feeling better and some pictures

I'm feeling a lot better after taking the medicine Erin and I got from the pharmacy in our neighborhood. It doesn't really matter to me whether it was the Eastern medicine or the Western medicine that fixed me up. I think it was both, working in conjunction. The best part was that there was this ancient, ancient looking Chinese woman who was in the pharmacy at the same time we were. She kept coming over and watching what the pharmacists were going to give me, and asking them questions. On the way out of the pharmacy she explained to Erin and I that she's a doctor, and she wanted to make sure they were giving me the right medicine. Then she got on her bicycle and went on her merry way. Sometimes I love China. She was really nice. But on to more interesting business than me being sick.

I've been wanting to post some of these pictures for a long time now on ye olde blogge. During all of our travels I felt compelled to take pictures of door-knockers, rain-gutters, paving stones and other smaller details. I think this stemmed from a frustration with the grandiose, tourist-shots I was taking at the beginning of our travels. It's essentially impossible to convey the scope, or beauty of most of the places we've traveled in any kind of landscape shot. Or rather, grandiose beauty is far less interesting to me than idiosyncratic details. I think it's a little bit pointless to take shot after shot of places like, say, Tienanmen Square, or even the Forbidden City. I still took plenty of these pictures, but the photos I like most are the ones that focus on minutia, or on the people in my neighborhood. This is all, of course, my completely subjective, personal opinion. Without further adieu, I present to you some of the pictures I took on our trip that I think are interesting: