I’m in Beijing, China at the moment, visiting relatives for about two weeks. One of the things that’s struck me is how much the city has changed from just four years ago. I’ll be writing up a couple of longer posts fleshing out my thoughts on the changes after the trip; in the meanwhile, I’ll try to post some things that stuck with me at the end of every day.

Today’s musings:

• Housing prices in China (Beijing, at the very least) are ridiculously high. I cannot begin to describe how high they are everywhere.
• So is water. Water is like milk here in terms of price. Good for China.
• Jackie Chan is also everywhere. If you ever wondered what he does in his spare time, it’s spent doing commercials. For everything.
• I am consistently surprised at how good at Photoshop people can be when they’re forging brands and their associated styles.
• The abundance of cheap labor in China means that we see some predictably menial service jobs available (elevator service in particular) that extract a pretty terrible toll on the workers over a long span of time.
• Someone is going to get really, really rich bringing the electronic delivery system that currently exists in the US to China.