Tianqi hen hao

沒有人要跟我談談 :( .

It's pretty ok in Beijing right now, the weather is abnormally awesome. Last night I was even cold and I saw an awesome dark blue sky, that was the result of an extremely random 20 minute rain. Oh China and it's weather altering means of clearing up the sky. So what I hear about it is that the Chinese government has control over its skies and can induce rain or whatever it want with intentions to clear up the weather after or to clean the streets or something, weird huh?

Anyway, the weather has been incredibly clear. I am including in this the time that I went to the Great Wall and saw the most amazing night sky in a long time. Because we were in an incredibly rural area away from the cities, there was little interference in the sky with city lights. I swear I saw every single constellation and named every formation in the sky that I could, which is limited to the Big Dipper, the Northern Star, ummm Orion's Belt, and...the...MoooOOon!

The moon was very bright, Tammy showed me this awesome trick she found out on the camera. She explained to me the mechanics of the aperture or light intake or some shit but I forgot because I am camera illiterate, but pretty much the camera takes a long time to take a picture so if you are aimed at the moon and move the camera around while it is taking the picture, it makes cool shapes that looks like spilled glow stick. Just like this:

It was hard to be precise in what I was trying to draw. It didn't really turn out to look like anything.

Look above my head to see the moon :)

In any case, the weather has been amazing and I have been able to see much more at night even comparative to the states where all the AMAZING city lights block all the stars and such.

ACADEMICS
In class, we just had our first examination, which included a written (not bad) and a spoken/oral (horrible). My ear is just not used to listening to fast Chinese, whereas I feel the people with a Taiwanese or Hong Kong background (having guang dong hua or pu tong hua spoken at home) have a huge advantage over me. Laa! I will just have to listen in on locals' conversations.

We're going to go shopping today nearby the Dongwuyuan Zoo, maybe we'll even go into the zoo to see the sad pandas. Don't think it'll be as exciting as my sister's monkey expeditions.