Houhai, Sanlitun, and Coffeenie

This post is going to be about my weekend. On Friday, I had plans with a couple other people to go back to the 798 District (Beijing's art district). However, those plans were foiled by our general unwillingness to go all the way across town to one of the outer ring roads. Therefore, we decided to take a local bus to see a movie, with we being me, Isabel, Conrad, Alex, and Lizzie. There were some other people too, but they split off. We arrived at the movie theater and bought tickets to Elysium. We heard it was about class struggle, but it turned out to be mostly about really violent physical struggles. About 20 minutes before the movie ended, we got fed up with the whole thing and left, only to return 5 minutes later because we realized how close the movie was to ending. After that, we went to a really cute restaurant called Der Hut where the service and food were both awesome and the grand total for a five person meal was $12.58 USD. After dinner, Isabel and I split from the group, intending to go to Jessica's house, but eventually ending up at Houhai to meet a bunch of other people. We went back to Isabel's house, changed clothes, and sloshed through the pouring rain in order to get to Houhai. Once at Houhai, we struggled to find a taxi that would take us to meet our friends. The taxi that took us only took us because we jumped into the cab nearly before the other guy got out (perks of being a white person in Beijing). After some serious communication issues, we ended up at the south entrance of Houhai. Our directions were to meet at the local Starbucks (Xinbake); a group of locals thought it would be funny to give us wrong directions. Luckily, we ran into some friendlier people who pointed us the correct way. We arrived at Starbucks just in time to see the majority of the people we had come to meet decide to go home. However, with the people that stayed (in total it was me, Michael, Isabel, Zach, Erik, and Jessica T), we walked around for about an hour and then headed home on the subway after failing to procure a cab. I'm definitely planning on returning to Houhai; the view is incredible there. After I got home, I Skyped my friend Mia.

On Saturday, I woke up and Skyped with my friend Alison, then met up with a bunch of other people (Erik, Nina, Jessica T, Jessica P, Will, Zach, Michael, Reid, and John) to go find a fake Chipotle restaurant we'd heard about. We wandered near somewhere called the U-Center for about 20 minutes without finding the rumoured restaurant, and ultimately ended up at the mall in a Korean restaurant. After lunch, I went back to school and met up with Maya, Conrad, and Lizzie and we went to Sanlitun, which was awesome and which has lots of awesome foreigner fare (ex. burgers) and fun shopping. We then just walked around Sanlitun taking pictures. We walked up to the top of the Adidas building and looked at the view (which was gorgeous) and then walked down and across the street to watch some people roller-blading and take more pictures. All in all, it was a good day/night.

On Sunday, I went to Jessica P's family friend's coffee shop with Erik, Michael, Jessica T, Jessica P, and Nina. The coffee shop is called Cofeenie. I finished nearly all my math homework and rediscovered my love for iced lattes, then went home. It was a quiet day, but it was nice.