Earlier today, CNN anchor and Beijing correspondent John Vause was filming in Tiananmen Square, Beijing when he suddenly encountered a man holding an umbrella who won’t step away from his cameraman’s lens. Maybe it’s the matching umbrella and pants, but this goes down in our book as the silliest censorship effort ever.

Come on China.  This is just straight up embarrassing.  If you’re going to exercise some government holier-than-thou power, at least do it in respectable uniforms.  Did you really think, “Oh, if we have plainclothes cops with umbrellas, maybe the rest of the world will just think our citizens are rude instead of our embarrassment of a government flopping around like a dying fish on the world stage”?  Probably not.  That thought is FAR too advanced for your little communistic minds.

Fireworks.  Really?  Maybe with some of the newfangled napalm fireworks.  Does the Chinese government really think that their people are so dumb to believe FIREWORKS lit a SKYSCRAPER on fire?

Let’s talk about the most controversial of topics: Chinese gymnastics.  Partly, because it’s probably a popular topic and I like to watch to see who comes here from weird Google searches.  The other reason being that the Chinese women gymnasts are uglier than sin itself.  They have singlehandedly made me ashamed of my heritage.  I hope you’re reading, Hu Jintao. *puke*

It’s been suggested that my disdain for the “women” gymnasts for China sprouts from something very shallow.  Fact of the matter is, out of almost all the Olympic women gymnasts competing, the Chinese are by far the hardest to watch, strictly because, well, they’re ugly.  It doesn’t help that they get ridiculously high scores for doing stuff like…falling off beams.  Let’s not even talk about screwing over Nastia in the uneven bars FOR A TIED SCORE.

Anyways, back to ugly.  It doesn’t help that they’re like 13 years old.  Every commentator that fields any gymnastic event has been talking about it.  Come on, China, heavy makeup isn’t going to hide something like, oh, let’s say, puberty.  It’s intuitively obvious to the most casual observer that you collectively, red China, are implementing the modern day equivalent of child slavery.

Please direct all your complaints to 21st century human rights.

Here’s a quick rundown:

Day 4 – Summer Palace
Day 5 – Ming Tombs, Great Wall
Days 6-10 – Shanghai with the group
Day 11 – Temple of Heaven
Days 12-14 (today) – nothing

Actually, days 11-14 have included 4 days of excruciatingly painful massage therapy. Apparently, I’ve got a lot of problems, but this guy is really good. He just makes everything hurt. But somehow, after the pain, everything feels a lot better. Who knows, this guy might not be a quack (as I first suspected) after all. Too bad I have like 12 sessions left with him. That’s 12 days of pain.

In other news, Beijing is an unbelievably distracting place. Hot girls + short skirts + black tights + boots = even more hot. This just means I have to get out of here even more.

I miss America. I’m ready to go home. Home is where your stuff is.

However, today is still post-worthy, strictly because of dinner. Thanks to a very generous friend of my dad’s, I present to you what I had for dinner.

I’ve been doing so much better about taking pictures of food. That is, you realize, the most important part of any kind of traveling-related photography. Here’s lunch that I picked up around the corner for 50 cents:

Then, for dinner, we went down to Wangfujing and this is what I had for dinner. It costed $8 for the both of us to stuff ourselves. That’s right, be jealous of my shao long bao.

More to come soon.

However, I did make an amazing discovery.

After spending all morning looking for an internet cafe (with no avail), I came back to my place disheartened and longing. I plopped down on my bed, turned on my laptop, turned on the TV, and while channel surfing, I heard a sound. A familiar sound. It came from my computer.

I received e-mail.

The astonishment was unreal. I didn’t know what just happened. Maybe it was a ghost. Or maybe, it was a gift from the heavens. Apparently, someone nearby turned on their access point.

It was slow though. Slower than dirt forming. But it was something. And now I can update to my heart’s delight. The reason for the slowness, I found out, is because some quake in Taiwan took out some of the undersea backbone cabling. That stinks. My dad couldn’t even get on MSN Messenger these past weeks. What has the world come to.

Only thing interesting that happened today was that after coming out of Starbucks this morning (I’m 19 RMB poorer now, but that Americano kills whatever the one at Brookhurst and Ball serves up), there were a ton of cops all over the place.

I wondered if they were coming after the white guy that I was sitting next to at Starbucks earlier, but all of the sudden, this female cop jumps on a stage and starts belting out some song. She’s a little tonedeaf.

[googlevideo]4266711557273683542[/googlevideo]

My dad decided to give me the full taste of the culture here in China, so he took me to a pizza buffet for dinner. It was actually surprisingly good. My body was craving vegetables, so the first picture I took of food is of celery. If you look carefully, you can see a slice of pizza on the other side of the plate. Sorry I’ve been so bad about posting food pictures, I’ve been too consumed by eating instead of photographing.

So that’s my place. My home for the next 5 weeks. The manly bedding is my favorite. I still have yet to figure out exactly where in Beijing I am. I think I’m somewhere in the southeast. All I know is that I’m near the Temple of Heaven. Figuring out where I am will be tomorrow’s project.

Today’s project was actually to find someplace that I can get online, but that has yet to happen. Thanks a lot, Mao. Instead, I just walked around the huge department store next door to my place. It’s really ridiculously big.

There’s an unbelievable amount of construction going on here in China. Just to get an idea, I’m going to try to do a photo series. Across the street, they’re building this big mall/department store thing called Glory Mall. Yeah, it’s across the street from the giant department store. Here’s what Glory Mall looks like today:

Glory Mall, Day 1

More adventures forthcoming. I wonder what the group is doing. It’s kinda lonely here by myself. At least I’ve got Melvin.

P.S. The iPhone is hot.