20 million people small

A comment a friend made last night at dinner that really holds true about Beijing. She said, "In Beijing among expats it's easy to meet people because no one really has 'their group.' No one wants to be alone in Beijing." She remembered later that she had started to quote part of this song. 

This past Saturday I went on an all day hike at the Great Wall with Ow and friends from my office, Xiao Dai (QQ), Henry, and QQ's friend JiJi. The hike involved getting up at 7:30am and finding food and water which we were supposed to have purchased the day before while making everyone on the bus wait. Whoops! We then boarded a bus that wound through the mountains up to the wall so quickly that multiple people vomited in the aisle. Yikes. Luckily things got better when we had a beautiful view from the wall with no tourists since we took a completely "hiking trail way" up.

Despite this all day intensive hike, however, we still decided to go out to a club called Latte. The club has a cool 1920s + steam punk decor to it. When you come in, you see a small hotel-like lobby with tiny decorations on the walls and red couches. Then, as you enter the club there is a giant boiler-room machine complete with spinning propellors and pipes. The dance floor itself is tiny and entirely up on a 4 foot high platform so everyone sitting around at tables can watch you dance. It gives you a bit of that "stage fright" experience that adds to the fun.

Sure enough though at the club we ran into a native Chinese friend we had made earlier in the trip. He was the best friend of another native Chinese girl I had met at my apartment the first night when I couldn't figure out how to open the door to my studio and we had all had dinner together earlier in the week.

This trend of running into people I knew only continued for the next few days. On the way to work Monday I saw someone we had met for the first time at the club on Saturday and briefly said hello because I was running late. And finally at dinner that night, Mo and Hanna introduced us to some of their friends and it turned out they knew the girlfriend of the founder of the company I'm working at.

Anyways - amazing how after being here for only 3 weeks and I'm already running into folks on the street I know.