Ni hao！I’ve finally arrived in Beijing and been able to get this posted!

Beijing is a busy town! There’s almost constant traffic on every street, if not by car, then by foot or bike. Every store is almost always busy, and at their busiest, you can have over two hundred people crammed into one store or restaurant.

One of the interesting parts of being in Beijing is walking past all the street vendors. I’ve seen Olympic merchandise, books in English and Chinese, jewelry, fruits, vegetables, nuts and even some toy cars.

Another thing is that there are very few actual swinging doors in China; most stores either have sliding doors or heavy plastic curtains to keep the air-conditioning in. Oddly enough, at least in this part of Beijing, there are very few bugs; only ants, mosquitoes and butterflies.

However, there is one bad thing about Beijing that’s noticeable from the start; the smog. While it usually doesn’t impede breathing directly, the visibility across town is quite reduced. Beijing is working on cleaning up in time for the 2008 Summer Olympics; I hope they succeed, as being able to see across Beijing from the top of Beijing Language and Culture University’s administration building would be quite nice!

Five Chinese words/phrases for you:

1) 好久不见！Hao jiu bu jian! (pronounced How jeu boo jen) Literally translated, it means “Long time no see”. Recognize that? America got the saying from China!

2) 自行车。Zixing che (pronounced zee-hsing chuh) Bicycle.

3) 走。Zou. (pronounced zoh) Walk.

4) 汽车。Qiche (This one’s rather tough as well; it sounds like a cross between a q and a ch. The best pronunciation spelling I can think of is qhi-che.) Car.

5) 中国。Zhongguo (pronounced Zzhong-gwo) Translated literally, it means “Middle Kingdom”. It’s the Chinese name for their own country.

Until next time,

再见！

-Tom Brown