Mokka mit Schlag » Travel

Just noticed that Louis Armstrong (a.k.a. Moisant) has free wireless now. Hardly seems worth a blog post. Maybe I should be using Twitter.

Better yet, I should figure out a way to feed Twitter into this site.
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Shoreline Park, 2008-06-24, 6:12 A.M.

What sort of topsy-turvy world are we living in when Southwest is the service leader?
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Dateline: Beijing, Wednesday, April 23. We ate an early dinner at the Rathskellar again (not its real name, but I don’t know what else to call it.) We had the fish hot pot again. Then we grabbed a cab for the other side of town to catch the “Peking Opera for Dummies” at the Liyuan Theatre. We planned to wander around a bit before the show, but we hit the worst traffic we’d seen the whole trip, and got there with not so much time to spare. The folks we were planning to go with never showed up. I hope they just didn’t come instead of being stuck in traffic for two hours and still missing the show.
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Sunday morning and it’s raining. I figure I’ll give it an hour to stop or calm down before I give up and head out anyway. I neglected to pack an umbrella. However I bought one easily enough at a little convenience store down the street. It was 26 Yuan (about $4) which struck me as a trifle expensive, but when I opened it I discovered it was actually a really large, solid umbrella, of the sort that sells for $20 or more in the states, not one of the cheap $3 umbrellas that magically on every street corner in Manhattan as soon as the rain starts.

Prices here are quite cheap. A couple of days ago lunch was an amazing duck sandwich from a little hole in the wall bakery in Shicha Hai for 4 Yuan (about 65 cents). A couple of times I’ve known I was getting a bad deal (a 10 Yuan Diet Coke, a $100 Yuan one hour cab ride), but I haven’t bothered to haggle because the price was at worst in line with New York prices, and usually cheaper still. If you bother to haggle at all, the price drops fast. If you don’t like haggling, just look for stores that use scanners on major streets. Then the price is whatever’s been entered in the computer, not whatever the clerk thinks he/she can get away with.
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The Chinese-language television channels in our hotel seem to be split into news, music, and various historical dramas. The dramas are roughly half Kung Fu, half soap opera. The only modern drama we’ve caught is one that we could best interpret as Chinese Law and Order; but otherwise China does seem to prefer drama set in the pre-revolutionary past. Whether this reflects the preferences of the viewers, the producers, or the government censors, I don’t know.

At least one of the dramas we caught came from Hong Kong. It took me a few minutes to figure out why the actors’ lips were as badly out of sync as in any Saturday afternoon Kung Fu movie on WGNO: this was a Cantonese movie from Hong Kong! Only this time it was dubbed into Mandarin instead of English.

The one English language channel at our hotel is CCTV 9, which brings new meaning to the motto “Fair and Balanced”. This is like a Chinese version of Fox News, only without the entertainment value. Right now they seem to be obsessed with two stories: the class system in Tibet before China “liberated” it in 1955, and the various protests against Beijing hosting the Olympics.
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