beijing

arrived in beijing this morning after flying from chinggis khan international airport in ulanbaatar to tianjin international airport in tianjin, china. from there, we took a 100 KM bus ride (free with our plane tickets!) into central beijing, where we were dropped off in the middle of a city busily preparing for next summer's olympics. they should just put a giant "under construction" sign over this whole mutha. there are so many new expressways going up all over, and so many new skyscrapers, some rising from the ground at odd, eye-catching angles, bursting forth. not that you can see much of this from any distance because the air quality here is atrocious. if i were an olympic athlete planning on being here in 2008, i'd start training now by smoking a pack or two each day.

we ate lunch at pizza hut and then taxied it over to the guesthouse i set up online a few days ago; we all fell asleep through the early evening. now amanda and i are at a smoky internet cafe (where i'd bet access to sites like "freetibet.org" are blocked) and annette is...somewhere. my mom gets here tomorrow afternoon; she's probably waking up in california right now, freaked out of her head that she's gonna fly from ONT to san francisco to beijing, half a world away from everything she's ever known. but she doesn't have anything to worry about. it's not that strange: i'll be there when she gets off the plane, and there's pizza hut, and the transformers movie is playing at the theater below this internet cafe.

adios.