Xi'an is still lovely, meals are still overwhelmingly filling, and times are always right for sweets.

thoughts on Beijing two days later

I am still sorely disappointed that all those signs and buildings for China Unicorn were instead for China Unicom. That's just fuckery.

How I came to have bangs

Had a very Seinfeldian experience the other day in Beijing. I was having my hair cut at some salon that was capitalizing on the whole Korean craze, so my stylist was this Korean guy with a goatee. I had around me a translator for Mandarin to Korean, and a handful of English to Korean translators. No one knew the word for "bangs."

Perhaps they will grow out.

Xi'an

One of the things I remember from my visit in the early '90s was these walled porches... (okay, I just really like lit things in the dark.)

...

This morning (I think I still have the blog set on EST, but whatever), they said that we would be going to a cheap, but still moderately classy (foreigners shop there!) mall. A wonderland, really.

They took us to IKEA. My mom practically threw a fit when my aunts wanted to have their Swedish meatball lunch.

Ahoy from Beijing

Beijing alternates between beautiful and tacky, although the two categories aren't mutually exclusive, as you see above.

The cousins haven't paid their broadband bill, so I'm temporarily stealing wireless from the aptly named "NETGEAR." ("wireless" disappeared late last night, and "linksys" has been unreliable. I suppose people with enough character to give distinctive names to their wireless also know to password protect.) As my connection to you all is so tentative for the moment, I'll try and post little vignettes as my little airport bars increase.

From the future

20-some hours spent traveling actually wasn't as bad as it could have been, since on international flights that are essentially trial periods of purgatory, they have this whole cache of tv shows and movies that you can watch. Unfortunately, my ADD and quest to optimize my experience meant that I would watch 10-30 minutes of a movie and then decide I should try something else.

I finally found something that wasn't so bad- Dead Poets Society-then my mother leans over about 50 minutes in and asks, "doesn't he commit suicide in the end because of his father's disapproval?"

I suppose it wasn't an entire loss; we had already passed the inspirational part of the movie and were then getting into the pain of adolescence blah blah blah blah blah