iamback / Marjolein Katsma

I generally have a problem using or assigning tags – keywords – to things because my mind wants to classify things hierarchically. Ask me to come up with tags for something, and I usually draw a blank.

But today I finally hit on something that I thought might be useful: assign the tag “provincial capital” to those cities that are the capital of a province. There is no other way in this system for that classification, after all. So, while I was trying to put some order into Turkmenistan, I assigned that tag to provincial capitals.

To my horror I found that tag also assigned to the provinces they are a capital of, and worse, to the country those provinces are a part of.

Surely, tags are not hierarchical, but just applied to the things they are actually attached to? If tags are “inherited” upward like that, it makes a joke of applying tags to things. (If a singel city is busy and smoggy that doesn’t make the whole country so…)

Am I misinterpreting what tags are, or is 43P using tags in a really strange way?

I reported the “upward inheritance” I saw as a problem, only to have it assigned Won’t fix – without any comment – which is not very helpful either.

I then thought I could fix the problem by removing the tags again from the cities I’d assigned it to – only to find that while removing them there works, the “upward inheritance” is still there. So Turkmenistan somehow still is provincial capital even though none of its provincial capitals still have that tag! That’s nuts.

If there is no way to assign a tag to one thing only, without having it spread to other things that it doesn’t refer to – how does one use tags usefully?

And how can the useless and now-removed tags be cleared from the country and provinces they don’t refer to but were assigned to automatically by “upward inheritance”, other than by removing the tags from where they were actually assigned to (which I already did)?

Really – Turkmenistan is not a provincial capital. It’s a country.

Looking for an Internet cafe in Beijing? Try asking a local for “Wăng bā” or look out for this pair of characters (copy them on a piece of paper, or memorize them): 网吧 – it means “Internet Cafe”.

There are actually quite a few Internet cafes in Beijing, most of the “neighborhood” type where mostly young people from the neighborhood come; the most popular activities seem to be games and (video) chatting. Unless you really need a very fast connection (say, for uploading photographs) these neighborhood Internet cafes will do nicely for checking your email or some browsing and are a lot cheaper than the “business centers” found in many hotels (which often do not offer a much faster connection anyway): in a hotel you may pay 10 Yuan for 10 minutes, while an average neighborhood Internet cafe charges 3 Yuan per hour.

Identification is (legally) required, so don’t forget your passport, and expect to pay in advance for the amount of time you want to be online. The system usually gives you a warning 15 minutes before your time is up, but when it’s really up it’s just “poof!” (so if you’re emailing, save drafts regularly…).

In one such place they tried asking 10 Yuan per hour so I just started laughing and wanted to walk away; they then gave me a scrap of paper and indicated I should write down what I expected to pay. “3Y,” I wrote, and they said “OK”. So don’t be fooled into paying more when (currently, fall of 2006) the going rate seems to be 3Y – not super-fast but certainly good enough for some emailing and browsing.

Many of these places also sell some drinks or snacks but it’s a good idea to bring your own bottle of water or tea, just in case.

And, of course, it’s much more fun to do as the locals do with some couleur locale than pretend you’re on business here and pay much more for the same thing!

All the big Western brands are to be found here – and expensive. There’s some good shopping as welll, and I found nice little presents to bring home, and generally wasted some time here.

But what’s disappointing is that it felt like a chique shopping street in almost any big city. There are many places I would return to in Beijing, but Wangfujing is not one of them: one visit is enough. Except to go to “snack street”, that is.