I finally found the internet connection in my room. It was hidden under the desk and the guest information folder makes no mention of it. It assigned me an automatic DHCP address the first day, but now it seems to require a static IP address. Weird. I was greatly entertained by some of the Chinglish instructions in the fire-safety section of the guest info like "Nip the bud after smoking" and the title of this post.

My first full day in Beijing has ended. I'm utterly exhausted from an afternoon of walking, so I'm going to write my activities down while it's fresh in my mind, then go eat something before I hit the hay. I've got to get up early tomorrow for my tour of the Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, and the Summer Palace.

My company contact Lawrence (Lin Tzu), picked me up at the hotel about 8:30 this morning and drove me to the SGI office. It's only 10 blocks away, but it took us almost 20 minutes to get there. When the guide books say that traffic in Beijing is horrible almost beyond comprehension, they aren't exaggerating! The roads are a mad conglomeration of pedestrians, bicycles, cars, and trucks...all jockeying for position and paying no attention whatsoever to traffic signals. The Lamaze breathing exercises that I learned with my wife before our son was born are really paying off!

I spent a couple of hours at the office checking things out. My systems hadn't cleared customs yet, so I'm hoping that I'll have some hardware to teach on come Monday. I suspect that they're even now being frantically retroengineered in some dank Beijing basement. Poor bastards, that'll set the country's computer industry back at least a decade! At lunchtime, Lin Tzu rounded up everybody and took us to a nearby Hunan restaurant for lunch. He introduced me to everyone. They had names like Jacky, Bronson, and Victor. I think it's amusing that everyone picks such dramatic western names rather than "Bob" or "Don".

The food was excellent. We had about 15 different dishes that included spicy pig trotters, lotus root, steamed buns, smoked beef, assorted veg, and boneless duck feet. I ate a bit of everything although I went light on the duck feet as they were quite gristly. Everyone was impressed by my mastery of chopsticks. I used waterless antiseptic wipes to clean my hands afterwards. So far, I don't feel ill.

Lin Tzu brought me back to the hotel after lunch. As it was still quite early and the day was sunny and warm, I decided to trek over to the subway station that we passed on the way to/from the office and visit an area behind the Forbidden City called the Back Lakes region. It was only about a 5-minute walk to the station, and I managed to get there without being creamed by a truck or rammed by bicyclists. Tickets cost about 5 RMB (~75 cents) and the trains were clean and new, albeit jam-packed even at 1:30 in the afternoon.

Let me stop the narrative at this point and mention that I feel very alone and out of place here. There seem to be very few foreigners in the city right now, so I stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. No one has been rude to me, but I do get stared at quite a bit. I do plenty of staring back though, it's kind of entertaining to look at these people and visualize them a mere 25 years ago wearing baggy Mao suits, quoting from the Chairman's Little Red Book, and happily carrying buckets of manure up the hill to increase the harvest of the glorious People's Collective Pharm.

The Back Lakes is a series of small man-made ponds and canals that were created to bring supplies into the Forbidden City. It's one of the few areas in the city that hasn't been bulldozed into modernity, and it still retains the twisty-turny, narrow streets and tree-lined neighborhoods known as hutongs that used to be ubiquitous in Beijing.

First I walked over to Desheng Men Jianlou, the Arrow Tower, which is a fragment of the old wall that surrounded the city during the Ming Dynasty. There was a coin museum inside, so I spent some time looking over the various types of money on display. It was interesting, but you can only look at so many coins with square holes in the middle before your eyes start glazing over. I prefer paper currency. I walked up a flight of stairs to the upper ramparts and was rewarded with a wide vista of the endlessly changing skyline of this smoggy Asian metropolis. Inside the tower there was a small exhibit of contemporary art.

I then walked along the shoreline of Xi Hai (West Lake) and Hou Hai (Back Lake). It was very shady and pleasant and the locals were out fishing in the dirty water, playing Mah Jhong, and ping-pong. Old men were standing around in their Speedos slapping their saggy skin and jumping into the filthy lakes (I'd slap myself too if I got any of that filthy muck on my bod). Couples were canoodling on the benches and clipping each other's nose hairs...must be some sort of primate ritual like monkeys picking bugs out of each other's fur.

I stopped at the house of Soong Ching-ling (AKA Madame Sun Yat-sen) which is supposedly where Pu Yi, the last emperor was born. After that, I was pooped, so I stopped for a beer at one of the many little bars that line the lakeshore. The first word I learn in any foreign language is "beer".

Occasionally, I turned off the main drag and wandered through the alleyways of the hutongs where I saw ordinary Chinese doing ordinary things like washing cats, children with slit pants squatting to take a dump in the gutter, and old folks bent almost in half from lifetimes of hard work nodding off in doorways. The pedalcab guys hectored me constantly. The hutongs are their main turf since the streets are too narrow for taxis. I preferred walking and waved them off

I finally reached the far end of Hou Hai and tried to locate an old mansion listed in my guide as having gorgeous gardens. I was unsuccessful in finding it among the twisty alleys, and my feet were starting to ache, so I decided to turn back.

I got back to the hotel around 6pm and was ready to pass out by 8pm.

Next: touring Beijing with Lulu and the Mad Old Dutchman.