...and then there was shopping & eating

After the meetings....
So, I am beginning to come to the opinion that shopping within a building is not the way to go in Beijing. The deals are in the regular alley way neighborhoods or hutongs. For obvious reasons I cannot diclose on the world wide web what I got for my immediate family members and Danielle (because they may read this blog once or twice) as Christmas gifts, but let's just say that if one bargains hard, one can fit a student's budget.

Strange Dinner
So after a hard evening of bargaining, and a long day of chatting about export control regimes and policy-making processes (hunh?) it was time to treat our selves to a great dinner. So what did Jasmine Tea-Jeanne, Boxing Rebellious-Bi, PowerRanger-Ryan and Victor decide to eat for dinner?....T....C......B.....Y.....icecream. Soumya would be proud. Parents will be mortified. My brother will shake his head and recall my tantrems about not having ice cream in the home freezer in the winter months.

...And now for a brief ode to refrigeration to justify those tantrems of my youth:
Why should ice cream have a season when we have hi-tech things called freezers to store it. There was a time when it was normal to shut down a chocolate factory during the summer months. In the prehistoric era when no one had refrigerators or freezers, store shelves would go bare of chocolate candy until the fortuitous invention of the candy shell. Refrigeration is wonderful. It enables my dual obsessions of chocolate and ice cream to be satiated year round! (and now for a leap in logic, mis-using latin)....Since I can eat it year round, I should and ipso facto, our dinner of TCBY is hereby justified.

Then we went to bed....knowing that Wednesday's business would be more relaxed....or would it??