karen left for work this morning at 9:20am, earlier than yesterday, but still later than her usual time. i woke up at 9am partly because of the smell of her frying a pork chop for breakfast. google calendar reminded me of a 12:30pm harvard lecture on corruption in china. since i had the time, after a late breakfast of yogurt-granola-blueberries, i made my way down there (CGIS south S020, belfer case study room) via the shortcut to francis avenue. it was the second day of rain but the precipitation had stopped momentarily, the landscape enveloped in a thick fog. i brought my umbrella just in case, as well as a mug of hazelnut-vanilla tea on this damp and cold day. i took my dSLR, hoping to get a few snapshots in this misty weather.

belfer case study room is a pit-style lecture room. it seemed to be a popular lecture as nearly every seat was filled and the stream of late-comers had to sit in the back on rolling chairs. the speaker was new york times journalist michael forsythe. it was a very interesting talk, but he threw out a bunch of chinese names assuming everyone knew who they were when in fact i knew none of them. it would've been nice if he could've briefly introduced some of the characters (he did do it a bit with the princelings of he guoqiang and zhou yongkang). the first name he brought up was guo wengui, the whistleblowing chinese playboy businessman who's currently exiled in a $60 million manhattan condo.

forsythe's slide game could also use some work, which is entirely text based. the bulk of the talk was the various tools he used to gather his information for his investigative journalism articles, everything from administration for industry and commerce (AIC) records, overseas corporate records, property records, marriage certificates, occasional wikileak sources (like the panama papers), and even tombstones. the talk wasn't so much about the details of the corruptions, but rather on how to gather evidence of said corruption. like i said, very interesting topic, but could've been better presented.

by the time i left at 2pm, it was raining heavily again. thankfully i had my umbrella. i saw a few pedestrians who weren't as lucky, using random objects to ineffectively keep dry.

i heated up some pulled chicken for dinner, placed on a toasted onion roll with a chunk of oaxaca cheese on top. just one sandwich was enough to fill me up.

unlike yesterday, karen didn't come home until well after 8pm. she said she went to "basket market" and came home with a container of orange juice. soon afterwards i heard her sizzling another pork chop in the kitchen, filling up the house with the smell of grease. just one more month!