Today was quite the lovely Sunday. Woke up, cooked some tasty eggs and toast. Then Will and I took our chess board to a park and played a couple of games. I lost both-- I have still failed to beat Will-- but today was my best game so far. It was a nice warm 40 degrees so in the sun I was pretty comfortable. We did attract a crowd. There's a lot of Chinese chess here (I think it's the same thing as the game 'Go') but not as much guo ji xiang qi (International chess)! Little kids really liked to stop and watch, as did the laoshi (elder). Everywhere you go you wll see crowds of people playing chinese chess with big crowds around them. There's a little park that's on my walk from the subway to my house and it took me a while to figure out what the crowds were, but now I know!
Damjan and Annalies came to meet us after a couple of chess games. We walked around the park a little bit and then found a cafe in Nanluo gu xiang to play a different board game called Settlers of Catan. Nanluo Gu Xiang is a little area, near houhai (where we did the ice bikes), made up of cafes, bars, and little craft shops. It's an area of hutongs, meaning it's small little buildings, rather than big big big buildings. They're really cute, but the buildings don't have their own bathrooms so you always have to run outside to the nearest public toilet. This is what Nanluo Gu Xiang looks like:
We sat in a cafe, called xiao xin's, for a few hours with our game. It was quite relaxing. Rest assured that we were able to surf the net wineless-ly there.
