So! Finally back in Beijing

Back in Beijing as of last week. I started work last week, too, and will be moving in to a new apartment today!

Work: at 51give and its non-profit arm, 51Sim (Sim= Sustainable Innovation Movement). Both are involved in microfinance and rural development work in China, particularly focusing on renewable energy and sustainable projects.

Right now, as my first project, I'm taking over a business plan competition for university students with business plans in green energy. It should be pretty neat to see what they come up with, but I'm walking in in the middle of the whole thing, and the final event is in 2 weeks, so I guess that's a little crazed. Wait, crazed? Me? Never.

Most people in my office are Chinese--I'm the only American--but there's a French girl, a Mexican girl, and a bunch of Brits. It's hard to break the ice when everyone is afraid to speak to me because they don't know if my Chinese is passable or not.

Commuting in the mornings here is the most ridiculous thing ever. I'm not sure there's any other place on the planet more crowded than Beijing subways at rush hour. In the trains, it is 80,000 degrees, approximately, and you are pressed in among strangers with barely room to breathe. To get off at your stop, you have to elbow and shove people out of the way, while saying roughly, or possibly yelling, "I'm getting off! Let me off! I have to get off!!" If you don't push and shove and kick, you will miss your stop. Once off the train, you are shunted along in a veritable crush of people. This morning I am pretty sure I bruised a rib on a railing when shoved from behind going down a staircase.

What else? Apartment: more on that soon. It's a decent place but needs some work to make in habitable. My bedroom, in particular, resembles a Neanderthal cave more than a modern living space. It's decorated with absolutely HEINOUS reproductions of European masterpieces. For instance, you know the painting of Napoleon on the rearing steed, brandishing a sword? There's a 7-foot high print of that in the master bedroom. All the pictures are in incredibly tacky golden gilt frames....really, it's a gem in interior decorating. I'll put up some pictures for everybody's amusement in the next few days. We're living in Dongsishitiao, on the East side, if that means anything to anybody. No?

OK: back to my boring and awkward life at work, pretending I am useful. ha.