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Once I had established my studying habits I started taking in the city. I had a nice long stroll through some hutongs on one of those first days of exploring. Hutongs are narrow alleys weaving through closely-knit communities and past courtyard houses (some would say 'cramped' some would say 'close-knit'... depends on how you take it). It's an old style of living that until recently had been about the only way to live in Beijing. It's quite a contrast to the modern Western-style suburb where the intent is to be separate and to have your own little estate and where everything you need is a car ride away. Hutongs however are built on a human scale and the feeling is nice. I had been looking forward to this for a long time, curious to see this old style of living before it met with the bulldozer in Beijing's race to destroy everything that's distinctive about their city in the run-up to the Olympics.














People are starting to realize what a treasure in these hutongs is being bulldozed away in the eagerness to 'modernize' and 'westernize.' So some developers are now taking old courtyard homes and restoring them to their original beauty and in the process also installing the modern conveniences... or at least a private bathroom (and these modern conveniences are, as far as I can tell from speaking to Beijingers, the only thing that makes the high-rises that are spreading all over Beijing better than a hutong).

The beautiful old courtyard pictured below was in the process of being restored when I stumbled on it halfway through my hutong stroll. Nice timing, too, because it was time to eat. I stuck my head in and asked if I could take a picture. They said 'sure' and since lunch was about to arrive from the little shop across the alley they invited me to stick around. Lots of eating and toasting and declarations of friendship. A good time. The guy with his arm around me is the representative from the bank or whoever or whatever was putting up the big bucks for this. I think it's because he was there that day that we had such a good spread. After seeing something like this it's not hard to feel that restoring or maintaining the old courtyards is a better way to develop than what's generally going on now in Beijing but of course there aren't enough old courtyards to go around for the thousands of people flooding in from rural China.
















Studying in China was working out really well so that answered the question of whether or not I'd be coming back to China soon. So I left town to see more of the country because when I came back I was just going to be hunkering down in Beijing and studying.