almost birthday

Wangfujing, site of many over-heated mall runs.

Tomorrow (well, tonight) is my birthday. I don't have much planned. It'll definitely be an improvement over last year, where I ended up sniffling into a sub-par bowl of beef noodles in Beijing's Wangfujing district and elbowing through a scrum of over-stimulated Chinese eleven year olds to examine the new Harry Potter book. Then I ended up having an awkward dinner with a bunch of Russians, where I attempted to be interested in their complaints about basically everything. (We did have some tasty Peking duck.)

Things looked up around evening. I wandered over to my usual haunt, the Sakura Bar near Qianmen. In the course of the evening, I fell in with a couple of friendly Mexican grad students. We ended up getting drunk and talking about how awesome Cypress Hill is late into the night over magnum bottles of Tsingtao. Now that made up for a lot.

There was, however, absolutely no cake involved. I imagine birthday cake can be obtained in Beijing, but it will probably be red bean flavored and have demented, overjoyed looking Olympics mascots on it.

Mom and I are going to Bouchon tomorrow for lunch, then will pursue exciting retail opportunities in St Helena and Napa. Napa features such delights as excellent shoe stores so I'm looking forward to it. A post on Bouchon will DEFINITELY be forthcoming.

Everyone should do themselves a favor and listen to this song: Zeep, "Keep An Eye On Love." It's breezy seventies sounding samba and it makes me happy right down to my ventricles. (Do I have ventricles?)

I think I'll do a post about Mongolia and Mongolian music next. I just can't get enough of those crazy steppe-dwellers.