Yet another random tip.

[randomness]

In China, you should examine the sunscreen products carefully before you buy them. Available sunscreen often includes skin lightening additives. That's probably not what you want.

I noticed this while I was looking along the drugstore shelves for dry skin cream*. (Watsons, CapitaRetail Mall, Xizhimen.)

Another reported problem is that many local brands don't work, but that's a general problem with products in China.

*Also, you'll need plenty of moisturizer for Beijing. The city is dry, dry, dry: particularly in winter, but also early spring, late fall, etc.

Comments

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

Also take a gas mask! The day after I left (Nov. 2011), the US embassy reported the air quality as "wicked bad".

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Hah! Definitely. (Although I assume you mean last November.)

Have you heard about the @BeijingAir Twitter feed? Every hour it reports the air quality conditions...as it turns out, from the top of the US Embassy building.

It's become rather controversial, as it provides data the Beijing authorities won't. James Fallows has three blog posts about it in The Atlantic:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/11/air-emergency-beijing/247642/
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/11/more-on-beijing-air-and-your-us-tax-dollars-at-work/247812/
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/11/in-china-time-is-not-ripe-for-honest-air-pollution-readings/247817/

I'm vaguely amused that my tax dollars are going to pay for an air pollution monitoring station in Beijing. Let's see how long that lasts.

All that having been said I was apparently very lucky because the air was clear enough when I was there last that you could even see the mountains in the distance from the 10th floor balcony of my friends' place. But even my friends said that was remarkable.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Oh, and as for the "wicked bad" reading, I think all those years of living in Boston may have influenced your memory. As the LA Times reported:

The measurements drew widespread attention last November, the first time a reading for fine particulate matter went above 500 micrograms per cubic meter, about seven times the U.S. standard for "acceptable" air quality.

The embassy ended up reporting that off-the-charts reading as "crazy bad." (Embassy officials say a computer programmer with a sense of humor embedded the language in the program linking the monitor to Twitter without realizing it would ever get used.)

The embassy quickly deleted the tweet and replaced it with "beyond index," but the fanciful description stuck in the imagination.

Those wacky programmers!

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

I think all those years of living in Boston may have influenced your memory.

Sad, but true. I checked, but even the Globe got it correctly. But there's nothing so Boston as cultural parochialism!