china is crazy. i think china seems so different because the differences are hard to point to. i mean, cape verde was Different. it was obviously different, and that was that: the roads weren't paved, there was ocean everywhere, the whole country housed fewer people than oakland, etc. and cape town and buenos aires were different too, but they were big cities, and "big cities are the same everywhere".

            

but beijing is a big city, and it is not the same. i am not talking about the scorpions on sticks or the skewered dogs - i was ready for those - but everyday things that i see and feel astounded that no one else is astounded. some things i guess i would get used to, but others i can't imagine ever accepting as normal.

for instance, there are these public exercise machines all over the city. john calls them "giant lego sets" - they look like playskool toy sets blown up with that 'honey i shrunk the kids' machine. some are just like the self-help machines you can find in the states: push-up, sit-up, pull-ups, etc. then there's one contraption that helps you do the splits in midair, switching from right leg forward to left leg forward every second or two. on another, you do a weird nordic-track run that makes you look like a cartoon character running in space, just before buzzing off at 300 mph. the funniest machine, i think, is "the humper", a rhythmic pelvic-thruster that simultaneously works your biceps and abs. (john says that sometimes couples symbiotically exercise on this machine, but i have yet to witness it.) though there are no age restrictions to the machines, it seems they primarily serve people between the ages of fifty and eighty.

another oddity is the abundance of bicycles. i don't know what the official count is, but i would guess that in beijing there are roughly one billion bicycles. you can buy a "lost" bike for as low as US$5, and repairmen and "lock unlockers" wait at most major intersections. the herd mentality is beautiful. bikers pile up at a red light, and when a critical mass is reached, just swarm across the street. i think this tactic is supposed to stop the cars - and it usually works - but sometimes the cars just plow ahead, honking. it looks like discovery channel footage of a big fish attacking a small school of sardines. only, the little fish collide: in three weeks, i have seen five or six actual impacts, and at least twenty post-accident arguments. (i haven't seen a single helmet or injury.)

oops, my time is up. there are some other things i don't have time to talk about right now. one is the black market for north face and Gucci gear. another is the strange cooexistence of extreme politeness with trample-you-down subway ethics. another is the fact that you can't - as was the case with every other language i've studied - take word XXX and say "el XXX-o" and have a new word, and that sometimes if you try to say the Chinese version of "el XXX-o" (which would be, roughly, "EchsEkksEccs"), you end up with liver instead of dumplings.