more beijing

after taking rest of day before yesterday easy (bed at noon, woke at 1800 got some cheap food then back to sleep), yesterday went back to tianenmen(?sp) square to walk round some more with Viv from hostel (who has been teaching english for that great supplier of imperial culture to the global unwashed the British Council for a year to chinese people, but who also knows about quaternions) and Jeff who I have been exploring Beijing with for the past week or so. A couple of beers in the evening mushroomed into being out 'till 0400, with a dutchman we were also with managing to piss off a few Chinese people by talking Japanese at them (they understand, but are not friendly to the Japanese at the moment; I accidentally used Russian at one of them the other day and no enragement occurred...). This morning everyone has been saying hello to me in the corridors (even ones that I do not recall having seen before) and I'm told by one of the people who started drinking but scuttled off around midnight to sleep that I look like I was out until 0400. The main instigator of the 27h day that was last weekend (Alicia from Sydney) has left for pastures new and Indian, although I thought she'd left earlier in the week too, but in fact she'd just had a 3 day hangover and had been hiding in her room (sound familiar?). This evening, night train to Xi'an to see teracotta(?sp again) warriors - probably stay there three nights or so and then try to find somewhere else in China to look at. Here's the blog of some Glaswegians that I met in the hostel here (don't believe the lies about them being in New Zealand).