So I am changing the MO for posting a little bit. I am going to use the date I actually publish posts as opposed to the day that I post it to Blogger. You may have no idea what I am talking about and that is fine. Basically it will not look like such large gaps in between the days I am posting which has led to some "are you still alive mails?"

Here is the Summer Palace where Yachi and I went on a beautiful Saturday. The Summer Palace is not really a palace but a 700 acre park built / reserved? during the Qing dynasty. I am going to be kind of lazy and let the pictures mostly speak.

Here is the entrance with tons of tourist groups and their really cool hats. One day i am going to get one of these hats. Every time I see a group like this I try to get a hat from someone in the group but no one understands what I am asking or is willing to give up their hat.

Can't have the railings going to shit.






Many boats that later in the afternoon were all being used out on the lake. They were paddle boats which brought back fond memories of my wee years.


People catching up on their rest. I imagine that it would be hard to get all the homeless people out of this park due to the size, if they even wanted to.


Yachi imitating the woman we saw earlier. I could not understand why you would turn sideways and bend slightly forward to take a picture. It seems close to the worst position possible.

I really liked this flowery tree. Liked it so much I took about 30 pictures of it. Ask me when I get back for the slide show.

This guys were not very happy with me cause i walked right in front of their wheelbarrow. So I took a picture of them just to make them even happier.

This was the way most of the bridges were here. You can see the normal bridge in the background aka the one that is not 10m high.

An island that I really wanted to get on to.



Me enjoying the beautiful flowers.







You can never escape the city.









i am amazed they could not move these boats in time to avoid beaching them.











A half naked man. If you will notice in any other picture of people they are wearing coats because it was pretty cold still.

I used Yachi as a front to allay the man's suspicions.

Yachi in front of CiXi's marble boat. CiXi was the mother of an emperor and parlayed that into a 74 year reign as the power behind the curtain which is longer than anyone else in the Qing dynasty except for maybe KangXi. She was not very well liked as she had a tendency to push people down wells and such. She also drank human breast milk to stay young.

She convinced her nephew (I believe) to build the boat in the background instead of a navy. The boat is marble which does not float, doesn't even come close to floating. The navy would have been useful in the next decade as China was taken over by everyone including France (which has to be humiliating). This boat marks the beginning of the end for the imperial system in China.

Our lunch which was 5 dollars. I love China and i love those dumplings. One bag was a dollar and was awesome.

So Saturday we decided to go to the Summer Palace which turned out to be a great decision. Those pictures will be in a separate post.

This is some heavy duty drilling that was occurring on our way to the coffee shop to grab some breakfast before wandering around the Palace.

After the Summer Palace we went out to dinner with William and Michael. Michael took us to a restaurant that is located in the old castle of a brother of one of the Qing emperors. The menu is based on what the people in the palaces ate but not what the emperor ate. It seems like a small distinction to make but an important one I guess. After some investigation there is only one restaurant that serves the food the emperor ate (Royal) and a couple that serve palace food (Imperial).

The restaurant was good and huge. It will be a fun place to go back to when it is warmer out so that you can sit outside and take advantage of the beautiful surroundings. The menu was pretty interesting. They had things as diverse as flower salad (which we are and was good) and deer afterbirth and embryo (which cost $450 US that we did not eat).

One of the funniest things though was how all the wait staff had wireless iPaks and headsets for ordering food. It would be the only place to run a restaurant like that though. It was massive comprised of at least 20 different buildings. It also has received the honor of being one of the ten best tax payers of Haidian district. For the observant among you, you will have noticed that this is the first place I have gone out in the district I live in (Haidian) that is not right near my house. Props to you.

After that we went to Bodhi for a foot massage with everyone which was fun. It is always more fun with the more people you go with.

Friday was a lot of fun but it started off with a lot of no fun.

i am not the biggest fan of writing my reviews at work so i had put off my mid-year review until a week before it has to be commented on and submitted. Needless to say my manager was not excited about this but i finished it up on Friday.

for lunch i wandered home and yachi made some good food for us. This was a nice switch and gave me a chance to see what the walk home looked like in the middle of the day.

this pictures are the result of that wandering. i have to admit i thought it strange that this little girl was striking out on her own with no adult supervision. i think she lives up around the corner as i have seen her a few times since with some people who i am assuming are her parents.

the funniest thing i did all week i did while i was at home for lunch. yachi and i were sitting on the couch and i managed to get one of her fingers up my nose to about the first knuckle. i have not laughed that hard in a while. She was disgusted of course but could not stop laughing. As Morgan would say we have become too comfortable with one another. i laughed about that all the way back to work.

i stuck around work for a couple of meetings and what not but still could not manage to finish my review so i decided to take off early and meet yachi at the coffee shop to finish it. Yes there are coffee shops here and they are almost exactly the same as the us.

considering the place yachi was at got sued by starbucks for trying a little too hard to emulate it's multi-national big brother it is no surprise that they are almost identical. They both have free wireless and $3-5 drinks. i cannot believe people would pay 30 quai for a coffee (unless they were still receiving an American salary and have a really favorable exchange rate).

on the way to the coffee shop i saw what might qualify as the most stereotypically Chinese thing i have seen since being here. The pic on the left tries to capture it but it is hard to see. Also this pic starts the first of a series that you should probably click on to see the large version and all the things in the pic.

this large group of security guards was practicing martial arts in the middle of the cement sport area near my house, poorly i might add. i watched them side kicking in turns for a while and kept expecting some hero to come walking out into the middle of the field and challenge them to a fight were he / she kicked all their asses by her / himself.

Michael schumacher will not stop following me. i saw his bike again but could not locate him. He was probably hiding out somewhere spying on me.

after the coffee shop yachi and i wandered home to get ready for our big nice dinner in Beijing. i had made reservations at the nicest (according to the guide books and the issue of wine spectator that has an article on Beijing) restaurant in Beijing.

the walk home provided us with many interesting sights though. The first of which was this handicapped motorcycle. The little green sticker is a handicapped sticker and the license plate is actually a handicapped plate. i am not sure who is handicapped though the driver or the passenger on the back. Also i am not quite sure what this buys you in china. There is no handicapped parking and good luck trying to get in any of the buildings here if you are handicapped. i have yet to see one wheelchair accessible building. Ok actually i have seen a couple but they are all by accident. Basically they have a door on the street level or something. For anything with a door that does not open in the street it is only steps. Maybe everything will be handicap accessible by the Olympics.

we also saw what might be the weirdest breed of dog ever. It looks like a normal dog that was cut in two and two pieces that are nowhere near the same size were glued back together. These dogs are all over now. Apparently they can only be seen in the spring.

side note, it is officially spring here. The weather is not really that different but the government decreed it to be spring and all the buildings / people / etc... Are now springified. You might ask what does springified mean, good that you have me here to fill you in.

all the guards have dropped their winter uniforms which appeared to be trenchcoats over what you would expect a guard to be wearing. Now they all have some sort of teddy Roosevelt rough rider outfit going on. You know the cowboy hat rolled up on one side and lots of buttons. Also the main doors of most buildings are open. In the winter they open the doors in a weird opposite way. It is hard to describe but i will give it a valiant effort. Imagine two sets of doors both sets containing three doors. In the first set, the far left door is open. In the second set, the far right door is open. This is supposed to conserve heat as it makes it go farther or something. Anyways now they just have both middle doors open so you can walk right in.

this is yachi and i all dressed up for dinner in my house. i found out how to set the timer on my camera. Next up learning how to set the timer on my obsoleted vcr.

so a little background on the courtyard aka the restaurant we were going to. First none of the cabs we got into knew where it was going which is weird because the second point i was going to bring up is that it is across the moat from the east gate of the forbidden city. Everyone knows where the forbidden city is and given that piece of knowledge it is not hard to find the east gate. You just go to the forbidden city and drive around the perimeter. Anyways after trying two cabs near my house we ended up walking to the hotel and getting the doorman to question cab drivers until one who knew how to get there was found.

as i said the restaurant is on the moat of the forbidden city. Me being the romantic type i had made reservations a while before and requested the only window seat in the house. When we got there we got the table i reserved (i know this should not have been a surprise but you did not hear the reservation call and the confusion on both sides). The table was indeed the only one that looked out on said moat and the forbidden city and it was even set off the main dining room. Yes very romantic and i know at this point all the ladies are cursing their luck right now for not having a boyfriend as thoughtful as me.

this pic to the right is the view out of our private little floor to ceiling window. Me ever being the gentleman i let yachi see out this side. It was a phenomenal view and you could even watch a guy fishing off the bridge you see for the majority of the night.

the restaurant itself was alright. The wine list was good but at this point i am happy to see anything other than great wall and dynasty. It was strong in Bordeauxs and as overpriced as you would imagine a good wine list in Beijing to be. It was nice to have the first glass of real wine i have had since in china though (i will not count the local vino).

it was to be a night of firsts in china i guess. It was also the first night i had used a fork and knife since i left the hotel. There actual were no more firsts but that first sentence sounds so ostentatious that i have to leave it.

the pic on the left was my view which was awesome as well but a little darker than the other.

as we were sitting there eating it finally hit me what the restaurant struck me as, a British colonial establishment from the early 20th century. It was all old white people in Beijing eating so-so French food and drinking good wine. Definitely colonial. Worth the view though.

after the dinner we decided to walk around the forbidden city some. It is really pretty at night and i wish i had a couple of better photos. Unfortunately it was kind of cold and i had drank the better part of the bottle of wine so my fingers were even shakier than normal. The two pictures you see are all that were not fuzzy from about 20 total.

it was a popular place to walk around at night and i am sure i will make it back some night when it is warmer out and try to take some better pictures. i want to get all the flags on the walls surrounding mao's picture at nights so stay tuned.

the exciting event on Thursday was that we went out to eat with hua at the place near my house and finally had some good food. i knew the place was good as it is always packed and the things i have had there would be good if i had liked the meat the sauce was on. As a side note, it was tendons that i had eaten that one night and that i will probably stay away from in the future.

we had lots of good stuff this night though. We started off with a spicy noodle and a sweet tofu dish both of which were great then moved on to pork ribs and this bowl of frog which was a little spicy as you can probably guess from all the peppers on the top. Overall it was a great dinner and a good time. i will probably be eating there more often now that i know some good stuff to order.

So Wednesday was much less exciting and on top of that i forget my camera when we went out. We went to dinner at the hot pot place with the crazy menu and this time i managed to hold on to a menu to peruse it at my leisure and take pictures of all the interesting items. If you remember the first sentence of this post though you have an idea of what is coming. As i reached into my empty pockets to grab my camera i realized that they were indeed empty and that i had forgotten my camera. So next time i will take some pictures to silence my many doubters.

the other entertaining thing that occurred today was me and yachi having a disagreement on the street. One thing that is loved by the Beijing populace is an argument. People gather around heated bargaining and call their friends if there is an actual disagreement. So yachi and i having one made for some pretty exciting times. Not only was it an argument but it crossed racial boundaries and it was in another language. There was one point where i had to chase an old man away who was standing there watching us. Only to have him later return and watch from a safer distance. In retrospect it was pretty funny and to be honest i cannot even recall what the argument was about.

Tuesday i decided to play hooky and yachi and i went to the pearl market so that she could see this pearl place for herself.

when we got there it was right around lunch time and i knew that they served Chinese pizzas somewhere around the market as i had seen someone eating them last time we were there.

we decided to grab one before going in so yachi could taste this magnificent food. We ended up wandering around the hutongs though trying to find this pizza stall and then trying to find our way back.

that is where we found the picture above, i think he is saying step off before i have to wear your ass out with this bat. i would argue that this is a more effective approach than dog inside signs you see in the states. The idea of someone coming at me with a bat frightens me a little more than a dog.

here is another random picture in the hutong. i am not quite sure what it was but it was interesting seeing English and such random English at that.

one funny thing about the hutong was the interest of the people in there. yachi being Asian and me being Caucasian draws a decent amount of attention everywhere we go but the amount of interest we sparked in the hutong residents was amazing. i am guessing that they are still talking about seeing us right now.

we finally gave up on finding the pizza place and almost gave up on finding our way back to the market. Of course just like that saying If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it's, well, broken. So as soon as we stopped looking for pizza we found it and i must say it is the best i have had so far.

after the pizza we actually went into the market and went down to the basement which i had never been to. The basement is a fish market so there were tons of fishes, turtles and eels. The reason i have no pictures of this area was because my hands were firmly lodged in my jacket with my fingers frozen around various items. The eels were still petrifying but i should be able to take a picture next time... Maybe.

there were also the more interesting deep fried skewers (scorpions, starfish, grasshoppers, ...). We did not try any though as we pretty much flew through the floor.

we bought a couple of handbags as well. It was interesting seeing how that works. You walk past a backpack stall and the women working there offer you a binder that has pictures of everything they offer. The actual goods are hidden behind the backpacks.

we bought a nice fake Gucci for one of yachi's friends. yachi picked it out and i bargained for it. i had explained the whole bargaining exchange to yachi but after about 30 seconds into it she was laughing so hard that she ended up leaving. Basically it goes price, counter offer from me which is referred to as "joke price" than a brief discussion on what currency we are talking about than whether i live in Beijing than many many offers about price.

i was happy as i thought i bargained pretty hard and got a good deal until after i gave the woman the money. She gave me the special needs compliment (oh you are a very good bargainer). If i really was a good bargainer she would not have said anything. Although i did get the bag for about 20% of the original asking price.

after that we bought a random fabric bag for yachi which was much easier although still as funny to yachi. Then it was up to sandy's on the fourth floor to look at pearls for a friend. After deciding on a potential pearl for him, yachi started talking earrings with the woman and she started making them for her right there. It was pretty cool to watch this. yachi would sketch something and suggest some colors. The woman would then make it in about 5-10 minutes.

we then decided to check out the fakes market better known as the silk market. i needed a jacket to wear around. i brought my zegna jacket as a spring jacket but i refuse to subject it to Beijing weather. So i was in the market for something cheap and light.

on the way there we walked past my feminine alter ego's restaurant. It is truly a feel fine establishment.

since i did not really care about the jacket i started off looking primarily at ferrari and BMW f1 jackets. How cool would that be if i had one of them, unfortunately they are pretty small but someone is getting one as a present.

i ended up finding a north fake in my size that i was able to bargain from 1880 down to 180. Before you think i am a great bargainer i would remind you that they just start with a ridiculous amount for the 1 in a 100 person who will pay it. i probably could have gotten her down to 160 but i was bargaining for about 20 minutes and starting to get light headed. Her voice would have given out soon as she was screaming at me how i was robbing her.

one of my favorite tactics by the salespeople (women really as there are very few male salespeople) is the "other for that price" tactic. Basically whatever offer you make would be fine to buy this other item in the stall because it is off lower quality. The good thing about that for me is that only about 2 things in any given stall fit me so i can say "gee i would buy that for that price but you only have this in my size".

we also ended up buying a shirt for yachi and some presents for people back home. The presents we bought from the unbargainable woman. There are a couple of them and it is alternately refreshing and frustrating. Refreshing because it is so much easier to buy things but frustrating because the price is always a little high.

after the silk market we headed to the oriental plaza mall and south beauty. i am starting to think that might be my favorite nice Chinese restaurant. After dinner though we wandered around the mall some and came across these mannequins. Obviously they are nice and well cared for unlike the ones earlier that were on the street but something about the mall environment made them a little crazy as you can tell by their expressions.

we also wandered around the hutong area outside the mall where we found this mannequin. a lady of the night looking to make rent by luring other mannequins in. sorry for the dark picture but i did not want to use the flash and scare her away.

after wandering around the hutong we finally found a place where we could grab a cab and headed to bodhi for the second time in three days. This time we got a foot massage and for the first time i really enjoyed it. Even the foot part of it. Before they had been a little too heavy on the pressure points in the foot but this time was great. Number 13 is my new favorite masseuse.

after yachi pulled her feet out of the tub the guy told her that she needed a pedicure before the massage and brought in a lamp and a straight razor. After a strict admonishment to not move he went at her feet with the razor for a while cutting off all the callouses. It was gross but interesting to watch, kind of like faces of death with no blood or people dying. From there it was back home.

Monday i went to work and left yachi to wander around the area on her own.

i saw yet another car trying to get as close as possible to the train station and then getting stuck. They should probably put up a sign about this. Something along the lines of don't even try to go down this way as it is a sidewalk that ends in a dead end (and you still have to jump over the fence to get into the subway center). Maybe something like that would work.

they also tore down most of the trees on the sides of a street / alley i walk down to get to work. The old trees were dying so they just uprooted them and put new babier trees in. This took about 3 hours as near as i can tell.

when you uproot so many trees what do you do with the old ones? Just make a giant pile and leave them there. Someone will want them for something and you will be saved the trouble of having to remove them yourself.

here is the fore-mentioned pile.

the most exciting thing that happened today was that i saw the subtitles that Jason had mentioned in Shanghai.

slight digression about DVD's. Someone who knows more than me can probably explain this but for the pirated DVD's here they rip out the special features and commentary and add in the Chinese language version and subtitles where the other stuff used to be (all of the above is pretty much conjecture based on a conversation Jason and i had while drinking copious amounts of Guinness so i am not sure how much rigorous debate it will stand up to).

sometimes though it seems that they basically rip out all the subtitles and add back English and Chinese. Most of the time these are just really bad (like in batman begins where Bruce kept getting called bitch) but every once in a while they just grab a copy of subtitles that are handy and push those in. So underworld: evolution (which yachi and i watched) contained the subtitles for detention, a movie no one watched, but for which the subtitles are on many many pirated movies.

if you are ever watching a pirated movie and see the opening line, man speaking in serbo-Croatian... Then a bunch of dialogue which does not apply at all to the movie now you know where it comes from. Say it with me, now. And knowing is half the battle.

Sunday was pretty tame. We walked around the areas near my house so that yachi would not get lost if she decided to explore by herself. We ended up in wudaokou and eating Korean food at the place i had eaten with some work people. Pork fusion. i love that name. The food was good and i still love all the free stuff you get there, sweet coffee and sticks of gum. Hard to beat free sticks of gum.

we decided to walk home from the Korean restaurant which was cool because we saw all types of interesting things such as parking meters. It seems like most of the streets and parking lots around here just have attendants to take your money (ridiculous amounts of cheap labor) but for some reason one small section of the zgc has meters.

we also saw some donkeys which had not quite made it on to the menu at the hot pot place. We also saw a old man sitting right off the sidewalk wearing pink pajamas and holding tightly on to his lap dog. Not something you see every day. Unless you are in Beijing where you do see someone walking their dog in their pajamas pretty much every day at almost any time.

after the strain of walking all around we decided to go to bodhi and get full body massages. i know, i know, such a rough life is what you are thinking to yourself right now and i would have to agree. i mean we had to take a taxi to the massage place for our $15 full body massages. Talk about hardship.

one of the benefits of taking the cab though was that we got to see the pulsation fitness club which was right next to the fake walmart called innovatively enough galmart with pretty much the same sign. It even called itself a supercenter, as opposed to say a hyper market.

the only drawback with the massage was the frequent punching of the nuts. This type of massage was big on long strokes to move energy through the body and on the leg those long strokes were just long enough to pretty much punch you in the nuts or the labia if you were yachi. What made it a punch was the vigor with which the stroke occurred, a little less vigorous and it would have been a whole different ball game.

Saturday was a pretty tame day. i watched almost the entire second season of family guy while people cleaned my apartment. i had to make it look pretty for my guest (or more specifically the ayi's had to make it look pretty).

for dinner i went back to little fat sheep with hua. Lucky we went that night as they torn down that building the day after we went. Part of the fun of being in Beijing. There are more around i just have to find one now.

after dinner i jumped in a cab outside to go pick up yachi at the airport.

the cab happened to belong to one yang son yan. The first bizarre thing was that he spoke fluent English which is probably the first cab driver i have had that speaks anything beyond numbers.

he had a neon lit bowl thing below the radio. He asked me to guess what it was, i told him i had no idea and he asked me again "come on guess". i guessed ashtray and he told me how smart i was and how good a guess that was. He then cryptically told me there was a TV in the car and then blasted the radio. Playing was backstreet boys, another first for china, at extremely high levels.

after the song he asked me to guess where the TV was in the car. i told him i had no idea and after a couple more rounds of "come on guess", "no really i have no idea" he showed me the TV in the passenger side visor.

the TV happened to be hooked up to a DVD player and the audio output was hooked up to the radio. What this means is that as the backstreet boys were coming from the speakers, the video for the song was on the TV. i thought this was amazing but there was more.

after showing me one of the videos he pulled out the microphone so you could karaoke along with the songs / videos. That is right a rolling moving karaoke bar. The one and only karaoke cab in Beijing. He also had lights around the ceiling for a little mood lighting.

at first i would not sing so he just took the mic and sang at the top of his lungs to equally loud music while going 120 kph on the airport highway in busy Beijing traffic. It was equal parts terrifying, hilarious, and awesome. Something that will never be repeated. Until i call him to drive to the great wall that is.

he would not let me out of the car until i got in the front seat and pretended to sing into the mic so you get the picture of me singing to backstreet boys.

as side note my favorite apart of the ride was when he turned around after a song and said "is it ok if i play that one again, it is my favorite". For some reason i could not stop laughing about this. He really loved the backstreet boys.

here is the first thing you see walking out of customs in the Beijing airport.

after a delayed flight i picked up yachi and we just went home so she could pass out.