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| JET Adventures 74 - CHINAAAAH |
| Monday, April 02, 2007 |
  
  
  
While on the plane to Beijing Louise and I considered titles for our upcoming tour of the middle kingdom. Tokyo had been "Let's Birthday Get Smashed", Kyoto/Osaka/Kobe was "Get Over Your Pneumonia Self", but it wasn't until I opened the inflight magazine to be confronted with pictures of dead/demented horses that we recognised the omens of the "Feral Adventures Say Yes" trip.
We landed in Beijing. Except it wasn't Beijing, the plane had flown somewhere random in a different time zone. We made it to Beijing, somehow arriving an hour before we were supposed to arrive even with a 3 hour delay and an extra plane journey. Never have my conceptions of time and space (tenuous at best) were thrown completely. Not to be deterred we set off for the Forbidden City, which looked about an inch away on the map but actually turned out to be a 2 hour walk because it turns out that Beijing is actually the size of Belgium. The best things about the Forbidden City were the Roger Moore commentary and the green shouty guards who shouted at everyone, all the time. I pointed my camera at one and he shouted "NO PHOTO" at me. The doors were marked with signs saying "NO VIST" and the statues had signs saying "NO CLIMB". Brilliant.
Then we hit up Tiannamen Square because Lou wanted to buy a kite, although she didn't realise that the price also included a gaggle of tramps who followed us around, a hawker trying to sell us a ball of string, and a small child.
Beijing is filthy - even the airport had its own smog, which we found out was due to Mongolian sand storms and the dust from everything being demolished for the Olympics. The people are brilliantly rude - we saw kids wearing arseless trousers so they could squat in the middle of the road without having to bother removing them, the service was sullen and involved throwing things at us, and people spat all the time in varied and interesting ways.
We took an epic 4 hour death hike on the Great Wall. The Chinese guides shouted ZOBA (GO GO GO) at me to conquer my paralysing vertigo (NO LOOK! NO FALL!) and pointed out all the bits of the wall where people had fallen off and died. In between all those bits though, I realised that it was actually one of the best things I'd ever seen.
We rode bikes round all the tiny windy hutongs that they're tearing down (10,000 a year), yammed whole ducks, steamed buns and dumpings by the truckload, and I had a brutal Thai massage to try to restore my legs after the wall ate them, but the masseur refused to touch my feet until he'd called in the man with the bag full of knives to sort them out. I tried to take a picture but he shouted NO PHOTO at me.
Then we took the overnight train to Shanghai and slept in bunkbeds and taught the people in our room to play ridiculous card games only to find out they were professional hustlers.
Shanghai was almost exactly like London except that the Starbucks sell pies. We saw furious pandas and weird video montages in the art gallery warehouses, watched an acrobat show, haggled for incense and strange Chinese boardgames, and discovered our snot was black from the pollution.
  
  
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posted by Alice @ 8:58 pm  |
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| 2 Comments: |
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Fab travelogue as always, I'm so jealous of your ability to describe accurately and make me snigger at once, move over Colin Thubron and all that, but please STOP THE JUMPY BOUNCY PHOTOBUCKET GALLERIES THEY ARE DRIVING ME AROUND THE TWIST!
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I like the one with you and the alien. I shall call it 'the twins'
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Fab travelogue as always, I'm so jealous of your ability to describe accurately and make me snigger at once, move over Colin Thubron and all that, but please STOP THE JUMPY BOUNCY PHOTOBUCKET GALLERIES THEY ARE DRIVING ME AROUND THE TWIST!