aha!

well, for the past couple of days i had thought that blogspot was restricted in china, as every time i tried to go to the domain i would get a screen full of chinese characters that seemed to say blogspot did not exist in china, but here i am, fourth attempt back on. i've been staying in a hostel about five minutes from tianemen square(guy in front of tank) the city is cold and crowded. its been around twenty degrees here at different points in the day. i bundle up accordingly but after about a half hour of walking i'm so sweaty from al the layers i take some off, then the sweat is dramatically cold, its a fluctuation of uncomfort. but not unbearable. when i arrived at the sanfrancisco airport i realized that i had forgotten my passport. after going back to the house and getting it the line was amazingly long and there was only an hour to flight, cutting in front of the line works beautifully however, made it to the plane with five minutes to spare. yesterday i hiked to a hidden part of the great wall, run down and completely seemingly completely ignored since it was built, me and a group hiked along its curvy spine, scrambling over stairs that disintegrated under our feet and peering out of castle like windows in the different look outs we came to. my chopstick skills are back, i bet i could peel an orange with them already, the food is good unless you order a western dish, and in that case it is very bad. i've seen to very intense fights in the neighborhood i am in. a man got a chair smashed over his head and then he fought a girl and a guy, lots of blood, then last night when i was reading before bed i heard a fight outside. i could just see it out of the corner of my window, they were yelling at eachother and tussling til the sound of one of the mens heads hitting the concrete reverberated off of the hutong walls. the locals around were meandering past stoically seemingly unimpressed. i was lost in the hutongs, which are labyrinth chinese neighborhoods for hours today after unsuccesfully attempting to buy train tickets to mongolia at four different places, i have a plane ticket out of moscow on the sixteenth of february to vienna, so i have to get out of asia to there somehow. we'll see.