Back home in Beijing - June 25-29, 2012

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Alright some belated news for you all!



I arrived back in Beijing on Monday, June 25 in the afternoon. I returned to the Long Xuan hotel – aka home – and got myself re-settled. For dinner, I met up with Liz and Fernanda at a local restaurant. We ended up eating Chinese style – getting lots of dishes to share and having way too much food. Apparently the two bonded over a love of food in my absence and this is now a common dinner ritual for them.



Tuesday I returned to work at CAUPD. I was given an assignment (yay!) to research Canadian cities that are similar to Hai Ning to use as case studies in the Master Plan. I’ve been actually working hard researching Mississauga and trying to think of other cities to use. Chinese cities are so, so big – it’s sad to think Mississauga is our six-largest city at 700,000 people when there are countless cities in China you’ve never heard of with millions of people.



Tuesday evening I relaxed – it’d been a long time traveling and it’s nice to just be home.



Wednesday I decided I needed exercise. I went skating in the afternoon then went to frisbee in the evening. I felt great after!



Thursday, Fernanda and I went out for dumplings at the local mall and discussed our travel plans for after we finish work at CAUPD. We spend soo many hours discussing this pretty much every day. It’s a lot to plan out 4 weeks of travel!



Friday evening Fernanda and I had dinner with a co-worker of ours from USC, Alexandra, and two other USC students. Alexandra is working down in Haikou, a city in the provice of Hainan in Southern China, at a resort. She’s helping develop a marketing plan to attract Westerners to the resort. (Currently Sanya, on the southern side of Hainan, is the bigger tourist destination.) She came up to Beijing for the weekend to do some tourism. We took them out to the Beijing noodle house near our hotel because really it’s where you need to go when you visit BJ! It was sooo delicious.



After dinner, Dave (from my Shanghai and Nanjing stories) came up to Beijing. He decided sort of last minute to make the trek up. Fernanda, Jeff and I had plans to go to the Great Wall so he decided to join in though he barely saw any of Beijing as a result.



Anyways that’s my short entry for now. Great Wall and Canada Day stories are coming up! It was nice to spend a week doing not much of anything after all my travels! And it’s of course nice to be back home in BJ :)




-Dafne

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