北京欢迎我

Hello from Beijing! I will be here until May 1st participating in an exchange program between UCSF and PUMC (Peking Union Medical College). I will be doing some clinical rotations while I am here, although I haven't received my schedule yet. I'll use this blog mainly just to talk about interesting things I do, see, and eat, and hopefully it won't read too much like a diary, but that seems to be how most things I write about turn out. With that said, here's what's happened in the last two days or so since I left San Francisco:

--Had a boring 12-hour flight on Air China, in which there were no individual TVs, so I was forced to watch movies like "King Kong" and "The Banquet" (which turned out to be okay, although I really don't like Zhang Ziyi anymore)
--Got assigned to a dorm room when they weren't expecting me until Sunday (for some reason), so I had to spend quite a bit of time cleaning it to make it habitable -- it hadn't been cleaned since last year, so there was a thick layer of dust on everything
--Woke up super-early on Saturday morning, so I walked to Tian'anmen Square (about 25 minutes away, at a brisk pace)
--Ate Peking duck
--Went karaoke-ing for 3 hours

The flight was interesting, in that a lot of the people were really social. I was looking out the window on one of the emergency exit doors at Alaska below, when a traditional Chinese medicine doctor from Xinjiang who was returning to China after 40 days in SF visiting her daughter at USF, started a conversation with me. Later, I talked with a politics professor returning from CSU East Bay to Shandong and a retired preschool teacher from Chicago going to China for vacation, about random things, too.

And now, photos:














My room, before everything got put away. I took the bed and the desk that's on the left (farther from the little patio we have for hanging clothes).


















Our bathroom. Note the shower head on the wall. Also note the window in the door, allowing anyone to see inside (I taped a piece of wrapping paper over it.














Alaska from the airplane.