quintessentially chinese

So right now I am sitting in a Chinese tea house, where I ordered from a picture menu and with the help of the only person within a square mile that speaks a lick of English.  He works at the internet cafe down the hall, but I prefer the tea house because of the wireless.  The "tea," mind you, is some sort of red bean paste frozen thing.  I like red bean paste :).  The whole staff is staring at me.  And the guy that helped me comes and reads my email over my shoulder every 10 minutes or so.  Evidently that's acceptable around here.  Oh, and I'm posting this via e-mail rather than the site because the CCP (the Chinese Communist party) has blocked my site.  I thought that was really interesting.  My 10 yuan also got me (unlimited?) Chinese salty snacks like dry-roasted edamame and 2 other kinds of dried seeds I haven't identified yet.  Internet is dangerously hard to find around here.  The CCP used a fire in an Internet cafe a few years ago as an excuse to shut down most of the internet cafes.  It's amazing to me to ask people "Internet?" and not have them immediately know what I'm talking about, much less a place nearby where I can use my computer.  This place is a 20-minute walk from my hotel (!!).  I'm headed to Microsoft to check in and do some paperwork in a bit, and I'm hoping they can help me with this Internet situation.

Things have definitely been much harder than I expected so far.  There's really no pinyin anywhere, just Chinese characters, which makes things downright impossible.  Additionally, Chinese characters of course can be printed in different "fonts" just the way our characters are, so even if I sit and compare at a particular character sometimes I can't tell if the differences are significant or not.  Is that trapezoid with the imperfect corner and and overextended side the same as the box at the bottom of this character I'm looking at on the map?  I don't know.  Additionally, my map from MSR was made using Paint edition 3rd grade, is not to scale, and landmarks only the hardest things to find.  I think things will be much better come Monday though when I have a building full on engineers to help out.

I'm eating all of these dried snacks whole, but I'm pretty sure there's at least a part of it that I'm supposed to be removing...