And I ate Papa John’s pepperoni pizza to celebrate. Yes, they have Papa John’s here. And, surprisingly, not only did the pepperoni taste like good ol’ American-style minced animal, the pizza tasted almost the same. It was excitingly, tantalizingly similar. Needless to say, or needful to say, since I’m saying it — I really never should use the phrase “needless to say” ever again — that was an awesome dinner, and only relatively expensive. The pizza (delivered! yay for Westernization) cost 114 yuan (yuan=kuai=RMB=0.147 dollars), which is basically 17ish dollars. Not too shabby for a meal par excellance.
I also watched “Into The Blue” with my roommates, a summer-y hot babe and hot dude kind of movie that was easy to digest along with the pizza slices. Oh — forgot to mention. I got a new roommate. The old french guy moved out, and a new french guy moved in. C’est la vie. The new guy is actually really awesome and very nice, and I like him a lot. He just graduated from college and is here in Beijing doing an internship at EDF, the French electricity company. So he’s a swell addition to the apartment.
I just finished giving a presentation to some employees here about the sorry, sorry state of American public schools, a favorite subject of mine recently. I gave a short and quick PowerPoint presentation detailing some statistics of American public school students and of Washington, DC in particular, and then I had them watch a very cool 20/20 show titled, “America The Stupid.” It’s good stuff. I totally recommend you watch it. It was mentioned to me by a friend and I found the video on YouTube. It’s a 40-minute long video on why introducing choice into our school systems would be a good thing, and why public primary and secondary school education as it now stands is bad. And why letting it stay that way is a bad thing. I think the Chinese people enjoyed watching it. Though the audience eventually dwindled down to about half of the original attendees. But that was more indicative of their time-constraints than of the program. But yeah, I think it’ll lead to some good convo’s with some of them, and a re-evaluation of their views on an American education. A good kick in the perspective is never a bad thing.
That’s all. I’m gonna watch the new Star Trek movie with some buddies tonight. I hear it’s good.
Glad you had a good American dinner for your birthday! We celebrated here with the younger crowd from work and had raclette. Hope all is well!
Love, Mom