day 0.5 in china: shenzhen

<-jade dragon snow mtn in lijiang

this is gonna get very long, so its pseudo linear with bumps along the way that have nothing to do with anything...i guess that's how i write anyways. and it'll be in installments. and the photos will be random (can you tell i'm adding to this intro as i go?) the first thing i did in china was lose $100 to a conniving cabbie. i was gonna pay him $140 to drive me 40km (from the hk-shenzhen border to our hotel near the airport). when we were getting out, i handed him $200 and asked for change. he said he didn't have change, so i paid him $40 more (in HKD), and he fumbled around his pockets a bit before handing me back my benjamin (err i guess its actually a mao, but mao's not very descriptive since every bill in china is a mao)--or so i thought (DUN DUN DUN)! he handed me a fake hundred! of course, i didn't find out until i tried to spend it (which i did several times in many ways: after crumpling it up, after soaking it in water, to a street vendor wearing gloves. apparently its a very very bad fake. jon thinks its printed on A4 paper, but it wasn't my fault! it was dark! and um, yeah, it was dark!). i'm a bit peeved, b/c i already think that $140 for 40km is pretty steep. come on, 25miles?! i used to drive 25 miles to pick up my groceries!

funny things seen on tv while in china:

1. a jolly, bearded caucasian man turned himself blue. the interview was in canto, so i didn't catch a lot of it, but i think he did it with a glass of water and an electric current.
2. a program about ppl breaking guiness world records--1 guy hung horizontally from a helicopter for a significant number of minutes using a bowl and his abs (the bowl created a vacuum).
3. a live variety show of police/army propaganda. lots of soldier/dancers doing choreographed kicks, choreographed marching in place, and choreographed...police barracades (?), all to music, very weird. i guess china is very proud of its large standing army.

that first night in shenzhen, we ate at the dongbei equivalent of a yakitori place (which means it had that extra splash of msg to make it authentically chinese, but i'm not sure what makes it dongbei specifically except that the owner/chef is from dongbei. i guess in china, restaurants are labeled by the loyalty of the workers, not by the type of food--which was HOT). everything came skewered, well, except for the BIG POT of spicy soup filled with yummy veggies. we daredn't (is that an ok contraction for "dared not"?) try the fuzzy egg or the various organs, but jon was very brave and crunched the cartilage like any old pro. of course, i ordered the corn, eggplant, and bokchoy (on a stick! all on a stick!), and they were delicious. we ate as much of the hot sauce soup as possible, fishing out the solids and dabbing them on plates to relieve them of their fiery bathwater. nevertheless, i was jonesing for a popsicle afterwards (in keeping with the sticked theme). instead, i got a "strawberry" ice cream cone--half the cone was missing, the ice cream tasted very artificial, and the "real fruit" turned out to be raisins. on the upside, 1 big bottle of beer only costs $4! 1 handle of rice liquor only costs $5! (not that we bought any, but it's refreshing to see that we could've gotten drunk cheaply--that's the equivalent of 50 cents, btw). and that's how we spent our first night in china.