- Visiting the Forbidden City
- Climbing the Great Wall
- Eating Peking Duck
- Seeing the Kung-Fu show
- Shopping at the markets
- And much, much more!!
In the meantime, let me relay to you a little "slice of life" from my ride back from the airport. I had to take the commercial bus from the airport to my house. Ticket cost me $13 instead of the usual free Army shuttle that I take, but the bus was nicer and the driver was a lot less cautious than the military driver and made the trip in about 3/4 the time.
On the flip side, the clientele wasn't the usual mix of clean-cut military types and dependents. It was a mélange of Koreans and Caucasian hippies. One in particular sat directly across from me and was happily watching a show on his Mac laptop (totally hippy). I won't go into detail about how he was constantly pulling at his unusually long and curly hair; putting it up into a pony tail, only to take it down a minute later and run his oily fingers through it. Or the smell that was coming off of him, which was something between incense and someone who just finished a particularly rigorous workout. Let's just say that he was a iconic hippy: slightly overweight, smelly, with little-to-no personal hygiene.
Anyway, he's watching this lame British sitcom that he's TiVo'd on his laptop that I'm sure he thinks is hilarious but is positive that most people don't get it because they don't have the developed sense of "humour" that he possesses. While he's watching it, he's digging through a shopping bag of things that he bought at where ever it is that he came from. He pulls out a DVD, unwraps it and opens it up to see the liner notes. He doesn't put it in the laptop. Instead, he puts it back into the bag and brings out a second DVD. He repeats the same process of opening it up, reading liner notes, putting it back into the bag. Noting too unusual about that, right?
No, nothing at all. What was unusual was what these two movies were and the fact that the same individual would buy them. The first one was an Australian movie called "Feed", about a criminal who force feeds women to death. The other was called "Ladies in Lavender", about two sisters who befriend a mysterious stranger that washes up on the beach in the 1930's Cornish seaside village. I've linked both films to their IMDB page, and I strongly encourage you to read both thoroughly to really get the feeling for just how far apart on the spectrum these two films are. One features hard core sex scenes with morbidly obese women; the other stars Dame Judi Dench. I don't think I need to illustrate their differences any more than that.
The point of the story? A hippy's taste in movies rivals that of his own revolting personal aroma. Or put another way: a smelly bohemian cinema enema.
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