Day 2, waking up in Beijing

Woke up at 4am, I guess the jet-lag does work this way too. Klaus's apartment is so big that the wireless router he has does not provide a very good signal all the way to my room, so I had to find some awkward position in the bed where it could connect.
So, welcome to China. Facebook, Google, YouTube and all other site's are being filtered out through the Big Chinese Firewall. I tried in the airport to connect to the internet to find an address, that worked fine, but I am guessing Nokia would be asking me to reimburse the phone bill if I started using data here, though the 3G on my phone is finally work, and blazing fast.
I searched the Internet a little and found some different companies selling VPN connections in UK and US. It works the way that a secure tunnel is created from where ever you are in the world to a VPN server for example in San Francisco. Once created all the internet traffic is tunneled that way and to every site you visit, it looks like you are located in San Francisco, even though you are in Beijing. Like me. At $10 a month for 3 months I figured it would be a good idea to use for my entire trip through Asia. You never know who is listening in on your connection.
I was able to pay using Paypal and 30 minutes later I was browsing old school again. Then I got an email from Paypal that my account had been blocked because of activity on the account originating in China. Crap. They had then blocked the payment to the VPN provider I had paid just an hour earlier, they emailed me seconds later telling me they would block my connection in 24 hours again if they did not receive their payment, ffs

Looking out the window it looks like a marine layer gone bad. No, it is not the windows that are dirty, it is taking out of the window. It is around noon now, and it just doesn't seem to go away. Pollution! In San Diego they have a UV index that goes with every weather forecast, lots of blue skies therefore lots of sun. Here they have a pollution index to go with their weather forecast. Today at 11am the measurement from the American Embassy says, 268, which in their terms means it is very "201-300 Very Unhealthy". I guess I will pass on that Beijing Marathon invitation on the Great Wall that I received

When Klaus came home from work, we were going to meet with a friend of his for dinner. As I suspected, Klaus does not own a car, so now I know why he has so many bicycles. He gave me the camping kind of style bike, not quite sure I would be riding that thing anywhere else but here! We drove towards the "LG twin Towers", where we met with his friend and they thought it would be good for me to try some Hunan type food. This restaurant had pictures of the dishes in the menu, I guess I should consider myself lucky for that so far?
I ordered and got a big pan that looked like a chicken that had been to the blender for about 5 seconds. Kind of surprised to see the roosters head with the comb and everything, maybe that's what scared Klaus into becoming a vegetarian :-)