Logic

I’ve not actually run in five days, as I’ve had a terrible cold. Most of my weekend was spent wondering if I should visit a doctor, and not being very enthused about the options there—either overpriced laowai medical clinic or Chinese hospital. However, I’ve spent much time considering that this could really be a positive thing for marathon training. After all, the air here is so polluted that perhaps running is detrimental to my practically pristine lungs. (Herein comes the “logic” of our title—luoji in Chinese). Perhaps my marathon experience would be best served by as little exposure to that polluted air as possible. However, I’d guess that 10 out of 10 running experts would decree that some running needs to take place, at some point.

So how does one spend a weekend while sick in Beijing, not wanting to leave one’s fairly monastic cell of a room? (OK, so it has TV and internet, but it’s all in Chinese!) Why, watching pirated DVDs, of course! Why don’t we just call this “research on the state of intellectual property law in China in 2007”? According to one of the introductory sequences on one of the DVDs (I think it was “Pride & Prejudice” but they all start to blur together), “You wouldn’t steal a car, You wouldn’t steal a mobile phone…Buying pirated goods is stealing. Piracy. It’s a crime.” Not much irony here, really. Not that any of the DVDs I bought were pirated (The box to “Pride & Prejudice” has a cast list including Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner, Colin Farrell, Jon Favreau, Ellen Pompeo, and Joe Pantoliano—it almost makes me want to figure out if any of these people have ever all been in one movie together, or if someone just made a random list of American movie stars--and I use that term loosely. And of course none of them are really in this film.)

To make up for the brevity of today's post, some photos of the "fan dance" to amuse readers.




Bottom photo, left to right: rural dairy mogul (are there any urban dairy moguls, anywhere?), Xie Lihua, laowai.