After spending five months living/workng/falling in love with San Francisco, I've found myself once again on the other side of the world with Beth, this time in China. We spent one night in Seoul, South Korea visiting a friend of Beth's, before arriving here in Beijing. We have one month to spend here, and keeping true to our traveling fashion, have little to no plan. We're curretly staying with a family that we know through some complicated ties (Beth's orthodontic dad's nurses daughter's family, whom we met up with a few years ago in Thailand). They're ex-pats who have been living here with their adorable and amusing seven and nine year-old boys for the past three years and are quite happy to have visitors.

Yesterday we went to the Great Wall, which was totally amazing! It's cool to think that something built to keep enemies out is now attracting and uniting people from around the world. We took a gondola up, hiked part of the wall, and took alpine slides down. It was really fun and the workers kept yelling "slow down slow down" in really poor English as I wizzed by ignoring them and gigging the whole way.

Arrarently escaping to Asia may have been a good move. The swine flu isnt here yet but keeping with Chinese fashion, they're freaking out. Apparently the government came busting into the hotel room of a Mexican family and took them military-style into quarantine in the middle of the night, speaking no English. I think there are a total of 75 people being quarantined, none at all symptomatic. One of them is a Mexican diplomat living in China who happened to travel to Cambodia and apparently was also taken into quarantine just for holding a Mexican passport. The Chinese government can do whatever they want without question (those who question are killed without a thought). So different from my nice American Democracy with freedom of speech and pretty much whatever else we want!

That's all for now! I'm hoping to seek out some interesting "food" today, which apparently shouldn't be too difficult.