I can see for miles.....

2 days before I turned 22, I got to drive in China. I drove about 3 blocks blasting loud music, weaving through pedestrians, bikes and cars all around. It was great. I’m going to get my licence here soon.
Zac came in from Shanghai for my birthday and 10 of us went to a nice GuiZhou restaurant. On Saturday we went to the Fragrant Hills, which is due west of civilization, but still technically in Beijing. I took us about 2 hours to get there. These hills are famous for having a great scent and having red leaves covering the mountain at this time of year. When we got there, it was all green and brown. All of the red leaves had fallen and had since been picked up by peasants to sell to the visitors. So on the entire mountain, there were no red leaves. It was bitterly cold and we stayed at the top for less than 10 minutes. The view was nice. A sprawled out city with a population nearing 17 million and tucked away on the other side of the hills were nuclear power plants sprawling the countryside.
When I got home the night of my birthday, there was a giant bouquet of flowers in the living room, from my landlord (who is also the ‘Chinese parent’ of my roommate), for my birthday. There was a little red box on it, which had a set of pearl cufflinks. Not really my style, but it was a really nice gesture. When I told my roommate what she gave me, he mentioned that his ‘Chinese-American brother’ has a pearl company. For her birthday, I should send her a pearl necklace.
If anyone is interested in what I’m doing here:
For about a month now, I have been working on a deal between the hi-tech incubator that I work for and a Venture Capital firm listed in London. We are trying to form a partnership to develop a web platform. I have been my companies rep to create the budget, revenue models and initial business documents. I have worked mostly out of the VC office which is pretty cool and if the deal goes through, I will be working there full-time on this project. The first Friday in November, I found out that the VC director that has been focusing on this platform was to ‘pitch’ the CEO to get funding for our project. He gave us two hours notice to refine the powerpoint and budget. 5 minutes prior to the meeting, the other person I have been working with told me that he had another meeting and that I was going in for the pitch. I thought that I was there to change powerpoint slides and be unnoticed, but the CEO sat right across from me, and the asked me to begin the pitch. Although we got hacked to pieces, I came out of that meeting smiling. I pitched a VC CEO at 21 and we’re getting a second shot. That was a really cool day for me.
Yesterday, I booked a flight to Seoul and I will be in Korea for about 6 days. Hopefully I will have more interesting things to report on afterward.