Sunday, July 13
11:05 PM

OK, I want to put in a word here about the availability of cheap labor in this country. It is unbelievable how many people are employed here. I mentioned in a previous post about the pharmacy we went to with an employee in every aisle. It's like that in every store you go. I've now been to two different malls and while they were both very modern and had a western feel to them, the big thing you notice is the number of employees per square foot. And it's not just malls. People are employed doing anything and everything. In my apartment building, there's a woman who sits downstairs and pushes the elevator button for people coming in. Granted, it can be a bit tricky because there are 3 elevators that have completely separate buttons, and each has a display showing what floor the elevator's on. So you basically have to play a little game every time to guess which button is the right one to push.

Coming through the tollbooth on the way back from the Great Wall I noticed that there were no less than 3 employees per tollbooth lane, all taking tickets, just to speed things up a bit. And there was a woman with a broom who swept off the curb after every single car went by. Also, there are all these people wearing red armbands with some sort of chinese lettering on them (I can't read them). I've been told they're paid to be security people to just sort of hang around outside various locations or at street corners just to make sure nothing nefarious is going on.

The staff in every restaurant I've been in has been insanely polite and helpful. And you can't tip here -- it's just not part of the culture. Not even taxi drivers. They give you the fare and they mean it, and that's it, bye.

Today I hung out with my host family in the morning and did my laundry. Well, I put it in the machine but Yi Pei took it out and hang-dried it, and left it folded neatly on my bed this evening. She even hung up all my shirts. They fed me breakfast and lunch. Then around 1:30 I headed over to the school on my bike. Ji Young was there with her newly-assigned language exchange partner; a chinese girl named Smile. Obviously not her real name, but it's the one she picked to be her English name. It'll probably work OK for her while she's in China, but if she ever goes abroad she might want to think about switching it out for something else. But in the meantime, it's funny.

After they finished up, Ji Young introduced me to another Korean girl who she just met there. Apparently this girl's father was friends with Ji Young's father so they told them they should call each other. This girl is in graduate school and had a full scholarship to major in Chinese Studies at Beijing University. She's only been studying Chinese for 6 years, but is so good at it that she's one of only 2 real-time interpreters being used to go between Chinese and Korean in the olympics. She'll be interpreting for coaches and players and TV people. She's going to be on TV a lot during the olympics. Anyway, they invited me to go to the mall with them. They were going to get their nails done (which costs $5 here, by the way -- see note about cheap labor above) and were probably going to go out afterwards. So I said sure, and we all got in a taxi over to Wang Jing mall.

We got a drink first and then they went off to get their nails done and I walked around the mall. After I got back, Ji Young suggested we go get foot massages and I didn't have a problem with that, so her friend walked us over to some place that only a local would know (in some random building and up some stairs) that was really nice. These 3 girls came in to be our masseuses and I remarked to Ji Young that this would be a really weird job and that I wouldn't be able to do it. She just laughed and said, 'Well, they didn't study. So now they get to do this.' So we all sat there together in these amazing chairs and they brought us drinks, and worked on us for over an hour. It was amazing. Afterwards they charged us 58 yuan each. For those of you who aren't up on the exchange rates, that works out to about $8. I mean, really, see note about cheap labor above.

Anyway, after that we were all starving so we got in another taxi and her friend took us out to this amazing Korean restaurant where we each had 900 different plates of things in front of us and were mixing stuff up and cooking stuff, and it was just incredible food. Her friend paid -- but I saw the bill. It was 135 yuan. That's less than $20. And remember, no tipping!!

I'm going to sleep now.... more tomorrow.