last day

Well today was my last day at MSRA.  I spent most of it trying to sort through a bureaucratic nightmare complicated with a language barrier.  But then Lu Min and I celebrated the end of the nightmare with some KFC, which there are a lot of here.  It actually seems almost more Chinese than American to me at this point; they certainly have about 5x the density here.  But the KFC here doesn't have biscuits, which is, to quote Lu Min "a pity."

I'm off to travel for the week.  My itinerary takes me roughly to Guilin/Yangshuo (beautiful/majestic rock structures http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=guilin&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi), then up to Hangzhou (West Lake), then Suzhou (nice gardens) and finally Shanghai (heard of it?) before I exit the country.  I am overly excited about what will actually turn out to be my last Chinese experience: the magnetic, elevated train (Maglev) from downtown Shanghai to the airport, reaching speeds of something like 450 km/hr.  I am least excited about carrying a life's worth of stuff and the trip of a tourist's worth of junk around the world.

Things I will not miss about Beijing include the inefficiency, blood tofu, and trying to do anything at rush hour, on a holiday or weekend, or something that involves walking on to property owned by the Bank of China.  I will definitely miss my $1 noodle place next to work, the kindness of the Chinese, and the research support and advice I received at Microsoft.