Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Real Pizza in Beijing?... Impossible... (?)

Another week, another test, and more procrastination. But such is life. Anyway, the other night we decided to go out for some pizza, and not the crappy little Beijing pizza with its strange cheese and weird sauce at relatively high prices--the good stuff. So, we grabbed a taxi up to the BeiDa (Beijing University) area to go to the Kro's Nest, a pizza restaurant, bar/pub run by an American skateboarder. The place has the feel of an American college hangout, and the prices fit as well. But the pizzas are really well-sized (especially for Beijing) and they taste great. Besides, I'd wager that the prices are still a bit cheaper than in the States. I couldn't resist the opportunity to order some wings, which weren't bad, despite the fact that they brought me barbecue instead of buffalo (at that point, I was just glad to have them--didn't feel like arguing). Then, I got a small cheese pizza with olives. The whole meal, with a bottle of water (I was still too price-shocked to get a beer for an extra 35 kuai), ran me a nice 95 kuai (~$14), but was well worth it.

I got an email yesterday from the program with which I'll be traveling to Tibet, informing me that if the situation doesn't get better, they may either cancel or rearrange the program for safety reasons. The good news, however, (depending on how you look at it, of course), is that I've heard tell (in one way or another) that the situation is calming down. I haven't heard any official news in the past day or so, but I have reason to believe that with strong police/military force, the riots in Tibet may be calming down, in addition to in the immediately neighboring provinces, while riots in Gansu might still be going strong in some smaller areas. Also, it just might be possible that exiled Tibetan guerrilla forces may have been trying to enter Tibet through Afghanistan and/or Kashmir in order to provide renewed effort to the riots, but that the Chinese government would most likely have deployed a special task force to prevent this from happening.  Of course, this is all just my own speculation. ;)

On a ligher topic, my quest for Purell has been fruitful (in some form), as I received a package from my parents with a fairly nice supply.  Also, for some reason, I got an email back from the sales manager of Purell in China, responding to my angry email.  They explained that while their retail distribution is wide in Shanghai, they haven't yet expanded to Beijing, but that Purell is in many clinical settings.  He also gave me the cell phone number of the Beijing sales manager, and told me to feel free to give her a call to meet up and purchase some products--which I just might do if my supply runs out.

By the way, I'm still working on getting my Yunnan pictures up.  (Hopefully not too long after this post--the problem has been that all of the photos are a total of 37 mb, even when compressed, and our internet is very slow and sporadically logs us out, so getting them all up at once is impossible).

Well, it's almost time for me to meet with my tutor, and I still have a lot of studying to do, so that will do for now.

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