CHINA - YOU HAVE SEEN THIS ALREADY!

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HI - NOTE: The China and Mongolia entries have already been posted, and you have probably already read them (if not, why not??!! - just kidding). Basically the website crashed and lost everybody's travelblogs - rubbish!! Hence the delay in getting the rest of our travel blogs out. Very annoyed. So the photos from Beijing and Mongolia part 1 are lost, and it will take us forever to upload them again, so no photos for these entries - but photos for all the rest -so read them if you have the time! Thanks, Nic and Anton xxxx

Hi there!

Apologies for the slackness in updating this blog thingy, but chances to use t'interweb have been slim, and our luck in finding PC's that have English script installed or whatever, slimmer!

Anyhoo, we touched down in Beijing, and from the moment that out taxi driver veered across 6 lanes of traffic with utter composure we realized that it was going to be a crazy few days. We have been staying with my friends Stacy, a Chinese lawyer, so we have been seeing and doing things that we wouldn't have otherwise - there is a big world outside the Lonely Planet guide!

BJ is MASSIVE - 13.2 million people live in this city! Everything is in a district - there is no 'centre' so to speak, which is a bit bizarre. You meet people in X bar at the West gate of Chaoyang Park, or the East gate of the stadium. And there are high-rises everywhere - even though this city is huge, there is still not enough room for people to live in houses, so everyone lives in a flat. There are people everywhere - you cannot get a people-free quiet moment to yourself! And the 2008 Olympics preparations are in full swing - people work on the sky rail, buildings and transport systems day and night. There are construction sights everywhere. But the pollution is horrible - we have only seen a blue sky once the whole time we have been here - so I don’t know how they are going to clean that up in time for the Games - I can’t see many athletes performing at their peak whilst struggling to breathe in the smog. We met a Spanish business man who has been living in BJ for the last 3 years, and he says that the most interesting things about BJ is noticing how the people react to the changing environment around them. Chinese who are around 55 years old have seen the Cultural Revolution, experienced dire poverty, seen the fall of Communism, the opening up of China, and now China getting rich and becoming a major economic player. Their lives have been marked by huge contrasts - its strange to think of it like this. This city is one big contrast - you get spanking new plaza's next to tiny old hutongs (ancient alleys), you can buy Gucci shoes, or a $2 pair of flip flops, get a Starbucks or drink snake’s blood. It’s very bizarre.


Trying to get around has been interesting too - we are staying at Stacy's boyfriend’s, and there are no tourists or expats around here - so Stacy has had to write stuff down for us in Chinese so we can point at it. Miming has got us pretty far too. Trying to get Imodium was interesting.....


We have been mostly eating and drinking, which I think is a pretty good way of experiencing this city, seeing as food is so important to the Chinese, and they party hard too! We have had everything from chicken knuckles (I didn't know they had knuckles either, but apparently they do) to river weed tempura and fish that we had to catch ourselves. (I think it was this that gave us seriously bad stomachs. And running around HUGE Tiananmen Square trying to find something other than squat toilet is no joke!). We have also been partying with Stacy and her friends, which mostly involves going to swanky bars and clubs, and being waited on hand and foot - people light your cigarettes for you, pour your drinks at your table and bring you exotic fruit platters (random, I know). I don't know if I can ever return to the sticky floors, groping hands and red wine induced haze of Infernos.....Stacy’s friends are brilliant - they put us to shame by being multilingual - some spoke English and Spanish and Norweigan fluently! A lot of them have chosen Western names for themselves - mostly pretty normal names (though we have heard some corkers in our time- Eustace Cheung, Circle, Orange, to name a few…) And when one of Stacy’s friends introduced himself, we thought he was called ‘Prince Charles’ for about 3 hours, when his name was actually Richard. We could barely hear him above the thump of the hard house and techno music (that’s’ what the kids in BJ are into!) A great thing about BJ, (food and socializing aside) is the way that English is used (or misused). I opened a fashion mag, and there was a picture of a model in a cocktail dress next to a pot plant. The caption underneath read 'she treads through the glen feather light. She accepts change uneasily.'???!! There is also a drink called 'Pocari Sweat'. Despite it’s disgusting moniker, we tried some - it pretty much tastes as it sounds.


We have actually done some sightseeing too - we hiked on the Great Wall - which was, well, Great - it is huge - thousands of Km's, built to mostly keep out the invading Mongols. There is a rickety old chairlift that you take up to the wall - on the notice before you get on this lift, it tells you that you are 'not to bring any explosive or foul smelling materials' onto it. Hmmm. And to get down from the Wall, there is a toboggan. Seriously. They have his really ancient wall, steeped in magnificence and history and human suffering, and they have a toboggan down from it. This really epitomized BJ for me - the contrast of old and new, and what they deem to be a good idea and what really isn't. Anyway, despite its tackiness, and my moral and aesthetic objections to it, there was no other way down, and the toboggan was sort of fun, until Anton decided to ram into the back of me, as I was going at a grandma’s pace (v scared was gong to flip out and hurtle down the hillside) coinciding with the exact moment a huge flying beetle beast thing flew into my eye. So my objections to the toboggan were not unfounded. It is a bad idea. We have also encountered the vastness of Tiananmen Square - nowhere are there any sort of memorials to the students that died in 1989 -shameful, and there are loads of huge tacky picture of Chairman Mao everywhere. The Forbidden City and Temple of Heaven are supposed to be beautiful - we head to BJ again after Mongolia so we're going to visit these then. So….onto outer Mongolia next…..!

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