this is Friday night, the night of the hotel party. So last Friday i went to Ms China's party, tonight was for the atc which is the group of people i am working with. They rented everyone a hotel room at the nirvana Beijing resort and planned a full night of festivities.

i drove out with jay and tom instead of taking the bus. Jay had written down directions but they proved to not be very accurate. We thought we were lost until i spotted a bus that i believed resembled the atc buses taking people to the hotel. Neither jay nor tom believed me at first but after a little bit we were so lost that we decided we might as well pull up to the bus and see. We pulled up and tom started yelling out the window at the bus. Turns out they had no open windows though so no one knew what the hell he was saying. Finally we pulled up next to the driver and yelled at him. He unfortunately decided not to answer but someone on the bus heard us and called us and told us that we were following the right bus. Immediate disaster avoided.

we arrived at the hotel and my first impression was of a penitentiary. It had lots of gray cement and steel. Turns out on the inside to be extremely nice. This is where a previous governor of Beijing came with his 2nd and 3rd wives.

the line to check in was long and continuously changing. They told us to get in to two lines divided by name but then as i was almost at the front of that they decided to merge them back together.

also i thought i would not have to worry so much about cutting in line but i was wrong. There was this woman who must have been 5' on her toes. She started out pretty far behind me but every time we took a step forward she took a couple of extra inches. i kept watching her do this and kept staring at her expressing my displeasure through my glare. As ineffective as my mom's glare at this point. She just paid me no attention and worked her way up to two spots ahead of me.

i was staying with jay so we dropped our stuff off and went back to dinner.

the first thing you saw entering the dining room was a back log of people standing in front of the welcome Microsoft sign and guess what they were doing. If you said the macarena you were wrong. If you said taking pictures give yourself a gold star.

the dining room was nice. There were lots of fun toys for people to play with. Air mallets that squeaked and became the weapon of choice for the night. You would expect that because they were blown up they would not hurt when they hit you. You would have expected wrong.

there were also pens and clapping devices for the truly lazy. For those that just could not be bothered to actually clap they provided a device where you simply had to lazily wave your hand and it clapped for you.

there were also bunches of balloons in the middle of all the tables attached to stuffed animal dogs. Quickly the contest of the evening became which table could have the highest balloon bunch or alternately which table could float the largest object with their bunch of balloons. Remember these are all engineers. Everyone seemed to be having a great time and it was fun seeing cans of beer floating across the room. The one disconcerting thing was the stuffed animal that one table got to float being attacked by many squeaking mallets. i may not know much about Chinese culture but it has to be bad luck to beat the shit out of a dog in the year of the dog.

i sat at a table with jay, frank, lianfeng and his fiance. There also were a couple of random late comers who sat at our table as well. By the time we got there we had to take a table at the back.

the floormats that i took pictures of are in all the elevators and they change according to the day of the week.

Friday took me a while to get without my shoes in it. i rode the elevator randomly up and down a couple of times. Whoever got into the elevator would stare at me quizzically while i rode it all the way down or up with them and then did not get out.

Saturday was taken in the morning so it looks slightly more clean.