The American embassy in Beijing is under heavy guard right now; in fact, the whole embassy area is roped off.  The reason?  Beijing wants to keep defecting North Koreans from dashing into foreign embassies.  Fair enough!

I went back to the store on Liulichang where I bough a t-shirt for my sister and chatted with them for a while.  When they found out my backpack was stolen, they offered to replace the t-shirt for free.  Such nice people!

One of my main interests in China is the contrasts you see in daily life, especially the social contrasts between the old-school communist society and the newly emerging capitalist side of things.  Today I picked up a couple of books at the Xinhua Bookstore in Xidan.  They include a textbook for first graders called "I love the Chinese Communist Party" and a history of the CCP for children.  I couldn't believe the books I found in the "Nationalism" section of the kids area.  One was called "I Reject  Depraved/Evil Teaching" and the first page started talking about the Falun Gong movment.  A cool one was all about the flag raising in Tiananmen and the training that the color guard goes through.  I also picked up a volume in a series of biographies of great people in history.  Did I get Confucious?  No.  Abraham Lincoln?  No.  George Washington, Napoleon, Sun Yat-sen, Buddha or Mozart?  No siree, I picked up the biography of Bill Gates.  It's odd how people idolize him here, and yet China is supposed to be so Linux-friendly.  However, I do see a <strong>ton</strong> of people on the street studying computer books about Dreamweaver, Maya and Photoshop.  <em>Microsoft</em>, blah.