Meet with Shieva and friends

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I woke up before Sarah around 10am and switched to the living room where I began watching the movie 28 Days about a virus outbreak in London. She woke up around noon and prepared for her interview as a reprographer for some German firm. When she was ready we walked out and parted ways for the day. I stopped at a cheap dumplings shop near her place and feasted on “baozu” and soup. Then I returned to the hostel and showered. After, I did internet for a bit.

Later on I made my way once again to the “fakes’ market and picked up all of my suits I was really impressed with my new gear. I was definitely going to be looking sharp at work.. After dropping the suits off at my room I decided to get some food at the next-door dumpling shop again. While I was downing a tofu soup, Piero stopped by and we chatted for a while. We talked about some of the old cats from HEC as well as about the trip to Eastern Europe with Avid and Chris Boyle. Piero seemed to have a similar position as me about Chris being an absolute psycho when he’s drunk.

Piero needed to take off so I picked up my washed clothes and headed to the pharmacy. I was in luck! After a week of desperately searching for pharmacies to send me the medicine I needed I finally found a pharmacy only a few blocks from the hostel that sold it. Much relieved, I jumped in a cab and headed for jujitsu. Being very tired I decided to take a nap in the back seat and was surprised when the guy tried to charge me 50 Yuan when it was usually about 30. I somehow communicated to him that I took the same route often and so he accepted the 32 Yuan that'i gave him without much of a fight. I stepped into jujitsu on time for once and was positively surprised by the presence of the guy from Utah again. We had a very educational class but I couldn’t exert myself too much since I had somehow hurt my ribs.

When class ended I jumped in a cab with Vincent and an 18-year-old German girl that was interning in his development film company. We stopped at my place to change and then moved on to the bar Souk to meet Shieva, her sister, and a friend that worked as a journalist for the English newspaper, Beijing Today. On the way Vincent and I were cracking numerous jokes with sexual innuendos but the German girl took it well and wasn’t offended in the slightest. We arrived at the bar and it had a great outdoor seating area that kind of looked like Wanial’s New Hyde Park backyard. I got a Mojito and we all shared a shisha. Vincent got us to chat about China’s 4 sensitive “T’s”: Tibet, Tiannamen, Taiwan, and textbooks (in Japan). The girls didn’t take that one too well and a short while after the youngest one claimed to be tired and they all left. Then it was just the 3 of us and we began having a discussion on the development of Africa. I was surprised to hear myself take a quite aggressively prejudiced stance that blacks were inherently fairly lazy and always sought a quick buck. I guess my experiences seeing them in China and Japan had jaded my opinion of them quite a bit. I left a short time after and caught a tofu casserole before heading to sleep.

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