Accepted

I spent all day Saturday with one of my students, who invited me to a college fair at a downtown hotel. The day started off well when I checked my e-mail to find a message from the University of Colorado at Boulder saying the school has granted her admission. It was nice when I met her dad to be able to say, “Nice to meet you – by the way, your daughter has been accepted to college.”

After the fair we went to Jingshan Park and Beihai Park, both ancient imperial gardens. During a peasant revolt in 1644, the last Ming emperor hanged himself in Jingshan Park when it became clear that it was over for him anyway. At Beihai Park, I randomly ran into someone from my Chinese class at McGill (amazing that I recognized anyone from that class, considering how often I went, and remembered his name; even more amazing that he remembered mine). We’re having dinner this week.

We had then planned to take a driving tour around Tiananmen Square, but traffic was bad due to the “two meetings” in progress – the National People’s Congress and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress. Police brought traffic to a halt on our side of the street so the other side would be clear for party officials leaving that day’s session. We waited about 20 minutes until several charter buses drove by in the opposite direction. I observed that they were mostly empty, but my student wasn’t surprised.

“They are the important people in China,” she said with unusual force and resentment. “So they can waste the resources.”

We continued on to her apartment, where I met her mother and we chatted before going to dinner at a Sichuan restaurant.

On Sunday Niall and I had dinner at Beijing’s first Ethiopian restaurant, which opened last week.

China Fun Fact: Beijing’s subway network set a new one-day record two weeks ago, with 3.5 million passenger trips (Washington, D.C. tops out at about 800,000).