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Jian Bing
Across the road next from my grey wilder beast of an apartment complex, next to the gigantic supermarket that sells everything, and beside the man selling plastic bags of assorted dried fruit and nuts, is the man that makes my favourite Beijing breakfast, jian bing. I join a short queue for the egg pancake. He has one, steaming circular hot plate. First he ladles out pancake mixture onto the plate and takes a homemade tool that looks like a window cleaner from a plastic bucket of water and swirls the mixture around the plate in a perfectly circular motion til it reaches the edges. He cracks a fresh egg into the centre and breaks it up with the window cleaner, and repeats the circular motion until the yoke is everywhere and the whites mix with the pancake. Some of the white is left runny, to cook underneath as he adds the next series of ingredients. (A double cement spatula technique grabs the pancake on both sides from underneath and flips it). First thing is a brown sauce that tastes a little like soy, a little like Vegemite, (it's probably hoisin sauce, a dark brown jammy substance of fermented wheat, soy beans, sugar and chili according to most cook books, but also sometimes vinegar, mustard seeds and molasses -- it's most commonly found as an accompaniment to kao ya, or Beijing Duck, to grease the thin pancake before the tasty strips of duck. It's also used in a bunch of Chinese dishes to enrich the flavour. It's approximate cousin at a family dinner table is bbq sauce). The sauce is painted onto the pancake with a household paintbrush. Then he asks “lai la jiao ma?” do I want chilli, and I do but only a little, and he scoops a thick pitted paste and mixes it with the brown sauce. The smell at this point is mouthwatering. He shakes out some black sesame seeds on to the top from a shaker. Then chopped up shallots, and lots of coriander. On top of this he places a sheet of deep fried dough waffle, and folds the pancake around it. The crispy wheat dough is broken in two places by the spatula to provide the folds, and the whole package is folded up and put in a steaming plastic bag for two kuai and five mao, the rough equivalent of 40 cents. It’s filling and tasty and gets you going for a few hours. That and a banana (which in winter lie frozen like my fingers in the fruit seller’s stall) make the perfect, cheap breakfast in Beijing.

Waiting For Godot
Rufus Wainwright is playing when I come to my favourite café (favourite because it’s the closest and sells cool things), Waiting For Godot (the first song off Want One, Agnus Dei. It’s a mixed tape). Up next there’s Leonard Cohen’s The Guest. There’s Beck, and Azure Ray’s New Resolution, and a spoken word performance of Alan Ginsberg’s America. The place has WiFi, though it rarely works. But it’s a comfy place to hang. You can buy postcards of Samuel Beckett, and an array of funky stationery. The coffee is OK, and the menu is a summary of the café’s identity crisis (are we are bar? Are we a café? Do we cater for Chinese residents, or Westerners or both?) with sandwiches that don't quite bridge the gap between East and West. The Christmas decorations are still up in mid-January. A Tom Waits poster. The stationery is amazing – all designed by the staff here. Things like journals in brown canvas draw string bags and blank postcards for you to get creative with. I bought up a stack of Christmas presents for friends back home.

Morning Trip to Sanlitun
All of Beijing's buildings wear their aircon on the outside. They have filled in the giant hole on Sanlitun North Street with scaffolding marking out a new shopping megaplex, and the building that had spent years being dressed and undressed next to The Bookworm finally has a glossy coat of windows and shiny metal. The taxi is playing 103.9FM, Beijing's traffic radio station Beijing Jiaotong Tai which every cab driver (almost every) listens to religiously. It generally plays easy listening Chinese pop music and keeps the drivers up to date with traffic updates and news. It's a division of Beijing Radio [read more here and here].

Alameda
Jenny now on a posh salary takes me to a posh new restaurant in Sanlitun called Alameda, a Brazilian menu and the full dining bit with wine and water glasses, and the light chatter of working lunches. We ate pumpkin soup, then Beef Mignon and Parcels of goat's cheese, and parted with a hefty, posh 200 kuai.