Roisin
Roisin in China Joined: January 12th 2008
Logged in: February 19th 2011
Logged in: February 19th 2011
Travel Blog Posts
bu dao Chang Cheng fei hao han
Well here I am, back in my beloved flat in Budapest, with the morning light, grey though it is, barging through my front windows. For the sake of my fair and gentle readers I will cast my mind back across continents and timezones to recount my last adventures in and around Beijing. "Bu dao Chang Cheng fei hao han" says the scrawly handwriting of Mr Mao at the Great Wall of China - "No arrive Great Wall never good person", by which I suppose he means that one may never consider oneself truly worthy or fulfilled without having taken the 919 bus from Beijing to Badaling and scaled this unbelievable product of human endeavour and imperial grandiosity. Happily I can now aspire to be a "hao han" and even more happily I had a most brilliant ... read more
Summer palace
Hardly a minute to spare these days as we swing from major tourist attractions to haggly shopping to fine feasts to Beijing pubs, where, incidentally, there is a thriving live music scene, singer-songwriters to beat the band, long hair and patterned plectrums, and meaningful chords (especially ninths) emanating from every edifice and orifice. Missing a day of blogging means that I now have far too many great Chinese experiences to write about and my flight leaves tonight at 2.20 (about the price of a Chinese main course, incidentally). Aggh! I have to look at my photos to actually remember all the things I did in the last few days. We - myself, Song, Hailing and a friend of hers who joined us for the day and paid for everything - took a taxi to the Summer ... read more
Tian Tian and Song. She is 15 years older than him
Well I'm stumped and stifled and stilted: I cannot think of a single joke using the word Beijing...so I'm in mourning for the punnage potential of Shanghai and Xian. What a Shanghaily disappointing Xianticlimax to my literary tour of major Chinese cities. Oh oh oh! Wait! As I sipped my black tea in KFC yesterday (I'm a sucker for Chinese culture), there was nowt but Christmas music on the radio...Deck the Halls, I Saw Mommy Kissin' Santa Claus, I Wish it could be Christmas Every Daaay. Sure I was only waiting for Beijingle Bells. YES!!!! (Sorry Mam, I'm sure you saw that coming a mile away!) So, here I am in this capital of culture, staying with the lovely Song (a musical girl, indeed) in her lovely flat in the west of this sprawling metropolis (God, ... read more
City wall and icy river
Despite the reservations of my travel companion about the length of our stay in Xi'an, I am delighted that we had today to explore the many sights of this "north-western" city - as my Shanghai-calibre guide continuously refers to it, though it is clearly and firmly plonked in the eastern half of this ginor(year of the) mouse country, according to my map at least. Hello to my Xi'aunties! So, like, we headed off after the customary full Chinese breakfast, suitably clad in warmest woolies (us, not the breakfast), and hopped on the bus to the partly authentic and partly restored city wall, one of Xi'an's finest features and a sight for four eyes indeed. The wall is 14.5km around and wide enough on the top for the Cork hurlers to practise the long puck...sure what else ... read more
Bell tower
Happy birthday to my coolest, most favouritest sister! Arrived in Xian yesterday after an easy trip from Pudong airport in Shanghai. On the way to the city centre I saw my favourite Chinese roadsign again- "Rear end collision: keep distance". A look at the main streets yesterday revealed an alarming number of designer shops in what is otherwise a much less affluent city than the Shanghaive of activity we left behind. Nevertheless Xian has some lovely features, such as a restored city wall with Chinese-style towers, a magnificent bell tower positioned arc-de-triomphe-like in the middle of a killer roundabout, and a bustling Muslim quarter. Of course Xian's claim to fame is its proximity to the burial site of the first Qin emperor, who decided he needed a colossal terracotta army to help him to rest in ... read more
NY dinner
Time for Chinese New Year dinner...yippee! Incessant fireworks around the area all day. I've just zipped my new suitcase with a meagre 20kgs inside..I didn't think of the internal flights in China when I brought nearer 30 kgs from Hungary. Luckily Hailing can take some of it for me to Xi'an and Beijing. This afternoon we went to the supermarket, and I was kicking myself that I didn't bring my camera. The crowds are a bit hard to describe. Remember Tesco on Christmas Eve? Well multiply that by about 50 and imagine 53 checkouts going hell-for-leather. I saw one other foreigner, otherwise twas thousands of locals getting their dinner ingredients. Mammy Wang has been slaving over a hot stove here for the last few hours. Great air of celebration here, the New Year TV programmes are ... read more
At Shanghai station
We went to Shanghai South Railway Station early on Sunday morning to try to get tickets to the picturesqueueue city of Hangzhou. You may have seen on the news that some Chinese stations are aflood with masses of anxious travellers these days, and that in some places the trains just cannot travel because of the snow. Happily for us tourists, and unhappily for the poor unfortunates elsewhere, there were no such problems in Shanghai. The army has been called in to all the major stations, and the masses are flooding through Shanghai station in the most orderly fashion imaginable. The place is like a modern, high-tech airport, and the little-boy soldiers were all smiley and cheery as they pointed us in the right direction. The train was as comfortable as any German equivalent and eased us ... read more
Hailingual
Well I can't believe I'm here at another Saturday, with its attendant soundtrack of scales and ditties live at the Pudong Czerny furnace, under the watchful ear of Professor Wang...ee orr san (1 - 2 - 3!). I see in the nooz that much of China is in crisis because of the snow. Shanghai has a few flakes all right but nothing to write home about. So I won't. Frightening stuff on the telly though from other provinces - no water, no electricity for more than a week. Shanghai is doing its bit by turning off the flashy lights of the skyscrapers to divert power elsewhere. It's great to have Clifford Coonan's Letter from Beijing in de Irish Times to catch up on what's astir around this heuuge country. The good news is that the president ... read more
Did I tell ya about this traffic jam?
Yesterday we went to the beautiful town/city of Suzhou (sue Joe) which, though it is only 75Km from Shanghai, was unfortunately separated from it by the mother of all traffic jams. Tranglam trachta sron le toin (no fadas out here) (That's Irish, by the way) doesn't even begin to describe it! I kid you not we were in the car for 10 hours yesterday...5 there and 5 back, for a journey that typically takes 1 and a half hours max each way. It seems that Shanghai exists in a cosy little microclimate where snow is kept to a minimum by the heat generated by 17 million people. Just a few miles outside the city we hit the real thing. Snow ho ho. Not lorryloads of it, exactly, but loads of lorries which were on the expressway ... read more
Today I went along with Herself to a conducting course given by a Swedish choral conductor. Hailing and her friend Jenny (a lovely girl who is for all the world the spitting image of Maria Doyle Kennedy...yer wan from the Commitments) were taking turns translating, rehearsing, directing and accompanying. Not your average translators, these lassies! And without wanting to sound too adoring, it fairly puts you in your musical place to hear them hopping around the choir parts and the intervals not a bother on them, the hoors. Why didn't I practise the piano more?!! It was good to be there - plenty of new music for me. The conductor himself is like a zombie having flown 10 hours from his holidays back to Sweden and then 2 days later heading off to Shanghai. Not great ... read more
