MONDAY – FRIDAY:
HUAI CHU:¹
The Great Firewall of China²: Remember when I was upset at Livejournal and Tumblr and Muxtape and a billion other sites being blocked? Let’s add another to that list: FACEBOOK.³ Of all things that they could have blocked, honestly. Bye bye stalking-at-my-convenience, uploading and tagging photos, and whatever I used Facebook for in the first place. I guess the only things left for me on the Internet here are my email, Flickr, and this blog. I swear, I’m being chased off the Internets. ⁴ (edit: Thank goodness it was blocked for only one day though; they put it back up on Thursday.)
Mosquito bites: I’m itching so badly.⁵ I’ve accumulated ten mosquito bites —- on my feet alone. TEN.⁶ Um, bring on the Cortizone?
Loopy weather: Rain one week, nice weather for one day, a string of disgustingly humid days, and then torrential downpour just like that? How about no. Oh, and no to unavoidable puddles that make you want to throw off your shoes and never see them again.

HAO CHU:⁷
Carrefour: (n): supermarket on steroids. I’ve been there thrice in the past week, and let’s just say that American stores have nothing on Carrefour. You don’t get escalated ramps for your shopping carts or guillotined turtles⁸ or fish flopping out to the aisle⁹ like you do here.
KFC: Don’t hate, but how bad is it that I’ve eaten there twice in less than a week? Fries and fried chicken, how I’ve missed thee.
Kiwi floats:¹⁰ I regret not getting a photo, but one of these days I will! Oh, and I got it at McDonald’s of all places. More on that later.

Anyway, Tiananmen photos! I put them at 500px for the sake of loading time, but you can click for a larger version.

The area near Tiannamen was flooding because there was so much rain! And there were these three girls who actually stepped out in the deep puddles to take pictures with the Asian-touristy pose. Nothing like a waterborne-disease breeding ground for a photo op.

I’d go on about the weekend (which was great!) but I think I’ll just make a bunch of entries about it over the course of the week.¹¹ But here’s a quick summary: I visited Tiananmen (twice!), the Forbidden City, and the Temple of Heaven. I watched the Beijing Opera.¹² I went to this really nice bar/club and Client¹³ was there (!). I went shopping for 9 hours straight. And I think I might just have a cold. More later!

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footnotes:
¹: harm; disadvantage; read: BAD
²: Props to whoever coined this term! I thought it was like, one of the cleverest things ever. It refers to China’s Internet censorship; they mass-block sites like crazy. Let’s just say that I am no fan of this.
³: I was agonizing over the Page cannot be displayed message, and then a Google search of “facebook china blocked” led to sites that were last updated Jul 01 2008. Cue multiple headdesk-ing and raging equivalent to KA;SKF;LEAK F;LEKFE;ARRRRGHHHHH!!!!!!
⁴: I tried to go on a different proxy site, and when I typed in the URL, I got Site Error 30: You’re in china. WHAT — THE.
⁵: I first wrote out “I’m itch so badly”, like the “i’m die” macro. Goodness, all this Chinese makes me sound like a lolcat.
⁶: Most of these bites were acquired during a taichi session. In my defense, it was outdoors, I was barefoot, and I was wearing a skirt. And not to mention, I’m really prone to bug bites.
⁷: benefit; advantage; read: GOOD
⁸: There are cutting board stations around the meat section, where butchers prepare the poultry. Anyway, there was a butcher preparing turtle meat …. and I turned my head to see what was going on and he beheaded the turtle with one downward motion of the blade. And the severed turtle head kept twitching on the far corner of the board. No joke, those turtles really have some life in them.
⁹: They have live fish on display for people to buy, and one poor fish decided that hanging onto life by a bin of ice just wasn’t cutting it. It flopped out of the box and onto the aisle, much to the chagrin of the people nearby.
¹⁰: Kiwi soda and ice cream. They even have the kiwi seeds!
¹¹: Yeah, a lot did happen over the weekend aka I ended up taking 83825938 photos.
¹²: …and did not use my earphones once. I even had the iPod out just in case.
¹³: Electroclash musicians. They did “Down to the Underground” with Pete Doherty and “Pornography” with Carl Barat.

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