More snow since yesterday. Its quite dangerous actually, I keep on hearing stories of people falling and at night from my room I can hear people slipping too. I'm living on the 6th floor but everything is paper thin. Thank god for government regulated heating (the government turns the heat on and off each year, if you want more you go out and buy a space heater, but it works quite well overall). More eating adventures yesterday; I ordered tofu, a dish I didn't recognize by name and the waitress sort of wisely smirked when I ordered it and then huddled with the other waitresses after taking my order and they all chuckled. This is routine for me so I didn't think anything of it until I saw her walking from the kitchen with a giant steaming couldron (sp?) in her hands. Somehow I ordered all like the Chinese version of stone soup but mine just had tofu in it. Seriously there was at least 5 lbs. of tofu on the table with a giant spoon sticking out of this pot. I had a surprised face and sort of laughed and all the waitresses laughed with me. I had one bowl and that was enough. I asked them to wrap it up to go and it took all four of them to put it in plastic bags. I could have taken it home in the pot for an extra 20 yuan but figuring it would spill everywhere on the icy streets I went against that option. So know there is all this tofu in the fridge and I'm kind of tofu-d out at the moment. Don't know what to do about that.

Last night I went to a talk put on by this group called "Beijing Energy and Environment Roundtable" or BEER, the speaker was the head of the U.S. Dept. of Energy in China and it was fascinating. He was so honest and insightful, has many years of China experience under his belt and offered some great words of wisdom. The event was packed and I was very surprised and excited to see how many of my peers are doing interesting things here.