At Home in Beijing

On Tuesday, Mark and I arrived in Beijing from Urumqi in Western China. We've spent much of the week settling in, shopping for necessities, and I've been participating in orientation activities for the Stanford program. I hope the photos will give an idea of where I'll be living and working for the next three months. The apartment is beautiful, situated on a lake, and very quiet. It is in a building renovated by the Packard foundation (see first 2 photos). The campus (Peking University, also known as Beida) is enormous with a lot of trees and greenery. It is equiped like a small city with at least 20 restaurants and canteens, fruit stands, banks, stores, etc. My office is in a building in the middle of campus -- about a 15-minute meander along a tree-lined path (see photo 3, my office).

Our primary adventures since we've been in Beijing have revolved around shopping. For the first four days, we went shopping every afternoon for food and basic household items (a printer, dish soap, laundry soap, dumplings, etc.). Why everyday? Because with no car, we were limited in what we could carry down the street to hail a taxi. We walked off-campus to nearby mega-stores, then caught taxis back with our load of goodies. Each of the first outings took 3-4 hours -- taxis misunderstood where we were going, lines were long, we got distracted, etc. On Friday, we finally bought bikes and cut our shopping time down to 1.5 hours... now that's progress! The likelihood of our new bikes being stolen is very high, but at a cost of $35 per bike, we figure its a worthwhile investment.