You know it’s going to be a good day when it starts with a visit to a Chinese police station. Fortunately (for my now-panicking father) it was a just matter of bureaucratic record-keeping; I had to register as a foreigner living in the neighborhood. What was peculiar about the station, though — aside from its four doors which all directed people to their right, when only the furthest left door was unlocked — was that we arrived to find it populated solely by two policemen playing PSP on a couch. They told us (my roommate came to help me register, which was nice of him) that we were in the wrong place, and should go to the office to the right. After fervently denying that this office could possibly be locked, one of them eventually came to check the doors. Only then did he choose to inform us that the entire station aside from his buddy and him had gone out to eat. It’s worth remembering at this point that it was 11:25, at a police station located not only in the capital of the country but right next to a good deal of government buildings and really important/ seemingly guardworthy areas like tian’anmen and the forbidden city. Call me crazy but I think the scene would be pretty different at a police station near, say, the white house. In any event, the guy got right back to his playstation and told us to sit tight until someone with some semblance of authority came back from lunch, which we did. Eventually someone showed up and I got all my stuff registered, so now if the chinese government decides to purge foreigners from the city or something they know right where to find me. Yay!
Speaking of where I live, I thought I’d give a virtual tour of sorts, because my parents asked me to. Here’s the facade: 
then there’s the main room, the kitchen, my room (taken from the bed, which is up against the far wall), and the bathroom. The latter’s notable because it has a shower in it but nothing to contain the water, so in the words of my roommate it ‘just kinda goes everywhere’ which would be fine, except that it’s rotting the hell out of the door.
Oh, and just for fun: here’s what the view from my window looked like at home on December 31st:
…and here’s the view from my window now, 3 days later: 