Tuesday
Went shopping in Xidan, which fffor me means the giant bookstore. They still have copies of my favorite penmanship book (Chinese penmanship, of course), my copy of which is wrinkled and water warped from overuse. I picked up a wuxia kung-fu magazine, which I’m having a very hard time getting through, it’s chock full of classical language and expressions that I just haven’t learned.
For lunch, I called up Dwight and we ate at the Be There or Be Square (BTBS) cafe in Times Square on the south side of Xidan. The cafe was pretty nice, and the hot honey lemonade was delicious, but I noted that the drink alone cost more than my entire dinner of the night before.
At that point, we met up with Helena and Max for some shopping in the Xidan clothes market, trying on watches and examining the Counterstrike T-shirts. It was so nice to see Helena again, she’s been working with Albert in Gansu province and really learned a lot from the experience. She’s really into her element in Beijing, and her excitement about the city is infectious.
At six, I ran off to Alfa, a small bar/club north of Workers Stadium for the Beijing Linux Users Group’s monthly meeting. That night, they sold BLUG t-shirts and gave away copies of Red Flag Linux developers edition. Also, there was a demo of some Oracle database software running on the Red Flag distro—they gave us a copy of the Oracle DB too. I talked with Bruce, whose wife is an IT consultant; Martin, a German journalist who runs a small agency here in Beijing; and with David, who released of Yggdrasil Linux back in 1995, the first Linux distro to appear on CD. He’s in China now, studying the language. My first run-in with a kernel hacker!
Dinner was along (my roommates Isaac and Cindy had already eaten) at a small restaurant down from the hostel.
Food
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Breakfast
erm, forgot (to eat).
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Lunch
crispy pork on rice, hot honey lemonade (the best drink ever).
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Dinner
la pir (wide transparent noodles with veggies) and yang rou chuar (pork kebabs).
permalink | Micah/Beijing | 2004.07.15-17:11.00
