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Published: April 16th 2008
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Well I got my first view of China today and it looks nice, we were handed meal vouchers for breakfast and lunch so the Norwegian guy and I headed of the restaurant car, there were a lot of english speakers on the train and a surprising amount of middle aged ones. Breakfast consisted of two boiled eggs, two slices of bread, jam, butter and tea. As I hadn't eaten anything but 6 biscuits for 36 hours it went down very well even if it was virtually thrown at us by the waitress.
The next couple of hours were spent looking out the window, I was getting quite excited about China. There were supposed to be views of the Great Wall of China from the train but no luck so far. I had my first real Chinese meal at lunch although we had to take it back to our compartment as they didn't have space in the restaurant car, it was meatballs with cabbage and rice and wasn't bad.
Eventually we did spot the Great Wall but it was quite far away and even though I put the zoom on my camara on full the picture still wasn't great, it's
Great Wall of China
From a long distance on the page so 'ill let you decide.
Arrival in Beijing was uneventful, you can tell that they were sprucing the place up for the Olympics there were even little parks by the train tracks to try and give you a good impression. It was quite a momentous occasion for me, the end of my Trans-Mongolian adventure and a total of 10491km by train. I also saw my first Chinglish sign saying 'No burning', I think it meant to say 'No naked flames'
I managed to find my hotel without to many problems, I had prebooked it and I knew it was near the train station (I didn't want to go to far as I have to catch the train to Shanghai tomorrow). The hotel was actually really nice and the most important thing was that it had a computer with internet in the room, I just disconnected the ethernet cable and plugged it into my laptop and was all sorted. I took a shower and was intending to go and get my tickets to Shanghai from the train station however the hotel had a small travel desk and they did it for me for a small charge.
I was getting hungry by this time so decided that I should go and eat, I checked my Lonely Planet and the nearest restaurant that they listed was actually an English pub, that was me sold, I headed over (about 1.5km) and found that it was being refurbished - bugger. It was a fairly useful walk though as I spotted the Vietnamese Embassy, useful for when I need to get my visa. I had also spotted a TGI Fridays so I headed back there and had a quick bite, I then started chatting to a guy from Hong Kong and we had a few drinks, he suggested a trip to another bar area and I didn't object so off we headed. We had some more food from a few of the food stalls (very nice) and then found a bar, I started chatting to a two English guys and we all basically got drunk (one worked as a teacher in China and one was attending a martial arts training centre).
I got back to the hotel quite late and decided to Skype Kate, she was there so it was a drunken chat (on my side at least) it
was now getting late so I decided to hit the hay but then noticed my parents were on Skype so another drunken chat. It was getting really late now (almost 6am) so definitely time for bed.
A couple of observations about Beijing though, generally it is very nice, clean and cheap. Like Moscow there are a lot of soldiers around, they even sit in pedestrian underpasses watching everyone. I was warned about two things in China, one is personal space and the other was spitting. I had no problems with either however the sound of people clearing there throats ready to spit was fairly common but they generally make there way to a bin or somewhere discreet to actually do it ( I think they get fined now). There is also the internet, contrary to popular belief you can access the bbc and wikipedia websites (although this is a recent thing I think), and although internet cafes are fairly rare (I haven't seen one) the hotels seem easy places to access the web.
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