okay i'm going to stop talking about whether blogspot is up or down, because today it is up again, but who knows about tomorrow. it's frustrating living with this uncertainty, but that's the life i chose when i moved to china. anywho, last night i went to the chabad seder to be a jew. i mean, i am a jew, but this was the first service i've been to in Beijing. it was cool to see how many jews we have up in here, and there are probably even more that just have their seders at home. i think we're probably secretly running China just like we run the US. the service was long and boring and used lots of melodies that i didn't know, just like every time i go to a service that is more conservative than good old Brooklyn Heights Synagogue. so overall, i guess i'd say i wasn't wild about it. and it cost 150 kuai! i may be jewish, but i am not made of money! sorry, i dunno why i can't stop making cracks about jews. i made jokes through the entire service. anyway, the most eventful occurrence of the evening was that i learned that "next year in jerusalem" doesn't mean what i thought it did. first of all, i thought it was just a private joke with my family until i saw it in the haggadah. and second of all, i thought that it meant like when you weren't really going to do something. like you'd say, "oh yeah we should go to that exhibit some time." and then i'd say, "yeah, right. next year in jerusalem." fyi, that is wrong.
another realization- this morning as my bus pulled into our complex, i looked at the sign on the first building that we always pass when we enter, which says "tnaruatser faelder." i was wondering what that could mean, and tried to read the chinese above it to see if it was a restaurant like the building next to it. as i translated the chinese, i realized that the sign said Red Leaf Restaurant backwards. haha.
also, my plans for travel are becoming quite finalized, which i'm super excited about. i already have my tickets to fly to bangkok on april 23 and then to Kunming, Yunnan on May 2. From there, we are going to work our way up to the top of Yunnan and then fly to Lhasa on May 21, hit up a bunch of Tibet hotspots and take the train home to Beijing on June 1. Hooray! i'll try to update on the road, or else i'll just do one huge ass one with lots of pictures when i get back. either way, we all win.