Weekend Notes

The subway started checking luggage on Sunday, with metal detectors. They also made me take a swig of my water before letting me walk in with it (apparently to make sure it wasn't toxic).

Dinner Saturday was amazing--it was Korean Barbecue, and the best darn food I've had in Beijing by a longshot (sad, isn't it?). I'll have to go back.

Noticed a small company dancing to really bad techno-pop outside in Wudaokou in the morning, as an early workout. They did not look happy:
"Yeah, yeah, we're dancing."

Cranes remain everywhere:


Sunday night (after museum) included a trip to a Chinese flying acrobatics show, which was certainly interesting, and a lot of fun, save the drunken Western college students around me (way to lack any grace at all, guys). There were some certainly impressive displays of human strength and flexibility, but I liked the action-packed stuff better. Lots of high jumping, leaping, people-stacking, coordinated ring-diving. The beset part were these guys in a large mechanical apparatus that hung by a single axle and spun free. At the end of each of the two arms were a circles where one man stood each. They ran around the small circles and made the entire apparatus spin--an awesome display of how angular momentum works. They did some rather absurd and dangerous things while on it, and managed to get an otherwise quite clueless audience to play along for a bit. All in all, not a bad time. Though dinner that night was some bread.

Line 10 is still not open, as the government promised it would be (by "Late June"), so I have been stymied in my plans to actually get where I want to go in a reasonable amount of time. We'll see.