Shall I De-Can the Wine?

I've just realized that my wife is more like a little kid at X-mas time than I am -- she's always asking if we can open a few presents early.

Something else I've noticed: Many restaurants and eateries in Beijing place cloth covers over your jacket and/or purse that you've hung or placed on a chair. In some places they are full-on chair cover type things, and others are merely sections of cloth draped over the articles. I find it to be a nice gesture, but I don't understand exactly what they are meant to accomplish. My first thought was for deterring thievery, but my better half thought it was to protect the items from spills. If it is for spills, why then do they not issue me a bib or something to protect the rest of my clothes?

Today we went to the big foreign language bookstore downtown to seek out the Lonely Planet book for China, as we are planning some excursions to see places other than Beijing. Well, it turns out that they don't carry the China book (just the China one; they have all the rest) for some nebulous reasons they couldn't really explain. I guess Lonely Planet said some things about China that they didn't like.

On the way back we stopped in the little convenience store at our apartment complex to pick up a few things, and we found this:
Yes, wine in a can. True, it's sparkling so maybe the can helps with that, but still. D-what also picked up a can of sparkling grapefruit juice that turned out to be alcoholic as well. I passed on the Chocolate Fudge flavored soda this time, but maybe I'll go back and give that one a try later.

Not sure what the next week or so holds as far as blogging goes, what with the holidays and we might be traveling a little, so we'll just see what happens.