hey!

yesterday i went with my friend jeff to attend heyrobics in chaoyang park. heyrobics is apparently a very popular swedish aerobics-style group exercise routine (in sweden it's called something else, while heyrobics is the international name). basically, it's a series of medium tempo aerobics moves and strength exercises interspersed with light running set to swedish house music and led by a very swedish guy about my age named linus (pronounced lee-nus). it's totally ridiculous but also an effective workout. i'm sore all over today.

linus says that in sweden you sometimes will get thousands of people attending free sessions in city parks during the summer, which must be quite a sight. there were probably about 50 people yesterday, though jeff says that's about twice as many as normal (a swedish young professionals event swelled the ranks a bit). most everybody was a foreigner or a significant other of a foreigner. of course this attracted a lot of attention from the families enjoying a late summer sunday evening in the park, but funnily enough a number of them joined in. i guess with a strong tradition of group exercises in public places, many people in beijing don't find it that odd to dance around in a big group in the park for exercise. jeff and i we speculating about where you could pull this off in the states, and decided probably only san francisco and portland, maybe new york.

so i'm back and relaxing for a week before taking off to xining in qinghai province next sunday. the flight was uneventful but the movies sucked. we left in august but arrived in september, so i think they just showed a random assortment of whatever they had on hand (goddam iron man 2 again). i went to the summer palace finally with a former coworker visiting from out of town. it's as nice as everybody says. otherwise, i've just been biking around, cooking, watching dvds and thinking about getting ready for traveling.

it's surprising how quickly i've adapted back to life here, considering that i got very used to living back in the states this summer and it was a bit hard to leave. but when i went to register with the psb, the ladies working (or sitting and chatting) behind the counter began interrogating me on the difference between butter and cream, down to how they were made. i said i didn't really know because i'm not a peasant, but i was still admonished because americans are supposed to know stuff like this. it reminded me that it's these kind of bizarre interactions that make daily life here fun, and make me glad to be back.

http://heyrobics.com/