Attack of the Vampire Mosquitos...

Since winter's begun to set in, our bedroom has been besieged by evil, blood-sucking, winged little creatures that go bzzzz at night.

The Enemy (Aedes Irritatus!)

You may recognize some of these tools of mass mosquito destruction.. If you're from PETA, you may contact us at 1-800-UNHCR. I'm sure you'll find someone who's more than happy to take up our issue with you.

That's.... just a sumo wrestler.. but we could use the firepower!

How I spent my National Holidays :P

Ok the National Holidays are big in China. The whole country gets a whole week off work. I've been told this is so that they can go to touristy places and blow up some cash. I've also been told that they then have to work the next two weekends to make sure that their workplace productivity doesn't dip. (These guys may be onto something but I�m pretty sure that my innate indolence wouldn't support it)

Anyhoo, wanting to take a bit of a break, I did go to the zoo which was not all that bad in retrospect. I'm sure that the 5 hour walk helped me in my personal weight loss campaign! Then after day 2 of the National Holidays, things got boring. It was a Monday and we were sitting in the office (which happens to be our 2nd living room at the apartment) with nothing to do. Now having already gone through half of my second book in as many weeks, I needed to do more than just sit back and relax. (It wasn't really the sitting back and relaxing that was the problem. As you can see.. I loved that part... it was more that little creature in the back of your mind going 20 unread emails, 25 unread emails, 40 unread emails....)

Freakonomics is reccomended reading for anyone who's interested in looking beyond the usual stats and figures... Book two was "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feyman" - a hilarious & anecdote filled autobiography by the nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman.

So I finally ended it on Tuesday morning... stepped up to the whiteboard and mapped out the entire AIESEC XP simulation agenda for our Induction Conference happening at the end of the month, while listening to Beethoven's 7th & 9th (Thanks Mairi for the aural suggestion!).

Try the classical music thing the next time you need to focus. The absence of lyrics means you dont focus on the music, while the soothing sounds block out all ambient noise.

And so to all my Putonghua speaking friends... I'm sorry I broke from the culture.. I promise I'll take my opulent, touristy holidays another time and do my bit to keep China's consumer economy going! Duibuqi! Wuo jirdao, Ni mingbai!

Pictures do say a thousand words which is why i thought i'd put in a photo instead of the normal boring 'headline title' for my blog entry. To celebrate the National Holiday, we decided to visit The Beijing Zoo. Ok so it wasn't exactly a celebration - we had nothing to do and the zoo seemed like the cheapest way to spend the day.



To be honest, I was quite disappointed. I've seen bad zoos in India and for all of China's development, I was hoping the conditions for the animals here would be better. Most, if not all spend their entire lives in cages or plexiglass enclosures that measure no bigger than 40 sq ft. The only animals with fairly large spaces were the the lions, tigers, bears and elephants. The public ofcourse take full advantage of the zoo being understaffed and routinely throw food and drinks at the animals. It was particular distubing to watch two beautiful Siberian tigers fight over an empty mineral water bottle that some idiot threw at them.


It wasnt a complete waste though. I saw my first live giant panda! Funny creatures they are.. and for all their apparent docility, they have been known to attack humans! I also managed to get up and close to my two favourite big cats - the Black Panther and the Royal Bengal Tiger. Magnificient creatures... absolutely mesmerising!