Zai Jian, China!

Monday was my last full day in China, and I had some work to do. As part of this trip, I was charged with shooting a short video while in country, and I spent the morning and afternoon working on said project. I'm going to hold off for now discussing the subject matter of my shoot - I'd rather let my coworkers see the finished product with fresh eyes. But once I'm finished with the video and it's been presented at work, I'll post it here with a written account of the shoot.

From there, I went back to Tim's Texas BBQ for a wonderful dinner that was half Chinese (catered from a local restaurant), and half Texas. Once might think that this cuisinal mash-up could be a real disaster, but the two types of food actually compliment each other quite nicely. Babequed pork ribs met their equivalent in Chinese deep fried ribs; stuffed jalepeno peppers paired with sauteed green beans and red peppers; brisket played off of grilled pepper chicken. My only regret was not taking a photo of the speread to share with all of you.

From there, I met up with five friends from my tour group for a few drinks before heading out for a last night on the town. By 11:00pm or so I was starting to feel quite tired, and wondering whether to follow through on a night out or just head home for a final night of full sleep and then maybe get in some last sightseeing before departing on Tuesday. But when plans to visit the Great Wall on Tuesday morning fell through, I figured I might as well make a night of it. It's been so strange to be getting only 5 hours or so of sleep most nights - at that level I'm usually a zombie. But here, I've been functioning just fine, and that's with miles and miles of walking most days. Maybe I'm set for a huge crash when I get home - wouldn't be surprised at all. On the other hand, maybe this means my jet lag won't be too bad, since I never acclimated to a normal nocturnal sleep schedule in China. I'll know soon enough.

So it was 11:30 or so, and we were ready to head out. We had planned on heading over to Houhai Lake, north of the Forbidden City, where a number of clubs and restaurants have sprung up in the past couple of years and turned a sleepy neighborhood into a relatively hip and happening area. And I was ready for that, even eager to see what Beijing hipsters looked like. I've seen enough non-sensical Chinglish on locally-designed t-shirts that the idea of any locals adopting hipper-than-thou attitudes would be an amusing sight.

But suddenly, things took a turn when an alternate suggestion was made, and before I knew it, a cab was depositing me in front of Party Life! - four floors of karaoke. Now, I don't know if Party Life is representative of other karaoke joints in Beijing, or Asia for that matter,. But I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume they're all pretty similar, and go even further out on said limb and make the observation that the karaoke bar is to Asia what the bowling alley is to middle America. Lots and lots of kids, and some adult aficionados, gathered together in a casual setting made whole by a truly scary buffet of strange meats and fried potatoes. We had our own room, complete with a video screen, two microphones, maracas and a tambourine - oh, and about 40 beers among us. I'm not going to bore you with details, because as Bon Jovi and the Backstreet Boys and Madonna carried us through the night, what to us at the time seemed brilliant and hilarious would be tedious to everyone else. Like most drunken evenings that last until 5:00am, you had to be there. But we had a great time, and it was a great way to close out my time in Beijing.

On my way to the airport, where I'm writing this post now, I happened to glance out the window for one last glimpse of China. And what do you know, I saw sunshine breaking through puffy white clouds - for a moment, at least, it was a Blue Sky Day over Beijing.

Feel the Spirit

Just back got home tonight after spending the entire day on the Olympic Green. Saturday was all about playing tourist - today was all about reveling in the Olympic Spirit. And my timing couldn't have been better, as it rained nearly all day today and made it a good day to stay inside.

Security here to get into the Olympic green, where the Bird's Nest and probably half of the venues are located, is insane. Insane. A valid ticket to an event of the day is required to enter the Green, followed by an x-ray of all bags, a walk through a metal detector, a wanding and patdown, and a request to demonstrate all electronic equipment. As I'm walking around with a camera, a camcorder, my Blackberry, a Chinese phone and my iPod, it takes a while. But I'll say this - although an American was killed Saturday in Beijing, I feel extremely safe once I'm in, a feeling compounded by the military installation smack in the center of the Green, complete with radar and anti-aircraft missiles on standby. Whether the soldiers on guard are awake or not is, apparently, an entirely different matter (see photo).

The afternoon was dedicated to water polo, and if I've ever seen a more physical sport, I can't think of it. The dudes that play this sport at the Olympic level are 6'-4", 6'-5", 220-230, amazingly muscled and absolutely ripped. Ripped. It's like if Schwarzenegger in his prime had the torso of a swimmer. And to get that body, all you need to do is be able and willing to dash up and down the length of an Olympic-sized pool for ninety minutes, treading water the entire time while playing offense or defense, and wrestling in place with a similarly-sized barbarian at the same time. Saw the Croats, ranked number one in the world, beat up on Italy, and the US take down a Chinese team that was about as good at water polo as I am. As the host country, they get a free entry into the competition, but safe to say they won't last long.

(Which leads me to wonder - in the Chinese system of sports schools, where everyone with any aptitude for sport is shunted off to special academies where all other education is an afterthought, and failure is said to be rewarded with physical abuse - at what point, if you are a Chinese athlete, do you become a water poloist? I mean, are you a swimmer who just doesn't make the cut, and so your consolation prize is a course of anabolic seroids and a funky cap? Do any of these guys actually choose water polo for themselves, or is the sport "bestowed" upon them? Just asking, 'cause I don't can't imagine any kids in China with posters of Tony Acevedo on their walls instead of Yao Ming. Well, not any straight ones.)

From there, a friend and I caught a preliminary round of women’s gymnastics. Now, in some circles, women’s gymnastics has come under some fire recently for the young age of its participants and the glossy veneer of preening dance and presentation that accompanies the actual athletics involved. Such criticism has only increased this year with the suspicion that China has doctored the ages of two of its female gymnasts, who apparently had only been fourteen years old until they made the Olympic team this year, when they suddenly became sixteen to make the age cutoff. But anyone who has ever watched an American girl of teen vintage or less can attest that the popularity of gymnastics derives from those very attributes that bring it criticism. For so many young girls, watching these 80-pound marvels test the human limits of plasticity is like looking into a mirror of dreams. With the ice-skating princess of the winter games, gymnasts form one half of the square root of girl power, which may in later years manifest itself in riot grrl or punk chik and cause endless angst for countless parents, but in its original incarnation takes the bedazzled form of vaulting fairies.

I was bored. The Chinese, Russian and US big dogs had competed earlier in the day, and we were watching France and Belarus stumble through some pretty sloppy routines. A nice face plant or two sparked things up, however.

I headed home. Happy to be back at the hotel at a decent hour, with time to stop at the lounge for a quick beer. In previous days, the lounge has been pretty quiet by 11:00 at night, but this evening it was packed, with all of the workers standing around in front of the bar, watching a replay the USA-China men’s basketball match. Yao Ming vs. Kobe Bryant. The toughest ticket in the games. Have I said that everyone here loves basketball? Every Chinese basket, including free throws, roused a large cheer. An older Chinese woman seated in front spoke no English but was engrossed in the game, and when Kobe missed a three-point attempt, I heard her speak one solitary word of English – “Hahahahaha!! BRICK!”

Walkabout

Sorry for the delay in posting these last couple of days – after getting very little sleep the first couple of days here, I ended up crashing on Saturday night for ten hours before hustling out to make my Olympic events on Sunday.

Saturday was a day of epic walking. From the subway to the hotel in town where I picked up extra event tickets, and from there to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. After only five hours of sleep on Friday, I was a bit worried that I was going to give out before the day was through, but hey! There’s an Olympian in all of us.

Tiananmen Square is smack in the heart of Beijing, and in and of itself is in much to speak of – a vast expanse of pavement, the largest town square in the world, marked only by the presence of Chairman Mao’s mausoleum in its center. Unfortunately the mausoleum was closed today, so I missed the chance to pay my respects to he waxy eminence. But, as is the common thread in this trip, I met a very nice family from South Africa whose son is competing in archery today. And, as is another common thread in this trip, the government inexplicably decided to close the event to spectators, so they were left unable to cheer their son on, left only to hope that he makes the semifinals where they can finally see him compete.

On the north end of Tiananmen is the Forbidden Palace, build six hundred years ago as the exclusive home of the emperors. It somehow managed to survive myriad regime changes over the years, including a planned assault by the fanatical Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution. Today it stands as one of those rare historical sites that emanates a timeless power of its own, rivaled in my experience only by the Acropolis in Athens and the Alhambra in Grenada, Spain.
I’ll leave descriptions of the site to the guidebooks, and note only two facts about the site, one historical and one current. Historically, the only men who made the cut, so to speak, to serve the emperor in the palace grounds were eunuchs, so as to ensure the purity of the royal bloodline. For boys of low birth, it was their only path to higher station in life, thus their willingness to subject themselves to a gruesome procedure that it is said killed many of them in the process. I’ll also skip a description of the procedure, save to say that a eunuch’s “precious” was saved in a jar until his death, when it was placed atop his body in his casket so he could enter the afterlife whole once more.

On a more modern note, when visiting the site, resist whatever urge you may have, no matter how hungry you may be, to stop off at the small restaurant just inside the walls for a quick bite to eat. A greasy spoon of the most literal kind, I was served white rice with beef and a pickled chicken and vegetable mix. Good enough. But when I took my tray from the woman serving up the chow, the slimy layer of grease and God knows what else on that tray made it nearly slip out of my hands. I did what I could to eat what I could, but was as careful as possible to skim off the top and steer clear of contact with a coating of something that was a far cry from Teflon.

From the Forbidden City, I made my way north through the hutongs, the ancient, low-slung neighborhoods that still populate a few areas of Beijing, to a hole-in-the wall restaurant called the Caribou Café, of all things. Run by a globetrotting former photojournalist, I had that most traditional of Chinese meals, spaghetti carbonara. And a brownie. What can I say – I was starving and needed a break.

Finally, the day closed with my first Olympic event, watching the USA’s women’s basketball team hammer Czechoslovakia. President Bush was on hand to watch the first three quarters, and got almost no notice. The USA men’s team, however, showed up at half-time and caused a near-riot as the Chinese fans and even the seating ushers went a little crazy for Kobe Bryant. I’ll touch on this more a little further down the line, but this country LOVES it some basketball, and whereas Michael Jackson and Coca-Cola may have been the USA’s defining contributions to world culture in prior decades, basketball may so far be the cultural bridge of the twenty-first century, at least here in China.

It's China's World, and We're All Living In It

OK, so I figured I'd break out my Opening Ceremony post from the haggling post below, because really, there's wasn't anything funny about the Opening Ceremony. Except the flag bearer from Kyrgyzstan, I think, who had to dress up like a paper-doll version of Genghis Khan.

After haggling at the Silk Market for the better part of three hours, I headed over to the Novatel Hotel near Tiananmen Square, where our viewing party for the Opening Ceremony was being held. Tiananmen and the Forbidden City were unfortunately closed today, as the 80 or so heads of state in town for the Ceremony were doing lunch together. I wonder if W. told Hu Jintao how much the barbeque in Beijing reminds him of Crawford.

It was around 6:30 or so, an hour and a half before the start of the Ceremony, and as I strolled up Jianguomennei Dajie street - no, I can't pronounce it - the crowds began to gather. Thousands of Chinese with flags, headbands, face paintings, t-shirts - a truly remarkable display of pride and patriotism. A couple of blocks up the street, a small square was packed to capacity under a jumbotron, showing footage of the Bushes, the Browns and other heads of state being graciously welcomed (and, dare I say, looking suspiciously supplicant) by Hu Jintao in front of the Great Wall. As the crowd awaited the start of the Ceremony, they began chanting and cheering and banging drums and raising all kind of cain. It was awesome.

The vibe has been seven years in the making, and the people of this country are nothing if not proud of their heritage. After Mao's Cultural Revolution killed off somewhere between 30-70 million Chinese and threatened to wipe away all traces of their long history, the Chinese are back in a big way. They make half the world's goods, there are over one hundred Chinese billionaires, and while the U.S. has spent itself into tremendous debt and done nearly everything possible to devalue the dollar, China sits on reserves of over $1.4 trillion. They're feeling pretty good about themselves, and some Chinese would say that they are merely back on track after a bad twentieth century (see rape of country by Japan in 1930s and 40s and failed Maoist extremism thereafter). Today, the Communist party of the 21st century has embraced capitalism (the official party line is something along the lines of "Making money is a truly glorious pursuit" - seriously) because money brings power, and just as America has always deemed itself a special, special place, blessed by God and democracy, China feels the same way, and is happy to point to five thousand years' worth of butt-kicking (minus a Nanjing Massacre here and there) to prove it.

Watch the Opening Ceremonies tonight, and from the first, breathtaking spectacle, ask yourself if the message China is sending the world tonight is anything other then:

DO. NOT. MESS. WITH. US.

And after this night, seeing how they've pulled this together, and pulled this off - I would tread very, very carefully around the dragon's den.

Special Price

Well. I'm knackered. It's 1:45am and I've just gotten back to the hotel after a long day of touring and watching the Opening Ceremonies at a party held by our tour company (unfortunately, while my company is very generous in supporting this trip, I don't think I could get away with submitting a $10,000 ticket reimbursement as part of my expenses.)

Day One on the ground here was mostly personal time for me - I took the time to meet some friends and do some shopping before the events gear up tomorrow. My Uncle Joe lived and worked in Beijing for seven years, and so I visited a friend of his from Texas named Tim, who runs a joint called.....Tim's Texas BBQ, a great joint in the embassy district replete with dusty wooden floors, rattlesnake skins on the wall, and Hank Williams on the jukebox. Now, I've eaten and will continue to eat some wonderful local cuisine on this trip, but I was more than happy to enjoy some of the best brisket and barbequed pork ribs I've had in a long time. One never knows what local flavor will present itself. Tim was a wonderful host, especially considering that he had been up at 2:00am this morning to serve Georges W. and H.W. Bush lunch at the ceremony opening the new American embassy building in Beijing. Quite a day for all of us.

After lunch with Tim, I headed down the street to the Silk Market, famous in Beijing and other parts as THE place to shop for "Authentic Chinese" goods - i.e., great knockoffs. Now, picture a seven-story building, and then picture each floor of said building filled with rows and rows of stalls no more than ten feet wide, an endless parade of tshirts, coats, jeans, purses, suitcases, electronics, you name it. It's like attending the world's largest Convention of Quality-ish Crap. I spent three hours there, roaming the aisles and picking through nearly everything for sale (the top floors actually have real pearls and jade for sale, huge quantities, but after sifting through piles of knockoff Dolce & Gabanna shirts and Diesel jeans, I wasn't about to try my luck at distinguishing real freshwater pearls from the faux variety.

Now, I am by occupation a negotiator, handling contractual terms for my company. I'm used to spending weeks, sometimes months, hammering out the finer points of distribution rights and production fees. Sometimes very involved, sometimes very complicated. Shopping in the Silk Market is to my regular job like speed dating is to wooing the only daughter of a devout Roman Catholic. It's a hell of a lot of fun. And it goes something like this:

Walking down an aisle of stalls, the laowai ("white dude") sees an item that would be a perfect gift for one of his family members (let's say it's his wife, since she's currently stuck at home with a one year-old who has a cold and two molars coming in, and this laowai knows what's good for him. Yeah, that's a good hypothetical). His pace slows, and a hand snaps out from a row of tshirts to grab his arm.

"Hello, sir! You look so hot. (Said laowai has sweated through his shirt for the second of three times on the day). You like t-shirt? Good price, special price for you."

"Well, actually, yeah, I kind of like this one...."(checks out the size, looks at others, decides to go with the one in hand. How Much?" And with those two words, a contact sport begins. Out comes the obligatory Casio calculator.

"Regular price...(types in a number)....280. For you, special price of 200." At 7 yuan to the dollar, that's about $30.

"Let me see that." Laowai takes calculator. Tap tap. "20."

Now, I wish to God that in my real job I could get away with countering at only 10% of an opening offer. If I tried that in a negotiation at work, I would be met with wailing and gnashing of teeth, and if I was dealing with an agent my boss, or my boss's boss, or his boss's boss would soon be receiving a phone call describing me in terms best left to people who get a daily ration of pills in small paper cup from their nurse and clap their hands because they're getting jello with lunch. Feelings would be hurt. Relationships could be damaged. In the Silk Market, it's just business.

"20?!? Oh, you mean U.S. Dollar? Euro?"

"Nope, 20 yuan."

"You crazy! You give me best price, your best price."

"20."

"You crazy! No way, I lose money. I do.....(tap tap)...180."

"25." (Again, roughly $3.50).

"Here, I give you best price, best price...(tap tap)...140."

"30, and that's it. No more."

"No no no. You crazy! 120. Final Price. Best price."

"30 is best price. That's it."

"120."

And then...you walk away. Turn your back and flee.....but slowly. And you'll hear a tiny voice, receding into the market din, say "Sir! Sir! OK! OK! 80!"

Whatever you do, don't stop. KEEP MOVING. Because then you hear - "50!"

Now you can stop. And turn. And prove your mettle, because this is where most people settle. (Actually, scratch that - most Americans are notoriously bad negotiators, and settle somewhere much higher, in the neighborhood of half the opening offer.) But you've gotten this far, and this is now actually the fun part. As you walk back to the stall, they will try like hell to budge you off of 30, just to claim victory. Don't let them do it. They will always, always insist on 35, even as they begin to bag your bounty for you. Don't pay it. Stick with 30, even to the point of carefully and specifically pulling out exactly 30 yuan from your stack of 700 yuan. They will always take the money.

And here, finally, is the payoff - seeing how they react on the close of the deal. Most of the time, transaction completed, their angry frown will melt away and you'll get a big grin. Game well played, and they're happy to acknowledge it. Everyone once in a while though, the vendor will be truly, honestly pissed off. Not because it was a bad price for them (believe me, it's not), but because they lost the game. They practically push you out of their stall.

It's fantastic.

Arrive

Finally settled into the hotel after a long day and a half of travel to get here. We'll keep this entry short, as there isn't much to say about fifteen hour flights. I will say this, though: I'm learning quickly that the Olympics are as much about the people around the events as they are about the events themselves. In my short time thus far in transit and on the ground, I've noticed a palpable excitement that seems to infect everyone I've met. Everyone is happy to be here - many have come to Beijing for their third, fourth, fifth Olympics - in a way that I've never seen before. Anticipation is running very high. Tickets for the Opening Ceremonies tomorrow are going for $10,000, and there's an active market for them.

The Canadian women's synchronized swimming team was on our flight; and I sat next to the girlfriend of America's extra-lightweight judo team member, a gentleman by the name of Taraje Williams-Murray. He placed ninth in the Athens games in 2004, and is back for one more try at a medal before he retires. Judo is basically a second job for him (a full-time job in recent months), with nothing to show for it but a small amount of prize money from international competitions. He's one of those American athletes who dedicate their lives to their sport, yet remain nameless and faceless save for a few brief seconds in the spotlight, if they're lucky. He fights on Saturday and I'll be thinking of him.

We disembarked in the new international terminal of the Beijing airport, one of the new architectural marvels that is redefining Beijing, along with the CCTV Tower, the National Grand Theater and the Olympic Stadium, affectionately known as the "Bird's Nest". If Beijing's goal has been to project itself as a thoroughly modern city and culture, it's done it's best these past few years to build a fitting facade.

On the drive from the airport to the hotel, we also encountered the infamous Beijing smog, and let me tell you - it's bad. Real bad. For the Los Angelenos out there, it's like the heaviest June Gloom you can remember, and it's everywhere, with a slightly metallic taste to boot. I was reading on the flight over that the smog isn't just confirmed to Beijing, but covers the entire country, and in fact is borne over the Pacific Ocean to the U.S. in sufficient quantities to deposit quantifiable levels of particulate matter in the snowpack of California's High Sierras and even in the Great Lakes. Yikes.


But the hotel is nice, I have a stable and speedy internet connection and so far the only site I've been blocked from is Facebook. Tomorrow, with no Olympic events yet scheduled and no ticket to the Opening Ceremonies, I'll be hitting the streets of Beijing by day and retiring to the Casa America in the evening for to watch the ceremonies on TV, just like you. Enjoy the spectacle!

Getting One's China On

So here's the checklist for the trip. Amazingly, I'm nearly completely packed the night before my flight. My procrastination when it comes to packing is a long-established joke in my family; my mom still rolls her eyes in exasperation when she recalls how I started packing for a semester in Rome about two hours before my flight - and we lived about an hour from O'Hare.

Clothes - t-shirts and shorts, mainly. It's gonna be 85-90 degrees with high humidity, so nothing fancy here. I asked a cousin of mine who visited China recently if I needed something dressier for restaurants, clubs, etc., and his response was "Capri pants are all the rage in Beijing, so stock up now". Thanks. Mom always implores me to bring a jacket, no matter where I'm going, and I shrugged this off today until I read that a rainstorm of sub-monsoon strength is hitting the Chinese mainland in the next couple of days. Raincoat, check.

A/V equipment - Sony HD Cam w/tape stock and extra batteries (I'll be shooting a short video over the course of this trip as well); Sony Cybershot point-and-shoot camera (thought about buying/borrowing an SLR for this trip, but if I'm already lugging around a camcorder, that's just too much); Macbook Pro; iTouch; iPod; Blackberry for phone and work email connectivity (if you want to reach me quickly this week, with helpful suggestions or spiteful comments, email me at nathan.moore@travelchannel.com - I should have the Bberry on me at all times).

Medicine Cabinet - Hep A shot and typhoid pills beforehand; Tylenol PM; Imodium AD; a strong course of prescription antibiotics if the Imodium AD can't do the trick; Tums and Tagamet (sensing a theme here?)

Movies - loaded on the iTouch - Before the Devil Knows You're Dead; Harold and Kumar Go To Guantanamo Bay; Into the Wild.

Books - Time Out Beijing and Frommer's Beijing guidebooks; a great new travelogue called "Lost on Planet China" by Maarten Troost (I'm not the only fan - check out some other travelers appreciating his guidance in this YouTube clip); and Norman Mailer's WWII epic "The Naked and the Dead".

Music - So in the spirit of Cameron Crowe, the director of "Say Anything", "Jerry McGuire", "Almost Famous" and other movies that usually rock but sometimes suck (i.e., "Elizabethtown", but that's what you get for casting two leads in Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst who can't, you know, ACT), who has spent his entire life making mixed tape after mixed tape to mark his mindset and mood during any given season, I thought it might be fun to put together a mixed tape for all of you, a China Playlist, if you will. These are songs out of my library that, in some cases, seemed to suit a trip to China, and in other cases are just songs that are stuck in my head and represent "Summer 2008" to me. Listen along and in one sense you'll be on the road with me.

1) "Battle Without Honor or Humanity" - Kill Bill Vol. 1 Soundtrack - RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan starting things off right. Uma Thurman stalking people with a samurai sword - is that wrong?

2) "Johnny Appleseed" - Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros - "If you're lookin' for some honey, best you don't go killin' all the bees". Amen. Theme song to last year's "John from Cincinnati" on HBO. Crappy, nonsensical show, but the surfing footage was spot-on.

3) "Jigsaw Falling Into Place" - Radiohead. Hum along.

4) "Lovers in Japan-Reign of Love" - Coldplay. Generally, I can take or leave Coldplay, but this new album is impressive. And this is maybe the best cut.

5) "Skinny Love" - Bon Iver. Eau Claire, Wisconsin - represent!

6) "Hard Sun" - Eddie Vedder. Off the "Into the Wild" soundtrack. Hope the movie's as good as this song. As a solo traveler, I can relate to the story - just hope mine ends a little better.

7) "Wolf Like Me" - TV On The Radio. I saw a werewolf drinking a pina colada at Trader Vic's - his hair was perfect.

8) "Lost" - Coldplay. Been stuck in my head for weeks. Damn handclaps.

9) "White Winter Hymnal" - Fleet Foxes. First band other than the Beach Boys that remind me of the Beach Boys.

10) "Fire It Up" - Modest Mouse. Que sera, sera - kind of how I feel going into this.

11) "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" - Santa Esmeralda. Also from Kill Bill. Gotta love that Spanish guitar.

12) "Time Won't Let Me Go" - The Bravery. I always get a little nostalgic when I travel, especially when I'm on the road alone, for previous trips I've taken.

13) "Wave of Mutilation (UK Surf)" - The Pixies. Slow dance version of the Pixies' apocalyptic ride on the El Nino, from "Pump Up the Volume" - maybe the best thing Christian Slater ever did.

14) "Reckoner" - Radiohead.

15) "A-Punk" - Vampire Weekend. My favorite new band. So whitebread but....not.

16) "Falling Slowly" - Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova. From the indie movie "Once", this won the Oscar(TM) for Best Song last year. Gotta see this movie if you haven't yet.

17) "Growing Up" - Peter Gabriel. Great, spooky lyric in here - "My ghost likes to travel so deep into your space".

18) "Seven Nation Army" - White Stripes. I've been told that this song is the new crowd anthem at soccer stadiums in Europe. Would be great to hear it in Beijing.

19) "Tryin' To Throw Your Arms Around the World" - U2. This song has a whole new meaning in the context of my host country.

20) "The Lonely Shepherd" - Gheorghe Zamfir. Zamfir! Panflute! I've said enough.