First full day in Beijing
Went to bed at midnight. Woke up at 4 scratching my skin off. 26 hours of awake, then 4 hours of sleep? How in the fuck did I even wake up? Probably better that I did, every mosquito bite is potential malaria. I spray myself up, which I forgot to do last night, and go back to bed. I wake up much more rested, go down to breakfast, play some guitar for a bit, then go check shit out. I walked around for a good hour, taking it in, and I bought a watermelon (to be filled with whiskey, of course). As I was preparing to go back to my hotel, some guy said in rather unclear English how cool my beard is. We started talking, and he insisted that he shows me Tiannanmen and the Forbidden City. We were waiting for the bus and I asked him if he could help me find an electronics store. He can't understand why, so I decide to take him to my room to explain a socket converter (which I apparently don't need, boy howdy did I feel fucking stupid). I didn't pay attention to what I did with the key and that made me nervous. I can't figure out, was this key on my table the one I just put down? We go back down, and I'm paranoid about him having taken the key and being a con artist. But I flew with it. We bus it on over there, and he starts showing me around. He was a really nice guy. Which worried me. At one point, he tells me how I can't trust people, and that got my mistrust gears a-turning. But he was the best free tour guide I could have asked for, friend or con-man aside. We took a thousand pictures and I'm worrying about who he's given the key to and what they are doing with my guitar and my computer. As we leave the Forbidden City, I guess he started to feel sick, and started to worry about me giving him the swine flu. He insists we go to the hospital and I wonder what kind of ploy this is. Eventually, he stops and tells me we must take a cab or call the ambulance. I don't want to pay god knows how much for the cab, so we wait at an intersection. Except it's not clear to me that we are calling an ambulance. As far as I know, he's calling one of his homies to pick me up and kidnap me. So I'm waiting here, worrying what the next hours will hold, but apparently the ambulance dispatcher said there's nothing to worry about, it's normal and wasn't very clear about how he wasn't sending one. We wait, and the whole time he keeps asking me, "Are you sure you don't have a high temperature?" Eventually he trusts my answer and he takes me back onto the bus to my hotel. What the fuck kind of con is this? Have me run around all day while my room gets ransacked? Oh lord I'm scared. We're on the right bus, step one to feeling comfortable. We get off, step two. He's coming up to my room to get a coin (trading), alright, he's on the level. I'm very glad to have made this friend today, but the snark hunt was kind of ridic. Time for a stoag and pouring Jim Beam into a watermelon.