今天下午我和我的同屋坐地铁上届看东西，走路去孔庙我们迷路了，我们找到了一个胡同，所以照相一下，这是我的胡同。

For the sake of time, I will finish the story in English. Today me and my roommate took the subway downtown to see some things. We were walking to the Temple of Confucius and got lost. It wasn’t far on the map but we couldn’t find it. We ended up in a back alleyway neighborhood where people live, called a hu tong or alleyway. Here’s mine, heh….

We found the temple, there was much construction like in the Forbidden City and the rest of the city for that matter. I want to come back to Beijing in 2008, I think this place will be much cleaner and lots of construction will be finished. The city will be a great place to visit, I think Beijing will modernize and grow even more after 2008.

昨天晚上我跟我的同屋看了我很善良的朋友，他性姜。他叫我们他的儿子。他很喜欢喝啤酒。虽然每次去看他我们喝太多了，我们喜欢去看他。只剩下在北京九天，时间不够了。

今天晚上我要去看京剧，我没看过京剧。

Yesterday me and my roommate went to see our friend Jiang, the old Beijing man. He calls us “er zi” (son) because we are about the age of his daughter and because he considers us good friends. He told us to look him up next time we are in Beijing and can stay with him, we told him he is too kind. He likes to drink alcohol leisurely, and he can drink a lot. Even though everytime we go see him we drink too much we are always willing to visit him. Only 9 days left in Beijing, not enough time.

Tonight I will see Beijing Opera for the first time.

I’m overseas but that doesn’t mean I can’t follow and cheer for my team to win. The fist time I’ve been to ESPN.com in a while and I found this on the front of the college football page. Woohoo……Go Hokies!

Thursday (7/14) my roommate and I took the subway for the first time to Tiananmen Square. I usually ride my bike everywhere but to get downtown that would be an hour and a half bike ride. We were there just before 8pm, at 8pm exactly the lights come on and all the surrounding buildings are lit up. It was very cloudy, couldn’t see the sun setting at all. Many days it’s like this, maybe its the pollution, I don’t know. Some guy wanted to sell me a Mao book, I said 5 kuai, he laughed, he wanted 40 ($5).

After Tiananmen it was time to eat dinner. We decided to walk towards the next subway station to see more of the city and then find somthing around there. Before we got too far I got a bright idea, to ride in a rickshaw. I had never done that before, it was pricey because we were around Tiananmen, it was worth the 30 kuai though (almost $4). So we were on our way, it was great actually, we were both tired and we also got a great way to see things. I talked with the driver and told him we wanted to eat something so he took us through some back alleyways, we would not have found our way there by ourselves. Ate dinner at a small restaurant, we got a young kid to talk to us and then he wouldn’t stop, he was saying all the English words he knew, he was pretty smart. I told him to not stop studying English.

My roommate is only 18 so he doesn’t drink back home. Here you can get a 22 ounce bottle of local beer for $.25. We each had one. Had a good time that night.