Mao Mi in Beijing: Last Night in Beijing

It's hard to believe, but tonight is my last night in Beijing. But before I'm done I still have to pack, do a blog entry for class, go to our banquet dinner tonight, and sleep enough so that I make up for staying up all last night to finish a paper that was due this morning. Ahhhhh.

Since I last updated, I visited the Temple of Heaven, haggled for $8 (59 yuan) fake Converse at the Pearl Market, ate at Pizza Hut, had Little Sheep hot pot for the second time, revisited the hutong between Ghost Street and HouHai, went the State Council of Information Office, had dance battles at Propaganda, heard William Farris from Google give a presentation, wrote a paper, gave two in-class presentations, had some quasi-dim sum, and visited some Olympic sites, not necessarily in that order. And I'm sure there's a bunch that I forgot.

Lots of interesting stuff, especially at the SCIO (basically the state's PR/propaganda machine) and the Olympic areas (specifically the International Broadcast Center and the Main Press Center). In terms of the SCIO, it was interesting to see how their spokesperson strategically used the language barrier, which seemed largely manufactured since he spoke to us in English by the end of the info session, to sort of carefully control the flow of information as we asked him questions. Definite highlight of talking with the Olympics spokesperson was when someone asked him what would be the sort of worst case scenario for him in terms of managing the two media centers once everything is in full on Olympic mode, and how would he respond? His answer was power outage, which, while simple, makes perfect sense. And how would he respond? He pointed to the window behind him and said he'd just end it. It sounds kind of morbid writing it, but it was hilarious at the time, I guess mostly because of his tone which I won't even try to replicate here.

And now, of course, for photos.

Outside the Silk Market (not where I bought my fake shoes)