I smile, 'cuz I'm happy.

Hello and Happy New Year to all y'all!!!

We like our little computer, it is neat and enjoyable to type on, though sometimes slightly difficult due to it's small size, which results in some spelling and grammatical errors which i am too lazy to correct before publishing.

word.

we love Beijing it is a great, lovely, wonderful type of city and we are very glad to have been here this week. we could easily spend another week here, or just move here someday, but we have a flight we have to catch from hong kong to Bangkok on the 8th and we want to spend a few days with my buddy Neil in HK, so we leave tomorrow morning on a 25 hour train ride to the south. on the last two overnight trains we did, we skimped on the price and settled for the hard sleepers instead of the soft sleepers, which ended up being plenty comfortable and way cheaper. but for this leg, since it is so long and we've actually managed to live well under our daily budget so far, we decided to splurge and get a private sleeper car for just the two of us; it might be nice not to be sleeping above a snoring Chinese dude or just below an old lady who keep climbing down over your bunk to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
We re so excited to be able to stop wearing our long underwear. apparently it will be around 70-75 degrees next week in hong kong. coming from an average high of 34 to 74 is more than we could dream of at this point. Sayin' goodbye to our winter coats for the rest of the year!

today was our last day of winter, so we strolled to a nearby lake which was surrounded by a really cool and lively neighborhood, all built out of the same totally sweet gray stone that our hotel's neighborhood is made of; old school china-style.
the lake had about a foot of ice on it and was full of ice skaters and families playing. we rented an ice chair, which was like a sled but had 2 small seats for us to sit upright on and they gave us some long ice pick like devices to shove ourselves around on. we only wiped out once and one other time we collided with a mother and her son on another chair, but Alicen managed to catch the son before he fell on the ice and from the way he was laughing, it looked like it was a memorable moment for the kid. great times on the ice! oh, then we strolled around the lake and in one place they had carved away the ice for about a 15 foot wide by 60 foot long stretch and we showed up there just as a dude in a speedo jumped in and did the butterfly stroked for 2 laps while people watched and cheered him on, including a few people from only a few feet back on the ice...very entertaining and badass.

so far we've enjoyed a very chillaxed pace on the trip; we''re trying to take it fairly easy and not get caught up in tourist mode, rushing around to try to see everything we can. there is so much more we could be seeing or doing, but it is important for us to find a pace where we can really settle into, as we're hoping to be able to keep traveling for another 6 months or so and we don't want to get burned out. but so much of what has been great so far is not the type of stuff that looks great in pictures or is really anecdotal to type about. we've been doing a ton of walking, which has actually helped us both lose weight unlike every other holiday season we can remember. just strolling through the random backstreets of china has been fantastic. to be able to get a sense of how people here live and how they are both so similar and different from ourselves is really something. i hope we can keep up this pace and general attitude toward the trip, because so far it's really working out great.

tonight for dinner we had sichuan hot pot; which is a lot like Japanese shabu shabu except the broth is full of red peppers and gets everything really spicy. very tasty and the last type of food we had told ourselves we would try while in china. we had Peking duck last night for new year's dinner; different than what I'd had before but, again, really tasty...and cheap!

oh, for lunch today we stopped at a street vendor and spent about 75 cents on something that looked good but turned out to be mildly life-changing in it's deliciousness.
basically it was a fluffy tortilla, tossed onto a just cracked egg and fried up with it, wrapped around lettuce, diced...something that tasted good, and deep fried chicken strips....it was, like, stupid. i want to start cooking when i get home, and i learned today that throwing an egg on the grill before cooking something on top of it is never a bad idea.

we had an absolutely fabulous new year's eve. we spent the day at the site of the summer Olympics; saw the aquatic center and the Bird's nest stadium where they held the opening ceremonies. we even got to go inside the birds nest and they had a massive Christmas tree in the middle of the field and were playing Olympic highlights on the huge screens. everywhere we looked in said, Beijing 2008, which caused me to start to reflect on what 2008 has meant to me and what 2009 might bring. i ended up having a pretty overwhelming moment as a number of different realizations and memories and emotions all seems to hit me at the same time. let's see if i can briefly sum up;

the day before we had gone to forbidden city and part of what we saw were some Buddhist antiquities which reminded me how Buddhism largely focuses on the impermanence of all things; we'll all die, everything fades, nothing lasts...this can be a frightening concept for me and it stuck with me as i was in the bird's next.

i thought about how i never would have thought that i would visit china or anywhere in Asia, for that matter, when i was younger and how this massively important section of my life was something that i never could have predicted. largely and most importantly due to Alicen's influence on my life i ended up doing something that, to my old self, was totally unexpected.

this led me to think about the trip that we are on and how the only reason we are taking this trip is because of the very specific people we have grown up to become.
finally, the most important realization that hit me was an understanding that every single person i've ever met, spoken to, listened to, etc. is someone who taught me something unique that has accumulated to become me and how incredibly thankful i am to all of you and to everyone else i've ever known for the addition that you've made to my life. even if it is only someone i knew for one afternoon, that interaction has helped to shape me into who i am.
i'm 30 years old, i won't be around forever, and this trip is sort of the accumulation of my life and choices so far; so, whatever happens to me or anyone of us later, this is happening right now and i am very happy and excited about it.
it was a pretty special moment for me and i'm glad it happened on new year's eve.

then we went out and partied.

thanks to all of you and happy new year!

off to Hong Kong tomorrow; so stoked!

p.s. a lot of Chinese people walk down the street softly singing to themselves

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