Now that's a stadium!

(reposted unmodified)

I've arrived in Beijing and I've begun taking a one month intensive Mandarin language course that I signed up for while in India. It's nice also to be able to settle down for a little while as a change from moving from place to place every two or three days. Some friends in Beijing set up an apartment for me before I arrived. I am for a long time in their debt. Attached you can see pictures of the place. I'm particularly proud of the kitchen, pictured. It's simple, I know, but I've cooked a lot since I arrived, so I've enjoyed just having the facilities for it. The building shown is one of the iconic structures that represent "The New Beijing" . This one is the Olympic stadium shaped like a bird's nest, definitely an architectural wonder. Because of security surrounding the Olympic construction site, it was hard to get a clear shot. I managed to find a hotel near the grounds, the far side of which had a clear shot of the structure.
Mandarin is a very very very difficult language to learn. Gone are the friendly cognates, pronunciation, tonality, and alphabet of more easily accessed languages such as French and Spanish. Learning this is like starting *completely* from scratch. In a (successful) effort to keep ourselves entertained and motivated, I organized a private lesson among my fellow students with my tutor to learn some of the more colorful Mandarin turns-of-phrase, not to mention useful sentences for the more, er, practical situations of daily (and evening-ly) life here. There was a lot of beer involved in the lesson.
Beijing is a huge city, development is everywhere. The capital has its towers and architectural wonders, but compared to Shanghai it has traded off such a large volume of towers for sprawling yet still somehow tasteful apartment blocks.