i have not checked my email in FOUR DAYS
access to internet here is unhealthily poor - or healthily, depending on your point of view.
there's a level of desperation in Beijing like you wouldn't believe. trust is a liability - a luxury one can't afford to have. never trust the first price you're quoted, and especially not if you're with a very, very Western-looking boy. and on no account get into a trishaw, especially not when they agree to take you someplace for ten yuan, change drivers half way and then try to ask you for 300 yuan. salespeople will lie straight to your face. "250 yuan, best best price. lower really cannot," they'll say to the jovial white tourist in Bermuda pants. Then they'll turn to you and say, "Gei nin 80 yuan, hao ba," without the slightest hint of shame. the streets are roiling with people, most of whom are trying to sell something. and I'm convinced the unbearable temperatures here are as much a product of summer as the circulated heat of innumerable bodies.
such a world away from just now, when I sat alone on my balcony in the glutinous night air, slurping the cool, sticky sweetness out of a peach - simply and purely.
Communist guards beneath a capitalist umbrella. No symbolism, of course.