Sandstorm

Friday is our last day of gym membership. I am of two minds about this. Of course, it's the best ever excuse not to go to the gym - not belonging to it - and that's always handy, but on the other hand I hate the thought of my somewhat obsessive compulsive schedule being disrupted. Furthermore, that will be the end of my free internet access. I am such a first-world brat to be so put out about having to pay to go online. "It's good that you can't use the net," said one of my teachers today. "You can use that time for studying!" Clearly she has never spent seven months in a foreign country where she doesn't speak the language, thousands of miles from everyone she knows. If she had, she would understand the importance of Cat and Girl.

Sandstorm the other day, which is much less exciting than it sounds. I remember before I came to Beijing I checked the weather forcast and was warned of "smoke." "Smoke" is not weather, people. (You can tell because weather changes, but the smoke, or more accurately smog, is a constant fixture.) The sandstorm took place while we were sleeping, and now everything is covered in a thick layer of yellowish dust. It's pretty gross, but Beijing is a dirty city and that's all there is to it. The sand-sweeping women (mentioned in an earlier post) are nowhere to be seen.

Here's something you may have wondered: how do the Chinese type? No, they do not have enormous keyboards with thousands of keys. Instead, they just type the pinyin (Romanization) of each word and the computer suggests characters. The computers here at the gym do this all the time by default, and I have to remember to switch to English settings to use them. Here's my email address in Chinese: 欸流通热·厄脉络。粟米谈话。恶毒。 Isn't that neat?

My roommate has been watching a lot of Oprah lately. A friend in America sent Zhu Meina a 20th Anniversary box set and it's been very popular. Have you ever seen that show? It's strangely compelling. It makes me want to make a billion dollars so I can give people stuff. It also makes me want a makeover, but not an eighties makeover. The eighties are really big in China at the moment (because they were busy doing other things during the real 80s, I suppose) and everywhere you go you see people with big hair and neon pink cowboy boots and I don't know what-all. I'm terrified to try to get a haircut - I know a girl who got mulleted, and bad. That could have been me. I'm sticking with the ponytail.