Hope this works...

Ok, first of all, I hope that this post works...no censoring, please! Second of all, most of the options on this webpage are in Chinese, so I hope when it comes time to post, I click the correct button!

Anyway, we have had an incredible few days! First impressions: It is very, very polluted, and I have had a minor sore throat until today, when I noticed that suddenly I didn't. So my body has finally realized that pollution is the word of the day, and therefore we must adjust. Everything is HUGE - the streets are very broad, and the buildings are very large. Mentally I'm associating this with Soviet architecture, not thatt I have a whole lot of experience with Soviet architecture, but that's what I'm going with. Even the distances are vast. A block is about a half mile long. So we are about blocks or so from Tienanmen Square and the Forbidden City, which is about 1.5 miles.

The people are FASCINATED by us. Yesterday we walked down to Tienanmen Square, and were stopped many times by people wanting to have their picture takenwith us. They have no problems just stopping us and asking for a picture. They also have no problems touching - their sense of personal space is a lot different than ours is. And it was HOT yesterday (90 + degrees and sunny), so that personal space thing was kind of an issue. The other interesting thing is the pointing and staring. There's a lot of it. You know, we kind of stand out. And many, many, many people would turn around to stare at us. Several children pointed at us and brought us to the attention ofwhomever they were travelling with. Apparently the pointing and staring thing is ok. It's disconcerting. They all want to say "hello" and ask us where we are going and where we are from...many of them speak far better English than I speak Chinese. (I've gotten down "Hello" and "Thank you").

By the way, my favorite person in Beijing is the woman who brings me coffee in the hotel restaurant in the mornings. And she knows it. I've been practicing my "Thank you" on her quite frequently.

Today we visited the Forbidden City. It is VAST. And that word doesn't even begin to describe the size of this place. And we didn't even examine the buildings off to the sides, such as the concubine quarters, we just walked straight through (a distance of about 3.5 miles or so, I think). I was disappointed because much of the City is being restored (for the '08 Olympics, of course. And there are people out hawking souvenirs ALREADY), so many of the buildings are behind scaffolding. What has been restored is beautiful. I took about 75 pictures (really), and I am not sure if they all will be good - the problem I had is two-fold. One, I'm sure you are aware of: there are a lot of people in China. So there are a lot of people in every single place you go, so therefore, there will be a lot of people in the pictures. It's just unavoidable. The good news is that you might actually be able to get a sense of scale. The other problem I had goes back to the vastness of the buildings - you just can't get far enough away from them to really get the whole building into the picture. So I did the best I could, and then I bought postcards. You'll have to wait on pictures until I return, however.

Tomorrow we have two lectures - one with the vice minister of education, and the other with the vice president of the China Women's Federation, and those both will be about education. More later on that, and about our visit to the school yesterday (fascinating! can I use that word too much, do you think?).