Pics from when Yachi and I went to the Forbidden City. I realize that I just posted some Forbidden City pics but I am trying to get back into chronological order so deal with it.


Yachi in front of the tree that was stunted to look like the Chinese character for person. Note the 20 quai drink in her hand. Price gauging the tourist is a global behavior.


Scary halloween trees.


A very small bamboo forest.


A very fancy gold bannistered phone booth. I was the subject of much ridicule for taking this picture. Everyone else in the area stopped what they were doing to laugh at me taking it.






Old style fire extuingesher.


Meaner than 20 snapper turtles. Look at that face.




I know why the caged foo lion sings.




One of my favorite pictures I have taken and I am not quite sure why.


A couple not shy about where they come from. I asked them if they had any ketchup with them in a french accent. They were not terribly amused.




Because it was cold enough that you needed two hoods.


The starbucks in the dead center of the Forbidden City. I asked for sugar with my latte and got a cinamanon struedel latte.


A little Seattle love.


Packed with some people trying to maintain a semblance of a line and the rest of us who just cut to the front as quickly as we could.


Deep thoughts.


Proving that every house has a broom closet.


Some space age tiger shit.




Read this and tell me how not eating onions, chives or garlic is fasting. Shit that is half the English with their bland food. I am going to write a book about this fasting and call it the East China Diet. Pretty soon you will be hearing about it from your fitness obssessed neighbors.




Bars always make me curious about what great things are hidden on the other side. I will always wonder about this.




A slightly different sort of structure that I had never seen before and have been unable to see since. Maybe it was like the wardrobe and I should have wandered around in it to find a nice Christian battleground.

Monday was the day I learned about Chinese utilities. Apparently I am a voracious consumer of electricity so the monthly amount the landlord had put in had run out in the middle of the night. She put additional money in but gave me many suggestions on conserving electricity. I thought about this for a while and came to the conclusion that I really did not use that much electricity. Unless I wanted to live without lights I could not see how I could save much more. Anyways it is not that much of a worry as it only cost $5 more.

Yachi and I decided to take the day off work and go see the Forbidden City. We probably should have waited for a slightly warmer day as it was freezing out and Yachi ended up catching a cold but I am getting ahead of myself. It was cool going back to the Forbidden City. It is probably one of my favorite places to visit in Beijing and I am always finding something new in it. I am going to post those pictures as a separate post so I will just skip to walking around afterwards.





It was so cold and windy in Tiananmen that no one was even trying to sell any random junk to you. We made reservations for a duck place in the Hutong area for later that night and headed to McDonald’s to eat lunch and warm up. On the way we saw a fake McDonalds.





We wandered around the Hutong area for a while and found a scroll for Jasmine as she had lost her last one. The woman I bargained with was not terribly happy about the price I ended up paying which was too bad. As I was giving her the money Yachi found something else she wanted and the woman refused to sell it to us for less than 100 quai when it was worth 5. We also saw an auction going on for this frog looking thing.

As our reservations approached we started trying to find this place for dinner, Li Qun. We had been warned that it was hard to find but I think the holy grail is more accessible than this duck place. We had to keep asking random people on the street and they kept us moving in what appeared to be the right direction. We finally found a sign at one point which was as hard to see as you would expect from this picture.

We also found a mannequin that had not done so well for herself. It was like C-3PO in Cloud City. She had a head but poachers had taken her arms and legs. We wished the best of luck to her and forged on to find this restaurant. When we finally did find it there was an old man arguing with a rickshaw driver about how much he owed. We appeared to be the only people in the restaurant when we got there and the woman seated us at a table as the old man came in from arguing. He proceeded to give the woman very specific directions and when she didn’t understand him he just raised his voice. I was praying that we did not have to sit with him and his wife.



Of course we did end up eating with him and his wife and surprisingly they turned out to be great dinner companions. The place also filled up very quickly. The duck was good and the environment was interesting. The owner had fully taken advantage of the “duck in the traditional Hutong” aspect to cater to a predominantly foreign crowd. It was Monday and the place had more people standing around than tables by 7:30. Here is a picture of the vultures eyeing our table. I said this out loud and a couple of people ended up taking offense. Apparently vulture is somewhat derogatory. Who knew? Not little old me.

The couple told us how the rickshaw guy they had been arguing with got them into the rickshaw promising a ride for 10 quai but bumping the price to 480 once they got there. They ended up paying him 20. When Yachi and I left there was another older man arguing with the rickshaw driver. All I heard was “you gave me one price than bumped it up when we got here, I can argue all night…”. We took the old couples suggestion and went to the Green T House which is a restaurant / tea house near the Worker’s Stadium.

The Green T House was a divisive place for me and Yachi, she thought it was ridiculously overpriced and overblown. I agreed that it was overblown but it was fun pretending to be a baller and have dessert that came in a bowl of dry ice. You could not take pictures in the restaurant which is too bad. Yachi’s cappuccino came in a contraption that took two people to carry and had the sugar wrapped in rose petals. They stuck flowers in everything like the drink I ordered. As I said my chocolate cake came in a bowl of dry ice. What made it bearable was the exchange rate. Had it been in the US there is no way I would have gone. Also you have to ring the doorbell to get in. The door is locked to the outside. I would say like a speakeasy but the whole place is surrounded by floor to ceiling windows so you can see everything going on inside. One last thing, the menu did not have any mention of specific foods on it. Every entry was something like “ocean blowing a cool breeze on your soul” what that translates to in food terms I doubt I will ever be smart enough to determine.

Here are some Forbidden city pictures from exactly two months ago when I went there with Jasmine.

It was still pretty cold out but nice because it was no where near as busy as it is now.


It looks almost like the Ghostbuster monster.




One extremely long piece of carved marble.












Everything is under renovation for the Olympics. They are slowly opening up new areas though and the work they are doing on them is pretty impressive.

Credit card companies are everywhere.







Lots of marching.
More marching.







the look on this guys face is priceless.

Sunday we decided to make a market day. We woke up a little late to make it all the way to the dirt market so we decided to go to the Southwest part of the city and look for an animal / insect market. On the way to the subway we saw the beginnings of something I will expound on later that I call the John Henry phenomenon.

We got out of the subway and set off in the direction that we thought the market was and amazingly turned out to be right. It was mostly animals that you could look at with out being worried about how they were being treated in the market proper. So fishes, bugs, grubs, worms. The fish were pretty cool, they had live shrimps and manta rays even. The also had a lot of random Chinese goods like scrolls and jade. The stuff here though seemed to be of better quality though than what you generally find in the other markets. There also was a lack of other noticeable foreigners.

Outside were some cool things but you also got into the mammals which start making me question their treatment. There were a lot of plants and artwork. This artwork though appeared to be pretty authentic and was being bargained for at about $500 - $600 US so I feel like if it was fake it was a really nice fake.

There were some random things like these jugs of spiders which I can only imagine were for your garden and not harmful to humans. There were also a lot of rabbits, turtles, chipmunks, dogs and cats. There were also a lot of chinchillas which struck me as kind of surprising for some reason.

They gray market area was mostly centered around birds, cats and dogs. There was someone selling puppies out of the space below his seat on his moped. There also was a guy selling puppies out of his trunk which is what Yachi is staring at along with everyone else. There were quite a few husky puppies in there that took a lot of willpower to turn down.

On the way back to the subway we stopped at another Chinese pizza place which was not as good as the one outside of the pearl market. The one there is the best I have found here so far. The dough is nice and thick. Yum, it is making me hungry typing this.

We wandered around Sanlitun during the day which presented it in an entirely different light on our way to the Yaxiu market (Also known as the last of the big western fake markets I had yet to visit). There were lots of good signs as this is the bar district and has lots of drunk idiotic people there at night (maybe myself, why are you asking? Think I would get drunk and idiotic? Shame on you.).

We stopped at a grocery store to satisfy my kit-kat craving and saw this display of female sanitary products. After seeing this I had so many questions. Is a woman going to come in and try a hanging pad like this? I laughed picturing a woman trying to match the correct area to the hanging pad to see if it fit right. If not what was the point of hanging it out, so you could pour water on it and see its absorption rate? So that you could feel the quality and see how it is put together? Yachi had to drag me away. There was also a woman clad in vinyl (vinyl skirt, vinyl shirt, vinyl cowboy hat) who was selling yoghurt. Not even beer but yoghurt, I was speechless. I tried to snap a subtle picture but was caught and it turned out fuzzy as they all do.

The market was pretty much the same as the other ones but had a larger selection of random household goods on the top floor. It was like a Ruby Tuesdays or whatever that store is called where you can buy random things for a pretty good price. I even found the source of all calculators at this market (aka the main method of bargaining). We also saw a couple of guys haggling over a Speedo with a saleswoman. I had to know where they were from and asked them. Brazilian of course.

After the market we tried to find a restaurant called Mediterrano that had been recommended by Holly and Jason. We walked about the entire length of Sanlitun street and could not find it. We stopped to look at the map yet again and decided to ask a couple walking towards us if they knew where it was. As the woman was telling us it was closed another woman on her bike got run into by a car behind us. It was the first time I had seen that and I was amazed that after watching for 15 minutes and talking to this couple the cops never showed up.

We did not necessarily believe this couple so we stopped in a bakery near where we thought it was supposed to be and the woman working there confirmed that it was indeed closed. We decided to head towards the Metro Café which was billed as the oldest Italian restaurant in Beijing. This time we decided to take a cab and after he dropped us off we realized that there was no café in sight. At this point both Yachi and I were pretty close to defeated but we wandered around some and through a stroke of luck finally found the restaurant.

I am glad we found it. The food was outstanding and the décor was very nice as well. Overall it is my favorite non-Chinese restaurant in Beijing. I decided to get a steak as I had not had a big piece of meat since I have been here. That was a mistake. Who knew that my body would be unable to process meat after not eating it for a while. I finally understand everyone who says that beef is too heavy and hard to digest. I ate 190 grams of beef and my stomach killed for the rest of the night. Who knew China was going to emasculate me in this way?

We decided to wander over to Bodhi after finishing and get some full body massages. On the way there Yachi had what might have been here most eye-opening experience even though it was not that crazy. We decided to cut through an area that was heavily guarded and just looked like it was not somewhere you were supposed to be able to walk. However we were able to walk right past all the guards and through the stadium to get to Bodhi much quicker. Yachi thought we were not going to be allowed through at all.

I am back from a week and Cambodia and it was awesome. I will talk about it more later.

I have realized though that I am really lagging in getting things posted so I will probably stop linking to pictures at least until I am caught up on th eposts I have backlogged. So with no further ado back to posting actually content.