BAD air

Hello Folks,

I hope everyone had a good weekend.  So the air in Beijing is a bit smoggy.  The last few days have been record breaking bad.  see article for more info:  Beijing Air Quality  On a scale from 1 to 500, the air quality was 755 on Saturday and we have heard that either 1-25 or 1-50 is consider healthy.  I will never look at a bright blue sky the same again.  I used to take a bright blue sky for granted, never again.  Right now the air quality is 182 still not good but much better than Saturday.  I saw one of the English teachers wearing a mask yesterday and she offered to get us some.  One of the other teachers said they don't really help.  I figure they can't hurt so there may be some pictures to come with me sporting a cool looking medical mask. 

Despite the smog, we ventured into the city.  It's really neat living in a growing city, new things pop up all the time.  We knew there was a new subway line that opened (line 6) about 3 weeks ago.  It runs parallel to the line that we take into the city (line 1).  Line 1 was the first line to be built so it the oldest and busiest. We found out from a fellow teacher that there is a new express bus to the city.  We took the express bus and it ended up taking us to the end of line 6.  Not as close to the center of the city we expected but it was nice to ride on a new bus and new subway line that is not as crowded as line 1.  There are about 15 lines in the city and most of them are pretty crowded.  There is a saying in Chinese that I will attempt to translate: when you get on the subway, you must turn into a picture.  There have been times we have felt as flat as a picture.  I have wanted to take a picture of how crowded it is but we are unable to get the camera out because it's so crowded.

So back to Saturday.  With it being National Pizza month, I decided I wanted pizza for lunch.  We had looked up a restaurant, "Annie's."  We were pretty hungry when we got to Annie's.  We ordered Annie's pizza which was kinda like meat lovers.  We forgot that Chinese sausage is not very good.  It kinda looks like hotdog but tastes nothing like a hotdog.  Everything else on the pizza was good so we just picked it off.  They brought us bread and butter.  I love bread and butter and they had warm butter.  I think it's the first time I have had warm butter in 4 months so it was awesome.  I was quite exciting to find the restaurant we were looking for.  This doesn't seem to happen very often. 

Next off to the Temple of Heaven. There are some picture of this that I need to download.  Hopefully, I will remember soon.

Sunday I decided I wanted to try Malaysian food.  I kept accidentally calling it Mongolian food so Ryan and I had quite a few laughs about it.  Well, it wasn't meant to be.  We never found the place so we went to a near by mall and ate some Korean food which we wanted to try anyway.

After that, we were off to the National Museum of Natural History.  It was a pretty cool museum but we were not able to read much.  Only a few things were translated into English.  Anyone can enjoy animals, dinosaurs and fish.  So we had a pretty nice time except it was located in between about 2 subway lines so we had quite the hike to get to it.

Monday was back to work...sorta.  We haven't been doing any teaching as of late.  We were told today that we will begin teaching one class of kindergarten each day starting tomorrow.  I am looking forward to having a little something to do.

We had heard that the water cube from the 2008 Olympics has been turned into a water park.  Check out some pictures: Water Cube  I can't wait to go, I think it looks pretty neat and  I feel as excited as a little kid when I think about going.  Now we have something fun to do on the next bad air quality day.

Well, that's all folks, have a great week.

Julie