A short post today, last week was pretty quiet.

After my family returned to the states, I spent a couple of days catching up on homework and work for my internship. On the morning of Wednesday, Nov. 9 (that’s the evening of Tuesday, Nov. 8 in the US…) a group of us woke up at 5:45am to take the subway to the Beijing Bookworm, a bookstore, restaurant/bar, and meeting space for expats, to watch the results of the presidential election alongside about 100 other expats. We had planned to simply enjoy breakfast and be back at UIBE by our 1:30 classes, but as you might imagine the event was not as enjoyable, stress-free, or brief as we had hoped. We were there until 4:00pm, and we all had a few drinks – we needed them to get through.

I’d like to pause and say that I do not intend to be glib about this election – it has hit me incredibly hard and though I wouldn’t give up the experience I’m having in China for the world I do wish that I could be at home with my friends and family to support effected communities and to organize. However, this isn’t a blog about politics or my views on politics, so let it suffice to say that I and my fellow students here do take this deadly seriously, even if the picture below seems to show us having a grand old time as the results came in.

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Our view of the fall of American democracy

Friday, Nov. 11 was Singles’ Day in China. It’s sort of a reverse Valentine’s Day mixed with Cyber Monday – it’s the single biggest online shopping day in China, I guess because all the single people in China go online for retail therapy?

At work on Friday, I had a bit of a challenging task. My magazine’s food editor wanted to do a piece called “Getting Moderately Deep with Beijing’s Street Vendors,” in which Beijing street vendors would respond to questions about life, happiness, and eternal truths. However, my editor doesn’t speak any Chinese. So I had to translate 15 “moderately deep” questions (ex. “If you could change one thing about your life, what would it be and why?” and “What is your personal motto?”) and take to the streets asking corn vendors, candied hawthorne vendors, sweet potato vendors, and chestnut vendors what their deepest dreams and fears were. I was super nervous about it – first of all, these were just odd questions, and second of all, my Chinese honestly isn’t that good and understanding street vendors, who often have thick accents, is a particular challenge. However, it ended up being a really fun exercise. The vendors were by and large wonderful to talk to and very sweet. Most of them were happy to answer my questions, and all of them kindly lied to me and told me my Chinese was very good at the end.

This past weekend, my friend Alana had some friends visiting (they’re studying in Shanghai for the semester and came up for the weekend). So Saturday we went down to Sanlitun, the big bar area in Beijing. We went to some classic Beijing dive spots, like Kokomo, a tropical-themed rooftop bar where you can buy both a Sex on the Beach and a Philly cheesesteak, and Mojitoman, a hole in the wall marked by a giant neon sign reading “MOJITOMAN IS BACK” (Mojitoman had briefly been kicked out of his hole in the wall when the police built their new station next door, but he has made a triumphant return and has marked down all drinks by 5 kuai to celebrate). Both Kokomo and Mojitoman are renowned Beijing bars due to the sheer strangeness of their atmospheres, so it was fun to embrace the weirdness that is Beijing.

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A nice reminder, spotted in Sanlitun, that love hasn’t been defeated just yet.

Finally, I’m going to leave you all with a little comic relief, which I think we could all use right now. I bought a moisturizing face mask from 7-11 this past week, and it was called the “dragon mask.” I pulled it out of the package only to discover that it was actually designed to look like a dragon. Here’s me as a skin-care-obsessed dragon:

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Rawr

As always, thanks for reading. Hang in there. Lots of love to you all.