Geriatric...

So for probably the first time in my life, I feel sort of “old”. Some of the folks here don’t get a lot of my references so my non-stop witty banter sometimes is not understood I think. Or maybe I am just super lame. They don’t know david hasselhoff from what really made famous, Knight Rider, they only know him from Baywatch! (the subject was broached b/c I was singing select verses from his German #1 hit “Freedom!”. I find it funny that I think everyone knows his status as germany’s greatest pop star). Its just weird when people talk about how they were born in 1988 and 1989 and stuff like that. And while Rich and I are super excited to see the Transformers movie when it opens here next Wednesday, most never really watched the cartoon b/c it was past their time. Weird.

Anywho, yesterday’s trip to the “Temple of Heaven” was pretty cool, but honestly it seemed kind of artificial. I don’t know what it was, its like these old temples are so perfect they had a Disneyland quality to it. See pics above!

The 'black market' market, now THAT was cool. Surprisingly it was in a 4 story building- funny this nice building is all devoted to fake stuff. It was really entertaining to see all the ripped of Dolce and Gabana, Burberry, Chanel, North Face, Nike, Adidas, Tumi, Timberland, hell even fake IPods! Some was blatantly terrible, like you could tell from far away, but some was really incredible, basically real. From what I am told, that is possible as sometimes these factories will produce a couple of thousand more than what was ordered by the Nike’s of the world and sell them on the side. We joked that the coffee shop in there even sold fake coffee, like plain hot water with dark food coloring in it...

The funniest part was when we got caught in what we now call “the Gauntlet”. It was about 5 or 6 of us walking through, all guys, and we made mistake of walking down a corridor with fake shoe vendors on each side of us. It was like we were out in some street market, they were all crowding us as we were walking through, thrusting their “AIR JO-DAN! NIKE! PUMA YOU BUY!” in our faces and even sort of hitting us with them. It got so ridiculous we could not stop laughing, but it kind of wasn’t funny b/c we could barely get through. So I just put my hands over my ears and started yelling “AHHHH!! TAI DA-SEN! AHHHH!” (AHHH! TOO LOUD! AHHH!) which made us laugh even more, but it still wasn’t funny b/c at this point we were practically getting fondled. Its like they barricaded both sides of the corridor with burning tires like on Black Hawk Down, but eventually we got through. We laughed for like 10 mins, then decided it was so funny we would walk through again. But alas, as we went though again, laughing, they realized were just screwing around and kind of left us alone that time. :-(

You can be sure we will train harder and faster over the next few weeks and return to face “The Gauntlet” again….

Everyone is sort of dragging today – we’re not positive if its just the fact that there was so much going on the first few days and now we are settling into a groove/coming down, or the fact that the air had gotten steadily crappier since our first two rainy days here. Its like, sort of ridiculous how bad it is – there is just this gross haze that hangs around, and it kind of makes your throat and eyes hurt all the time. I will be sure to get a good pic that illustrates it, but the fact that:

1) Not much in terms of emissions controls here

2) Building for Olympics

3) A desert outside the city = lots of small particles in the air

4) Really bad pollution from coal burning factories

Are the reasons why, as I read in USA Today, that the air is worse than New york, LA, Chicago, and Dallas COMBINED (!). Gross. I played some basketball the other day outside (Beijing Uni only has outdoor courts) and I swear I was going to cough up a lung.

So looking forward to the trip tomorrow – Tianamen Square and the Forbidden City. Will make sure to get tons o pics. And thanks all who have left comments – please keep them coming!