for the first time in china. its been 5 months! i sat down for a break and saw this dog having sex with this guys leg while he just sat there gazing off in the opposite direction totally letting his dog do it. this went on for a while. probably after i left too. he was not telling it to stop, he just lounged there letting it happen.

riding the bus sucks bad

finding and moving to a new apartment is pretty exhausting. this wasn't as bad as finding one in New York though. i did have to pay 4 months rent in advance, it was only $1000 dollars but i dont know how normal chinese people can afford to do this.

Ladies Market

i went to ikea, which is hell on earth in the states and it turns out it is similar to hell on earth in china too.


there is this market called the Ladies Market in beijing and i never even wanted to go there but stumbled upon it on accident. it is pretty cool actually.

i ate tons of street food that day. including this thing below that was 3.5 rmb and was huge and delicious

Back in Beijing (from Hong Kong)

angel got me these animals made out of some kind of leaves. some guy in sanlitun makes then and sells them for 10 kuai although i have never seen this guy. by the time i got back from hong kong they already started to dry out a little. she kept them in a bucket of water to keep the leaves from drying out. how nice is that?


i was going to live in this apartment with my new roomate. it was kind of bad. it had a squatter toilet in the smallest bathroom i've ever seen. the kitchen was really gross. the burner unit was like 2 holes with fire blasting out of them. luckily we found another apartment the next day.

look at this crazy bike rack! also my bike got stolen by the guomao subway station. my roomates boyfriend says that i can buy a new one for 30 rmb, which is $4.38. these are stolen bikes of course. which it totally normal to buy. my bike has been stolen and now i will enter into world of stolen bikes like everyone else.

this is on the wall leading into my friend sophie's building.

this woman's job sucks real bad. she sits there all day long in the elevator and just presses the button of the floor you want to go to. and its an apartment building so in the day time i'm sure there are times where she will just sit there for half an hour, hunched over on that stool, doors closed, listening to that radio.

this is sophie. now she works for some british pr company doing crap. she is so lucky that she lives in her dads service apartment and he doesn't even live there.