North Korea

This post is incomplete, you may want to wait untill it is finished to read it, but it doesn’t matter.

My trip to Dandong began late two nights ago.  At 10:45 PM we went to the train station to get on the train that left at 11:30.  The train was really nice because everyone had their own bed and there was air conditioning.  Having an overnight train is great because all you do is go to sleep and you’ve instantly arrived at your destination.  The only problem is we arrived at 5 AM and everything was still closed.  We went to the park and ate the snacks and bread that we had brought with us as breakfast.  It was a really cool park because it was on the river that borders North Korea,  but there was a really thick fog in the morning so you could only see a couple hundred meters in front of you.  After eating we walked along the edge of the river ad realized we we really close to where we wanted to go, the one and a half bridges to Korea.  One of the bridges was blown up by American planes in the Korean war.  The half bridge is the one that you can walk out onto to look at North Korea and the full one is for trains.  The full one was kinda spooky because it disappeared into the fog and you couldn’t see North Korea.

I have to go to Beijing now, so this post will be finished later…

Island

The trip getting to the Island was not very fun at all.  We left the house at around 5 in the morning and took a cab to a nearby park.  There lined up were about a dozen tour buses.  We got on the one going to Dalian (the rest were going to other places).  It really reminded me of all the Chinese tourists in the states who drive around on tour buses and get out to take pictures of squirrels.  I was going with my American friend’s family.  When we first got on the bus the bus driver was surprised to a white person on the trip and asked us if we had gotten on the correct bus and that he was happy we were coming along.  While it was a pretty nice bus (it had air conditioning) the sitting situation was not very comfortable.  I usually think I am pretty good sleeper; I always am able to fall asleep on airplanes.  But this bus was very uncomfortable with no easy place to rest your head or arms.  Once we got off the bus in Dalian we went into a ferry station that wasn’t near the water.  We had to wait around there for another 45-60 minutes and then then shuffled us out through some doors into an outdoor passageway where we got onto a bus to take us to the ferry docks which were out on a spit of land about 2 kilometers off shore.  When we got to the ferry, it looked large enough and nice enough, but there was a crowd of Asian people standing around it.  When they let us board there was a massive rush with everyone trying to claim a seat.  We ended up only getting one seat and we all just piled out bags on it and went to stand outside.  It was a one hour ferry ride and wasn’t all too bad;I was just disappointed I didn’t get a seat.

The Island was really cool once we got there.  It was just bug enough to have a couple taxis of their own and had a surprisingly lot of farmland.  It looked like they all had corn growing in them.  I learned that the tour group that we rode in the bus with was staying with us for the whole trip, including the bus driver.  They brought us to our hotel, which was some farm people house who were trying to make some extra money.  Each family had their own room and the place wasn’t that bad except it had one toilet and shower for each sex and the beds consisted of a blanket over a large wooden rectangle.  For dinner we had ALL seafood.  I tried most of the things, but especially enjoyed my bowl of plain rice.  I think it was the best dish they served (and that’s saying something important).  After dinner we took a walk down a road with a bunch of farm houses.  Outside each of them they had a 5 foot by 5 foot concrete pig pen with two pigs in them.  Some of them had extra pens with either ducks or chickens in them.  I almost felt sorry for the pigs because they got no exercise and had to lie around in their own filth all day.  After this, I learned how to play Mahjong.  The table they had in the “hotel” was really cool because it was automated and you pressed a button to roll the dice and if you pressed another the circle in the middle would come up and you would push all the tiles into it.  All the tiles had a magnet in them, so inside they table they would be shuffled and then set in long rows and would rise up out of the table ready for use.  And they were three different sets of tiles, so you would never have to wait for any to be shuffled and lined up.

Around eight O’clock at night the tour guide came to our room and told us we couldn’t stay in the hotel.  So, Scott (the other American kid) and I went to the police station to register that we were staying the night on the island and then went to stay in a different hotel that was attached to the police station.  Then, Scott’s host family went back to the original hotel.  Apparently all of the foreigners had to stay in this hotel.  We even met one American guy.  He was extremely weird and seemed like a real jerk.  When we asked him why he was in China he said “Only, to build the worlds largest construction project.” And when we asked him what it was he just said he was showing them how to build country clubs and golf courses.  He was also there with this lady who looked like his translator and he was really weird towards her too.  She was obviously told to stay with him to translate, but he kept making remarks like “Hey, do you wanna go down to the beach and grab some wine?”  To which she had to politely decline.  Some of the Americans that come to China are just the ones that don’t fit in back home. (AND I DID SAY SOME OF THE AMERICANS, NOT ALL, SO I DON’T NEED ANY FUNNY COMMENTS).

The next morning we took a walk on the beach before we left.  And I forgot to mention this earlier, but there were a ton of fishing boats moored out in the water off the island.  On the beach (the parts with tons of large rocks) there were shell things that looked likes clams, but you would take a screwdriver and pry it open and eat the thing inside.  I opened many of them, but only tasted one, and didn’t eat the whole thing.

Today was our last day of school where we have class.  Tomorrow we have out goodbye ceremony and all of the guys are demonstrating taiji.  It seems like another embarrassing video will be coming home with me.  Also, today we met a guy from the American council who is working on relations with the Northeastern part of China.  When you say it like that it might not sound that impressive, but the way he put it to make it sound good was that if the area represented in China was it’s own country, it would be the worlds 9th largest country.

This afternoon, three of my friends and I planned a trip to Dandong, which is a port city.  We will leave tomorrow afternoon and go by train.  The sole reason that we want to go to Dandong is because it is next to North Korea.  There is a bridge that goes to North Korea and there is a half of a bridge that was blown up in the Korean War (or as they call it the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea).  It’s about a six hour train ride to get there, we’ll spend six hours there, and then it will take about 10 hours to get back because we will have to go through Shenyang and switch trains.  They also have a museum for the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea which looks interesting.  There is a portion of the Great Wall too, but if you go there it says they have a sign saying not to cross this small stream and they have North Korean guard houses close by watching.  Apparently Westerners are not allowed to swim in the river, but if we were you are able to swim all the way across, as long as you don’t get out of the water because the whole river is the border, not the middle of  the river.  They do have boat tours to get a closer look at North Korea too.  It seems like it will be a fun trip and something not everyone gets to do.  If I wasn’t American I would be able to take a guided tour into North Korea, which would also be really cool.

This Last Weekend

Last weekend was my birthday.  Since I was going to go on a trip on Saturday and Sunday, my host family decided to give me a birthday party with my friends on Friday after school.  I was able to invite 8 of my classmates over and we had cake, went to a Korean BBQ restaurant, and then went to KTV. And they took LOTS of group pictures.  Overall it was pretty fun, but it might have needed a little less pictures.

Then, on Saturday and Sunday all of the 16 American students went on a trip to Benxi.  There were also Americans on the trip who were teaching teachers English in No. 1 high school.  They are here for six weeks on a program called English Language In China or something along those lines.  They were mainly people who remind me of Grandpa Saunders who do elder hostels.  When we were on the bus we drove past Benxi and kept going and went to a city that I’m not sure of the name, I think it’s called Huanren, but I’m not sure.  The first thing we did was visit the largest artificial lake in Liaoning Province.  It is called Dragon Lake and doesn’t offer much to look at except for some mountains in the distance.  It looked like it was about 20 feet too low.  After the lake, we went into a cave.  It was really nice because it was freezing cold.  Very few places in China offer good air conditioning, so this was a welcome event.  The cave was a pretty standard cave with colorful lighting and towards the end it became very narrow and had creaky staircases of a couple pieces of metal stuck together.  After exiting the cave you come out in a different place halfway up a large hill/small mountain and for 30 yuan ($4.60) you can take a zip-line down.  It was really cool; it went across a river and over the treetops and at the end they grabbed you before you slammed into the mat.  After going to the cave we went to out hotel and were able to walk around and go shopping.  We found a movie store where you can buy a two disc set of 14 movies for 10 yuan ($1.55) and they were recent movies like Green Hornet and old movies like Rambo.  And even though they probably only work in Chinese/international DVD players we have watched a bunch of them in school and it has been worth it. The next day we climbed a really tall/steep mountain.  It had stone stair going straight up the side and took about 30 minutes to climb after a 30 minutes bus ride up the other part of the mountain.  Once we got to the top we had a really cool view of  a small valley with a couple of apartment complexes in it.  After this, we went to a winery and toured the factory and went to wine tasting.  The whole factory was empty and looked fairly new (compared to everything else in China).

Yesterday, Anshan had the worst rain of my whole visit so far. Since it was raining, my host brother and I decided to take a taxi to school (they’re also really cheap.  6 yuan ($0.93) to most places in the city).  The first route the taxi takes ends up in him stopping, backing up a few hundred meters, and then turning around.  The water in the intersection was probably at least 2 feet deep with water and had 6-8 tall waves running across it.  The taxi drivers shoes got wet because water starting leaking in through the floor of the car.  When the driver turned around he went a different route and ended up being stuck at another flooded intersection.  At this point the taxi driver gave up and kicked us out.  We crossed the intersection on foot at the shallowest part and the water was about halfway up my leg and my shoes were soaked.

Again yesterday, while walking around the shopping area, Scott and I found three AFS students who have been in Anshan for 5 months and will be staying for another 5 months.  When we had asked AFS earlier about students in Anshan, they had said they’re weren’t any and these kids were excited to see us.  One was from Hungary, one was from Costa Rica, and the other was from Columbia.  We talked with them for a couple of hours and learned more about Anshan.  Apparently, the night market is extremely cheap and what we have been considering cheap (60 yuan (~$10) for a pair of shoes) is not cheap at all.

Also yesterday, we also had a meeting with the mayor.  He came with the director of education and our schools principle to give a speech.  We all sat at a long table and I was directly across from the mayor.  It was fairly unexciting and they gave us books with paper cut-outs as gifts.  After our meeting, my friends host sibling told us that the mayor is corrupt and kicks people out of building with little compensation to make room for new developments.

This weekend I will be going to an Island about four hours away by bus and then 1 hour by boat.  It is with my friends host family and should prove to be exciting.

I don’t know why this didn’t publish (maybe it did).

The past week

In my last post I talked about the plans I had for that weekend.  It turned out not being as fun as it was planned to be.  On Friday, we went on a train to Dalian.  Once we got there we had to turn around because we were not supposed to be going on day trips with this program.  I made it to the front gates of the amusement park and had to turn around.  It was a total of 11 hours on a train for nothing and the train was very hot because it had ceiling fans in it and only about half of them were working.  The next day Saturday the school had planned us to go to a Model UN conference.  This was another pointless day.  We sat there for about 8 hours playing cards and reading books because the whole conference was conducted in Chinese and the only thing we did was standup in the beginning when they introduced us and take a picture with them.  They just needed us there to increase their diversity I guess.  And then on Sunday when I was supposed to go whitewater rafting, I wasn’t able to go (It was with my friends host family).  From his reports I am glad I didn’t go.  They were on a slow-moving river and they shot water guns at each other ad it was really hot.  It might sound nice, but it wasn’t.

This week we had another field trip planned by the school.  It was to go to the Opera.  When you hear that we are going to the opera you picture us going to a theater to watch people perform, right?  Well, that’s what I thought too and so did everyone else.  Instead we went to large theater like place and then went into a side room where they put makeup on people (including the guys) and then we put on very Chinese costumes.  So, there are some embarrassing pictures coming sometime in the future.  The whole thing was extremely embarrassing for all of the guys and I think most of the girls too.

Yesterday, I got to do something that I had wanted to try at least once in my life.  My friend, Scott, and I went to a restaurant to get dog meat.  It was at barbecue where you cook the meat in front of you.  The dog wasn’t bad, but it also wasn’t the best meat.  It was sort of dry, but was edible and wasn’t that bad thinking about Spin while eating it.  At the end we had some left over, so Scott asked for a Doggie Bag.

Later today I will be going to the hot springs.  I think it is about an hour away from the city by car.

I also forgot to add that I made the chocolate chip pancakes that I brought from the US this morning.  They weren’t the best pancakes I’ve ever made, but they were still good.  The bad part was I didn’t have any butter or syrup to go with them.  I think all the kids liked them though.  Both of the parents only had one each.

English test and future plans

Since I’ve visisted the jade buddha I haven’t been very busy.  Everyday I go to school and on most nights I go out to dinner with my family or with just my brother.  Everyday after school I go out my a couple of american kids ususally to a park or a shop to get snacks because the Chinese students don’t get out of school for another 2.5 hours after us.

The Chinese students are finishing up their school year now and are all having their final exams.  Today was the English test and they played the listening portion over the loud speakers for everyone to hear.  They were ont the sort of simple stories that you would expect for an English comprehension test.  One of them was about a girl who was raised by her grandmother and her grandmother allways rolled her own cigarettes, so one day when the grandma wasn’t home the girl rolled newspaper like a cigarette and them lit it and almost burnt her face.  She resolved never to smoke again.  Another story was about a person who was feeling sad that he failed his test, so a girl asks him why he was sad and he says that he got a B.  To cheer him up she invites him over to her house to watch a movie, but he declines and says he has to study.

I haven’t been doing much recently, but I am looking forward to my plans for the next couple of days.  Tomorrow I am going to Dalian with my host brother, his two friends and one of my friends.  It is about a 3 hour train ride and ours leaves at 4:10 tomorrow morning.   Which means I have to get up in about five hours.  The days after that, saturday, I am going to a model un at number 3 middle school (I go to number 9).  I’m not sure that it’s going to be very fun because they told us we wont do anything, but at least it wll be conducted in English.  And then the day after that I will go white water rafting with Scott’s host family.

The nice part is that everything is really cheap.  The round trip ticket to Dalian (3 hours each way) is about  40 yuan or $6.19.  Tonight my host brother and I ate dinner for about $5.42 (or 35 yuan) for both of us and had plenty of food left over.

I am begining to learn my way around the city alot more now.  I can get to school from anywhere within about three to five miles of it.  Which is the extent of places I’ve visited in Anshan.  In China it’s considered a small city, but still has about 3.6 million people.

Also, on a side note, Uncle Peter, they had Chicago on the national news here because they celebrated the 90th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party (On Jul 1st).

Ugh, spellcheck is not working right now, so I will go ahead and just post this.

Jade Buddha

Today instead of having out cultural lesson, we went to see the largest single piece of jade in the world.  It was a good field trip for a short time because we walked there from the school.  We walked through a nice park that is about a block away from the school and it has some lakes in it.  The lakes are extremely polluted and you can see about four inches down in them.  One of my classmates told me that about two people die each year because of an infection of some sort from the lake （I’m not sure I believe that), but we still saw tons of people swimming in it.  Once we got to the Jade Buddha area we all went in to a very traditional chinese looking building and saw large carvings of buddhas made out of jade.  After everyone took a picture of the main one in the center of the room they decided to tell us that it wasn’t the large piece.  Then, we walked over to a building that was at least four times as big as the last one.  On the way there they have a slanted carving of a dragon and you are supposed to stand at the base of it, facing away and toss a coin over your head and depending on where it lands it determines your future.  When I threw mine it landed on the heart of the dragon, so apparently that means I will become a boss.  When one of my friends threw theres it landed on the hand, so they are going to become rich.  Another good thing about going to a Buddhist(?) temple is that you get lots of free wishes.  When you are walking in to the building that has the large piece of jade, if it is your first time you have to walk in the left gate and you get a free wish, but if you are returning, you walk in the right gate and the middle gate was closed because only the monks are allowed to walk through it.  Also, when going into the first building with the “smaller” statues if you were a boy you had to go over the left side of the door and the girls had to go to the right.  When we got into to large jade buddha chamber there was a sign that said we couldn’t take pictures, so everyone secretly snuck photos and risked going to buddhist-hell, but then they came over and told us we were allowed to take pictures.  The whole piece of jade is about two stories tall and a couple hundred tonnes (I forget the exact measurements).  It was a nice color too, I think in total it had about three colors: the stereotypical blueish jade color, brown, and small streaks of white.  They said when they unearthed it they had no idea what color it was going to be, so it was a big relief when they found out it looked nice.  On the front of it is a large carving of a buddha and on the back is the carving of some female religious figure.  Apparently there is also a lot of symbolism in the carvings, but I didn’t see a lot of it.  For example, the tour guide said that you could see some chinese characters in the lines in the jade and that some parts of the statue were two colors and if you turn it upside down and squint your eyes you can maybe see a phoenix.  They also had two smaller shrines around the buddha.  The one that I went to look at was for the future buddha, so I got another free wish.  Along the second story balcony in the main building they also have large pieces of paper with chinese calligraphy and sayings/prayers （I assume) on them.  When we left the large buddha we went into a cave that was really cold.  They had about five hundred statues of former monks in it and it went on for at least a half a mile.  Some of the statues were really weird, but most of them were just normal.  One  of them was a guy sitting on a bear and one was holding a monkey and one a dragon.  Also, another was blue and some of the other ones looked “special”.

After school about half of the american kids (the others weren’t allowed to go out) went to KTV.  KTV is chinese karaoke and it is extremely popular here.  They had a large selection of English songs, which is good because we tried to sing one chinese song and all it had was the characters, so we just skipped it.  The KTV places are really nice and are fancier than the expensive hotels.  But, these are more of a tacky fancy where they have Elizabethan style chairs and fancy wall decorations, but the rooms are really nice, with two flat screen tv’s and a large couch.

The chinese kids have a half day of school on Saturdays, so I have the morning free.  I think I’m going to sleep in and then upload some pictures.

Restaurants and Parks

I’ve been going to various restaurants over the past few days.  The first two that I went to when I first arrived were both Chinese, but after those I went to a Korean BBQ restaurant.  It was really cool.  They take hot coals and put them in a hole in the middle of your table and you cook the meat on them.  And for the larger pieces of meat a waiter comes over and cooks and seasons the meat for you.  And the other restaurant I went to was a Japanese restaurant.  While is wasn’t the best meal I have had here (I only ate about half of it) it did have the best piece of food out of all of the food I’ve eaten here.  It had really good tasting beef in it, but the rest of the meal was a little weird.

Two days ago, I went to 219 park.  There they have amusement park rides and a ferris wheel, but I haven’t seen anyone go on any of the things.  It’s almost like an old abandoned park.  It reminds me of the movie Salt where they run through the old Soviet era abandoned amusement park.  The rides look pretty creaky.  Also, when I was there I saw a building on fire.  There were some people standing around watching it and more  and more were coming over, then bright flashes started going off, so we ran away.  The interesting part was that I’m not sure if they have firetrucks here.  The only thing that came was a water truck, but it could just be that since it’s difficult to get back into the park they didn’t want to bring a fire truck there.

At the end of each day we have a culture lesson.  Yesterday we did calligraphy, which was fun.  The teacher told us to go very slow and plan our strokes, but I think mine look better with long sweeping strokes, if you go too slow the ink bleeds (and no, it wasn’t because I had too much ink in my brush, the teachers bled too).  Today we made dumplings and since I don’t like dumplings I only nibbled on one.  They taught us how to make them and then threw all the ones we made away and had the three cooks that work there make some for us.

Yesterday I also climbed a mountain in the middle of the city.  They have a ton of steps going up to monument thing on the only hill in the city.  It is also next to an antenna that we have nicknamed “the Eiffel Tower of Anshan”.

I want to upload some pictures soon, but I have to build up the energy because it will take some time.  I’m too lazy.  I wish I was an insomniac, then I would have all the time I needed, even though I’m actually not that busy right now.  It’s only 8 PM (we call it 20:00 here) and I wouldn’t mind going to sleep.

First day of school

At the beginning of the day I had to go to the police station to be registered as a foreigner staying in Anshan.  I really didn’t understand the process, but it was mainly just watching a guy fill out a form with information from my visa and passport.  After that I went to school.  All we did was learn Chinese, but the stuff that we are learning is stuff from Chinese I and I already know eveything in the textbook.  Everyday we have a different class at the end of the day.  Today, tuesday, we had Chinese music and the music teacher apparently spent a long preparing his lesson, but didn’t know we didn’t speak Chinese, so he didn’t get to use it.  Instead we learned childrens songs in Chinese.

It’s interesting being an american student in a Chinese school.  There are lots of people who will randomly come up to you and ask to take a picture with you.  Also, they will stare and whisper things to their friends.  I like this a lot better than what the other, older, chinese people do.  They just stare straight at you with no expression or with a frown.

*edit* This was unable to be posted yesterday due to not being able to use the internet at the time that I finished writing the post.

Great Wall and Arrival in Anshan

After staying the night at the hotel in Beijing we packed up our luggage and all got on a bus.  We stopped at a touristy lunch place where they had a lot of jade things for sale.  The most expensive thing I saw was a statue for $97,000.  Even the small things were hundreds of dollars.

Then, we climbed the Great Wall.  Yes, it’s more of a climb than a hike, so it’s referred to as climbing.  The section we went to is apparently the most famous section.  I think it’s called the Dadaling (<– not correct) section.  Apparently two years ago Obama came to this section.  On one part of the wall the stairs were so steep that I saw people climbing on their hands and knees.  The group of guys that I was with made it to the end of the wall.  It obviously wasn’t the end, but it was as far as visitors were allowed to go because beyond that the wall was falling apart.  When we got to the end we had a bunch of Chinese people haggling us to buy something.  One lady who was trying to get me to buy a hat came over and put it on me and started adjusting it when I had told her I didn’t want it.

After going to the Great Wall, we had to say goodbye to the kids going to Chengdu because they were on a different bus going to the airport.  The Anshan and Changzhou kids both had to take trains.  We took a bus to the Beijing train station and Chngzhou kids left pretty soon after to catch their train.  unfortunately our train to Anshan was the last train out of the station that night, so we had to wait five hours.  We ended up sitting in a restaurant and playing cards.  Then, we went to the train and got on our certain car.  It seemed there were three types: one had a door on the rooms with four beds in each room, another had four beds per section with no beds, and another had six beds per section with no door.  Our tickets were for the ones with six beds.  The good thing was that we all had bottom bunks, but the bad part about that is that you’re not near your friends.  We ended up playing cards and talking for most of the train ride, I just slept in an empty bunk on the second level near some of the other kids.

Our host families were waiting for us when we got off the train and they greeted us with bouquets of flowers and some people had signs.  Then we all took a picture and departed with the families.  My family went to a nice dimsum restaurant and then the brother had to leave soon after to get back to school.

Later in the day all of the kids went to the No. 9 School for a welcome presentation where a bunch of people spoke and there was traditional Mongolian dance, gongfu (kung fu), and calligraphy displayed.  Then, the school took us out to dinner across the street.

Oh, and….. I completely missed July 4th.  By the time any of us noticed that it was close it had already passed.

Beijing

Yesterday I had took the long 13-14 hour flight, it wasn’t too bad.  Nobody was snoring or talking too loudly and I had a touch screen video moniter right in front of me.  I ended up watching about 5-6 movies and playing games like asteroids and space invaders.  I slept for about an hour, but wasn’t very tired.

The Beijing airport is extremely large and yesterday it was strangly empty.  Customs was very fast and took less than 30 seconds, not including filling out the form which took about two minutes.

We are staying in a hotel near the airport that doesn’t look very nice from the outside, but it’s a lot nicer on the inside.  Most of the rooms have about the same size bedroom (2 people per room), but some of them have extremely large bathrooms.  Mine is one with the large bathroom; it is larger than the bedroom by a lot and the shower is just a faucet and a drain on the ground and you pull a curtain across half the room.

Also, in the lobby, they have a bathroom with hole-in-the-ground toilets.  And I, being foreign, have never used one of these before.  The first time I tried was difficult.  I could not figure out the correct position… Was I supposed to sit like I was in a chair or squat a couple of inches off the ground?  The weird part was that it was a motion activated flush, so I assumed I was doing it wrong when it flushed seven times during my stay.  In the end I gave up and moved over one stall to the handicapped stall where that had a toilet with a bowl.

Beijing is an interesting city.  I can’t tell if this is fog or pollution.  As the airplane was landing we descended into the clouds and they never stopped.  I assumed it was foggy, but the fog has still not ended.

The neighborhood that we are staying in in Beijing is a little bit sketchy.  Lots of things, like fences and gates, are broken.  It’s a lot different from the US in the fact that LOTS of people walk around and use the sidewalk.  It’s not like New York where people are walking places, but here groups of people gather on street corners and play chinese checkers or random card games or just to talk.  I went to the park down the road and they had ping pong tables, but I didn’t get to play because apparently you need to bring your own paddles.  Another weird hobby of the guys is that they like to lift up their shirts.  They stands in groups talking to their friends with their shirt above their bellies.

The driving is scary here.  Our bus driver, coming back from the airport, was very aggresive (everyone is).  You do not stop for pedestrians, you honk your horn until you get to them and then you swerve.  Also, lots of people bike along the side of the street, so when you get close, you honk your horn and then swerve to the middle of the road and try not to hit the cars coming the other way.

There is a really nice arcade less than a minutes walk away.

Someone is waiting for this computer in the hotel lobby, so I will go now.

P.S. Sorry,there is no spellcheck on this computer.

*edit* This was also supposed to be published a few days ago, but the computer in the hotel lobby in Beijing would not show the publish button.