Day 4 was set aside to hang out with a former classmate of mine who is from Beijing. He picked me up at Noon and took me too the Hyatt, a top of the line hotel (even by US standards) that is largely patronized by Westerners coming to town for business. The first floor housed a restaurant cleverly named Made In China where we enjoyed an exceptional meal and met one of my classmate's old friends.

From there we traveled to my classmate's medical device and water bottling factory, located in the country side an hour outside of Beijing. During the drive we encountered a street where spray paint symbols indicated that the government was widening the road by demolishing the store fronts on both sides and rebuilding them further apart. I imagine both that it doesn't take long for the government to set such a plan into motion and that the permission of the store owners is not required.

The country side was lush, but populated with plants that seemed less exotic than I had imagined; plants do not appear to have evolved very much since before there was an East or a West. We could have been in tropical regions of the New World and not known the difference.

Uneven cheap plastic tiles made up the floor which merged with the chipped plaster walls of the five factory buildings, reminding me how much Chinese construction had improved since they began renovating Beijing. Shortly after a brief site tour and taking a photo with his mom, we were dropped off at the base of the local Phoenix Mountain to do a short hike up a newly paved tourist trail that passed the Immortal's Cave, a local religious site, and included several vantage points, where one could see as far as the smog would permit.

Upon our return to the factory we were escorted to the in-house massage laboratory where men in white coats treated us like the experiments and began demonstrating age-old Chinese massage techniques. The highlight was the human torch, where towels were layered on my bare back, sprayed with alcohol and lit on fire, creating a rudimentary, and more dangerous, version of a heating pad.

To my surprise it appears that a widespread faith in Chinese Medicine prevails, even amongst those who have Western educations. The locals take great pride in the ability of jasmine to reduce your body temperature and cure warts, green tea to enhance your sex drive and oolong tea to cure cancer and enhance vision.

Having now met people both in and out of the City, I concluded that in general people are very happy in China. While the American lower class would be wealthy in China, it appears that wealth is not a prerequisite for happiness; crooked toothed smiles are commonplace.