I ate a scorpion yesterday and a Big Mac today. I liked the scorpion better

Days just seem to be flying by now. I'm over my jetlag. Staying up late worked, and I stayed out until 2 last night. I guess I'm back to my terrible sleeping habits. Yahoo! We're rich. Yesterday I had my first Beijing subway experience. A group of us decided to go on a shopping adventure in the Wangfujing shopping district, which turned out to be a terrible idea. It's basically a money drain for Western tourists, but it was still a beautiful area. The subway was packed, unsurprisingly. There's a concerted group effort to pack as many people as humanly possible into the cars, but my friends tell me that sometimes even this doesn't work, and people get left behind. As soon as we got to Wangfujing, we were accosted by this older woman and two young women claiming to be "calligraphy students," and asked us to come see their studio. They promised it was right in Wangfujing, so we decided to humor them. They peppered us with compliments and kept us talking, then attempted to lead us down an alley off of the main strip. Luckily Luis, one of the group - whose Chinese is probably the best - told the women we weren't going off the square. I had thought they were just going to put us in a high pressure buying situation, but we figured that they would probably take us somewhere we would be mugged. I'm glad one of us was thinking. 

After this, we went into a mall, the biggest mall I've ever seen. We were all looking for clothes and backpacks for our upcoming trip to the countryside. We ended up paying way too much for everything, something I realized today when we went to the Silk Market, a place where you could haggle. Still, it was less than I would pay in the US. After we'd finished shopping, we saw that a food market had sprung up in the fading daylight. It was here that I ate my very first scorpion, a rite of passage that I had seriously neglected back when I was a filthy capitalist pig. I also ate silkworm, snake, dumplings, some sort of chicken wrap, and a skewered fruit coated in sugar. We stopped at a liquor store on the way home, where I saw the Chinese take on tequila with a worm: some sort of vodka with snake floating in it.

Once we were back to campus, we hung around until 11 and then went out to the bars. I didn't realize until too late that we were going to the touristy, overpriced bar district. That seemed to be a trend for the day. The first bar was the most overpriced, and definitely the most entertaining. I paid about 7 dollars for a beer (my only one at this bar)  and enjoyed the house band, who serenaded us with a hard rock version of "I Want it that Way," the apparent anthem of bars hoping to lure in Westerners. We didn't stay very long, and started wandering down the strip. Outside almost every bar was a man touting the superiority of his bar, who would often try to push us inside. Finally someone shouted they were selling beer for 10 kuai, about a buck fifty, at Happy Pizza Bar, so we went inside. A rugby team from New Zealand convinced the band to let them sing a song, which turned out to be "I Want it that Way" with new lyrics about their desire for females to perform a certain popular lewd act on them. The refrain still rhymed, so I don't think the MC noticed. The last bar of the night was called Smuggler's and sold even better beer for 10 kuai, but I'm beginning to notice a certain trend in this blog, so I'm going to leave it at that. This place was packed with people from my school, who were about to go to a club. I declined, and Tom and I decided to take a cab back to campus. I still haven't paid my half of the fare. I hope he doesn't remember any time soon.

Today I was awoken by Nazar asking me if I wanted to go to the Silk Road. He meant the Silk Market, which was a good thing. I don't think we could cover the entire Silk Road in one day, as we barely covered the five floors of the Silk Market in one day. To continue my other trend of informing the readers of this blog of every item I bought, I got a watch and some sunglasses. I also got a crash course in bartering, something I neglected to pick up in Korea. You have to get past the seller's compliments about your looks and occasional threats upon your life (today I heard "I will kill you!" and "I will eat you!", neither of which sound particularly enjoyable) and pick the most ridiculously lowball price you can think of, which, as it turns out, will still give the seller a significant enough profit to make you both happy. I also tried China's McDonalds, but avoided the Red Bean Curd Tart. They put cucumbers on their burgers! 

Ok I'm tired of typing. This is also a really long entry, and I apologize to everyone who read it. Today I read that China officially passed Germany to become the world's third largest economy. I don't know who to root for in this situation, as I enjoy bragging to people that I'm descended from the stock of sexy German immigrants, and can you even feel schadenfreude about Germans? I'm confused, but no longer sleepy. Well, I'm about to go eat. I'll return to ramble later and remind everyone how much cooler my life is right now than theirs.