The Wudaokou Christmas Tree. Right outside (I kid you not) Pizza Hut.

Santa has visited China and toured the Great Wall! Has he visited you yet?

Cursory decorations and fuwuyuans wearing Santa Claus hats aside, Christmas is just another day in China. Although Wudaokou was quite festive on Christmas Eve with balloon, sparkler, and flower peddlers selling their wares on the street.

My friends and I celebrated Christmas Eve by eating pizza and watching The Polar Express. I tutored this morning (Christmas Day) and went through 'Twas the Night Before Christmas with my student. Presents will be exchanged later today.

Hope you are having a great time with family and loved ones. Merry Christmas - or as we say here: 圣诞快乐 (shung dahn kwai luh)!

xo Cathy

Paul's Steak and Eggs

This is the facade of our favourite Beijing diner. Paul is the owner and his photo on the sign. He really looks like that, handlebar mustache and all.

"Western Happiness to China" is the rough translation of the chinese name 喜来中. And not a bad description for the only place in the city that makes killer french toast and apple pies at affordable prices.

School of Rock DVD. Note the chinese text on the cover.

Several times a week, we pop by the campus Friendship Store to visit The Nice DVD Lady and browse through stacks of DVDs. It is worth mentioning at this point that the Friendship Store is the best campus store ever. You wouldn't think such a small space would sell everything you possibly need. Available goods include: food (local and imported), scarves, twinkly lights, stationary, liquor, chinese kitsch, badminton rackets, a tiny electronics counter that sells electronic dictionaries, dvd players, cell phones, mp3 players, toiletries... the list continues.

Anyway, tucked away in nook are several cardboard boxes of DVDs, containing movies old and new, priced at 8 kuai a pop (or about 96 cents USD). Presiding over everything is The Nice DVD Lady who keeps track of stock and screens DVDs on a little TV and DVD player in the corner. This is because pirated DVDs can contain surprises about picture or sound quality - sometimes the movie is completely different from the one on the package cover and disc label. Example: I bought School of Rock only to discover the movie inside was Rock School. This happened before in another DVD store and happened again yesterday with The Nice DVD Lady. Both times, I've returned to exchange the movie for another one.

When she saw me tonight, she excitedly informed me that School of Rock was in her new stock of DVDs. When she checked the movie and saw it was the real deal, she pulled it out of the box and put it aside just for me.

With customer service like that, of course I had to purchase the movie.

There was a NY Times article a few days ago about media and internet censorship in China.

Censorship has become a particular thorn in my side - specifically internet censorship. Thanks to the Great (Fire)wall of China, I can't get to BBC news, blogs posted on Blogger (my own included, even though I can, puzzlingly enough, still write posts), or even certain university websites - which is a complete pain when trying to figure out applications for graduate school.

Actually, this isn't entirely true. I can access the information blackout via proxy websites but it's a fiddly process and not reliable. Especially when trying to do research on really sensitive websites such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

The above error has become the bane of my (and Maria, the other UNHCR intern). existence. It pops up when we try to access a blocked page and the connection to the linking site (eg. Google) also freezes for several minutes.

Both of us are trying to find overseas friends to install a proxy program so we can reroute our internet connection through their computer to get around the firewall (any offers?). We're getting to the point where we're seriously considering going to our embassies (Canadian and Italian) and begging for access to their international servers so we can do our research.

Wudaokou subway parking lot

Just like back home, parking lots are often conveniently located near subway stations.

Except these are for bikes not cars.

Parking is easy. It's leaving the lot that's hard. I never imagined that extracting a bicycle in the dark without domino-ing the adjacent bikes would be part of my commute.

memories of warmer weather: twin boys bicycling on campus

The mercury suddenly dropped this weekend and it is freezing cold in Beijing. Technically it is below-freezing, especially when the wind blows because, as indicated by the smoke puffing due south out of the 食堂 dining hall chimneys, the wind comes straight from the North. And what is North of China? Siberia.

Good thing Craig just bought a contraband North Fake jacket from 秀水市场 The Silk Market aka Knockoff Market this weekend. Contraband because a number of companies (like Gucci, Burberry, Prada) recently sued the market for selling knock-offs so there is now a big show of notices posted throughout the market saying certain brands such as North Face are no longer available. The stallkeepers have replaced inventory with knockoffs of other brands and even shout "Columbia? Columbia?" instead of "North Face" as you walk by.

We were looking at a jacket that looked suspiciously like North Face but minus the logo and tagged with a Chinese label instead. So imagine our surprise when we asked the stallkeeper for another size, and she pulled the identical jacket - except boldly emblazoned with "North Face" on the chest - from neatly folded pile hidden in a black rubbish bag! After some haggling and chitchat with the stallkeeper (where I discovered she is from Southern China and only knows the English for important selling terms such as "best price!" "very beautiful" and "small, medium, large"), we got the price down from the asking price of over 800 kuai to 200 kuai or 24 USD.

And it is a good knockoff as North Fakes go. Of course the shell isn't Gore-Tex but the zippers are good and even the snaps and lining are printed with North Face. Curious about how to tell a real from a fake, we did some googling where we discovered that zipper placement is one thing that separates real jackets from knockoffs: North Fakes have zippers on the left side while the real deal have zippers on the right.

On Craig's jacket: the zipper is on the left.

My cell phone can read and write chinese!

I've lately been obsessed with making everything 汉子 capable, that is, able to process, show, and produce chinese characters. For example, just today, I switched from AOL Instant Messenger to Trillian because I can type chinese into the latter and not the former (stupid AOL).

However for the past few weeks, I was obsessed with making my cell phone chinese-capable. Text messaging is a big thing here since it's one of the cheapest forms of communication, but because I brought my cell phone from America, it didn't have the ability to process chinese characters.

So when I received a chinese text, the screen would either display:

Error: Incompatible message format.

or

*&%$@*^^@()#3(

Very annoying. I couldn't even read the SIM card functions in my phone menu. So I was toying with the idea of buying a local cell phone. But while phones here can be very cheap (especially Chinese brands), if I wanted a phone I could take back to North America, I need to purchase a GSM tri-band phone, which runs well over 1000 kuai. Since I had much better things I could spend 120 or so USD on, I kept hesistating about buying a new phone.

Then one day I passed a China Mobile store with sign advertising services such as unlocking phones and updating cell phone software. I went in and asked if they could add chinese capability to my phone... and lo and behold, for a mere 150 kuai (18 USD) I can now text in English and Chinese!