Phil’s blog

My schedule has stabilized these past few weeks and I’m pretty happy with it. My Monday-Saturday routine goes something like this:

• 7:50 - Wake up
• 8:00 - Go to the gym
  • 15 minutes of qigong
  • 15 minutes of stretching
  • v-situps, wushu style
  • 40 minutes of either lifting or swimming, alternating each day
• 9:30 - Return to the apartment, eat a bowl of oatmeal, and start work
• 12:30 - Lunch. We used to order delivery from a nearby restaurant but this week we started hiring a cook to come to our apartment to prepare meals. It’s a bit more expensive than ordering from the restaurant but it’s also less salty and greasy and there’s more variety of ingredients, so for me it’s totally worthwhile. After lunch it’s back to work.
• 7-8ish - Dinner. We usually eat at a nearby restaurant, sometimes order, and sometimes I cook. I’d like to just eat leftovers from lunch if possible but I’m not sure if we can ask the cook to prepare that much food.
• 10ish - Mandarin lesson. Keen and I have an agreement to do a 30 minute Pimsleur lesson every night, but so far we’ve only had about a 50% success rate. With each missed night we throw 10 RMB into a pot. Maybe we need to raise the stakes.
• 11ish - Chat with Justine, do personal email, catch up on news and blogs.
• 12-1ish - Sleep.

On Sundays we try to get out but sometimes work straight through if there’s a close deadline or if someone is visiting for work. So there’s a lot of work going on but I really don’t mind it, in fact I look forward to starting work every day. This is why I’m here!

Yesterday I went hiking on the Great Wall with Keen, Clement, and Clement’s friend Sheng. Our segment took about 4 hours and consisted almost entirely of climbs and descents, some of which were treacherously steep and broken. I actually slipped on some loose rocks and fell on my butt at one point going downhill, but I was fine. It’s supposed to be a less touristy area but we still passed the occasional hiker, all of whom were foreign - especially from France and England. The only Chinese people we encountered were selling drinks and souvenirs. They’d stake out places in towers where hikers would have just ascended steep sections of the wall. Some were persistent and one lady followed us and talked to us for at least 5 minutes until we took a break, at which point she tried selling us water, coke, a t-shirt, a book about the wall, postcards, and bracelets. We bought the water and the coke so she’d leave us alone. The most interesting part of the trip for me was seeing an old man herding goats on a hill next to the wall. He stopped on the wall to talk to us for a while (well, to talk to Clement in Chinese). He was curious about where we were from and said he was 78 years old and told Clement a bit about his 2 sons. He was the only Chinese person there that didn’t try to sell us anything :]

More photos from the Great Wall.