So here I am in Beijing. Day one in China. It is sunny, although due to the general haze of pollution, the sky is a flat white. If I look straight up, I can see the barest hint of blue, and the suggestion that there a few shreds of actual cloud above.

Alex and I got up early, around 7:30, had a shower and breakfast composed of a medley of fruits and yogurt from China, with the addition of bagels from Grateful Bread in Seattle. From the Western perspective, China is severely lacking in decent bread products and chocolate. I also brought a pile of chocolate bars with me.

I spent some time on Alex’s computer to do some work email, and then walked with him to work, about half an hour from our “serviced residence,” aka hotel room. Microsoft has four floors in the top of one tower in a four building set of highrise technology office buldings. Sun is in one of the other towers, the Google building is also just next door.

The bottom has a plaza, with some cafes and such. I stopped in one to get a drink — a Starbucks-like place called ‘SPR coffee’ where I pointed on a bilingual menu to indicate that I wanted an iced pineapple drink. It came with an oreo on top, because, why the hell not?

“Why the hell not?” is the only explanation for a lot of things here. I’m sure examples will accumulate.

On the backside of the four towers is a spot which is labeled TSINGHUA SCIENCE PARK. Tsinghua is one of the universities, and is located next door. The science park is made up of a tile plaza surrounded by a fountain-filled moat, and further ringed by terraces of paving stones and bushes, the uppermost level of which is blooming with yellow flowers.

I spent some time sitting in the park, took a walk around part of the Tsinghua campus, and had lunch with Alex and two of his co-workers in a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant (even saw a monk) before walking back home, feeling very white and freckled and blond on account of the people who stare unabashedly at me.

I detoured a couple times to walk through alleys full of street vendors — fruits and vegetables spread out on cloths on the side of the alleyway. Most of the vendors stared at me, and I wished I knew how to say ‘how much?’, or that I had a better handle on numbers, so I could try and buy some strawberries, or an egg. But I’m still pretty mute, and too shy to just pull out my camera and start taking pictures of people and their stuff, so I’ll just have to provide word pictures instead.

I saw an intense looking poker game amongst several sellers, all sitting under a big umbrella, hunched over their cards and smoking furiously. I saw a cucumber with a six-inch circumference. It looked like you could by slices of it. I also saw a few vendors with live seafood — plastic tubs with fish or shrimp, with bubbling air hoses frothing the water. There were women selling brown eggs, which were piled up in great towers, with cardboard molding between each layer.

I’ll get cracking on my Chinese, and hopefully go back soon with a little more gumption.