STO: Galway

The third largest city in the Republic of Ireland boasting the controllable population of 72,000 inhabitants, Galway lies on the western coast of Ireland. It's much more of a traditional Irish town than Dublin, with cobblestoned streets, ubiquitous pubs that aren't packed with tourists, significantly more Irish spoken and a leprechaun every other corner who never gets caught no matter how hard we pursue. There seem to be less non-Irish denizens overall, although we met a fair amount of Americans and Canadians working at restaurants. I arrived there Friday afternoon traveling with my housemates Jason and Matt along with the girls next door Diane and Thuy, groggy from a night out and wearing glasses after forgetting my contact case on a kitchen table. We stayed at a 22 euro/night hostel that was surprisingly comfortable, complete with a kitchen, a French staff, multiple bathrooms and carpeting. We had a room for 6, with the extra bed unclaimed during our entire stay.

While we did have a nice night out on Friday, the highlight of the trip was definitely a Saturday visit to the Aran Islands. The Aran Islands are a group of 3 islands in Galway bay, a 45 minute bus ride and 45 minute ferry from Galway city. We went to the biggest island, Inis Mor, at 10:30 and planned to bike until our ferry's 5:00 departure. The weather was just superb with extremely blue skies and I prepared for a nice leisurely ride around a pretty old island. There were a few sights around that we'd get to see and all and it'd be a generally pleasant day of biking. And it started out that way as we biked past cows, sheep, animal pens made out of stone, a fat donkey and a Jesus on a crucifux. But the day was totally transformed when we stopped biking and walked to the edge of these cliffs. Now cliffs are usually pretty mundane things - I'm sure we've all seen cliffs in some form or the other and we get kinda scared about falling down them. Some TV shows like to hang off them, and some college students like to take notes from them. But these cliffs were flatout drop-dead gorgeous. My facebook has an album of it that kinda captures it, and this picture is pretty sweet, but being there was really something special. The edge just drops off straight - you could roll a penny off the cliff and it'd hit nothing but water. We were all terrified looking over the edge, but I was the only one who stepped onto this ledge out off the cliff a bit and took a picture where it looks like I'm just hanging on. The water was also really pretty, the edges of the cliffs were beautiful, the grass was green, the sky was blue; you get the idea.

So that was the highlight of the trip. We got back to Galway exhausted and I actually got a bit sick and didn't end up going out.

I'll come back tomorrow with updates from this week.

STO: Life as an immigrant

When I came through Dublin airport off that Friday night/Saturday morning red eye, the immigration official asked me how long I was going to be here. I told him until December but that I didn't have my student card, and so he stamped my passport through for 30 days and said I had to go to this bureau to get a student visa if I wanted to stay here longer. That was fine, my study abroad adviser had told us that was protocol. Well, apparently nearly all of my friends were fortunate enough to get stamped out through December 31, even though they didn't have any documention proving they were a student either. They thank kind-hearted immigration officials - I blame racial profiling. It's ok, I'll probably accidentally spill a bowl of sticky rice on my way out.

Ok so I have a ton of forms to gather to apply for this student visa. They made it seem so easy, but I need my student ID card, proof from the university that I am actively a student, written proof that I've paid my tuition, a bank statement showing that I have funding of over €1000 (not as simple without an ATM card) and my passport. Ok, well it takes me a week to gather all that and on Tuesday morning, since I don't have class until noon, I venture towards city centre to collect legal status in this country. The Garda National Immigration Bureau, as it is called, is about as ordinary a building as I can imagine, with grey rock and dull glass the only external images. I arrived around 11am, hoping to be in and out in 20 minutes so I could make it to my class.

Nope. As I walk into the waiting room, I am greeted by a massive crowd of people of all colors, garbs and tongues. It's a stunning scene that I'm not sure I've ever seen before. It's a crowd that you might see in Beijing magnitude-wise, but much more heterogenous. It's like the New York city subway except that people are angry and disenchanted for different reasons. I look around for a place to get a queue, and realize that the line to get a number is 50 deep, and that another 200 who already have numbers are still glumly waiting. I imagine this is what Ellis Island was like, except with a big statue in sight and more Jews.

I can't wait in line, so I go to school and return after classes at 5. When I return, the queue is empty although the waiting room is still packed with bored expressions. It seems no one likes going through immigration - I can only imagine the uncertainty running through those minds. Well I stand at the front of the queue for about 5 minutes before I realize that something's up - there's no one there to call me up at all. Then I realize that they are no longer handing out numbers, even though it's just past 5pm and the place is open until 10. So I ask an official, "what gives?" Well apparently all those people in the waiting room? Some will be waiting until 10. Sucks. So I'm going to go next Friday, when I have the day off, and hopefully I can get things done then.

STO: Bored at school

I'm in the tale end of a 2 hour break between Phonology and Linear Algebra II. It hasn't been the most exciting of academic breaks. At RL, I once made it to downtown Boston between classes, and at Georgetown, I'm pretty sure whiskey was consumed between History and Foundations of Math once. Today I had expensive sushi and made plans with this girl Mary Clare from Notre Dame to make plans for a trip to Edinburgh in early October. Seriously, we agreed to call later about setting up the trip.

Now I think I've managed to drive away all the people who aren't really interested in reading this blog with the sheer boredom embedded in the previous paragraph. So for the rest of you who are still here, I think that includes less than 4 people now, I've been living the chill life in Ireland. This is my average day:
Oversleep my 9:15 alarm. Get up around 10:00. Brush my teeth and toss in the contacts, throw a little bit of cereal down my throat and walk to the 46a bus stop. The stop is about 20 minutes walk away, and the bus takes at least 15 minutes to get to school, so I usually realize that I am cutting it very close before my 11am class and start walking faster. Then I realize that all my classes are required to be pass/fail, and I ease my stride a little bit.

My bulky backpack provides plenty of awkward situations in the bus, whether I'm hitting people or occupying two seats. I generally lock in the iPod and ignore the death stares. When I finally get to class, I wish I could repeat the process, but I do actually pay attention and take notes. In the classes when the teacher asks questions, I generally silently chuckle at how simple the questions are, then wait, and when no one else answers it, I reluctantly answer the disturbingly easy question. I also try to exaggerate my sore throat so that they can't detect my American accent. My Linear Algebra class is particularly full of awkward silences when my classmates can't answer questions. I buy some sort of 4 or 5 euro sandwich at the cafes here, besides today when I splurged on €7.90 sushi.

All my days end around the same time, early to mid afternoon, and I generally take a different bus route that takes longer but requires less walking back home. I'm famished by the time I arrive due to my insubstantial breakfast and my penurious lunch. At this point my cooking has become legit, and I've made some good spaghetti with mushroom, minced beef and onions, and surprisingly tasty fried rice with egg and the aforementioned mushroom, minced beef and onions. It helps to come from a household with a good cook, and when I get back home, I'm going to spend more time with Auntie so I can improve even more. But right now I know enough so that I can avoid starvation or nutritional depletion (i.e. I can make more than eggs and ramen).

(although I still make mean eggs and ramen)

At home, it's basically homework time - minus the homework part. So I do all the things I would normally do during homework time - Facebook, AIM, Wikipedia, ESPN, e-mail - for an uninterrupted period of time. I'm not going out to the bars cause it's too expensive and I don't want to drink now unless I get to meet new people, which is not always a guarantee.

But some interesting things have happened in the past week. On Sunday, the Pats game was on at 9 and I got to watch nearly the whole thing. I missed Patriot football so much and getting to watch them from the first time since the Tom Petty concert was a treat. My take? Matt Cassel sucked. Everybody's raving about how he managed the game and oh the Patriots won again and beat Brett Favre! I didn't realize how stupid the general media was - on most snaps, Cassel looked nervous, unconfident and thoroughly not in control of the situation. He would bounce around the pocket when his protection was good, and scramble and get sacked or tackled for no gain. His O-Line is used to holding their own while Brady stood still and delivered bombs, and now happy feet Cassel is throwing them off. Cassel also didn't show that he memorized the playbook during his 4 years on the sideline, forgetting what side Maroney was on during one handoff. Then his underthrow of Moss really did it for me, and after that I officially pronounced his performance as underwhelming. That said, I think he can improve and I won't crucify him yet. Shit I gotta run to class, but I'll talk about Ultimate and the Garda National Immigration Bureau later.

STO: Shamrock and Roll

Hey there, long time no blog. Its midafternoon here in Rathmines, Dublin, Ireland and the midafternoons here are unwaveringly boring. That might be the problem with this city, or traveling in general - there really isn't all that much to do in a new place. I still have some neighborhoods I'd like to explore, and some homework to do, but there generally is a lot of time to burn. I feel like I was rarely so unoccupied in Beijing and attribute my differences in the two cities to the sheer size and interest of Beijing. There really was a great variety of culture and activity in that city, and moreover, my path to learning Chinese and the pitfalls I encountered along the way required the most of my efforts. But this blog is no longer about Beijing and the misadventures in an Olympic city, but rather about riding buses, taking classes and tossing back pints of Guinness in Dublin. But I really do need to leave this city in weekends to come and travel around Europe.

Well since I last blogged, I believe I've had a full week of classes. The reason I haven't blogged in that week is not that I've been so busy with schoolwork - on the contrary, I've yet to do any homework whatsoever. Honestly, I haven't had to. The real reason is that they've been thoroughly uneventful. All my classes are small lectures, except the Geography of Europe, which is a large lecture. Just to note, when I have told people that I am taking Geography, many people have replied, "what is this, 2nd grade?" People, the class is not merely about "ooh, that's Moldova" but rather about political and cultural borders of Europe and how places have shaped the history of Europe, which has in essence shaped the history of the modern world. So I'm studying the Modern World, thank you very much. Anyways, my other classes include an overload of 3 math classes (Linear Algebra II which has been a joke, Algebraic Structures which has been the punchline to the joke, and Complex Analysis, which has been legit) and 2 linguistic classes (World Englishes, which has not nearly been as interesting as I thought it would be, and Phonology, which is actually as boring as it sounds). So you can see how enthused I am over my schoolwork. This is due mostly to UCD's insistence that study abroad students in the arts college can only take classes in 2 disciplines with 1 free elective. So while I wanted to take a class on James Joyce's Ulysses or the Political Systems of Ireland, I was stuck with a math class I didn't need and a Linguistics class which I really didn't want. I mean, am I going to follow through on my linguistics minor now? I really wasn't planning on it. Well the one highlight of my classes so far have been the phonetics lesson in my Phonology class. Reviewing phonetics, the pronounciation of words which I learned in my intro to Linguistics class, the teacher would write down several words in the phonetic alphabet. Without getting into the technical phonetic alphabet, she wrote down the word think as "tink." I actually laughed aloud at seeing the Irish accent assumed to be the working standard and analyzed in an academic setting. If you don't know, the Irish don't pronounce their "th"s at the beginning of a syllable, and even the number 3 sounds like tree. Which is hilarious, make no bones about it.

Getting to school is a minor annoyance that involves either a 20 minute walk + 15 minute bus ride, or a 15 minute bus ride + a 20 minute bus ride with no walking. I've been choosing the latter but in the future I think I'll go with the former and only take the double bus route in cases of rain...so both routes will probably get equal usage. I haven't been a bus taker since 6th grade - I nearly avoided them in Beijing, or in DC, and I can recall one time I took the bus in Boston, and I was worried about getting mugged the whole time - but here they're the only way to travel because taxis are too expensive and the miracles of the underground train have not found their way to Ireland yet. My fellow students remark that Dublin seems stuck in the 80's in terms of music, fashion and mannerisms. I'm not sure I agree with them, mainly because there seems to be plenty of Leona Lewis and Katy Perry being played, and I don't know anything about fashion. With regard to mannerisms, I'll pass judgment on that later, but I have seen a fair amount of Irishman who could definitely be seen in a DeLorean.

I just spent 10 minute sof my life reading the wikipedia page on Back to the Future, and then somehow I got dragged into the Grandfather Paradox and now I'm on the page of Futurama's character Fry. Freaking wikipedia. For a video skit of the phenomenon on Wikipedia voyages : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcS_MrnxIcE . Yeah I should not be this bored. Ok so none of you are reading this because you're interested in my schoolwork, bus schedule or fallacies involved with time travel, but most likely you want to hear about crazy and funny stories involved with the nightlife in Dublin and perhaps a caption for the photograph of beer. Well the caption may be disappointingly unremarkable: It's a pint of Guinness and a half pint of Kilkenny ale at some pub in Dublin. In addition, the crazy partying here is all in all, fairly unremarkable.

Well Wednesday night was cool I guess. During the day, before going to my 11am class, I texted my high school friend Greg about whether he could do lunch at 2, after I got out of class. I then turned off my phone and proceeded to listen to my professor drone about something. When I turned it back on after class, I was prompted to input a 4 digit PIN code. I had absolutely no clue what my PIN was, having seen it just once when I bought the phone. After inputting incorrect combinations 4 times, I was locked out of my phone. So I never had lunch with Greg. When I finally got home, I found the box I bought the phone in and unlocked my phone. What a stupid design, I freaking miss using my American phone. Anyways, upon turning on my phone, I was bombarded with 7 text messages. Among 3 from Greg, I found one from my friend Brian, the native Dubliner with whom I taught tennis back in the summer of '07...which really doesn't seem very long ago when you write it down. Ireland was playing Montenegro in a World Cup qualifying match that day, which had already started by the time I switched on my pisspoor cell phone. After getting his message, I rushed to the bar where Brian and his friends were, and got to revel in my most Irish experience yet - watching a soccer/football match involving Ireland in a pub full of Irishmen. I mean, does it get more cultural than that? Of course I drank Guinness. While the match ended in a nil-nil draw, I very much enjoyed my evening of intellectual discussion, of sports, cultures, politics and foxy ladies.

On Thursday night my housemate Chad, and several of the girls down the street, went off to Galway independently, leaving 3 of us in the guy house and 2 in the girl house. (Although I would have liked to have gone to Galway this weekend too, we've now planned a trip next week.) So we had more space this weekend, and decided to play a wild game of King's for a lengthy pre-game. The night was a ton of fun and full of bonding moments that won't necessarily be very interesting in a blog. But the night can be summarized by the actions of my housemate, fellow Hoya, Matt Dzaman, who decided to showcase his chugging abilities after we had finished playing by downing a pint of beer in under 7 seconds. It would be about another 70 seconds before he gave the beer right back up, up through his esophagus and into and around the sink. It was pretty gross, not going to lie. But Matt then convinced us that he was not very drunk and all, and downed another pint in under 6 seconds, and this time kept it down. It was already 10:30 at this point, which is really late in a city where the buses stop running at midnight. So we hoofed it to a nearby bar, where I got a Guinness and talked to the bartender in Chinese. Matt ordered a Tranquilizer, which is half Jager and half Goldschlager and apparently delicious. He then proceeded to pass out on a table before booting all over the sidewalk. We went home after that. Yeah, I need a good night out badly. Last night, Friday, we actually stayed in, so I'm hoping tonight will turn this tide and raise all ships. In other news, I bought some souvenirs for friends last night, including shotglasses with Irish last names, and was able to find 3 friends with their names on them.

SPO: The battle at Wounded Knee

Today was a pleasant day. After an arduous night of significant drinking, I woke up rather late with a sore ankle and a gigantic bladder. An extremely lazy morning/early afternoon preceded a productive and interesting afternoon / evening that started with the All-Ireland Hurling championship match. So apparently hurling is one of the most popular sports here, one of Ireland's most unique sports in addition to Gaelic football (which I know nothing about) and is actually a really awesome game. Considered the fastest team sport game, the players (15 to a side) wield something resembling a hockey stick called a Hurl, and use it to whack a small ball that seems to be of the make of a baseball and the size of a hackey sack. The players are allowed to hold the ball with their hands and run 4 steps but otherwise have to bounce it or balance it on their sticks. They can handpass it to teammates by slapping the ball with their hands but cannot just throw the ball. Then there's the goal, which in addition to being a typical soccer goal, also has its goalposts extended ala the field goalpost in American football. Hitting the ball through the field goalposts earns 1 point, whereas getting it past a goalie into the goal is worth 3. So it's really cool that sometimes no one knows where the player might be aiming. The players often score field goals from really far away, over 50 yards out. We'll be looking at the screen and not even seeing the posts and then bam a guy would take a giant swing at the ball and it would fly way up in the air for a score. Kilkenny dominated the game, stealing the ball at will and scoring 3/30 to Waterford's 1/13. That score means Kilkenny had 3 goals and 30 "field goals" so they ended up winning by 23 points, but they give the scores in that format.

Afterwards I met up with Greg for mass at my local church. His Notre Dame program really takes care of their kids and they had a proctored mass today. Apparently the cathedral in Rathmines is the place to be, and really is quite ornate on the inside and has a giant green dome. I enjoy going to mass in different places, especially different parts of the world. Both the similarities and the differences of the services are really interesting, as are the revelations that a universal doctrine can be influenced by local customs. When mass ended, we grabbed a burger and shake at Eddie Rockets, which apparently is exactly like Johnny Rockets. Then I headed to a pub and watched some NFL action. There's a nice pub around my place that's also seemingly a good place to catch the NFL as an American was telling me, so it might become my new Lush. However they could only watch 2 games at a time and none of them involved the Patriots. So I watched the Saints play the Bucs and Reggie Bush rip off a 30 yard touchdown catch and run, and saw New England 17 Kansas City 10 in the top right corner. When I learned that Tom Brady had gone down with a knee injury, I dropped my Guinness. It's pretty devastating and I'm actually quite glad I'm in Ireland for it. If I had been watching the game this would be much harder on me. As is, my prediction of a disappointing Patriots season now seems inevitable, but hopefully Matt Cassell can step it up.

STO: Introduction to Ireland

This nice Saturday morning marks my one week anniversary in the fair city of Dublin. And by fair, I mean an expensive, rainy, alcoholic bog. Like any first week in a new foreign city, life has been eventful, hectic and full of culture shock. To recap: I left my glasses at home, my wallet in a taxi, spent a ton of money on drinks, had some great Guinness, toured the James Joyce home, bonded with my new housemates and even went to a new school. And boy the Guinness is good....soo smooth. So far I like my house, even though the shower is tiny and dirty, there is no room to put anything in the bathrooms, the lighting is limited, the stovetop starter doesn't work, and the upstairs shower has gigantic leaks down to my floor and we are suffering from extreme water damage. Meanwhile, down the court, the girls have this great house that costs the same as ours but came from an Ikea catalog. But I'm not bitter.

Dublin is a great walking city, which is important because there is no subway. We're taking the buses everywhere and are getting comfortable with the routes. It's about a 30-35 minute walk from our house to the city centre but less than 10 on the buses, which conveniently stop right by our house. The neighborhoods are diverse and interesting and the layout of this city in many ways reminds me of Boston. One crucial difference is that here, the same stretch of road will contain many different street names. Basically the street changes names every other block. In many ways this makes sense, because if you tell a cab driver Leinster street, they'll know exactly what block to take you on, whereas if you tell a cab driver in Boston to go to Commonwealth Avenue, he could take you to a myriad of spots along a 10 mile route. However it is very confusing for someone used to the American system, especially if you're trying to walk home and looking for Rathmines road and not realizing that Lower Camden street is Rathmines road. But again I'm not bitter.

Our place is south of the city, and our school is even further south. There is a bus that goes straight to school, but that stop is a full mile from our house. Making several of those walks has progressively deteriorated the health of my left foot, which bothered me so much last night I had to stay in (my liver, wallet and brain were also contributing factors). In the future we might take a bus from outside our house into the city, and then take another bus from there into the college, but that is a very indirect route that may take more time. I'll have to see. The UCD campus is big, green and fairly widespread, with very poor and expensive dining. One cafeteria we found charges 25 cents for a tiny packet of "tomato sauce" which you may know better as ketchup. The Irish are not famous for the cuisine, and it shows, although so far I've had some good meals of Bangers and Mash (sausages and potatoes) and Fish and Chips.

My housemates consist of Matt (Georgetown '10), Chad (Cornell '10), my roommate Jason (Cornell '09) and Sang Hyup (sic) who's 24, from South Korea, began learning English 10 months ago, has served in the army and is starting his first year at Dublin Institute of Technology. That might be the last we hear from him. Matt, Chad, Jason and I all love drinking and having a good time, which I think is a general pre-requisite for anyone visiting Dublin, so we're getting along well. Down the court, the 6 girls include 2 hoyas, Diane Healy and Casey Potter, a girl from San Francisco whose name Thuy Nguyen is just too similar to another friend of mine, and 3 girls from Bentley who love to hang out with themselves. Another house nearby contains 9 Georgetown men and one unfortunate Cornell boy. My friend Greg from Notre Dame lives on UCD campus and has seemingly limitless Fighting Irish friends also with him on campus, as Notre Dame's presence in this city is so big that they actually have their own centre. Let's see if they can win a football game though.

My biggest concerns now are chiefly financial. After freespending my way through Beijing, Dublin is a completely different beast, simply because the Euro is so depressingly strong. Although I do count my blessings that I'm not in London (sorry Crystal!), these prices are influencing every one of my decisions. If I were to drink like I did in Beijing, my average night out would cost over 30 Euros, nearly $45, and since so far we've gone out every night, that just can't continue. I haven't seen a lunch less than 5 Euros, and as a result us Americans will spend a lot of time eating and drinking at home. I hope to become a good cook here and also master the pregame. I'm also seriously considering getting a job here, possibly at a Chinese takeout restaurant so I can continue working on my Chinese, but I'm really concerned over how much time I'll have. Schoolwork may become difficult, and I will be playing Frisbee here, so we'll have to see how that works. Keep checking the blog, the next few days will include a wild night of partying tonight, NFL football tomorrow, and classes on Monday.

STO: Doubting in Dublin

It's my first day in my new house on Observatory Court and my third day in the great city of Dublin. My initial feelings of this place have been lukewarm, which is about several degrees higher than the actual feel of this place (about 64 degrees). I feel like I'm not even here yet, mostly because I've only been with my parents, haven't met any other study-abroad students, and have yet to get drunk (what??). So yeah, it's like I'm in Dublin Limbo - can I elide that into Dublimbo? Either way it's not a great place, like Annie I'm holding out for tomorrow in the hope that other study abroad students, including Greg, arrive and come hang out. For now, I'm alone in this house that has limited light bulbs (luckily there's one in the bedroom and the bathroom) with a South Korean student who isn't going to our college and isn't really much of a talker. Oh and I lost my wallet. Again.

This time it was in a taxi, which was very strange because I remember looking at dad as he paid the cab driver and thinking about asking him to get a receipt, but then I figured that I hadn't left anything behind so why bother. While I am still in shock at the loss of the wallet, it hasn't been found and I must assume it to be gone. Which sucks, having no credit, bank card or ID in a foreign city is not ideal, and if my parents weren't here I'd be really screwed. Luckily, they were and my mom gave me enough money to last until I get new cards shipped. Unluckily, they are here and my dad gave me a yelling of a lifetime and now is in one of his legendary sulking moods in which the sun implodes on itself until he emerges from his state of continual bitterness. I don't want to gloom this wonderful, usually cheery, blog up, but to sum up my current status: I'm alone with a South Korean in a dark house in the south of Dublin with no wallet, no contact from my dad, no numbers in my cell phone except that of my aforementioned dad's, no booze in my blood, and suffering from a lingering cough. And my ankle is not responding well to several days' worth of walking. Yeah

I think I'll make a final post about Beijing sometime, as i began work on a newspaper article about that which the Voice never got back to me about. So I'll edit that and put it up here, and then transition to making this blog about Dublin. If anyone has any ideas for a new title for the blog, preferably one as priceless as Tanked in Tiananmen, let me know. I also want a picture that captures the transition from Beijing to Dublin. And what a transition it is! Before I even arrived, I had remarked upon leaving a country where I looked like the inhabitants but couldn't speak the language for a country where I didn't look a thing like the inhabitants but could speak the language. I hadn't really understood all the subtleties involved with that type of change though. For one thing, my friends and I really walked around Beijing like we owned it. We dressed well, could afford anything we wanted and our conversations in English were either feared or respected but were nonetheless private. And we were better looking too. Well let's just say I don't walk around Dublin with that kind of cockiness and I still haven't gotten a feel for how the locals perceive me.

Dublin is very international. I think Americans tend not to give Western Europe enough credit for diversity - after all, they didn't incorporate African slaves into their society. While I like to think of all non-American countries as homogenous racial masses, the truth is that cities everywhere now are full of immigrants. Even in Beijing, the center of the ultra-prolific Han people, there were caucasians, Koreans, Russians and Kazakhs every so often. Dublin takes this to another level with a large amount of immigrants from India, Eastern Europe, China, South Korea, Eastern Africa, Jamaica, Italians and seemingly an influx of French and German tourists. Most servants within the restaurants that we've visited are not native English speakers, and I've already spoken Mandarin with 2 people. The streets are generally active but not crowded, a very welcome change from the peoplepalooza that was every public setting in Beijing. Orientation begins on the 4th, my roommates for some reason still haven't arrived on the 2nd, and I'm holding out for better times with the wallet and all.