At this point it has been close to two weeks since I have posted, no I have not died or decided I don't want to post anymore. People visiting (jasmine & yachi) have taken a lot of the free time I had to devote to the blog and the other little bits of free time I had were taken up by reverse engineering our IM client's communication with it's SQL backend (yeah you weren't supposed to understand just be very very impressed and think "wow that must have taken a lot of his time")((also I would not fault you if you thought "that justin he is one smart engineer who manages to have a keen fashion sense and a rapier like wit")). Suffice to say that posts will probably not be in real time until I catch up (maybe in April but probably never) and probably a little less common.

with that public service announcement out of the way, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

So I believe this is the post from Saturday. Just to set the scene, jasmine was in town and it was pretty cold out. Like snowing in the morning cold out.

we decided to head to the electronics market to find a camera / video recorder that marques wanted. He had told me that most of the ones on eBay were coming from china and specifically Beijing. We headed to the zgc to find this very special camera.

on the way there we say a man traveling in style. He was passed out in the back cart while his indentured servant biked him around town.

we did not ever find the camera but we did return to the hot pot place I liked there. I thought I would be able to at least order us some basic food but had greatly overestimated my Chinese abilities. Luckily there was a student sitting next to us who was helpful and spoke English. There also was an older couple who would ask the waiter to grab us utensils as they became needed. Like when we tried to eat the noodles we had dropped in out pots with chopsticks (aka an exercise in futility).

the snow and the rain from the night before left a nice film of dirt on all the cars outside. That should give you a good indication of how great the air / environmental quality is here.

we headed back to the apartment to drop off jasmine's purchases and see if there were a dedicated sanyo dealer (the camera maker) in Beijing. Turns out that there is not one in Beijing and the majority of the cameras on eBay were coming from Hong Kong, which is not really china no matter what the prc says. All the domestic, government owned airlines treat a flight to Hong Kong as an international flight.

we took a cab to the pearl market as jasmine wanted to perhaps buy some pearls. The traffic was not so good so I got a good chance to perfect taking pictures from a moving car. As you can see though the weather cleared up some even though it was still ridiculously cold.

here was a hypermarket we passed. I am not sure what makes it hyper. I imagine that they sell things at an insane rate in this store. Also everyone talks very fast sounding like the chipmunks.

I learned how to say market and supermarket in Chinese during class but hyper market is still not part of my Chinese vocabulary. Looks like I have something to ask a question about tomorrow during class.

also I have made a decision to take a picture of all the general tso's restaurants I see in Beijing. Later I can make a map and sell it like one of those celebrity maps in Los Angeles.

this one was located in the south west section of town. It was fun driving through this area because I had not ever seen it. To be honest though it looks a lot like the rest of Beijing. Not many of the buildings here have much personality.

we talked about this in Shanghai some. It turns out that they are growing so quickly here and labor is so cheap that they are just sharing plans for buildings. Getting an architect to design an all new building is too expensive and there are plenty of others going up that have plans you can borrow. Makes things more efficient I guess but leads to a pretty drab place.

every once in a while though you see something random to spice it up a little bit like this random sculpture on the street.

the pearl market itself was fun. It was more enjoyable this time as I could watch someone else buy something instead of just wandering through with my headphones on. We also went to the prestigious forth and fifth floors which turned out to be quite a bit nicer than the rest of the market. jasmine found what she told me was a good deal on pearls. I really had no idea.

I had just finished reading an article about conducting business in china and how after a little bit of friendly haggling, the store owner gets you a glass of water and you sit down to really talk business.

this is exactly what we did at this store. I kept myself busy chuckling about that for quite some time.

on the drive there we saw this market and the phrasing of the name made me wonder what it was they were selling. For some reason it brought chicago's commodities to mind.

jasmine and the store owner talked about different things about pearls using many tools and rubbing lots of different pearls together. Apparently that is a good way to discern the quality of a pearl. If it is smooth when rubbed against another pearl it is fake.

they kept given me pearls to rub together and asking me if I felt the quality. I, of course, said "ooo, yes. How could you not?" while wondering to myself what I was supposed to be feeling.

one of the coolest areas of the market had been pulled out though for reconstruction. They had a bunch of posters and curios here that I was looking forward to going through one afternoon. I won't be doing that unless they add the section back with the same stalls. They will probably just put more handbags there, we will see.

after the pearl market we went to go get a backrub at bodhi which was awesome. The masseusse actually climbed on to my back at one point and used her knees on my back. That was kind of a surprising maneuver. Also jasmine told me that they rub the breasts there so if you are female and come to visit consider yourself warned.

after massages we grabbed some Thai food and went to saniltun street. It was pretty quiet as it was so cold and still pretty early. We stopped by a DVD store and then went to the tree. This bar has been highly recommended by many different people and it does not disappoint. It has good beer, good pizza and is quiet enough to let you talk but not so quiet that you feel like you always have to be talking.

as we were walking out we saw this ad for a tour to north Korea. What is the tour of? Millions of people living in an incredibly repressive country while starving or only what the grand super friendly happy leader decides you can see? I will never know as they only give visas to about 100 Americans a year and I cannot see myself having the credentials to get one of those anytime soon.