I was feeling a bit queasy this morning after my dinner at Xiangyang Tun, but I felt better after meeting my fellow instructor and eating a little breakfast, so we headed over to the office. Along the way, I imparted to him the deep mysteries of hidden Beijing taxi knowledge. I introduced him to everyone at the office, then we tore down my equipment and set up his.

At noon, we hopped into my student Loney's minivan and drove over to a restaurant called Ya Wang (King Duck); it's apparently the most famous roast duck restaurant in the city, and I wasn't disappointed. We ate duck feet with wasabe sauce, deep-fried duck liver, sweet-and-sour duck, duck soup, a little fresh fish thrown in for variety, and of course, heaping plates of tender roasted duck covered with thick, crispy-brown skin. The roast duck was dipped in a sweet sauce then rolled in thin pancakes along with sliced onion and cucumbers, or pushed into one end of a hollowed-out sesame roll like a miniature duck pita. At the end of the meal we were served bowls of sweet rice porridge with nuts and berries. Omifreakinghod, it was the greatest Chinese meal I've ever had in my entire life, and after all the outstanding eats I've partaken of this week, that's really saying something!

Unfortunately, soon after I finished, that queasy feeling from the morning returned, followed by a couple of minutes of severe stomach cramps. They passed, and I felt better, so when Lin Tzu volunteered Loney to be our "shopping tour guide" for the afternoon, I accepted rather than returning to the hotel.

Loney is a really nice guy and his english is superb, so having him drive us downtown was a treat. We headed into South Beijing and parked at a market called Hong Qiao Shichang, a huge building with 4 floors packed full of purveyors of all sorts of goods. We headed up to the fourth floor where the pricier jade and pearl shops were located. I found some nice coral and jade jewelry, but was a bit surprised by the high prices and unwillingness to haggle shown by the salesclerks, so I didn't buy anything. Eventually, we wandered down a floor to a livelier scene of lower-quality jewelry and touristy crap, along with antiques both real and fake.

In the latter category, I was ecstatic to discover that I'd hit the motherlode of Cultural Revolution kitsch in the form of propaganda posters, Chinese Communist Party medals, windup alarm clocks with revolutionary scenes painted on the faceplates, and stacks upon stacks of the Chairman's Little Red Book in every conceivable language. There was even a pair of porcelain figurines showing two nude Red Guards doin' the nasty! Must've been from Mao's personal pr0n collection.

Loney advised not to accept anything more than 30% of the initial asking price, so I got to work haggling for a couple of souvenirs, and came away with some very nice items. With a grin, Loney told me that no matter how good a deal I thought I'd cut, it would never be as low as the price they'd negotiate with a local. Given how little things cost to begin with compared to what they'd cost in the West (if you could even find them), I still thought I was getting a relative bargain.

As time passed, I was beginning to experience more and more frequent bouts of severe cramping and nausea. I suppose I could've visited one of the squatting loos in the market, but I hadn't brought anything to use as toilet paper, and I was definitely concerned about my aim, so I figured that I'd better try and hold off for as long as possible.

When I told Loney that I wanted to buy some tea for my wife, he said that he lived only 100m from Beijing's biggest tea market. What serendipitous fortune! We hopped back into his van and he took us on a hellacious journey down the backalleys of his neighborhood, parting the seas of humanity in an unbelievable display of audacious steersmanship that left us all white-knuckled and quivering with fear. I just wish that I had a video camera with me, because words fail me at this point in describing just how amazing it was that anyone could've driven through that crush of pedestrians and bicycles without hitting a single thing.

At the tea market, Loney introduced us to a doll-like Taiwanese woman who sat us all down at a carved-wooden table and proceeded to brew about 12 tiny pots of various teas for us to sample. We had green tea, flower tea, black tea, red tea, and the king of teas, oolong. She held out the dry leaves so we could inhale the delicate aroma, then she carefully measured out a scoop into a little glass of hot water to steep, and poured a thimbleful into little white cups for us to sip. She told us to hold each mouthful and savor the taste before swallowing, which reminded me a bit of wine tasting. With the exception of the potent oolong, the flavors were so delicate that it was sometimes difficult to tell them apart. The oolong was a little out of my price range, so I settled on a half-kilo of the fragrant jasmine and a stronger black tea. Since he was a regular customer, Loney was able to negotiate an excellent price for us. My colleague and I decided to split the cost and each took a quarter-kilo. The tea lady gave us each a couple of nice, stamped-metal cans to put our stash in, free of charge.

Happily, the tea did a lot to relieve my stomach cramps, and I was feeling pretty good as we headed back to the hotel. Loney dropped us off and we gave him our profuse thanks for doing such a fantastic job of shepherding us around. Afterwards, I went back to my room, and promptly shed about 5 extra pounds, ifyouknowwutImean. I dug out my Cipro prescription and got started on the antibiotics right away just in case I had picked up some local bug, rather than simply eaten too much. There's nothing I want to do less than spend 17 hours on an airplane tomorrow while suffering from the runs.

Well, that's my story, and I'm stickin' to it. Hope you all enjoyed it!

Wan an (good night),

MrBaliHai