My Birthday Bash.

Horray. Another year had come and gone and I feel no different. I tell everyone that I'm 25 again for the third time. It's all meaningless now.

Gab, Maki, Judith, and Cadric came out to my intimate birthday dinner at Nam Nam, a Vietnamese restaurant in Sanlitun. Great food in good company. And boy was I surprised when chocolate cake with candles lit appeared before my eyes! We stayed there on the patio until well after closing time when all the lights were turned off.

We moved on to PartyWorld where we had another night of singing songs from the past until our ears were ringing and bleeding.

As a gift from Maki, I now have a pair of black Diesel shoes to add to my collection of shoes. It's really comfortable and it seems to go well with everything I wear! Thanks Maki!

Kyle's Bon Voyage Dinner.

Organised a bon voyage party for Kyle at the Crescent Moon Muslim Restaurant close to where I live in Chaoyangmen. From those I had invited, only about 10 or so had RSVP'd. But to allow for a few extras just in case, I made a reservation for 15. In all, 24 people showed up!

The food was good and the staff were genuinely Muslim. KTV at PartyWorld followed after, and Brie made an appearance to join us. It turns out that Cedric's new acapella group is co-ordinated by Brie. What a small world.

KTV at PartyWorld 1.

KTV at PartyWorld 2.

Marion's Bon Voyage Party #8.

And yet another Bon Voyage party for Marion! These parties never end...

This time, we went to have Beijing duck at a restaurant in Wudaokou, just across from the LRT line. Alp, his girlfriend, Joanne, Hyun Jung, Kyle, and I were present for this unbelievable last hurrah. With so many bon voyage parties for a person who never really leaves, it's becoming a tradition now. We'd joked about continuing this series of parties for Marion even if she finally leaves Beijing once and for all when months after, new people in the CS community will start asking who this Marion is!

Right after dinner, we moved on to Sculpting In Time Cafe a few doors down to join the crowd of other CSers at the weekly Wudaokou meetup.

Marie's Birthday and Bon Voyage Party.

Tairyo was the name of the Teppanyaki restaurant a number of us went to to celebrate Marie's birthday anniversary/bon voyage party this evening. A few familiar faces were there including Yang Rong and Cherry, who brought their boyfriends with them, but the vast majority of people I met were new faces. It has also been a while since Marie and I met in person, so it was nice to see her again and hear her heartfelt French Canadian laugh.

Tairyo was also a new dining experience for me as I've never had teppanyaki in Beijing before. For 150 RMB, you had all-you-can-eat with a plethora of meat, seafood, vegitables, and deserts to choose from the menu. For the teppanyaki experience, the chef before you would do his showmanship magic, sometimes involving fire five feet high for the "ooooh".



For the late night special, I left Marie's party to head on over to Nanluogu Xiang to attend a smaller bon voyage party for Marion. Kyle, Edward, Celine, Leon and a few others were there to wish Marion a bon voyage. I was there for the drinks and company as I'd already been to enough "Bon Voyage Marion!" parties in the past. I had no reason to believe that this would be the final one.

CS Boat Cruise on Houhi Lake.

It was exceptionally windy earlier today, with winds blowing past us at 50 km/h at its peak around 1600h. CSers started calling and SMSing me to confirm whether the cruise was still on because of the strong winds, to which I had answered with a reassuring "yes".

Gab, Rita, and I arrived at Houhai Lake at 1800h, 1 hour before the posted time of the CS Boat Cruise, just to check out the scene and hang about for a relaxing while. Houhai was relatively calm with people strolling around the lake under the evening light and breeze. I was shocked, however, when one man who spoke limited English at a boat rental place told me that they weren't allowing boats out because of the slight breeze. As an organiser of this event, I panicked a little, wondering what plan B should be. Fortunately, another boat rental outlet around the lake were offering boat rentals, which put my mind back at ease.

1900h rolled around and Kyle, Marion, Filip, Sascha, and a host of other surfers started pouring into the Starbucks, all on time. We had a count of sixteen people now to which blew my mind as only a fraction of them had responded to my post expressing interest in the cruise. IT was okay though, as my motto has almost always been "the more the merrier". Thirty minutes of mingling among others (and with me with two phones pressed up to my ears answering queries and giving directions -- oh, the ambassadorial responsibilities!) we moved out from the tiny Starbucks for the boats. Moving the large crowd, however, was a challenge, as many were content with waiting for other friends and hanging about just outside Starbucks. I finally managed to put together a group of nine surfers (finding a tenth surfer to fill the boat to maximum capacity was yet another challenge) and set them off to sail fifteen minutes later. As for the rest of us still standing in front of the Starbucks exercising their jaw bones and flapping their lips with one another, I wanted to put together another boatload of ten but this proved to be challenging yet again. Everyone was waiting for somebody else (hello! I said we were meeting at 1900h!) and when those friends finally arrived and hour later, we were then waiting for THEIR friends to show! This endless series of challenges I was being faced with was putting me on my nerves.



The challenging hurdles didn't stop there for the organiser though. Once I was finally able to bring everyone together to the boat launch, now we had to decide how we were to break up the group of fourteen, given that we were limited with a boat with a capacity of 4, 6, and 10. I wanted to put together a boat of 10 on the electric boat (like the first boat which I had launched over an hour ago) and stick four others on a boat of 4, but this decision was met with a re-assessment and we stood around for another fifteen minutes "pechakucha-ing" over trivial matters. If this wasn't enough to put me high strung, the debate over with form of boat we should take, whether that be a manually operated paddle boat or an electric one, would have pushed me over the cliff if it wasn't for the zen in me.

It was a lot of fun once we were all out on the lake and started drinking. I downed a bottle of ice-cold Qingdao in no time. At one time, we had all three boats fastened together side by side by side to form what could only be described as an awkward looking Catamaran!

Rough winds did blow the darling buds of May, but Tsingdao saved the day.

CS Interview.

I had in interview with an editor from TRENDSHEALTH magazine in my apartment today to help him with a story he was doing on CouchSurfing. With his assistant and photographer by his side, I was in the spotlight ready to face the barrage of questions and shine positive light on the subject matter.

Filip came over just in time for my photoshoot and stood behind the camera watching me pose for the camera while shifting around on the couch. It felt so unnatural, but I did it with a smile. Filip eventually joined me on the same couch by the request of the editor, Bill, who asked us to look jolly and affable, as if we weren't already. I wanted to ease the slightly awkward mood by telling a silly knock-knock joke with Filip, but my intention was so obvious that we started to genuinely laugh without me finishing the joke.

Bill asked us both to talk about our experiences with hosting and surfing on CouchSurfing and inquired about the general demographics of those on this organisation. Questions about personal security and how we heard about CouchSurfing were raised as well. All in all, I sounded like a salesperson for CouchSurfing by saying things like "Just because there's one bad apple, doesn't mean you have to throw the whole basket out!". Bill asked me if I was in close ties with the founders of CouchSurfing, to which I said no with an embarassed laughter.

Just as we were wrapping up with my fifteen-minutes-of-fame, Simone, my surfer from Guangzhou, popped in. I hope I was able to accurately portray and perhaps even rectify some misconceptions about CouchSurfing, unlike a certain someone in a radio interview with China Radio International (CRI) in October of last year.

Looking forward to seeing myself (shameless, I know) in the glossy pages of the June/July issue of TRENDSHEALTH magazine.

Huanghuacheng Great Wall.

My two couchsurfers, Simone and Thibeaut, along with 'G', Maki, and Javem made a voyage out to the Huanghuacheng (Yellow Flower City) section of the Great Wall today.

Huanghuacheng was chosen for two reasons: it was a new section for me to conqueror and that there were no direct buses to this section of the wall, limiting accessibility by tourists who tend to destroy the genuine feeling of climbing the wall. Our private driver we hired was a chipper one who laughed a lot and was very animated.

It took us all about 5 hours to walk along the wall, and throughout our journey, we hadn't come across anybody else, let alone any tourists!

The Golden Pömpel came along for the journey.

Pictures in Passing.

As evidenced in my previous blog post, I write too much sometimes and most of it is blah, blah, blah. I'm going to take a break with this post and will let the pictures do the talking instead. Please enjoy.








Grasshoppers, silk worms, scorpions, cockroaches, spikey things, snakes, and starfish are just some of the many delicacies you can find at the Wangfujing Night market in Beijing. Many Beijingers laugh at the tourists who come to eat this stuff as it's not something typical, nor is it traditional, to the Beijing diet.







The Forbidden City with that ominous portrait of the late leader, Chairman Mao Zedong, and the National Grand Theatre aka "The Egg" adjacent to it, on the East side of Tian'anmen Square. Designed by French architect Paul Andreu who was also commissioned to design the Charles de Gaulle International Airport in Paris where a portion of Terminal 2E's ceiling had collapsed, killing 4 people.






























A chick on a bus on our way to the Beijing International Book City. It was so cute! It took us nearly four hours to get to the destination, trying to figure out which subway station to get off at and where to take the bus to take us further. By the time we arrived, we had realised that they had closed 30 minutes ago. Ahh, it's the journey more than the destination, right? Right. Hooliganism (or training for the Olympics) on the Batong line on our way back.









2008.03.01: A housewarming party for Elle, Corina, Edouard, Ryan, and Pete's new 2-level apartment.

Tweetie Bird.

Who's Your Daddy?