A glimpse at the most beautiful place on earth

There’s a road in Shangri-La that winds through narrow mountain passes from the city of Lijiang to the very first bend on Yangtze river. The Yangtze is the 4th longest river in the world, dividing China north and south. This bend a place you can see from the moon, or on any world map.

(Houses north of the Yangtze have central heating. Houses south of the Yangtze don’t.)

The road to Shigu is populated with blue transports, taxis, rickshaws, pickup trucks that belch like tractors, and the occasional donkey cart.

As you wind up and down through mountain passes, you look across contoured green terraces of farmland on either side of this winding river.

Laura and I and the three boys took a ride on this road to Shigu, the town on the famous bend in the river. They stooped on the banks of the river and picked up stones and practiced their slingshots for hours.

Shangri-La is not a mythical place, it’s real. It’s the place where I am right now. Greetings from Lijiang China. I’m sitting in the hotel courtyard outside my hotel room, and it’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen.

For all world travelers and aspiring world travelers out there, Shangri-La belongs on your bucket list.

One of the best reasons to go to Lijiang is, you get the lap of luxury for the price of an ordinary hotel in the US. I stayed at a Westin in Cleveland a month ago and it cost about the same as the Chateau L’Act (“Fuguo” in Chinese).

Wanna see this place? It’s mouth watering. Here’s a video I shot:

If it looks this good on Youtube, you can only imagine what the real deal is like.

Ever heard of a book called “The Five Love Languages?” It’s about how different people receive love in different ways. Some people are “physical touch” people; some “words of affirmation”; some are “acts of service.” I think Laura’s love language is nice hotels :^>

I brought my daughter here in 2004 and we stayed at a guest house. It was a sort of a “Lonely Planet” type of place. It cost a whopping eight bucks a night. It’s probably $25 now, but still, if you like the low-rent backpacking approach to travel, Lijiang will suit you just fine.

Lijiang is China’s best-kept secret. Not many westerners here, but there’s a bridge in Old Town that was here in 1200AD. It’s home to an ethnic group called the Naxi, a dark-skinned people with distinctive food and dress.

This is in the foothills of the Himalayas, a few hundred miles north of Thailand and East of Tibet. 8,000 feet elevation. This is Southwest China, a part you rarely hear about. It’s the clearest blue sky you’ve ever seen with a laid back, almost hippie-like groove.

It never gets below 30 degrees F and never gets above 80. Today is December 3, it’s 55 degrees (13 degrees C) and I’m typing this in the outdoor courtyard next to a waterfall. The Chinese know this as a deluxe vacation spot, a serene escape from the relentless drive of China’s east coast.

Bryan moved here in 2000 to teach English. A year later I wanted to come visit him. I still worked at my Dilbert Cube job and we had a lot of debt and not much money. A company engaged me for some client work and we took it as a sign to just go.

Laura has always actively encouraged me to do stuff like this, even though she doesn’t have the kind of wanderlust that I have.

The client gig fell through but I went anyway. (My first-time travelogue is online in case you’re interested.) On the way there I passed through Taipei Taiwan then to Hong Kong before going to China.

I’ll NEVER forget my first trip to Asia; it was one of the most intense experiences I’ve ever had. I’ll never forget getting off the plane, taking the bus to the middle of Taipei and just walking around. I had to pinch myself. “DANG. I AM IN TAIWAN!!!”

My buddy Jim Cleary once told me, “Perry, you always take the scenic route.” He was right. When I got invited to speak in Australia a long time ago the travel agent said, “If you’re willing to stop in a bunch of strange places, you can go all the way around the world without paying a penny more.”

I didn’t just go to Brisbane. I stopped in Fiji first. Then after Brisbane, I went to Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, Singapore, and Dubai. Then Nairobi and London.

Dang, what a friggin’ head rush that was.

We started traveling long before we could “afford” or justify it. The saving grace is, if you go to the less famous parts of the world, everything costs 1/3 as much and you can squeak by. I stayed at a Youth Hostel in Hong Kong. Bryan got me a free hotel room in Lijiang the first time, but had I need to pay, could have found a place for ten bucks a night.

Oh, and also, my 2nd trip to China was mostly paid for by a magazine. I did some factory write-ups for ‘em. If you gotta go, there’s always a way….

Our first such trip was Brazil in 1999. If you have the stomach for international travel, if you have any inclination whatsoever, I think you should travel to strange and bizarre places. Here’s why:

IT HUGELY STRETCHES YOUR BRAIN. Every time I went on those trips, I could feel my brain cells struggling to absorb the experience. Occasionally you’d hear them squeaking and grinding. The time changes, the culture shock, the food, the customs, the strangeness of absolutely everything. Especially the first few times, it’s a radical experience.

Even after I came home I could feel my mind processing the experience for weeks afterwards.

You can never know how much it will broaden your horizons and your perspective. I can only promise you that when you come back, you’ll know your own inner world has become so much bigger. I never saw the world the same way again. These experiences color everything I see and do.

When I first visited Bryan I was downright jealous. Here’s a guy who gets paid $200 a month by the hotel he works for; he works about 20 hours a week; two hundred bucks a month was twice as much as any reasonable single guy could possibly spend in southwestern China. He had nary a care in the world. (At least that’s how it appeared to me.)

I was the sales manager of an ambitious little company; I had three kids; I was in the “early 30′s compression zone” of having a growing family, carrying the world on your shoulders and fighting like mad to prove yourself; I had all sorts of debts, pressures and obligations. The thought of escaping to a place like this was tantalizing.

I remember meeting an Italian girl in Kunming, she’d been backpacking through China for 5 months, living on her wits, taking odd jobs and living off the generosity of peasants.

A permanent escape would not have been a good idea. I was in a crucible then and I needed to earn my stripes. But that one week escape was a taste of heaven.

You only have to take a trip like this once, and nobody will ever be able to take your pictures or memories away from you. You can take a 1-minute vacation to Shanrgri-La any time you want.

OK, so what’s going on here in Lijiang?

Bryan has come to join us. Tomorrow we pick up our new daughter Zoe, and since he speaks fluent Mandarin, he can translate. He’s gotta ask the person questions like “Is she potty trained” and “what does she like to eat” and all that. We’re doing a few days of sightseeing before the adoption stuff gets into full swing.

Laura and the kids are here for the first time and they’re doing mighty well with the food and the strangeness of everything. Laura’s a tad anxious; doing an adoption is like giving birth, it’s reaching into the box of chocolates and pulling out…. another box of chocolates.

What kind of box did we get? The waiting is hard.

China is a different world. Everything is Chinese characters; the English translations are crude and often hilarious. The store called “Yak Meat Naxi Girl” sits right next to another store called “Yak Meat Fat Girl.” The two places sell the exact same thing: Yak meat.

Yak meat is tasty, by the way. This morning I got some Yak Butter Tea. It comes in two flavors: Sweet and Salty. Yak Butter Sweet Tea tastes, well, like milky tea. Yak Butter Salty Tea tastes like tea mixed with milk sea water. You might like it… you might not.

By the way I think tea is awesome. Most people start their day with coffee. I start mine with black tea.

There’s this joke in China – it goes like this: Three guys get on a bus, an American, a Japanese, and a Chinese.

The bus is rolling down the road and the American rolls down his window and starts throwing $100 bills into the wind.

The bus driver says, “What are you doing????!!!”

The American replies, “Heck, we’ve got so much money in America, what’s the big deal if I waste some of it?”

Then the Japanese guy rolls down his window and he reaches into his bag and starts pulling out cameras, video screens and watches and throws them out the window. They smash on the pavement below.

The bus driver replies, “What are you doing????!!!”

The Japanese says, “Heck, we’ve got so much consumer electronics, what’s the big deal if I waste some of it?”

Then the Chinese guy pops open his window, grabs a couple of passengers and throws them out the window.

The bus driver says, “What are you doing????!!!”

The Chinese guy replies, “Heck, we’ve got so many people in China, what’s the big deal if I waste a few of ‘em?”

Well, on Sunday afternoon Chinese time, we’re taking one of those Chinese people to be our daughter and live in the United States. By the time our American friends wake up, we’ll be a family of 7 instead of 6. Will share. Stay tuned!

Perry Marshall

P.S.: Laura’s got quite a few more great pictures at her blog – be sure and check ‘em out!

P.P.S.: If you’d like to be on my notification list, join it here.

Kids Playing with Needles, Tiananmen Square & Raging Capitalism

Ever see the famous 1989 picture of the student in China standing off against four tanks? That’s Beijing’s Tiananmen square. We went there yesterday. It’s vast, big enough for literally a million people.

The 1989 incident is just one of many reasons for the “Great Firewall of China,” the massive content filter manned by the Chinese government.

Subscriber Liz Parrish posted this on my blog the other day:

“I was in Guilin for 3 days in the fall of 1989. Tiananmen Square happened in June, I was in Guilin in October.

“In the gift shop of the hotel, they had said booklet telling the “real” story of what happened at Tiananmen Square, how the outsiders had incited the peaceful students to protest, etc. I nearly bought it but couldn’t quite bring myself to hand money to the Chinese government after what had happened.”

Hey baby, that ain’t nothin’ compared to the worship of Chairman Mao. His statues are everywhere and his face is on the money. Despite the fact that this guy was, uh, one bad hombre.

To a person, people here have admiration for Chairman Mao. They wear Mao hats and t-shirts and speak of him with reverence.

Who can appreciate the power of . . . persuasion . . . more than marketers?

Special offer, inspired by my China trip: I’m doing a one-time only seminar in Macao, Asia’s Gambling Capital. This seminar is called “Marketing Secrets of Chairman Mao.” It’s $49,000.00. Non-refundable. It will be staffed by a special “compliance crew” who will physically demonstrate these marketing secrets to you, until you accept their truth. Please email propaganda@perrymarshall.com if you’d like to receive pre-registration materials. ***Comes with special bonus: My new book “Josef Stalin, friend of children and puppy dogs.”

Lest you think today’s message is a bash China session, though, I’d like to show you the other side of the coin. I’ve been quite impressed with China this week.

First of all, yes, China is officially a “Communist country” but make no mistake, it’s the world capital of capitalism. It’s no welfare state, let me tell ya. It’s the most Darwinian place on earth. If it makes money, somebody’s doing it in China.

I was in China in ’04 and several things have dramatically changed since then:

1) We visited the “Drum Tower” in Beijing the other day. Looked over the city. I suddenly noticed the absence of . . . SMOKESTACKS. The last time I was in China, I would have seen twelve of ‘em. If not 20. All belching filth into the sky. In every city you can think of. This time in Beijing, I saw one from the Drum Tower. Just one.

Wow.

Why is that?

It’s the Olympics in 2008. Man did they clean that place up to get ready for it. It might have bankrupted the Greeks but it left China much cleaner. Oh, and yesterday, the day we left Beijing, the sky was as clear as it is in Chicago. Well, almost. It wasn’t smoggy like the day we arrived.

Years ago my buddy Tom Hoobyar predicted: “The Chinese will perfect environmental remediation and then sell it to the world.” Wouldn’t be surprised if he turns out to be right.

2) I visited a lake, near the “Hutong” historic neighborhood. It didn’t stink! It was lovely. In the past, when you walked past a lake or river, it smelled foul. No more.

3) No litter. In 2004 litter was everywhere. Now it’s gone. Streets are clean.

4) No plastic bags. China used to have these paper thin plastic bags that would blow around and get stuck in everything. Awful. The government banned them. Now you don’t see ‘em anymore.

5) They’re cracking down on piracy. No more pirated CD’s on every street corner.

6) Last time I was in China, EVERYONE smoked, especially the men. Cigarette butts everywhere. Not this time. Not many people smoking and hardly any butts.

I cannot imagine the US doing a 180 on that many fundamental issues in 7 years. It’s probably impossible in a democracy. But when the Chinese government decides to change direction, baby, they lay down the law.

I had a friend whose grandmother lived in Pittsburgh in the 50′s and when he would visit, the place was filthy from steel mills. If you hung white sheets on a clothesline in the back yard, they’d be gray when you brought them in. That was from the soot.

Pittsburgh cleaned up; I hope you know it’s not like that anymore.

China is cleaning up too.

China is growing like crazy. Growing countries have growing pains. You can’t go anywhere without seeing a huge construction crane in the distance. Or maybe 5 of them. They have a rapidly growing middle class. They have way more cars than before, and they’re nicer cars.

So anyway, yeah – we went to Tiananmen square where my boys played hackeysack. Saw a Kung Foo show, which was absolutely amazing. And got rickshaw rides in the Hutong with a really great tour guide who spoke great English. My 11 year old “The Artist” pummeled him with questions about Chinese characters.

You can see some of Laura’s pics at

http://compassionmama.blogspot.com/2011/11/beijing-day-3-hutong-and-tiananmen.html

Yesterday we flew from Beijing to Kunming to Lijiang. That’s sort of like flying from Philadelphia to Denver to Aspen Colorado. But our flight was delayed a few hours and we only had 45 minutes to make a connection.

This wouldn’t have been a problem except that they couldn’t check our bags through so we had to go pick up our bags and re-check them.

A super-helpful woman from the airline took pity on us and moved us to the front of every line. We made it with 3 minutes to spare.

It’s hard to describe how much China has changed in the last 11 years, since the first time I was here. Back then, white people were something of an anomaly. When Bryan first moved here in ’00, people would yell at him as he walked down the street:

HELLO HELLO MARIAH CARY MICHAEL JORDAN! HELLO HELLO!

When I visited, most of the cars were these pitiful little tin cans, or else trucks that looked like tractors, or these big blue diesel monstrosities.

Now you see Toyotas and Buicks and an occasional Mercedes.

Prices here have doubled or tripled in the last 10 years. What used to be a smash buy is now merely a nice bargain. And expensive stuff is the same here as it is in the US. At top rated hotels, a cup of coffee costs 5 bucks – it used to cost 50 cents.

It still costs 50 cents or a buck at the cafe down the street. But the difference is peoples’ willingness and ability to pay. The distance between top and bottom here is huge. The top goes up and up. As Jay Abraham likes to say, “How high is up?”

OK, one last tidbit before I go – and I promise to post some awesome pictures in the next day or two.

Where I am right now in Yunnan, there’s this bizarre fad, which is giving kids IV’s. As in, feeding kids intravenously just for the fun of it. Once in awhile you actually see someone walking down the street next to their kid with an IV. Today I saw an IV store, they sell the supplies. Just like a pharmacy.

It’s not cuz the kids need it. It’s because they think it’s good for ‘em. Sort of like vitamins or something.

Hideous but true.

I wonder what WE do that THEY think is totally insane?

More to come soon-

Perry

Ad Rank: What Everyone Ought To Know About The Jungle In Adwords

Ever heard of the alpha male?

It’s a term used to describe the dominant male among  animals that live in groups. Usually the alpha male has special privileges like eating first, drinking first, being the first to mate or even the ONLY  one to mate.

Wikipedia refers the alpha male as being the animal with the highest  RANK.

What does this have to do with AdWords?

Well, remember how Google ranks ads on search results… Using a mesure called Ad Rank.

Ads with high Ad Rank take high positions while ads with lower Ad rank sink at the bottom.

But that’s just half the story and like social animals, Alpha Advertisers (advertisers with ads of high Ad Rank) get benefits that their competitors don’t. If you can increase your Ad Rank, Google will be generous in terms of traffic, position and cost.

Ad Rank Formula

The formula is very simple…

Ad Rank = MaxCPC  x Quality Score

… and very important to understand.

Anytime you change your bid (maxCPC), Ad Rank goes up or down. Every time your Quality Score (QS) changes, Ad Rank goes up or down.  Every time Ad Rank goes up or down, your ads get preferential treatment… or not.

Where To Find Your Ad Rank

Well, you can’t find it. We know that Ad Rank exists but there’s no place in adwords where you can see exactly what ad rank each of your ad is receiving. However, it is possible for you to find out exactly what you’re missing out with a low Ad Rank using the Impression Share metric.

Impression Share is the percentage of the times your ads where shown out of the times they were eligible to be shown.  By customizing the columns in your Adwords account, at the campaign level, you can see how much impression share your ads have lost due to a lower Ad Rank. That’s one way to tell if you have great Ad Rank or not.

How To Get Higher Ad Rank And Dominate The Jungle

In order to have high Ad Rank, you need the ability to bid high and get high Quality Scores. It’s important to have both and it can be a challenge to obtain them. Although you can work your way up with high QS, it will be much easier and more profitable if you can afford bidding high as well.  Let’s get into more details…

Jungle Rule 1: Earn The Ability To Bid Higher

It’s all about your conversion rate. Every time you increase your conversion rate, you increase your ability to bid high. In fact, you should figure out the bid that yields maximum profitability for your business (yes, there is one) with every conversion rate you achieve.

How to have better conversion rates?

The offer. The copy. The design.

Those are my personal ingredients to high conversions…  in that order.

The offer is by far the most important component and it impacts everything else you do. To have the best offer, you need to know what your potential customers actually want. This is important and most people assume they know and fail to take the extra effort to “really” find out. If you’re interested in having a method to discovering what customers want, I always recommend The Perfection Of Marketing by James Connor, a book that I think every business owner/marketer should own.

Once you know what your prospects want, you need to know how to convey it with powerful copywriting. Spend time crafting a message that resonates  with your target market  in simple words.

Then comes the design. Crappy won’t do it (most of the times). Though some great copy writers can pull it off with crappy web design, you should leverage every tool at your disposal. A clear, clean and simple design wins. And by the way, simple and clear is usually better than beautiful.

Jungle Rule 2: Get The Highest Quality Scores

Ah, that little number we love to hate loving over at Tenscores.com. Are you still wondering how to increase Quality Score? Can’t blame you. There seem to be a conspiracy around the web to put people on the wrong track at every turn.

I wonder who started it…

Here’s the ONLY  thing you need to know about QS and it’s not complicated:

If you have low QS… unless the diagnostic bubble tells you otherwise, Quality Score  EQUALS click-through rates. Nothing else.

Let me explain.

The diagnostic bubble is that little place besides keywords that give you some indication about why you have low scores. Take a look at the screenshot on the lower right.

The “keyword relevance” part is key. What they really mean is keyword click-through-rate (CTR). So, unless that bubble tells you of landing page problems or load time problems, all you have to focus on is CTR. That’s it. The tricky part is, the CTR is not necessarily yours, it is sometimes other advertiser’s CTR. But even that is no big deal if you focus on increasing your own CTRs continuously (without sacrificing conversion rates of course).

So unless things change, as of today, November 2011, there’s no such thing as semantic relevance in calculations of quality score. And if there is any at all, it is small enough to simply dismiss it. Since the day I stopped worrying whether my landing page was relelvant or wether my ad had keywords in it and simply sharpened my ad-writing skills for higher CTRs, quality score has become the least of my challenges. All that Google cares about in regards to QS is CTR. Thanks to Craig Danuloff for confirming this in his book on quality: Quality Score  In High Resolution.  Anyone who wishes to disagree should read that book in its entirety first.

So please, will you give more attention to your Adwords ads CTR?! I beg you, for the sake of your business.

And here’s where the circle is closed: the best  way to get higher CTR is to figure out what searchers want and give it to them. Just like increasing conversions.

Once you can afford bidding high because your conversion rates and profit margins are so good and you understand quality score well enough to increase it, the snow ball starts to roll, your ads get more exposure, you get more traffic to your website, your costs are reduced and you become an Alpha Advertiser.

Don’t wait any longer… rule your jungle!

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Certified Knowledge. If you would like to write for Certified Knowledge, please let us know.

Ad Rank: What Everyone Ought To Know About The Jungle In Adwords is a post from: Certified Knowledge

YouTube TrueView Video Ads: Only Pay For Interested Viewers

YouTube has launched a new ad format out of beta: TrueView Video Ads. The basic concept is that the user has a choice whether or not to continue watching the ad. The advertisers only pays when the user watches at least 30 seconds of the ad (or to completion, whichever comes first).

This new format is referred to as a TrueView in-stream ad. Long-form YouTube videos are eligible for the TrueView in-slate ad format. With in-slate, the user is given a choice to either watch a longer commercial video ad before the primary video begins, or see regular commercial breaks during the video.

According to Google's onesheet on TrueView (pdf), in-stream ad viewers choose to watch an ad 15-45% of the time. Some advertisers have seen 3-4x higher CTR's with TrueView than with other video ad formats.

YouTube Promoted Video Ads are being renamed "TrueView in-search" and "TrueView in-display" depending on where they show.

Such a shift in video ad delivery is sure to start affecting how video ads are composed. Advertisers need to front-end-load the "interesting" parts to entice the viewer to watch. Also, given that you only pay when someone chooses to watch the video, the proportion viewers from your ideal target audience will be higher.

First Day in Beijing

We boarded the plane a couple of days ago. My youngest, “Z-Man” who’s 7 years old, was so excited, every 30 minutes he’d get out of his seat with mom, walk up the aisle to my seat and say, “Dad, how long before we get to China?”

“Only 11 hours and 45 minutes.”

(It was a 13 hour flight. One of the things I love about living Chicago is, it’s easy to get to anywhere. And not just Cleveland.)

Our oldest, the one we affectionately call The Drama Queen, stayed home with our neighbors ‘cuz she’s in high school. But the three boys came with us. Bryan’s meeting up with us tomorrow in Lijiang.

Meanwhile here we are in the capital of China.

Beijing is a great place but before I get into all the fun stuff, I gotta get something off my chest.

The plane landed. It was 4pm, just starting to get dark. Beijing is a lot like Chicago – same weather etc. The sun was going down.

Laura looks out the window at the murky orange ball in the sky and says to me, “Is that smog?”

“Yeah baby, that’s smog.”

She had this look of mild shock.

It’s not like I hadn’t told her about the pollution in China. Nine years ago I was here, taking some factory tours. The smog in Shanghai was horrible, far worse than anything you’d see in LA. The sky was not blue, it was a murky yellow haze.

But the kicker is, I took a six hour cab ride from Shanghai to Dongyang – which would be roughly like going from Washington DC to the middle of Virginia – and as I went far into the countryside, the smog didn’t change one iota.

Imagine driving through farms in central Virginia and seeing the sky choked with smog.

That’s the entire east coast of China for ya.

I said to myself: “If I wasn’t an environmentalist before, I sure am now.”

This is why I fail to understand why everyone’s arguing about global warming. Why fight about problems you can’t see – like temperatures – while nobody’s talking about the problems you can see, problems so obvious they’re shocking?

Laura had probably heard my China pollution story ten times. But nothing had prepared her for actually seeing it for herself. At night in Beijing, there’s smoggy haze around every street light. This is a picture of the Beijing airport, and the glow around the street lights is smog:

If you want to solve environmental problems, you don’t start with greenhouse gases. You start with coal furnaces belching visible filth and well-known toxins into the sky.

Personally I think witch hunts going after invisible problems are really just ways of distracting people from the obvious problems. Human nature usually favors the imaginary problems over the obvious. I say, always begin with the obvious problem.

Keep in mind that the US outsources a lot of its pollution to China, so this is everyone’s issue, not just theirs.

When you watch Chinese TV, the commercials almost always include a brilliant blue sky with lush green grass. That’s because the average Chinese person rarely sees either blue sky or green grass. The China newspapers have a city by city pollution index that they publish every week.

Like I said, if I wasn’t an environmentalist before, I sure am now.

And if anyone ever tells you our environmental problems are all fabricated, stick ‘em on the next flight to Beijing or Shanghai and that’ll shut ‘em up permanently.

EndRant.

We checked into our hotel and went outside looking for a restaurant. We ended up going to street stalls (Laura and I were feeling more adventurous than the boys were). Number One Son who’s 13 liked the chicken and I got a bowl of noodles. The younger boys, well let’s just say this was a bit much for them.

Next morning we took a walk around Beijing. It wasn’t long before we walked by this art shop and the proprietor started talking to us about how many kids we had. To Chinese people, three kids is almost incomprehensible. He didn’t know we had four and were about to get a fifth. Not until the kids told him, anyway.

Man was this guy a good schmoozer. Number One Son chuckled as he worked his magic. “What is your name? Marshall? Ah, I show you what Marshall means in Chinese. Ma, that means horse. Shall, that means “Beautiful.” See, this mean “Beautiful horse.” Your family have strength and leadership. Very admirable qualities.

“Beautiful horse means courage and bravery. Ancient Chinese emperors prize these things, give you great honor. You must be very proud.”

Of course it’s hard to tell how badly he’s mangling Chinese syllables in order to come up with this stuff, but I tellya, this was great salesmanship. Number One Son is laughing his butt off. The proprietor says, “For 50 Yuan I draw “Marshall” for you in special Chinese calligraphy and you hang on your wall, yes?”

Number One Son, who has acquired his cynicism from his father, the advertising professional, can’t stop laughing. I say to him, “You learn to sell like this guy can sell, you will never go hungry.”

The guy did manage to levitate some dinero out of our wallets before we escaped from his store. Gotta hand it to him.

Next, the Forbidden City. As soon as you get there you get accosted by tour guides. The US travel service screwed up when they set us up with one so we were on our own. I hate being accosted by sales people but Laura reminds me that if I don’t talk to them we won’t get a tour.

So I negotiate a tour of the Forbidden City, along with a trip to the Great Wall of China, all for one package price. The lady takes us around, shows us everything. We even get to meet the nephew of the “Last Emperor” Pu Yi, who apparently is a famous calligrapher.

I’d been to China three times before – 2001, 2002 and 2004. I was shocked at how much prices had gone up. A cup of tea at the Forbidden City cost 3 bucks. Last time I was hear it would have cost 75 cents and in some places would have cost 30 cents. China USED to be so cheap you felt like you were stealing.

Beijing has modernized FAST. It is fully a first world, world-class city. I suspect other parts of China are less developed but you’ll hear about those in due time. We’ve got 4+ more cities before we’re done.

Our tour guide took us to the Great Wall, stopping at a “Jade” store on the way. They sold everything you could possibly imagine, carved out of jade.

The boys LOVED the great wall. We walked almost all the way to the top of that particular section, which felt like climbing all the way to the top of the Sears Tower. The weather was good and we got some ice cream when we got to the bottom.

You can see Laura’s pics of the Forbidden City and the Great Wall here:

http://compassionmama.blogspot.com/2011/11/beijing-day-2-forbidden-city-and-great.html

On the way back the driver took us to a Silk store. It was becoming apparent that these guys get kickbacks for adding extra destinations to your “tour.” Then he announced we were going to go to another special place and observe a tea ceremony.

Laura and the kids were exhausted. They didn’t want to go anywhere else. I told the guy I wanted to go to our hotel and skip the tea ceremony.

The tour guide replied that we have to go to the tea ceremony.

I said no, we want to go home.

He says to me, “No, must take you there, otherwise they take away my pay or end my job. Please sir, it only take 20 minutes.”

“Can I talk to your boss?”

“He doesn’t speak English and I don’t know his cell phone number.”

We’re kinda trapped.

We ride for awhile. Finally I say, “I want you to call your boss right now and find out how much the kickback is for the tea ceremony. I’ll pay you the money. But I do NOT want to go to the tea ceremony and you did not tell me I had to go to the tea ceremony when we started this trip. That’s dishonest.”

He calls his boss and tells me it costs 200 Yuan ($30) to not go to the tea ceremony. We pay him the thirty bucks and he drives us back to our hotel.

Welcome to China!

We had dinner across the street from the hotel. On the way back from the hotel, I saw a sign that said, “Foot massage soup.” Oh I just love Chenglish. Apparently they dunk your feet in some magic potion and massage your feet.

I decided to go get a massage. I took the back massage too.

So this guy starts working on my feet and back. Then he brings these glass jars and puts them on my back. It makes this painful pinching sensation. He insists that this is very very good for my back. He leaves the jars on my back for several minutes. This is NOT comfortable. However Chinese massage usually isn’t and I figure they know what they’re doing.

I get back to my hotel room and the kids say, “What happened to your back????” I look in the mirror and it looks like I have huge slices of salami stuck to my back. Giant bruises from “cupping therapy.”

Dang, this is hideous!

The massage guy had told me not to get my back wet, to wait until tomorrow night before showering.

Ummm…. okay. Chinese people sure have strange ideas about health. Laura said, “You look like you got attacked by an octopus.”

Three cheers for my giant red welts!

At least they don’t hurt. I will report back to you about whether I was permanently maimed by my trip to the Chinese massage guy.

Today we go to the Hutong (“traditional historic neighborhood”) and Tiananmen Square, the famous place where the Chinese student had a standoff with a tank in 1989. (This, by the way, is not what most Chinese people associate the place with. In China, Chairman Mao, who killed more people than anyone else in history, is considered a hero. But I digress)

And probably we’ll catch some Samaurai show. The kids oughtta like that.

Tomorrow I and my wife and three kids and my eight welts fly to Lijiang, the most beautiful city in Asia. We meet up with Bryan there. Stay tuned…..

Perry Marshall