Newton in Town

This was an interesting week here in Beijing because I got in touch with not one, but two different old friends from Newton North High School. Of course we have the Internet to thank, and surprisingly, the lesser publicized technology of pay-phones.

On Tuesday night I met up with Jonathan Crowder - someone whom I haven't seen in four years. Jonathan is currently teaching English in Hunan province and exploring the more wild parts of China. I took him to Nanluogu Xiang for dinner in a particularly good Chinese restaurant that I hadn't eaten in since last summer. He stuck around for the rest of the week, but I was unfortunately burdened by work, so I didn't see him again before he left early this morning for a 20+ hour hard seat train ride. I advised him against that endeavor, but he is determined to learn the hard way how unpleasant long stints in hard seats can be.

Last night, I finally met up with Preston Decker after weeks of telephone tag. Preston s in the unique situation of being the only person in China without a cellphone. As a direct result, I now have a pay-phone number stored in my phonebook as "big bird."

I met up with Preston and a bunch of other friends downtown at a new burger joint called "Let's Burger." This is not your typical bun and pattie compilation. My sandwhich came complete with 2 burgers, pickles, lettuce, tomato, onions, special sauce, bacon, and an egg. Matt ordered their most expensive selection: a double Wagyu steak burger (actually steak, not ground beef), which came with all the fixin's including foie gras and asparagus. I never thought I would say it, but sometimes a burger is worth $20.

After dinner Preston and I got caught up over a couple of beers. I hope he comes back to town soon because it was pretty good to see an old friend. Also, he lives in the middle of nowhere, and It's probably good to get away from time to time (then again, I live in the middle of somewhere and I still want to get away from time to time, so maybe it doesn't matter where you live).

The most interesting thing about all of this is that so many of my Newton North classmates continued to be interested in China. This is interesting primarily because our Chinese class at NNHS was not particularly great. Preston and I agreed that our pursuit of Chinese was a reaction to the class more than an extension of it. After our first times in China, we were both so angry that four years of studying hadn't produced any results that we became determined to learn the language as an act of rebellion. Jonathan is a slightly different story because he wasn't in our class at North, but he did go on the Jingshan exchange. He reports similar feelings - not learning too much on the exchange, but becoming determined to concquer Chinese anyway.

Several other classmates also continued to study Chinese. I haven't met any of them yet in China, but people from Newton pop up all the time. It's only a matter of time before we have a Beijing reunion of Newton North '04 Chinese students. I'm looking forward to it.