the beerman cometh

So, I’m back in Beijing and feeling right at home. I’ve been spending lots of time in the apartment, trying to recuperate from the flight and looking for a job and generally being lazy. One of the advantages of this setup is that I don’t feel obligated to go exploring every second. This is my summer after all.

Beijing in a funny city, in some ways modern and global, certainly bustling, but also curiously organic. Not crunch south California or university of Vermont organic, but rather functioning much like an organism, or at least a collection of them. Traffic is a good example. It’s some of the worst in the world, and not getting any better. Cars clog the roads like arteries fed on McDonalds, and yet, everything seems to work. People don’t signal before changing lanes, they just change, and, for the most part, nobody gets hurt. Granted, people do, but not as many as you’d think. Its almost as if the city were a giant octopus laying on its back, waving its 8 (times at least a zillion) tentacles around, but all with some larger plan, and of course, a fedora.

When I was younger and living in this apartment (roughly seven years ago) we had milk delivered every couple days, not in cool milk bottles like they had stateside, but in plastic pouches the kind we got with our meals in elementary school, but still, it came in our mail box, and the milkman brought it. This summer, in New York, I experienced Delivery Service of a different kind, also new to me, but today, for the first time, I met, or rather, saw, a Beerman. Much like the milkman his job is to do rounds delivering his wares, but instead of plastic pouches, he arrived at the apartment of family friends lugging a crate of probably 40 600ml bottles. The men with whom I was having lunch explained that they were too busy to go get beer themselves, and that really, this was much more convenient. I’ll say. These men, the son and son in law of our dear friend Nai Nai see getting me drunk as a task fitting of aspiration. So far they’ve been unsuccessful, but only because I match them cup for cup drinking beer while they drink Bai Jiu, the vile 80 proof (minimum) rotgut that Chinese men are so enamored of. Some day they’ll succeed, but I’m trying to stave it off until absolutely necessary.

That’s about it. Aside from loosing my keys and sleeping on a couch I have no adventures to report. I need to learn how to use my camera. Truly a daunting task, I think I’ll watch pirated dvd’s instead.