Days 3,4 and 5

On day 3, after much the same breakfast, our first stop was the china beijing equity exchange. One fun fact: apparently, most elevators in the financial building have carpets that have the name of the week and are changed everyday, so people can remeber what day of the week it is. Sometimes they are so busy that they forget which day it is. Our tour guide said he came in one day and saw the carpet that said Saturday and went back home.

After CBEX, we went to visit Google China and its biggest local competitor Chinese search engine Baidu. Google China looked exactly like Google US, with the lot of free drinks ( I had nescafe coffee, coconut milk and almond milk all in tins. Almond milk did not taste good ). Listening to their presentations it was very obvious Google is still an innovator, especially contrasted with the presentation from Baidu's CFO, which included a lot of posturing about how they are number 1. There were two major scandals about Baidu , 1) They did lot of click fraud to get more advertising money. 2) They demoted negative comments about the recent tainted milk scandal as the milk company was their client. Google milked it for all its' worth ( pun intended) about their transaparent search results.
For lunch, we stopped at a small street side cafe, where I had vegetable dumplings and chapati omelet. The whole lunch cost about $2.50. In spite of all the weird food stuff, there is pretty good vegetarian stuff, like sauteed vegetables, chapatis, noodles and rice dishes. I am having no problem getting vegetarian food.


After getting back, we went to Noodle Loft for dinner, where the cooks were making noodles in lots of different ways ( cutting the dough with scissors, shaving it, rolling a long single noodle, stretching by hand etc ) I took a video but because YouTube is blocked in China, nanna will have to upload it and post it.

And after all, what is dinner without some exotic meat, so while I ate sauteed vegetables and noodles, my classmates ordered, donkey or, as listed in the menu "ass meat".

After dinner, most of the folks headed for a bar but me and my roommate hit the "night market", a street side market much like Burma bazzar. The cool stuff sold in this market are cockroaches, beetles, lizards, caterpillars, sea horses and live scorpians on a stick. You pick the stick you want and the shopkeeper will deep fry them in oil and give them to you to eat. They also had yogurt in "muntalu". I skipped this more exotic treat in favor of the caramel dipped fruit. These are fruit dipped in sugar syrup and were very yummy.

After that, I bought a few stuff at the market, 2 kalidoscopes for aditya and 3 small china dolls. The haggling goes something like this.

Me: Doll. How much?
she: 65, very cheap for you
Me: No
She: how much?
me:5
She: no too low...
me: Ok ( I start to walk away)
She: wait, wait, how about 30
me:5
She: 25
me:8
She:20, final offer
me:10, final offer
she: 20, 20
me: No, 10
She: ok, 15, just for you
me: no , 10
She:13
me: 12
she:ok, 12
And I buy it for 12 yuan, about $2.

After night market, back to the room for a good night's sleep.

4TH DAY
Day 4 started with a minor scare. I had some inflammation behind my ear. I called amma and nanna asked them about it. They said it might be ear infection and so I better get it checked out. That unleashed a frenzy of activity. One concern about going to the doctor was the fact that if is an upper respiratory infection, I might get quarantined till they test whether I have the swine flu or not. But given a choice between going deaf or being quarentined, I prefer the later.
So:
1) I went and got my passport out of the hotel safe
2) Exchanged around $100 into Yuan
3) Bought a sim card for my phone & got our classmates' numbers
4) Called US and gave the number and told the plan to IS and SSV. Freaked them out.
5) Took actifed, ibuprofen
6) Called our university medical assistance program
7) Found a local hospital from US embassy website close to the hotel
8) Hotel sent a bellboy with me to the clinic ( probably to confirm that it is not swine flu !!! )
9) Went to clinic.
10) Doctor checked and said nothing wrong.
11) Medical assistance program paid the bill
12) Came back to room and slept for 5 hours because of actifed.

Woke up and got a red bean bun for lunch at 4PM. Went window shopping in the posh mall next door that was selling Jimmy Choos and Bacarat crystals. As an FYI, Jimmy Choo shoes start at around $500+ per pair.

Came back and went to shop at the Ya Chow market, another market that sells shoes, clothes, bags etc. Bought 15 Polo Ralph Lauren shirts each about 30 Yuan ( $4.50) . These are fake Polos. The "real" ones sell for about $50 in the US. However, my classmate who is from Beijing said most of the times there shirts are made by the same manufacturer and sold separate from what they send to US, so they are "authentic fakes". Anyways, it is basically a good shirt for $4.50, that's all.

From there went to "Ghost street" for dinner. Here all stops came off. In addition to the usual beef, pork and chicken my classmates ordered rabbit, turtle, pigeon and frogs. All in all a dinner yucky even for some of my chinese classmates. After dinner, came back to the room and slept.

DAY 5
hope you all read my short post about Tiananmen Square. We did not want to miss the chance of being there on the 20th anniversary. We got up at 5AM, got ready and caught the metro at 6AM to get to the square at around 7AM. We walked by the Forbidden City, crossed the road into the Square. Security was very heavy. Lots of military trucks with plainclothes soldiers. They kept a very close eye on the two indians, two americans and two chinese walking together. We were stopped at a checkpoint and asked to show our passports. We did not bring them with us, just had photo copies. Our classmate was able to explain how we are students just on a trip and want to see the square. After a few minutes, he let us in and we walked around the square. Apparently, they tightened it even more later in the day.

Anyways, caught the subway back to the hotel, had breakfast and left on our company visits to Lenovo and Symbio. At Lenovo they made us wear face masks all the way because of the Swine flu. We also got a chance to hold the Olympic torch that was used in some relays. As Lenovo was a top sponsor, they got to keep the torch in their museum. This is not the final torch that lit the flame, but was carried during a part of the around the world relay.

Got back and went to Silk market to shop. This is similar to Ya Chow market, although I did not buy anything today as we have to take a train from Beijing to Shangai and did not want to lug all this stuff. Got back to the room. Got bored with the chinese food. Found an Indian restuarant one block down. Got some aloo paratha and curd rice. All my classmates went to Karaoke but was feeling too tired to go, so decided to stay back and write about my experiences.

So now you are all caught up. Tomorrow is a big sightseeing day, where we will be going to the Great Wall, Ming Tombs, Bird's nest and water cube. Will post more about it later.

Xie Xie.