MIA

7-27-10
Oh the sporadic posts! It’s been two weeks since I last posted. Reasons!

I’ve been sick; I caught a very nasty cold and missed three days at work to sleep (actually, I showed up for the middle day and was sent home with instructions to stay home the next day.) My coworkers’ concern has been to understate the case, touching. On the third day (this past Friday) they called and dropped by the dormitory with an enormous care package of fruit and Chinese medicine:

I teared up a bit when they dropped by because it was so thoughtful and unexpected of them. The top set of pills is vitamin C, the second are honeysuckle extract, and the bottom was bottles of liquid which were supposed to ease my throat and stop my coughing. The dosages were large; for example, for the honeysuckle extract I was supposed to take 4-6 very large pills twice per day. I found that they worked rather well.

Part of the reason I caught such a nasty cold, I think, is because I simply did so much in the past two weeks. I am going to make a large photo post on all the things I did, but I can’t remember when I did what and so on. Here are the things I did, in vague chronological order:

- Visit the Military Museum; later that day I went to 798 Art District (the coolest place, I think, that I have seen so far in any city- lots of photos of esoteric street art).

- I went dancing at a place called Vick’s, which was quite nice; also went back to Latte. That night we found a speakeasy! In this day and age! Cunning had read about it; we had to knock on a brick wall, which hid a concealed door. The place itself was completely legal but had just closed when we found it.

- Thursday the 22^nd, I was sick; I showed up for work and got sent home. I slept most of the day. Early that evening we went to eat Peking duck at a restaurant a few subway stops away; it was delicious! We all stuffed ourselves silly. Katherine was feeling too sick to go.

- I spent most of Friday the 23rd asleep, but I ventured outside for lunch to Wudaokou Market (different from the outdoor night market) with Melissa; we bought matching white heels for 60 kuai (RMB 60= USD 8.85$); I am already very fond of them. This was a very odd market; the ground floor was full of clothes (slightly more expensive than the zoo); the top floor was full of jewelry stores, toy stores and hair and nail salons offering extremely cheap real hair extensions (40-60 kuai, or about $5.90 for staggeringly long, full-head extensions; compare to USD 200-300$ for similar items in the states).

- That evening we girls went to a fried chicken restaurant with our Chinese teacher Sophia. She rode on the back of my bike for about 30 feet (“I am so brave!”) before deciding she was frightened and would prefer to walk. At the restaurant, we were interrupted mid meal by splashing water and turned around to find a waiter chasing a fish across the floor with a net. Some woman got stuck in the bathroom. It took them over an hour to get her out (this is my personal hell, getting stuck in a bathroom in China. The smell!). Sophia loves to eat (she also weighs about 90 pounds soaking wet) and this restaurant was both delicious and dirt cheap. We had a kind of rustic starch ‘noodle’ soup, fried chicken wings, beef testicles (chewy!), and slivered crunchy stir fried potatoes; the meal was light because we all couldn’t resist buying skewers along the way.

- Went on a tour the next Saturday (24^th) to the New Summer Palace; it’s absolutely gorgeous; after we went to the Temple of Heaven; after that to Houhai and then to an unknown pub where you could write on the walls with Sharpie, then to Propaganda. This was another story I won’t get into here; suffice it to say that the tour was really fun, the evening after, not so much. This was a ridiculously long day. I will very fondly remember biking home at last with Shirley and Cunning and getting mantou and lamb skewers from “Bike Skewer Dude” (he sells skewers that he grills on a plate set up on the back of his motorbike).

- The next day, we went shopping all day. We went to the zoo (Huge, 8 stories and multiple skyscrapers packed full of people and ridiculously cheap things) where I bought what turned out to be an extremely ugly dress and a striped shirt (20 and 10 kuai, respectively). It’s difficult when you can’t try items on! The zoo market is insane; the 2^nd and 3^rd floors are entirely women’s clothing; the 4^th floor ‘designer collections;’ the 5^th, 6^th, and 7^th floors shoes and men’s clothing; the 8^th a food court. This food court has some of the cheapest, best food I’ve had in Beijing. The last time I was here Shirley, Katherine, and I split the best Szechuan stir-fry I’ve had yet. For this type of meal, you pick out the ingredients you like and pay by raw weight; they then stir-fry them with peppers, hot oil, Szechuan peppercorns, and cilantro and other spices; this is like what Zang, Lei Lei and Miao took me to eat.

- We then went to Silk Street, which is the largest market frequented by tourists and something like the 3^rd biggest tourist attraction in Beijing after the Great Wall and I believe the Forbidden City. Quoted prices here were absurd in order to scalp unsuspecting tourists; you are supposed to bargain aggressively. Example: Melissa examined an extremely nice Chanel knockoff purse that was quoted at RMB 2,500; after extensive bargaining she eventually bought it for RMB 130. I bought three Longchamps folding purses (25 kuai each; the 3^rd, 30 kuai; quoted price ranged from 50 to 120 kuai) and two pashmina scarves (RMB 30; I had gotten it down to 20 elsewhere but they didn’t have the colors I was looking for; quoted price anywhere from 50 to 200 kuai). Silk Street was fun; like the zoo, it has everything you might be looking for and a lot more that you don’t want. The sizing here targeted foreigners: in the rest of China, an XL or XXL fits me(!) (size 2-4); here, clothes ran enormous and the smallest rings were too big for my thumbs.

Monday (Yesterday) I had an extremely mellow day at work and then slept through Chinese class by accident; I’m still recovering from my cold. We watched an awful movie (Youth in Revolt) and slept early.