Week 5 (March 20/2005 - March 26/2005)
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Sunday, March 20/2005 |
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| Arrive back in Shenyang 7:00am in the morning. I spent all day updating this web page with the pictures from the trip, and passing out infront of the computer.... Sorry to make you guys worry. As urbanized Beijing is, the internet isn't as accessable as it should be. The hotel didn't have internet and I was not able to find an internet cafe to jack into. I will begin uploading the updates and pictures from today. The "high speed" ADSL is pretty sucky for up speed. I am lucky if I get 10kbps via FTP to my site. | |
| Monday, March 21/2005 | |
| Woke up this morning doing much the same as I did yesterday. I have now completed up to Beijing Tour Day 2. We have to take a quick trip to Ami's mother's place for special fish/pork dumplings. They were not bad considering I don't like fish too much. They also had a chance to see some of the pictures. | |
| Tuesday, March 22/2005 | |
| Today is another day where we are catching up with life. | |
| Wednesday, March 23/2005 | |
| Ami was sick with a bit of a cough today. So I did the normal precautionary things like put her to bed with lots of fluids. I made a hot tomato soup for lunch which worked well. We were out of any real sources of Vitamin C so I planned out a trip to CarreFour to get oranges and such. So I put Ami to sleep so she can get the bed rest she needs, while I stepped out to get groceries. I said I was going to return at around 5:00pm. I walked along Nan 3 Jing Jie, down to CarreFour. I also went to McDonalds to pick up two Big Macs. I was impressed at the fact I was able to order my two Big Macs without saying a single word of Chinese or English. Anyway, I found a new way to get back to the house down a street called Caita Jie.
When I got home, I had found that Ami had woken up and she tried to make dinner for me even though she was sick. Of course, I already had McDonalds so I couldn't eat much. That is fine, since I can always make fried rice with it tomorrow for lunch. I guess all the better to kill any stray germs or bacteria. Never hurts to practice good "food safe" procedures. In the evening, I continued working on this web page. |
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| Thursday, March 24/2005 | |
| Today I finally completed all the pictures for the Beijing trip. It was quite a lot, almost 400 pictures from the camera that I had to weed through to find the best ones for the web page. I still haven't uploaded everything but I am getting there.
Ami had gotten better, unfortunately, I got worse. I developed some kind of coughing. No stuffed nose or headaches yet. Looks like the beginning of cold or a flu. Great... I didn't need this at this stage of the trip. Oh well, all I can do is fight it and see if I can overcome it. Since I finished my web page work, I decided to go for a walk. I dressed extra warm and set out for train station. Although it was night time when I saw it before the Beijing trip, but it looked like a pretty busy place even at night. On the way there, I found the Korean Embassy. Funny that the had a KFC and a Korean KTV place right across the street. Also on my trip, I discovered a store called Obi, which is the equivalent to a Home Depot or Rona. On the way back home, I came across a KTV place with a big screen. They were playing the video for a song I saw on Beijing TV. I will have to search for it tomorrow. |
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| Friday, March 25/2005 | |
| My cough is getting worse, and I now have signs of a runny nose. I have to upgrade from cough syrup to something else. I spent the entire day inside for the most part and watched TV, I am finding easy to fall asleep in front the TV when I haven't the slightest clue what they are saying.
Beijing TV has like 8 or so channels. CCTV has 9 or so. And Liaoning TV has a couple. The dial goes from 0 to 50, so lots of channels are repeated. Of the shows I can remember skimming through: "X-Files", "World Backpacker", and "Survivor III Africa"; these are chinese redubbed. "Hollywood And Crime", "Just For Laughs" and "Crime Revealed", and "Reality TV" were left in English with Chinese subtitles. Just by coincidence, the Reality TV was doing segments about internet crimes including internet stalkers and pedophiles and stuff. The only other really annoying thing about the TV is the fact that they have commerical slots for infomericals. Most of them are pushing US foreign products like face achne medicine, eye wrinkle remover, adult underwear, the vibrating belt for weight loss, the lose weight while you sleep machines, and watches. Full with stupid white guys dressed like doctors saying it is clinically proven and lots of paid asian people saying "Yea it works" and the "If you buy now, we'll give you extra crap." I took a short excursion to 365.com bookstore again to see if I can find that song. Since I have no idea who sings it or what the title is, I ended up buy a couple the the 10 yuan MP3 CDs. This is really great because there is over 100 songs on the CD. As it turns out, I got the song first try. Ami went out to pick up Alexanderia by herself today since a 4:00pm pick up will most likely get very cold when the sun starts going down. |
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| Saturday, March 26/2005 | |
| The flu I have has escalated again to a plugged up nose and headache. No fever though, so that was a good sign. I needed some Vick's Cough Drops and some Vick's Nyquil. Of course, the whole pharmacy thing is kinda different here. You can walk into a pharmacy and they have lots of stuff you can buy but almost none of it I know what it is. It is like Chinese mystery medicine. It also becomes impossible to ask for Nyquil if they don't know what it is. So. This is where I have found the internet very useful.
Nyquil is basically 4 things: Acetaminophen (pain killer/fever), Dexotromthorphn HBr (cough suppressant), Doxylamine Succinate (antihistamine), and pseduoephedrine HCl (nasal decongestant). Well, the parmacist is not good enough to pick these chemicals out but if you gave them the symptoms, then they were able to find some replacements. Incidently, Dayquil is the same as Nyquil except it doesn't have the antihistamine. Acetaminophen (ASA or asprin) was hard to find on its own. It is usually mixed in some other drug. They gave me something made by "Ketan" which contains Guailfenesin as a cough suppressant and Dextromethorphan as the nasal decongestant. I was also using something called "Gan Kang" which is paracetamol (another type of acetaminophen) and Amantadine HCl (anti viral for Flu Class A). Amoxicillin (antibotic) is sold over the counter at 500mg. It wasn't necessary for me to bring that. However, Vick's Cough Drops only has one active ingredient, Menthol. Unfortunately, the candy also contains caffiene so it is banned from China. So I will have to do without the cough drops. Now, I am drugged up and ready to go! |
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