Happy 61st Birthday PRC

October 1st is like the fourth of July in China in that it's the anniversary of the day the PRC was founded in 1949. To my surprise there were actually some shops closed yesterday, apparently in observation of this, but thankfully they had all seemingly opened again as the week-long holiday progressed. You simply cannot stop the freight train that is the Chinese economy, especially not if you're some puny little national holiday. If the shops had not opened again I don't know what would have happened, because there was a veritable swarm of people out there today trying to get on the bus, eat hot pot, or enjoy the weather, which was actually nice. We went to eat hot pot last night and there was a guy playing the electric guitar with an amplifier strapped to his back (not an uncommon sight at restaurants) signing "Happy Birthday" to no one in particular, or perhaps to all of us.

Speaking of the bus: Taking public transit in Chengdu is not always easy; the buses are sometimes really, really full. Still, it's by far the cheapest way to get around and they go just about everywhere. What's more fascinating though is the incredibly complex system they have for their bus passes though. Basically you get a card upon which there are two kinds of credit: one based on the number of rides -- which can only be used for the holder of the card -- and another bit of credit called an electronic wallet that can be used to purchase bus rides for a friend that doesn't have a public transit card. The weird thing is that purchasing the first variety of credit gets you a 50% discount and the second variety gets you an 80% discount. The catch is though, that the credits for the 50% discount expire at the end of the calendar month, regardless of how much is left on your card. So as you might expect, today, being the first day of the calendar month where the transit clerks were working, the line in front of the credit counters was about 50 people long. And in the end you don't even save that much money... a bus ride on the "quality" buses (meaning still stuffed to the gills but including a door that actually closes) is only about $0.25. Anyway, I asked a Chinese friend to justify this overly complicated system, and his sound explanation was that "Chinese people are good at math."

CCTV5 is by far the best sports network ever: I'm pretty convinced that nowhere else in the world can you watch women's weightlifting, world cup table tennis, one-legged martial arts competitions and snooker championships all without changing the channel. In the afternoon they like to show these obstacle course competitions that I think inspired or were inspired by the Nintendo games I used to play when I was younger and had infinitely more time to waste than I do today. Sometimes there are professional sports from Germany (Bundesliga) or the United States (NBA), but it's live and therefore on at the weirdest times of day, like at breakfast, or at 3:00 in the morning.

Who can ball and who can't: In another sure sign that the US is fading fast when it comes to all things important, I played a game of 4-on-4 pick up basketball two days ago, teamed with a German, a Swiss and a Canadian against four Americans that were all younger than us. The conventional wisdom suggests that we should have gotten dogged... but somehow we didn't just win the game, we dominated, despite the fact that I can't jump half as high as I used to be able to, and the Europeans on my squad never really learned how to take a jump shot. So it's worth noting that playing a lot of basketball video games might not actually bring you much when it comes to on-court skills. My old-man-sounding advice to the American youth: Get off your asses! If you're going to sit in front of the computer all day, do something useful instead of playing Resident Evil all the time and eating Cheetos or watching stupid Youtube videos. Learn Chinese, read the wikipedia entry about double-entry bookkeeping, or try to figure out how to use the public transportation network in your hometown so you don't have to beg your parents for a ride the next time you want to go to the mall. Christ.