星期二, 八月 30, 2005
On Sunday, after the morning's language tutorial, I decided to do a bit of sightseeing, and went to the Lama Temple (Yonghe Lamasery). I haven't been there since March last year, when the sky was blue, the sun was bright, and the air was clear and cold. On Sunday none of those things were true! It was hot, humid, and the air was very hazy - quite apart from the smoke from all the incense! Still, I spent most of the afternoon there, leaving when it closed at 5pm. Then, feeling very tranquil, I went on to Yandai Xijie, near Houhai, where revised my new vocabulary over a couple of beers. It was a very laid-back feeling - I got talking to a guy selling faux antiques and trinkets, who asked me a ridiculously high price for a PLA lapel badge - and then gave it to me for free when I said I didn't want it! While we were chatting, I was approached by a beggar with a placard covered in newspaper cuttings hanging around his neck. Apparently he has been dubbed "the scholar beggar", and various articles have been written about him. He even has his own website where he publishes his work. I can't say that it means much to me, and nor do I quite understand how he manages to run a website if he has to beg for a living, but he was polite, spoke good if idiosyncratic English, and was interesting to talk to, so I'm glad to have met him. My good mood wasn't even marred by my iPod apparently dying - it froze halfway through a track, and got really hot until the battery died. I haven't tried recharging it yet...
At work, I'm revising all the work I did in Services Marketing and Managerial Accounting as I try to develop a pricing strategy for various services.
There's an interesting article in the Times about internet censorship in China. Oddly enough, as soon as I loaded the page, I lost my internet connection for ten minutes!
