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

[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!