Saturday morning i got slightly confused and woke up at 8 thinking it was 9. So after showering i ended up being one of the first people at breakfast which was cool because i got to eat with baogang, Gary and his wife.

we had a nice time talking about travel across both china and the us. There are some crazy visa restrictions for people with a Chinese passport. i just typed about three pages and erased twice as many trying to tell this story and it is beyond my grasp of written English. i will just have to tell you in person.

after breakfast i walked around the hotel and the surrounding area for a couple of hours and took pictures.

it was good to walk around in nature-ish areas. The air was almost clean out there even though it is probably closer to the factories.

it was cold but not freezing. You could see the ice melting and things starting to poke above the ground. Even this far outside Beijing
(past the 6th ring road) there is still an amazing amount of construction going on.

the hotel is expanding in every direction and their are many homes being built around the hotel. The cool thing is that they are homes as opposed to apartments. The first i have seen since arriving here.

in the haste to build certain safety measures are being tossed aside. Don't people remember baby Jessica?

it was also nice being able to see a little of the countryside. There were people ice fishing on ice that i thought you would fall through. Maybe they know something i don't so they were not worried about the ice breaking.

beyond the homes, there was an abandoned temple and some farmland that i was able to see. i took something ridiculous like 300 pictures so if walls and barren fields are you thing, let me know. We can get together and have the slideshow of the century.

i also saw a garbage pile that deepened my curiosity about a certain piece of garbage. It is a small section of a cylinder of cement. It is about 20 centimeters in diameter and 6 cm deep. It has a bunch of holes in it that are about finger size. i have also seen many of these in the dumpster for the poorer section i walk past to get to work. The dumpster is emptied every night and every morning there are tons more of these. Such a mystery.