Journey to Peter Burger

You know sometimes, when you're sitting in your warm, comfortable apartment, talking to westerners via the internet, listening to western music (the latest Mint Chicks album. It's great. Buy it), you can almost forget that you're in China.

Then you decide that you need some lunch so you venture outside forgetting that its ten degrees below zero and that the three high schools across the road are getting out for lunch so there's a million kids on the street all shouting 'hello!' at you and a taxi driving on the footpath tries to kill you and some store down the road is letting off dynamite to celebrate something or other and when you get to the burger place for an ultimately unsatisfying but occasionally necessary fix of western stomach-filler some old lady tries to elbow in front of you in line (and you let her) and they're playing that one Richard Marx song at full volume on a loop so by the time you get your order you're praying that whoever it is he is right here waiting for would just show the hell up already and then on your way back to your apartment you almost slip on the cruddy black stuff that used to be snow that's built up on all the footpaths.

China - every day's a carnival.