My friend Becky, whom I worked with at dear departed FizzyLab, is now working at MSRA (well, ATC at MSRA). She has a nice little place in the hutong near one of the back lakes (three small, man-made lakes behind the Forbidden City). We were planning on going to the Forbidden City (and perhaps getting some coffee at the Starbucks there… now there was a well-placed bribe!), but went to get some hot-pot for lunch instead. We ate quite a bit, went back to her place to digest, and started drinking some find Yanjing beer. Or Tsingtao. One of ‘em. Anyway, turns out they’re a whopping 3 quai (that’s 3 RMB) for 2 if you return 2 empties… that’s like $0.18 a bottle! for 750ml of beer! So we drank and chatted the night away. Another one of her friends, Jaime, from Mexico City, arrived in the evening, which was the time I needed to get going — had to catch a 9 AM flight the next morning, which means airport by 7 AM, which means taxi at 6 AM, and getting up at 5 AM…. ewwww…..

Wei-Ying hooked me up with two of his students, Guirong and Xinjing, who took me to the Pearl Market on Sunday morning to get some pearls for MK and Laura. It’s an experience… pearls are on the 3rd and 4th floor. The 3rd floor is a zoo, and it’s where the lesser-quality pearls are. You eventually find your way to the 4th floor (we were invited by one of the 3rd floor shops, and had to go up a sketchy stairway to get it). Then, it’s relatively quiet and the shops look like, well, shops. We went through a bunch, and it turns out Xinjing is a bit of a shark in negotiating for jewelry. Pearls by Amy was our second stop, and after a bit we returned as they appeared to have the best quality stuff. I let Xinjing negotiate… our plan was to get the price down at Amy’s, and if they wouldn’t hit what we wanted go somewhere else (we saw all the places on the side w/ Pearls by Amy, but didn’t go to the other side yet… some nicer looking places were there… Yonghong and Fanghua). I’ll not post the price quite yet, as I don’t want MK to know until we have the appraisal! but we got a good deal - Xinjing, a shy, demure female Chinese student is a total shark! It was impressive to see her in action. We picked up 2 21″ strands of 10mm pearls + matching earrings (8mm), one white and one black. Note: normally, you get 18″ strands, and that 18″ includes the clasp.

Now, you might be asking if they’re fake… after all, most everything else in China is. However, these are real. The deal is that the Chinese are using freshwater culturing and doing it at mass scale, so the price is very, very low. Check out this article from Nova.

Nick and I hired a driver for the day for 600 RMB. We started off at 7:30 and went to the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall — mostly to avoid the throng at the Badaling section that is closest to Beijing. It took about an hour and a half to get there, but that was fine. Once there, we went through the gauntlet of people shilling stuff — but they were mellow, as they knew we were going up and would come down at some point. We then took the cable car (i.e. skiing gondola) up to the wall, and started hiking about.

The main bit of this wall is a very steep section towards the left (I’d like to say west, but I have no idea, actually). It took us about an hour and a half to get up, but once there, it was well worth the view. It was also well worth the $150 buying some new Vasque hiking boots at REI two weeks previous! It was clear that the wall had been recently (within the past 100 years, probably 50) been restored… for example, I suspect they didn’t use 12″ square tiles back in the middle ages in China, nor did they use 1/2″ mortar. However, it did look like most of the supporting wall was original. This was confimed a bit as we got to the top and saw that the continuing section was overgrown and unavailable to tourists — that’s some old wall!

We headed back down and then through the hawker gauntlet. The first one (we forgot there were others, selling the exact same thing. After being lured by the call of “2 for 1 dollar!” Nick looked to buy two, then got haggled up to 150 RMBs for both. It appeared the real price was closer to 50 RMB (as some were calling that out), so probably more like 15 RMBs or 20 RMBs. Total tourist trap. I only imagine what’s at Badaling.