So last i left you it was Saturday. Sunday was a pretty fun day. Started off doing laundry which was not very fun or exciting. After hanging it though the day started to pick up. yachi asked me to visit hongqiao market (the pearl market) to see if they do indeed sell pearls. This was in the southern part of Beijing and sounded like a good Sunday adventure.

on the way there i finally solved the mystery of the small ceramic cylinders i had brought up earlier. Turns out they are used as heaters. i saw them heating up a pot on the street. The finger sized holes hold a small piece of coal. i am assuming that they are also used to heat up homes hence the new batch in the garbage every morning. at least it is a movement away from oil dependence, not the cleanest one but so be it.


there also appears to be a small tent community that popped up around the subway stop near my house. i am guessing that they have to go through less red tape than the Seattle tent cities that cannot seem to find a home. i think these might be for the migrant workers working on the subway though as they have electricity in them.




after getting out from the subway and walking up to the street my carefully planned directions feel apart. The intersection was the intersection of two streets named the one i wanted to be on. Apparently i had not looked at the map well enough to determine which of the same street i should take to get where i wanted. Fortunately there was a police officer who understood enough of my Chinese to point me in the right direction.

once i started walking i saw the blood mobile. The most scariest place in the world to give blood. i am one pint away from my two gallon pin and that is with many widely spaced decisions to get tattoos blocking me for a year at a time. i have never given blood in the bus. All i can imagine is right as the needle is about to go in your arm someone rocking the bus by coming in or knocking on the door or stepping too heavily. Mobile blood giving? No thank you.

so a store that they decided to name after me and my exciting life. This was not quite as good as party world because they had no pig but hey it is still party life. Suprisingly enough it was not a karaoke place it was just a hang out place where you could drink. Which would normally make it a bar but this was not really a bar just a hang out place. How you like that circular logic? booyah.



spring festival decorations are still up which makes places look much more festive. They are still up in my apartment as well. i am too lazy to take them down and they make the place look better. The walk to the market was relatively uneventful. There was a cool looking street a block over but i had to save something for the walk back.





i did see a fake evo though on the way. Only a lancer with lots of body work and a different spoiler. Speaking of cars, guess what the most popular car in china is? Alright since the internet is not quite as interactive as everyone would have you believe i will tell you. The Buick regal. The most middle class American of cars is the top seller in china. i have seen more buicks here than back in Michigan. everytime i see one still it is a surreal sight. i guess they are made in Shanghai though so they say Shanghai GM on the back instead of just GM.

i had to cross a bridge to get to the market. There were people flying the many kite kites from the bridge. As well as selling DVD's on the side for those that did not want kites. With my new shiny DVD player i stopped to look and lo and behold underworld revolution. The movie that taunted me in the us. Its release date was the Friday i arrived in china. So i bargained the guy down to the normal price of 7 quai. i was so excited all day to watch it only to find out why you should not buy DVD's from the guys on the street. Turned out to be a blank CD with fancy packaging. Lesson semi-learned. i will probably try buying some off the street again if i cannot find the movie anywhere else and just keep my fingers crossed.

the market was in an interesting area. It is across from the east gate of tiantan (temple of heaven) which is one of the biggest temples in the city. It also is in an area that has more of the traditional hutong area which is a lot less developed. In the midst of all this you have tour buses disgorging large amounts of German tourists and random American tourists deciding to walk there from the subway. i doubt that i will ever get fully acclimated to the schism between old and new in Beijing or at least not until they have torn everything down and built it all new.

the market is five floors but i only saw the 1st - 3rd ones. The fourth and fifth are "prestigious" and i did not feel like going up there after the full court sales press that was the 1st - 3rd floors. To be fair it was not that bad because i was not buying anything so i could just walk through and smile at all the people telling me how cheap their "insert random thing here". The pearl market has pearls but also has a little bit of everything else including the first know off ipod nanos i have seen here. The pearls themselves looked alright but little do i know about pearls so i am a bad judge.

after taking off from the market i was going to go over to tiantan but saw this building. Decided that it would be more interesting to see it and the surrounding area. It was interesting to see the hutong area surrounding the market. Kind of like Venice in regards to the small alleyways.






i kind of kept wandering around areas that caught my eye until i was pretty thoroughly lost. It was cool seeing the vendors on all the streets though so i was kept entertained. Finally i ended up walking around a variety of homes and decided that i should probably make some kind of effort to get unlost.



















this is where the drunk guy on the cart became incredibly useful. He was just rolling along in his cart with a bicycle stuck in it, banging the bicycle into tons of things along the alleyway. For some reason though he seemed to be going in the right direction and there really were not that many other directions for me to go. Turned out that i managed to get back to a main street and from there back to tiantan.

by the time i was there though it was too late to pay to get in. an adventure for another day. This time i walked back the same way i came but took the more exciting fun looking street that was a block behind. It had a very small alley as its entrance way.






right as i got on to the main part of the street i saw some rats trying to carry off a baby. The rats were not that big but there were a ton of them. The parents had to keep grabbing back their child.

the street had lots of fun stuff on it beyond rats like fish in a shallow pan. Lots and lots of vegetables and pretty unrecognizable meats.


















here is another example of why i feel like china is safer in some weird way. It is a store that is closed. They do not bother to take all the stuff in and lock it up though. They just leave it there under tarps. i am not quite sure why this flies. The area i was walking around in definitely was not the richest area of town and i am sure that someone would have loved some free groceries. Maybe it was fear of being seen by a neighbor, maybe the store owner was sitting behind the door just waiting for an excuse.

in san Francisco you saw a lot of people living in their cars. They had the back and front seat full up of shit and they would park in the sunset and move their cars whenever they needed to To avoid parking tickets. The car could drive far enough to get to a new spot but that was about it. Here is living in your car to a new level. i like how there is a little awning built to this place and how it just fits the van. The van also has the mirrored windows, that is a step beyond limo tints.

after this i went to the pizza company and had my weekly pizza fix. It it kind of like methadone to my usual pagliacci's fix back in Seattle.

saw a random park and decided to wander through it. Turns out this park is the Vegas of Beijing. Everyone in this picture is playing cards and gambling. Or i assume they are gambling because there are cards being played and money being tossed around.

there also was this really cool hill that i was too tired to wander up.

i think Morgan might have spent time here as a youth without realizing it. Whenever a child has to go to the bathroom the parents just make that square of the sidewalk a toilet. So you see little kids peeing all over. The only person i have seen pee in public with such abandon is my sister ergo her time here during her formative years.

after leaving the park i decided to wander up to wangfujing, the chi-chi shopping center. On the way i saw this sign. It made me wonder, if Microsoft started a store here would we call it "operating system monopoly"? (oww, sassy). If anyone i don't know form Microsoft is reading this, thems just jokes baby.

i popped out from the street right in front of my favorite clothing store, emnegildo zegna. Who knew they had a boutique? Luckily i only had 200 quai in my pocket so i decided it was not even worth going in. i am not sure how you would buy expensive things here, you would have to have one of those metal briefcases like drug dealers in the movies. Maybe they take plastic although the only place i have been to that does is walmart and they only take Chinese plastic. i will have to find out how to buy things at zegna :).

this was back in the subway going home. i went to the bookstore and got my book on reading Chinese which has proven to be an interesting storybook but not helped in my immediate recognition of any characters.

this ad was funny to me because who feels like that after taking robitussin? When have you taken some tussin and jumped off the couch ready to run a marathon? Usually you take it to placate your cough enough to fall asleep. It also reminded me of Chris rock talking about the tussin because the whole family apparently has decided to use it to take care of their woes.

this is how busy the subway was going home. To give some perspective this was two minutes after the train left. Yes i saw the train leave. i along with half of the people in line could not fit on it because it was so full. Let me also remind you that this is the first stop on the line so no one is on the train at this stop from previous stops.

we left about as many people as in this picture standing on the platform when we left. So many people everywhere.

on the way home i had a feeling that underworld might be bunk so i decided to stop at the DVD store cause they must have legitimate DVD's, right? Got a bunch of movies one of which (batman begins) is exclusively in Russian. It has English subtitles but only dubbed Russian voices. It is amazing how much that throws off the movie.

so that is the end of my mega-long Sunday post.

as it is Tuesday now i am going to catch you up on Monday and today right quick.

Monday, nothing happened. Ok not exactly true, i found police academy 2 at walmart today. Will the good lord ever stop giving me treasures? i wandered home with a quickness and watched that while eating my new specialty, dumplings.

today it snowed. Not much but definite snow all over the place.

otherwise i got stood up by the people who were supposed to come by and clean the house. Tomorrow is the newly scheduled appointment. My life is a full and rich tapestry.






more snow













field full of kids playing soccer yesterday. Not today as it is covered with yes indeed more snow.












one more thing i did tonight. i finally ate some food from the vendors on my way home. here is a picture of one eaten and one uneaten thing. i am still not quite sure what i ate but i am telling myself it was ribs.


music recommendation, jenny Lewis with the Watson twins - rabbit fur coat - team love. She is the lead singer for some famous band, Riley Kilo maybe? This is here solo project and it is pretty good. Better than good though it is free. Check out the link above as her record company is giving out her whole album minus a song. The style is pretty good. Gillian Welch but never happy.