Huang Shan

i am playing around with Youtube.com again, so here is another video. this is a video from a trip we took to Huang Shan (the Yellow Mountains) over Chinese new year 2005 (a year ago).

another sunday at the park

this looks a lot like last weekends post. it was the same crew, another sunday afternoon at the park, though a different park. it was super crowded this day, as you can kind of see from the picture. we were especially lazy this day.

something you will only hear in china

"Oh, man!! I accidentally bought the green tea toothpaste!"

-Fredrik, last night at about 11pm

spring in shanghai

i know this is late, but i really wanted to blog about our weekend, LAST weekend. people sometimes ask what we do for fun in Shanghai, so here is one example. last weekend was the first warm weekend of the year, and it kind of had that affect that spring has on students at CU in Boulder - on the first warm day, you see everyone out on the grass just soaking up the rays. so we had to get out and enjoy it. it had to be at least 80.

so saturday i had a bball game at 10am at a gym way down on the other side of town. so SR and i make it just in time (SR is one of the head cheerleaders for our team) and we only have 5 guys. but anyway, we pulled out a win (for the record, my line was 8 pts, 10 boards, 2 assists, 1 steal; the league keeps stats). then SR and i went for a hair wash to freshen up. this is a common thing in China. the barbershops all offer hair washes and shoulder and head massages. it is great. costs about $1 usually. so after getting cleaned up we went to one of our favorite restaurants for a good American breakfast. after some impromptu shopping and some japanese tepanyaki for dinner, we headed home.

that night we went out to an old warehouse near Suzhou creek that runs through shanghai to see a show. shanghai has some pretty good nightlife, and even though we dont get out too often, we like to go see a band every once in a while. the show was pretty good, but the cops showed up after awhile because it was too loud i guess. it is easy to forget you are living in a one-party communist country a lot of the time, and china is doing a lot to open itself up, but things like rock concerts in old warehouses are probably still difficult for the local police to understand. so we took off after the music stopped.


sunday the weather was beautiful, so i got to work trying to put together a trip to a park to throw the frisbee and kick the soccer ball. i rallied the troops and we headed out to Chang Feng park near my old university ECNU. but when the weather gets nice in shanghai, EVERYONE goes out to the park. and chang feng park is now free, so it was completely covered up, plus they have taken out most of the open grassy areas to build new buildings. so we instead ended up on a field at ECNU. it ended up being very nice. we threw the disk, and taught our swedish roommate fredrik how to play american football.
We then got Korean for dinner.