Colin in China

       The office arranged for all the interns to go see “The Legend of Kung Fu,” one of the more touristy things Beijing has to offer, but something I hadn’t gotten the chance to do yet and my fellow Americans had raved about it so I was pretty enthusiastic about going.  It was ridiculous, like some combination of Cirque Du Soleil, ballet, David Copperfield and cage fighting.  There were probably 60 different people who all made it on stage, all in incredible shape and flying all over the place in perfect unison.  The story was all in English (a testament to the crowd they want to attract) and a bit hokey, but I left the theater confident that I was physically incapable of doing absolutely anything I had seen on stage.  Very impressed.

       In the lobby afterward we were approached by two people who recognized our ID cards and said they were attorneys at Jun He.  We struck up a conversation and agreed to go out for some “traditional Chinese food,” one of them warning that it might not be they type we like to eat.  We brushed aside their disclaimers, feeling like we had already encountered the strangest fare this city had to offer.  We were wrong.

       In the traditional Chinese fashion, we all sat in plastic outdoor chairs around a series of mismatched tables right there on the sidewalk while the owner/manager would wander out in his greasy tank top to take our orders.  Our new lawyer friends took care of the ordering.  Beers came out, and a little while later some skewers of meat appeared on the table, which I am pretty sure was grilled lamb. It was very tasty, if a little fatty, and I thought that would be the most exotic thing brought out that night.  It turns out that was only an appetizer and waves of peculiar looking items on sticks followed shortly thereafter.  Among these were some roundish looking beefy things with a couple extra holes in them.  And they kind of tasted like slightly chewy beef.  Wanting to demonstrate to our hosts that I was unfazed and appreciative, I ate about 6 of these little things.  Only then did I learn that I had eaten 6 chicken hearts.  Not the worst thing I have eaten, but had I known what they were beforehand I probably would have capped my number somewhere considerably south of 6.

       Next came the soft, grilled chicken bone and beef tendon.  The chicken bone was cut into little slivers and soaked for a while, then grilled to the point that it wouldn’t splinter into deathly razor bits on the way down.  So it was edible, but really really strange to chew through and swallow.  One was enough.  The beef tendon was kind of like beef gum.  Chewiest thing I have ever eaten, and I had to give up after a little while.  In any event, it was good company and a nice gathering after a very entertaining show.

       Work has started to pick up!  My most time-consuming project involves researching every Chinese company in U.S.stock markets to see if I can find any evidence of accounting fraud.  There has been a recent spike in concern over the validity of the numbers that Chinese companies report to the shareholders, so now everyone is terrified to put their money into up and coming Chinese companies.  The organizations will have a skeleton office in the U.S.but keep all the important people and information stashed away in China, and China has proven reluctant to recognize the U.S. legal system.  There is no reciprocity between the two nations, which means that neither country is compelled to recognize a legal decision reached in the other’s courts.  This is problematic when U.S. investors demand to see more detailed accounting records from Chinese companies.  Many will consider State funds/loans as revenue, which drives up stock prices – even though that money is not really theirs.  A number of financial institutions and auditors have abruptly severed ties with their former Chinese clients, refusing be maintain any association with their financial records.  Long story short, don’t go pouring dollars into young Chinese companies just yet.

       My mentor (who’s name I still can’t really pronounce) has been working on an article that addresses the necessity and practicality of using border measures/customs as an effective means of protecting Intellectual Property rights for both Chinese  and U.S. right-holders.  Basically, registering with border protection in China means that customs has the authority to detain items suspected of copyright, patent or trademark infringement and notify the relevant rights-holder so they can prevent the fake or infringing goods form entering the stream of commerce.  I have spent a ton of time revising the work because, as I learned yesterday, the piece is slated to be published in a U.S. legal magazine.  I’m not holding my breath, but it would be a very cool thing to get some kind of mention in the article as an editor.  If that happens then I’m buying 100 copies of the issue.  To be continued.

       My roommate and I changed hostels last weekend amid a reservation misunderstanding, and it actually worked out in our favor.  The new room is cheaper, has a significantly nicer bathroom, and cuts 5 minutes off my walk to the subway.  The beds are comically hard (you can feel the individual coils in the mattress) and there is no window… at all – but overall we came out on top.

       Only 2 more weeks left in China, so I need to get a list together of all the things I should see/do before my departure.  If anybody has suggestions, ideas, questions, or items they’d like me to pick up before I leave, I will try and make everybody happy.  Keep in mind that with the checked-bag restrictions and all I won’t be able to deliver any 40 pound Buddha statues.  Sorry.  In case anybody doesn’t have it, my email address is patrickcrice@gmail.com.  Zaidjian!

Nearly two weeks into my job with Jun He, and I have not really done a whole lot.  Every now and then I’ll get sent an article or email that has been translated from Chinese to English, and I polish up any grammatical or phrasing issues.  Otherwise, I mostly just sit at my computer refreshing my inbox every ten minutes or so hoping the next assignment has arrived.  Today was encouraging, however, since the interns and our mentors all met up for lunch.

It seems more legitimate work is on the way, and it was nice to have some interaction the people that send us our emails.  I learned a bit about China too.  One of the partners (or Counsel, since technically you have to be Chinese to legally represent anybody in China), Louis’s mentor, is an American guy who spent a long time in Colorado but married a Chinese woman, learned fluent Chinese, and has been working in Beijing with Jun He for years.  His take on the Chinese legal/government system was along the lines of what we had learned in class, but from a more practical, I-have-lived-and-seen-this-in-action standpoint.

He said that the central government is both extremely powerful and extremely weak; China prosecuted 900,000 people for crimes/infractions last year.  To put that into perspective, that is a lower number than the state of Colorado.  China has 1.4 billion people. Colorado has around 5 million.  So, if you commit a crime in China, the odds are infinitesimally small that anything will ever ever happen about it.  And it’s not just petty crimes, it includes compliance with any number of regulations, traffic laws… you name it.  They simply don’t enforce anything, both from an administrative level and from a police level.

I brought up Tim’s (the BBQ guy) cliché that it is easier to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission inChina, and everybody at the table seemed to agree.  Chaos reigns supreme, and the American said that’s what makes China so much fun – you can just do whatever the hell you want.  He told the story of walking around Beijing with one of his friends, who happens to hold a pretty prominent office with an agricultural department.  His friend just looks around and points out that nearly all the structures in sight violate the building codes.  They are meaningless because there is absolutely no enforcement.  If you’ve got the money and the plot of land, go ahead and build your ten story building even if there is a three story restriction; nobody is going to stop you.

While this system certainly has its flaws, it sure seems like a driving force behind China’s outrageous rate of expansion.  There are no road blocks to development.  Local governments have far more control over local matters than the central government, so often certain provinces will simply disregard any legislation or demand from the central government because, unless the Central Military Commission wants to roll tanks down to Guangzhou, they are powerless to stop anything.  Maybe there is some semblance of method to this madness since, in a country so ridiculously big, it is completely unreasonable to expect a central government to have much of a hand in local affairs anyway.

Everything I see makes more sense now.  Vendors peddling blatantly counterfeit iPhones, iPads, cases and accessories set up shop directly outside the Apple store in the trendy Sanlitun district.  You almost have to nudge them out of the way to get into the store.  There is no recourse for this other than an occasional bull-horn rant from the Apple store owner.  I just imagine an angry Apple geek running after the counterfeiters with a giant broom screaming “SHOO! SHOO!!”  The police don’t care at all, and the likelihood that anybody will ever get prosecuted is so remote that the vendors just wander right back into place once the manager has run out of breath.  It’s absolutely crazy, but it makes sense.  My aforementioned complaints about the traffic, line-etiquette and cab drivers all lump into the same theory.  Go get yours, or somebody else will take your place.  If you have to step on somebody’s toes, that’s fine since there are no repercussions.

We had a torrential downpour last night, which I happily slept through, but it left us with one of the clearest days I’ve seen in China.  Blue sky, good visibility and happy lungs.  Today seems like a turning point for the second half of the summer.  A few more random things:

l         Rob and I bought a half-gallon of milk and box of cereal from the snooty grocery store around the corner from our hostel.  It was so satisfying to eat a bowl of fiber drenched with real milk.  But I’ll tell you, my stomach was none too happy with me for filling it with lactose after 7 weeks without.

l         Cheap Chinese wine is even worse than cheap American wine.

l         We saw a menu that had “dog meat” translated under one of the dishes.

l         If you order a hamburger at a Chinese restaurant, you will be disappointed.

     Louis and I both got to the massive building that plays home to Jun He around 9:10am after some unclear instructions as to when to show up.  We thought earlier was a much better idea than later, being the first day and all, and we were in the firm’s lobby with our suits right at 9:30, opening time.  The receptionist on the floor did not speak much English, but we were pretty sure she knew who we were and paged the right people.  She had us sit down in some comfy chairs in front of the reception desk, where we sat for about an hour and a half.

       Eventually our contact arrived (Jan) and gave us another tour of the office.  There are 4 whole floors of this building dedicated to Jun He.  There is the super-fancy 26^th floor with the batman doors, leather-chaired conference rooms and perky receptionists… and there are the other three floors which are considerably less glamorous cube farms.  Louis and I arrive at our cubes to see that they have printed name tags, which was nice, but our names were “St. Mary’s1” and “St. Mary’s 2.”  I guess that goes with the territory when you’re low on the totem pole in a massive company.

       The rest of the day involved sitting/standing around while the IT guys got our computers, email addresses and phones hooked up, broken up in the middle by a trip to the basement where we get FREE LUNCH.  That was very exciting news to hear.  Two secretaries greeted us and offered to show us how to get our food.  On the way down, one of them introduced herself and asked me two questions.  #1 – What’s your name? (Colin).  #2 – Are you married? (No… BUT I have a girlfriend).  They were very nice.

       The food was hard to predict.  Lots of bones, lots of mystery globs that kind of look like meat but definitely didn’t taste like meat.  Some of them were coated in sauce that made them impossible to grab with chopsticks, so I had to push them to the corner of my tray then try and stab them with the chopstick.  There are a few different options, so I’m sure we’ll figure it out before long.

       My first assignment involved reviewing and revising an article on making better use of U.S. and Chinese customs to prevent counterfeit products from entering the global market.  It was interesting and I definitely learned something, but the translation was pretty rough.  I knew where they were going but it seemed like every sentence needed an overhaul.  There is probably plenty more of that in my future.

       I moved from the University to a hostel in a neighborhood called Sanlitun, which is only 2 stops away from work.  Much better than the 2 transfers and 17 stops it takes from the school.  The staff was shocked that Rob and I wanted to move in for 5 weeks, but they are all really friendly and there is a bar and very tasty (and inexpensive) restaurant downstairs.  Still, despite our semi-permanent residence at the hostel, there are plenty of drunk international travelers making plenty of noise out in the hall.  I don’t think it occurred to them that people within earshot may have to get up for work in the morning.  Understandable.  We have a really small room, but we’re never there and it’s about half of what we were paying, so the pros outweigh the cons.

       Everybody from the program has leftChina, so only the five us remain.  It will be a very different stretch than the beginning, but it should be really interesting and fun to explore a new, more active part of the city. More updates on the way.

Today marked my last day of finals for the St. Mary’s program, appropriately capped off with our International Business Transactions Professor accidentally locking us all in the classroom during the test.  I was the first one finished and also the first one to try opening a very large riot-proof door.  One of the students had to call the program director to come let us out.  I doubt the distraction really harmed anybody’s exam score since the whole thing was open book, note and slide show.  People start flying out tomorrow, and I believe everybody will be gone by Tuesday except for the five remaining stalwarts that will stay for internships until early August.  I will move into a hostel on Sunday with one of the other guys sticking around, mostly to save some money and live closer to work since it’s over an hour subway commute from the University.  But boy is that room small.  We’re just going to treat it like we live on a submarine or something.

I was really lucky to have Melissa visit.  We kind of re-hit all the attractions in Beijing while she was here, including another foray to the silk market where she filled out her interview-worthy wardrobe.  I ended up with another suit, which is a bit shinier than I’m used to.  My friend John, the one with the lavish smoking jackets, convinced me to get a wacky inner lining too, so I basically have a gold suit with lime green on the inside.  I probably won’t wear it to my first interview but it is one of my more interesting closet items.

Melissa and I went to Tianjin for a day trip on her last weekend.  This is a city of over 5 million people, yet it still felt incredibly small compared with Beijing.  Better yet, cabs were piling on top of themselves to take you anywhere you wanted to go.  They need to ship a few of those guys over to Beijing.

Tianjin is only 30 minutes away by high speed train (very cool) but it feels completely different.  They’ve modeled the neighborhoods after different parts of the world, so we walked by “Ancient Chinese Culture Street,” Australian, French and German areas all surrounded by super modern Chinese skyscrapers.  Everything borders a very wide river that, when you pinch your nose, is quite nice to walk along.  It looked pretty gross, and there were countless signs that even we could tell were meant to warn people not to go swimming, but just a few hundred yards away a were dozen shirtless old men in swimming caps.

We made our loop back after some trinket shopping and found a little Parisian street and thought we’d sit a while and wait for our train.  We found a little French café that had 2 for 1 wine and FREE baguettes with butter.  What a novelty.  There was even a Chinese teenager down the street very expertly playing an accordion.  If you had just put me there randomly I would have absolutely no idea where I was.

Working life starts for me on Monday.  Last week we had a field trip to my Law office for students in the program, which I attended partly because I felt it would be a polite thing to do.  We heard the run-down of what the firm does and its history from one of the partners, and afterward our professor introduced Louis and I as the two students who would be working there during July.  The partner asked us who we would be working with, and I butchered my mentor’s name so badly that he had no idea who I was talking about.  Professor Hu had to talk to him in Chinese for a minute to figure it out.  I’m starting to understand numbers and some other basic words, but this Chinese thing is really hard.

A few more random observations to share:

• Little kids don’t wear diapers.  They just have a big ol slit in the seat of their pants, so occasionally you’ll see a toddler take care of business right there on the sidewalk.  One classmate wondered if the parents carried around plastic baggies… Some, I’m sure, just carry one with a rock in it.
• There are some really funny translations.  My latest favorite was a picture my friend took of a fire extinguisher.  Caption: Hand Grenade.
• I went to Hooters, right across the street from the hostel.  All the Hooters girls lined up and danced in unison to Gloria Estefan.  My gut says that won’t be my last visit.
• My fake Rolex, it turns out, is not waterproof.

Melissa and I went to the Laoshe Tea House, where they have a statue of H. W. shaking hands with its founder from 1994.  The tour group took us here during our first weekend whirlwind trip, and it seemed like an appropriately Beijing-y thing to do.  For the most part the show was very entertaining, but there was a group of Spanish high-schoolers in our section that were acting very much like they were in high school and wanted to be doing anything but sitting through a tea ceremony.

We left the ceremony and hit the gift shop, where you could buy a tea mug for over $100.  I walked with my arms closely tucked to my sides so as to avoid bumping anything off the shelves and getting pegged for thousands of yuan.  It was 9:40, and a friend of mine had said that the subway closed at 10pm, so a cab seemed like a good idea.  We stood on the corner for 40 minutes attempting to hail a cab on a very busy street, literally in the dead center of a city that is home to 20 million people.  Two actually stopped for us, but when I told them the name of our school they refused to take us there.  We were getting really frustrated and just started walking toward the gates of the forbidden city, the place that I’m sure you’ve all seen with the giant portrait of Mao’s spectacularly greasy head.  BUT, due to some acts of protest in the last 20 or so years, there are large barriers along each street surrounding the square that make it impossible to hail a taxi.

We inadvertently come across a subway stop and notice a woman exiting from the escalator.  It’s 10:30 at this point and we were sure that the line had to be closed, but in our desperation took a gander and went down to the gate.  It was open after all, and we hopped onto a train bound for Beihang Dashue (University), nervous that they’d stop running the train and boot us at some random stop halfway home.  Not the case, fortunately.

Something struck me as we were sitting through our dozen or so stops.  Three separate guitar players came by, singing/screaming and strumming away with their guitar bag conveniently opened just enough to throw a couple of bills inside.  One of them gave up and sat down as one of his competitors walked by, and I thought I was about to see a guitar-subway turf throwdown between a couple rivals.  Instead, he reached out and gave him some money, I guess in appreciation for how hard it must be to rely on something like that to make any kind of living.  I’m not sure how to describe that emotion, but I appreciated seeing some compassion for another struggling musician trying to earn his dinner for the night.

We made it back and barely hit the pillow by the time we fell asleep.  So don’t go relying on catching a taxi if you look like Oliver Twist in the middle of Beijing.

More updates on the way, it has been a very busy couple of weeks but there is no shortage of things to write about.

Starting June 27, I will be working with one other classmate at Jun He (pronounced, “huh”) Law Offices.  Professor Hu took the two of us down to the office last week so we could meet a few of the people we’ll be working for.  He wanted to take the subway so we could see the way to get there, which I appreciated, but at 2:30pm in Beijing is the wrong time to day to be trekking around in a suit.

We exit at Janguomen, but each subway stop in Beijing has several different ways to get to the street, often a few hundred yards apart.  We surface and start walking down the block, but realize after a couple buildings pass that we’re going the wrong way.  It’s really hot out.  Eventually we get back on track and make it to the lobby of this very nice building in downtown.  We get some napkins from the Starbucks in the lobby and towel off a bit before heading upstairs.

The offices take up 4 floors of this very large building, with the main reception area on the 26th floor.  The view is amazing, and there are these crazy sliding glass batman doors that open when you approach.  We met with three attorneys, one American and two Chinese, and chit chatted about what I’ll be doing in July.  Professor Hu offered that we would do anything they needed, like mop the floors, but I suspect it will be more along the lines of revising documents so they flow well legally and in English.  Beyond that, we’ll have to wait and see but it should be a very interesting month.

Hashing is a phenomenon that has spread to nearly every major city on the globe.  As described to me in hasty detail, a bunch of Irish guys who drank every day thought, well, we should get some exercise while we’re at it.  From their small group formed a number of other groups, newcomers encouraged at every step, and today hashing can be found nearly anywhere with a quick Google search.   It consists of running a pretty confusing path through a city, natural place, or section of 5,000 mile long ancient wall.  And you drink beer the whole time, and in greater quantities when finished.  If you’d like a more detailed description, please conduct your own Google search.

Hashing has reached Beijing.  I received a call from a friend of mine (also with the last name Rice) who says he has signed up for a hashing trip to the great wall, and that in his attempt to hold another spot open for somebody else in our group, they said he had to sign up a specific person to hold that spot.  He picked me.  I said I’d have to think about it on account of my bum ankle, but seeing as it had improved quite a bit and I had not much better to do on this Sunday, I agreed to go.

We met at, of all places, Tim’s Texas BBQ.  I ordered some breakfast tacos, which were waaaay off, but tasty nonetheless.  The bus arrived at noon, our group of scruffy non-Asians boarded, and we set off to some unknown portion of the great wall.  It took us a solid 2 hours to get there due to some unforeseen road blocks and perhaps a wrong turn, but we arrived at the base of a really impressive, hilly basin where the wall actually separated into what is now a lake.

The lead hashers explained a few different marks that we would be seeing on the course, written out in chalk.  They try and design the course to get you a little lost, then you have to find your way back along the right path.  Naturally I chose to take it easy and let everybody up ahead run the wrong way so I could follow them when they finally figured it out.  During our intro a bunch of fireworks were going off in the street since Monday was a Chinese holiday and some folks wanted to get their jollys out early.  China does fireworks really well.  Gunpowder came from here.  They know a thing or two about loud explosions in small packages.

The route was really scenic.  We didn’t ever actually make it onto the wall, but it was visible pretty consistently for the whole route and I got some great pictures.  My group, the walking group, took a much less strenuous path than the others, who climbed a really steep section of the wall itself and went about 10 miles.  I was feeling great when we got back while the runners all came limping in, many with little cuts on their shins from running through burrs.

Once everyone had gotten back, the “ritual” began.  I’ll sum it up very quickly: it involved standing in a circle for two hours, and basically everybody had to enter the circle at one point or another to the constant background music of drunken hashing songs, usually quite vulgar, and ended with each newly initiated lady sitting in the middle while the elders, or old hashers (or whatever they’re called) sprayed said lady with beer.  I was absolutely starving, and pretty offended about this ridiculous display of western idiocy at the foot of one of the most amazing structures in the world.  Really not my scene.  We finally got to eat dinner (which took another two hours) then got on the bus to head back to Beijing (another two hours) then got a cab to go back to the hotel (yet another hour).  It was 11pm by the time I got to my bed.  Apparently the other hashers didn’t have an 8am class to worry about the next day.

Bitterness aside, it was a beautiful part of the world and I think mostly everyone had a good time.  Just know what you’re getting into before agreeing to go off someplace with a hashing group.

I am happy to say that the suit I bargained for turned out pretty well.  Not that I am any connoisseur or anything, but it looks like a suit and fits well so there will be more on the way.  The outfit that made mine roped Rob into getting one too for the same price, so we’ll probably just stick with good ol Tony Tailor in the future.

This time, after some more specific directions, we did manage to find Tim’s Texas Roadhouse.  We walk in to see the walls covered with Duncan jerseys, UT flags, A & M helmets and a picture of Yao Ming shaking hands with the one and only Tim.  They had a happy hour deal on frozen margaritas, enchiladas, burgers and anything else Texan that a homesick Rattler could ever want.  I settled on the Mexican bacon burger, with four roasted chilis on top, and I could not have been any happier.  After a diet of rice, noodles, tea and unnamed meat and vegetables, a massive burger was the greatest thing in the world.  I think my strategy will be to periodically infuse my life with a little western food so I avoid a massive craving for jalapeno poppers and brisket toward the end of the trip.

Our little waiter at the restaurant was so excited that some real life Texans walked through the door (although I’m actually from Florida, Rob from Oregon… but John is 115% Texan) that he scurried over behind the bar to tell “Tim.”  What a crazy story.  He had worked the corporate life in Beijing for a number of years, got burned out and opened a couple of these restaurants.  His cliché was “It is easier to beg for forgiveness in China than to ask for permission,” meaning that he just went ahead and opened the place up without proper approval from the powers that be, since that may have taken 3 years and plenty of persuasion, monetary or otherwise.  He keeps the officials happy with an occasional case of Texas beer.  However, his current permit runs out in about 30 days so we’ll see if he sticks around for the duration of our trip.  We sure hope so.

My program is called the St. Mary’s Institute on Chinese Law and Business.  It offers five classes, all related to representing clients doing business with China.  This is also only its second year, so St. Mary’s is very conscious to make sure the students have a meaningful experience and the program has an opportunity to grow in the future.  Our Dean, Charles Cantu, has been working to get this started for years and he could not be more enthusiastic about it.

While we have class 4 days a week, the organizers want to be sure that participants get to experience Chinese culture and see some of the more famous attractions Beijing has to offer.  Our first weekend included a jam-packed itinerary that included the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, the Summer Palace, Bei Hai Lake and the surrounding Hutons, Peking Duck, a traditional Chinese Tea Ceremony, Olympic Park, the Pearl Market, and, of course, The Great Wall.

It was a thoroughly exhausting three day tour, and complete sensory overload, but it was a great introduction to all the incredible things within easy access in Beijing, and since I will be here for two more months I at least have a rough outline for things to visit again.  The food has been wild.  Nearly everything has been very tasty, though occasionally something will show up on the table that I can’t recognize or can’t stomach.  There is a certain type of sauce for noodles that tastes like spicy, carbonated vinegar… not for me.

Each of these sights probably deserves their own post, so as I revisit some of them I will go into a little more detail.  St. Mary’s is motivated to have all 30 students return to Texas and act as recruiters for next year’s trip, and while that is totally transparent I am 100% on board.  It has been amazing so far.

Here are just a few things that struck me as funny or different after my first week in China:

• In the Military History Museum, a teenage Chinese girl asked to have her picture taken with me.  Definitely a first.
• The Chinese don’t follow our system of lines or waiting your turn, and crosswalks are all but meaningless.  I’m always on edge walking around because you don’t know when the next silent electric scooter will come flying by.
• As I was talking to some friends in Atlanta via Skype, one of them complained that the Dallas Mavericks game was not on TV there but I had it on in China.  I was able to get the internet radio broadcast for the game, which was nice, but it was also about a minute behind the live action.
• Taxis are always an adventure.  I have been pulling up my destination on Google Maps, then taking a picture of the screen with my digital camera to show the cab driver.  It works about half of the time.
• Ordering food can be stressful, since my 5 word Chinese vocabulary runs out quickly and often I have absolutely no idea what I am ordering.  Generally, at a table of four, it is agreed that everyone will get something different and we will share the tasty dishes.  Most restaurants do not have pictures, just Chinese characters followed by a price.  We call it menu roulette.
• There are 15 basketball courts right across the street, and they are all pretty full for much of the day.  We have been playing in the morning because the heat/smog are much easier to deal with.  I turned my ankle (mildly, Mom) the other day and thought I should get some ice for it – but after talking to 3 different people the concept of ice cubes in a bag was not getting through.  I ended up buying two ice cream pops and tying them to my ankle with a hand towel.
• Beijing alone is more populous than the whole state of Texas.  From any point in the city it is just an expanse of skyscrapers as far as you can see.  I have never lived in a denser place.