beijing

beijing was absolutely freezing.  for some reason my brain had beijing placed south of seoul so i was only mentally prepared for conditions a few degrees warmer than the minus 12C conditions of seoul 2 weeks ago.  even when the flight plan map corrected my brains geography i maintained temperature ignorance.  that soon changed when my face froze again.   no bueno.  cold.  miserable.  i remember bourdain's visit to harbin and his description of the cold alongside the episodes shots of deathly cold streets...that's what beijing was like.  deathly cold city with a ton of people still walking around.  weathered and brazenly bittered by the climate.  

when u're in china u must turn on ur aggression.  it's not a culture based off an intentional lack of etiquette but rather it's the merely 1.5B people survival of the fittest.  if u don't squish to the front, someone else will beat u to it.  if u don't force ur will, u don't get what you want.  it's not rude when people don't take aggression as lack of etiquette.  a mere thank you at the end of the service cures all.  i took a black cab at 3am and when we dropped off our friend, the cabbie decided to have a change of heart and didn't want to go to our house because it was hard to find the way.  i rose my voice, yelled back at him and told him he better go hail us another cab or we weren't getting out nor paying him.  4am in double digit negative weather is not the risk u want to be taking when finding a cab.  he got us a cab. i said thank you.  all was well.

it's that kind of backwards clash of intelligence and years of closed society that embody this city yearning to break the reigns of oppression (which economically it pretty much has)  but also fill in the blanks that smooth out the surface of luxury.   beijing was too smart not to grow.  so it did just that.  but it wasn't culturally open to the rest of the world to learn from all aspects of finer living...and thats what u see.  huge infrastructure, with sub par store front occuppancy.   it's a great way to keep out foreign goods, but the first generation will have to suffer the growing pains to wait for the 2nd coming of china.  "the takeover".

i hadn't been to beijing since 2005.  was not impressed by the city then and wasn't expecting much of it.  but once i landed the changes post olympics were huge.  everything seemed to have developed overnight and as a true chinese person, dollar signs appeared in my eyes.  （i've always said, u only need to sell one toothbrush to every person in china...)  i dropped off my luggage and i picked up a fake iphone.  we headed to dinner at metropark lido where spicy food takes on it's own demeanor in the homeland.  less oily, more flavorful and definitely spicier.   i met my cousin's ICB American friends where white guys have more attachment to China than California.   They recommended us to go to "this place afterwards...".  we ended up in ktown.  hotel gallery for 3 ktv.  我們在大陸做生意。。。一定會來這種地方。。。跟朋友最不用去了吧？  但還能去哪？  我們年輕。  是她們賺到。  "she was practically begging you to take her home"...and so i went home sans the lady....on a mad hunt for foot massage that ended up with me raiding the local convenience store...and me making a mess at the office.  "why the hell did you buy all those sausages that you didn't even eat"  haha.  that was night 1.  day two.  we froze to the telecom store cuz cousin lost his phone.  then we went shopping with his colleague.  took some sticker pictures and went to qiao jiang nan with uncle.  tons of models there apparently.  and then a taiwanese opened man spa massage.  clean and the most luxurious spa i've been to.  followed by a visit to jiu ba jie to see frank.  寶貝睡三天。  mongolian beef was much better at 3am at 10 degrees colder and eric lost another phone at the spa.  

miserable flight to shanghai the next day.  no sleep. no problem?  HEADACHE.