the monkey's last days

so, everybody has left me here alone in beijing. other people you may or may not know from middlebury are currently galavanting around the frozen wastelands of china in the winter, while i sit here in the frozen wastelands of beijing. see below for an example.

i took that picture while standing in the middle of a frozen lake in a beijing park. there were guys fishing in the ice, pulling up guppies every now and then. we talked to them for a while, and one said that the city government doesn't like them doing that, and that he was nervous because we were foreigners who for some reason would broadcast to the world what they were doing. i guess i proved him right.

so i've been reduced to consorting with the lowly remaining students here, many of whom are not even from Middlebury!! *gasp* last night a bunch of us went to a bar on a popular bar street called sanlitun. actually, the bar is not actually on sanlitun road, but an alley nearby. I went there the first weekend, and there were at least a dozen bars and discos, etc. last night there were two bars. today there is one bar. beijing has for several years been threatening to shut the area down, and it looks like they finally got around to it. i went to one bar one night the first weekend, and now there is just a pile of rubble. it's pretty incredible.

in any event, i'm planning to get up early tomorrow morning to watch the superbowl (7 a.m.). i will make it a point to post once again before the new year, but if i don't catch you before then, xin nian kaui le, which means happy new year. so you can rock that on the 9th. welcome in the year of the rooster. in the meantime, here's a picture of the new beijing west railroad station.