Just a mess of things

Ahh! Where to begin?? The last few weeks have flown by and been packed full of fun things so I'll try to keep things organized and cover everything.
Two weeks ago, my friend from WashU, John, and his friend Billy from NYU came to visit. They'd been on a world tour to celebrate their graduation and had already been to Figi, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, and India. In an attempt to help them save some money, I let them stay in our apartment: one on the couch, and one on an air mattress from Walmart (Wa Er Ma). It was great to have them here and have a week long sleep over party, but unfortunately I had to work most of the time and didn't get to show them around. I did, however, write down some key terms in Billy's notebook so that they could show cab drivers. Before they came, I had written John a long email with instructions to get to my apartment, which is a little bit hard to explain since most taxi drivers haven't heard of the building itself or the road that it's on. Usually I tell them to go to a road that's nearby, and then hope that they know where the Walmart is, and if not then a certain subway stop. If I can get them that far, then I have to tell them to make a U turn at a certain intersection and then to go down a smaller street. You can imagine how hard this would be to write down in any language, so I had about a paragraph to send to him so that he could print it out and hopefully find the place alright. Unfortunately, he couldn't find a printer in the Indian internet cafes, so he ended up taking a digital picture of the email on the computer screen and showing that to the poor confused cab driver when he got to Beijing. It all ended up working out okay in the end, but they did have a few frustrating encounters with cab drivers who were afraid to take foreigners because they couldn't communicate. Nick was also very sweet and took them around a few times when he didn't have to be working. I had a lot of fun with them on their visit and hopefully they did too.
Last week my dad was also in town for business so I got to see him a few times. He took me and all my friends out to dinner one night at his hotel which was fun. He came in to have lunch with me at Microsoft one day and chatted up my cube mates, who hadn't realized that I was half Chinese. They got a big kick out of that and now often explain to me why I like certain things based on the area that my dad said our family is from. "Oh you probably like fish because they have a lot of fish up there." "You won't like this because it's spicy and people from that area don't eat a lot of spicy food" Funny that a place that I maybe went once when I was 4 can determine so many things about me.
Last weekend Lauren and I went to Hong Kong. We left on Thursday night and flew into Shenzhen, which is right across the border to Hong Kong. After a very confusing bus ride, where we had to get out multiple times to walk through customs and whatnot, we ended up in a beautiful hotel on the Kowloon side, called the Shangrila hotel. On Friday, we got dim sum at a very nice hotel on Hong Kong island near Central and then did a bit of shopping. After buying some nice flip flops, we made our way up to the peak on the peak tram - a very cool, but rickety tram that goes up to the highest point on Hong Kong island. It's pulled up a very steep slope by a thick cable, which is scary, but you get a beautiful view of the city, the harbor, and the beautiful, green rolling hills around it. On top of the peak is a mall and a bunch of pretty restaurants and stores that overlook this spectacular view. Lauren has a special passion for sour candy, which Hong Kong happens to have a lot of, so we each got a bag and sat up in a nice air conditioned Starbucks to enjoy the scenery. After that we went back to the Kowloon side and caught a showing of the new "Sex and the City" movie, which we had been dying to see but wasn't showing in China. We figured that it could count as our "American" activity for celebrating the 4th of July. When that was over we stopped by a small, very authentic Indian restaurant for dinner. Hong Kong is apparently known for having very good curry, so that had been one of the important things to cover on our list. Later that night we headed over to the most famous bar street and took a look around. It happened to be a much older crowd, so we felt a little out of place and didn't stay long, but I'm glad we saw it at least. On Saturday, we met up with one of Lauren's Rice friends who lives in Hong Kong and she took us shopping at some of the cheaper, local markets. We found a lot of cool little trinkets and also grabbed some dim sum for lunch. Later that day we met up with another one of her Rice friends who lives in Hong Kong and she took us to a nice, newish street of restaurants on the Kowloon side. We got a very good Chinese dinner, and then she took us to a local dessert place that has a large quantity of my favorite type of dessert: Mango. We each got some sort of assortment of Mango pudding, ice cream, and fruit pieces with tapioca and other yummy things and then rode the Star Ferry across the beautiful, city lit harbor. We got back to Beijing around 7 on Sunday evening, saw our first woman Beijing taxi driver, and came back to get ready for work the next morning.
Work has been going well and has gotten a lot busier for me lately. The device library website that I've been working on is only used by the Mobile Technology Center here in Beijing and handles about 40 devices. One of the device library administrators recently went to Redmond and showed someone involved with keeping track of devices there, who then asked my mentor if they could use some version of our website too. They then sent me a database full of information that was organized completely differently and had different types of things in it for about 10,000 devices. It was a little overwhelming at first, but I eventually got everything organized in our database structure, and am working on a version of our site that is fitted more towards their needs. It's a much larger scale project and has been pretty exciting. I also had not really done much work with web development or databases before so I'm learning a lot. My usability testing has been kind of slow to evolve but should pick up this week. I hope.
This weekend, the boys decided it would be fun to do some Karaoke, so we rented a room at "Party City," which looks a lot like a 5 star hotel, but is actually all Karaoke, or "KTV" as the Chinese call it. You can rent a room that has a whole KTV set up in it for your party and then stay there for some number of hours while enjoying their complementary buffet, soda and tea. We had a lot of fun and found that they had a bunch of good American songs in their system. The funny thing is, instead of using the real music videos, for some reason they have other videos that they either made or found that look like they were made in the 80s by the clothes and actions of the people. Also, sometimes they try to make it related to the song but it seems like they didn't quite understand what the song meant - For example, in one of the songs it kept saying "I want my baby back" and there was a video of an infant crawling around on the screen. Nick, Vinod, and Brian got especially into their singing and ended the night with raspy voices, but high spirits none-the-less.
Today we decided to explore an area that Nick had heard about called "Ox Street," or directly translated from Chinese - "Cow Street." It's supposed to have a lot of Muslim stores and restaurants, as well as a mosque. When we found the mosque, which looked a lot like a Chinese style temple and courtyard complex, there was a large sign that said: "No shorts or skirts." Right when we were about to leave because we had all come wearing shorts, a little Muslim Chinese man came out and told us to come back, and quickly showed us that he had loose, blue flower printed long pants, skirts, and shawls for us to wear. We walked around, clad in our new floral outfits, and enjoyed the beautifully and intricately painted buildings and took pictures with a bunch of Chinese, Muslim men who were hanging out outside the worshiping area. On our way out, the man who had lent us the pants and skirts taught the boys how to make "Tai Chi" poses and we got a few pictures with him.
That's about all I've been up to, but I'll talk a little more about what my friends have been doing. First of all, I should introduce our new friend Susan, who I met on her first day on the job as a design intern at Microsoft. She's also from the Seattle area and graduated from Forest Ridge, which is the small, all girls school I went to for 5th-8th grade. She went there from 7th grade through 12th grade, so we were there for one year at the same time but we didn't know each other. Small world. She goes to UCLA and is now working for the Mobile Technology Center on a cinematic approach to user interface design, whatever that means. It's been a lot of fun to have her here hanging out with us for the last couple weeks. Jaimie has been working on a video that the PR department at Microsoft is making for some sort of anniversary, or maybe Bill Gate's retirement.. I forget exactly... but she's been working in different locations around the city, coaching people on their English and filming them talking about how Microsoft is so amazing and is shaping the future and so on. She says the filming process is very tiring, but it sounds cool and she'll probably have some interesting things to show for it in the end. Brian has been working for a travel website called Here is China, finding companies to advertise on the site and interviewing people for a blog that he posts. I'll try to find a link and post it next time. His job sounds very interesting and he gets to go around the city and talk to a lot of people. Vinod has been working for a company that distributes educational tapes around China. His internship started out a bit slow, but he's been getting to do some accounting work for them, which has kept him pretty busy. Brian and Vinod are also going to Shanghai this coming weekend to travel a bit. Lauren had a bit of a rough week, but her job is shaping up to be very interesting. Her mentor, who lived in Houston for a while, has given her a lot of interesting reading material, and has had her help him with some important presentations and translations. She has gotten to meet a lot of the partners and go to interesting lunches and conferences. Yesterday she went to a big dinner with the Rice alumni group here in Beijing because the president of Rice and his wife were in town visiting. Nick has been doing a fair amount of teaching in the last few weeks. Although his schedule isn't very regular, he has a few students with whom he meets pretty frequently. Most of them are studying English in order to prepare to study abroad or to get ready for some sort of English test that they need to pass. He tutors them all over the city, in his apartment, in theirs, in restaurants, etc. A lot of times he gets a good, free meal out of the deal, which is also a plus. His students have been very enthusiastic to learn English and get used to American accents as well as learn more about American culture. Often they just pick a few topics to discuss and he helps them learn to converse more easily and fluidly and also get more confidence in their English. Most Chinese people in Beijing have studied English since they were very young, but only from Chinese teachers, and mostly in the form of drills and essay writing. This makes them fairly insecure about their ability to actually have conversations and he said that sometimes the first few times they meet, it's hard to get them speaking at all. It has been very satisfying for him, though, to see their progress and watch their confidence rise.
Okay, well that's all I can write about for now, I'll write again soon so keep checking and, as always, feel free to comment and ask questions or anything. Hope everything is going well, and I'd love to get emails or updates on what you're up to!

Love,
Emily

P.S. I'll put pictures up soon to go along with this, so check back. It will be more fun once they're up!