and they said beijing was modern! i’ve been completely cut off from the internet since i arrived, and i had almost completely given up my search for any form of connection till now. even in korea where i was two weeks ago they had internet you either could steal wirelessly or a LAN wire in the hotel. forget it here. they have big TVs and 60 channels (not counting cable) but NO ONE seems to think about going online. (for that matter, only 1 out of the 60 channels is in english.

and it’s in a very strange, pretentious sort of english — everyone speaks in fake british or american (it falters) accents with the characteristic chinese language enunciation; you know what i mean, where words ending in d or t, or l don’t get those pronounced. so a newsreader might say, “many peopow have die in the recen train acciden… i(t) is a terriber tragedy.”

which sounds a little like singlish, i realise. but if you say it with a flower drum song accent, you’d pretty much get the picture.

anyway, beijing’s been pretty pleasant for the most part. it’s not really wise to wear slippers everywhere though, unlike in singapore, because the roads are pretty much filthy. not filthy in the extreme in which i had previously imagined random dollops of poo on the road of course, but filthy in that it is crazy dusty. much like in korea, the cab drivers are also not fans of airconditioning, because they believe that it causes rheumatism or something or other. unlike korea, however, the air is just unfit for billowing through cab chambers at high speeds.

but yes, i am finally long de chuan ren! having walked some part of the Great Wall, i qualify for the honour — one that’s only of significance in my head, yes, but undoubtedly one that i’ve been more or less fixated on for the most part of my general search for useless random honours to call my own.

there are over 16 million people here — 4 times that of singapore. which explains why at any time of the day, you’ll see the equivalent of singapore’s entire population aimlessly roaming the shops and so on. which makes weekdays weekends and weekends hell.

as mentioned, the english standard still leaves much to be desired. though the chinese people are perhaps not as arrogant as the korean or japanese people in that they actually try, rather than have all their road maps, menus, store signs and the like in east asian blobby symbols. my favourite so far was the sign beneath the automatic tap in the airport toilet, informing you that you didn’t have to press anything to activate it: no unnecessary touching. my dad confirms that they have the same sign above the urinals’ flush in the gent’s.

another sign which might not be as easily understood by people outside of singapore or taiwan and the knowledge of coarse hokkien phrases is “no f**k foods permitted”, which was translated from a customs sign prohibiting the bringing in of “gan” (dry) food products. “gan” is a rude hokkien word. i suspect the sign writer got sabotaged.

not quite realising the aptness, i went out and bought dynasty warriors for the psp. i intend to start playing it on my flight to beijing tomorrow, and i hadn’t realised till now it was all about fighting as a feudal lord during the warring states period in chinese history.

i really hope my game is in english, since i bought the north american version. looking at the screenshot and all the chinese characters (edit: i meant the chinese words, not the characters/people), i suddenly had a flashback of the last time i played mahjong and pissed the entire table off by delaying gameplay everytime i had to count the circles/balls/blobs and bamboo things on the tiles.

there’s a theory in economics about people having the need to affirm their decisions and purchases after the transaction’s over. even though you can’t go back. like the way people look at their purchases and pat themselves on the back for the “good value” they found, how “worth it” it was, and so on.

likewise, i tend to read reviews of games/software i buy after i buy them. which is often stupid, because i get all disappointed if it’s a bad review. for dynasty warriors, it’s been generally good reviews, except for a long-ish bad one. the main point of contention in the latter is the unchallenging state of the game, being easy to learn and not having a lot of strategy. (but it rated the game medium/hard, which confuses and worries me — how much strategy is not enough strategy, anyway?)

besides, the manual that came with the game had 36 pages of information i couldn’t read in one sitting. and half of it was about the supposed “strategy” so purportedly lacking in the game. so i’m worried on two fronts: 1. that i’m going to find this game too difficult and will be forced to retreat into a hole in shock and 2. that i’m too stupid for the modern gaming industry standard as a whole, and will be forever forced to play games like kirby, mario and pong.

because the last time i asked about kirby and kirby-related games in a gaming shop, the counter clerk said, “oh, you mean the cute cute type of games, issit. the girl girl type lah.”

which is insults my incredible kirby-oriented gaming talent. and like, 51% of this world too, may i add.

before i leave tomorrow morning (at the ungodly hour of 7 am), please pray for my bladder control abilities, and that i may not encounter the much-referred to “doorless toilets” so famous in china. and that i will be spared the sight of a stranger’s (or a friend’s, or family member’s, or hey — even my own) excrement. i just… can’t.

after sitting and envying many sites which have been running nicely on better blog standards, i’ve finally converted to wordpress, which is an altogether much more advanced platform than my previous blogger one.

the upside is that being more advanced, i’ll have more control. which i confess i’m a fan of. and that i’ll have more options of changing its look, as opposed to being restricted to blogger templates.

the downside is that i’m now able to display my full incompetence as a page designer, and that i might not be able to make this page very much prettier in the near future — not without extensive trial-and-error-ing, botching the entire site up, and so on.

so if you write to me and tell me that you preferred the previous design, i will bot spam/crash your mail account. just to let you know.

but i get to finally have an RSS feed! yay! yes, blogger had one. but i couldn’t enable it for some reason. so i gave up.

many changes to this site are coming, for one, a big update to my galleries. so this is my bold first step in breaking the procrastination. hurray for me and pardon me while i pat myself on the back repeatedly.