Epic Travel To Hong Kong

Okay, where was I? I believe in my last entry, I was on the 24-hour trek across China, travelling from Longji Terraces to Hong Kong. At the moment, I am on what I believe is my final 24-hour train across China.Following a 2-hour trek from Hong Kong to Guangzhou, we are on a 24-hour train from Guangzhou to Kunming. But we’ll get into all that later. (By the way; I don't have any photos for this particular entry, so I'm just going to post a few random China photos that I haven't posted previously.)

The trip to Longji Terraces ended and we hiked down the mountain to a bus to Guilin in order to catch a train. It was supposed to be a three-hour bus ride. About an hour into the ride, the bus stopped along the side of the road, across from a larger parked bus. We were instructed to get out of our bus and into the bigger bus, so we did. We all found seats while the driver entertained himself conversing with various people in the front of the bus. Then, the bus started moving. Unfortunately, the driver wasn’t directing that movement. Evidently, the bus slipped out of park, causing it to roll downhill and ram into a relatively nice truck parked (originally) 25-feet behind us. There were angry people; there were cops; there was confusion. We got out of the bus and hung out around 20-minutes until we were able to get on another bus to Guilin. That bus got us there without further incident.

In Guilin, we had a few hours of free time, so we walked around, grabbed some dinner and bought some provisions for the 13-hour overnight train to Hong Kong.Nothing of significance happened except that the person that I was hanging out caught a case of the Tennessee Two-Step and caused us to be diverted to a Guilin-public-toilet-search that took up all of our remaining free time in Guilin.I’m glad I didn’t have the pork.

The train ride was pretty much without incident. I was in a cabin away from everybody else and I was able to sleep well. I think I’ve learned the proper combination of Advil PM and cold medicine that has allowed me to sleep 8-10 hours a night on these epic train rides so I don’t mind them nearly as much as I used to.

The train arrived in Hong Kong around mid-morning and we hopped on the subway to get to downtown. That trip lasted around 40-minutes and then we walked to our hotel – Goodrich Hotel. I know that there is a fight for space in Hong Kong, but the size of the rooms was a little ridiculous. My room had a full-size bed and there was no chance that I was going to fall out of it. The walls touched 3 ½ sides of the bed. I had to get into bed through a little opening at the bottom of the bed. There was a little closet and a bathroom in which I could practically flush the toilet while lying on the bed. I tells ya it was small. The television had four channels. Two were in English, though one appeared to talk about nothing but horse racing.I realize that I’m just sort of babbling about the room, but there’s no point in talking about what I did in Hong Kong at this point because this entry is about to end and I might as well save it for the next post.Speaking of which, see you then!

And Then There Were Rice (Longji) Terraces

Upon finishing up our time at Yangshuo, we left for Longji Terraces. It was sort of going from touristy-frying-pan into touristy-fire. The trip consisted of three local bus rides, each being approximately two hours and each being a little more “local” than the one before. By the last bus, people were sitting on floors and bags and I believe there may have been some livestock strapped to the roof of the vehicle. It wasn’t particularly unpleasant, but it made for an interesting journey.

When we got to Longji Terraces, I was prepared for a 45-minute walk with my overnight bag, which necessarily included my computer because there was no place to store that. A 45-minute walk with my bag isn’t a big deal. What I wasn’t expecting, however, was that 40 of the 45 minutes would be straight uphill. I suppose that after over six hours on busses, a little exercise was just what I needed, but it still was not a pleasant surprise.

Once we finished mounting the steps, we found ourselves at our guesthouse for the night. It had some food and drinks, but they were expensive for China and not of the highest quality. They did have free wi-fi, though (and you know how much I love me some free wi-fi) and it was the strongest that I had experienced in my entire trip.

After dinner, much of the group started playing cards – a Chinese version of Asshole, I believe. There was no beer, though, and Asshole without beer is like a BLT without bacon. What’s the point, really? In any event, by this point in the trip, I was getting pretty tired of spending so much time with the group, so I grabbed my computer, sat in a corner and played on the internet for a while. Because of the location of the guesthouse there really was nothing else to do except that or play with the local children and we couldn’t even do that after dark (6:30 pm). After a while, I went to bed, bored.

The next day the group took a five-hour uphill/downhill hike to our next rice terrace hotel. Deciding that all rice terraces looked pretty much the same, I opted to avoid the group again and take a bus to the next hotel. After being handed off from Chinese person to Chinese person, I finally got to the site of the next hotel. It required another walk uphill, but this one was only about 20-25 minutes and didn’t wind me too much. I arrived about 11:30 and waited about three hours for the group to show up. We had lunch and, for the first time on this trip, I had my own room. With a balcony. And wifi. Life was good. Life was oh, so good. Then it took a turn towards the craptastic.

Despite the fact that there are other hotels, a few restaurants, and a lot more people in this area, there again is very little to do. Last night, I enjoyed my wifi until it gave out around 8:30. Everybody else was downstairs eating and drinking, but I was still enjoying my Sheldon-time. After the wifi gave out, I just drank and listened to music. This morning, I got up and made myself some coffee. Then at around 8:00, the electricity died. This leaves for very few entertainment possibilities without going down, and consequently back up, the mountain. I’ve used the time to read and now to write up articles up to the present. (Note: For the record, the “present” is October 18. Since I can’t access this site in mainland China, it’ll no longer be “present” when you read this.) If we were in a city, or even a village, I could entertain myself by walking around, but that isn’t a great option here and, even if it were, this is primarily a tourist trap for people who want to look at rice terraces, so there’s not a lot of local culture for me to soak up.

In a few hours, I’ll leave with the group for another 24-hour trek across China in order to go to Hong Kong. Hong Kong is one of the spots in the trip to which I have been looking forward. I trust there will be scorpion bowls. And Facebook. And, hopefully, I’ll be able to start posting these articles. Until then . . .

What the Hell. More Random Thoughts on China

I have about twenty minutes to kill before I take off for a cruise down the Li River, so I thought it would be a good time for another random thoughts entry. Want to hear it? Hear it goes.

Spitting: There’s a lot of spitting here. The first few times I noticed it was in Beijing when old ladies hocked up something huge and left it on the sidewalk. Evidently, it’s something of a cultural phenomenon. There have been attempts to stop it, at least in Beijing, but non-spitting laws don’t seem to be discouraging much of the activity there. In Shanghai, there are No Spitting signs in all of the subway cars. It could be much worse, though, I suppose. It’s still better than the dog poop avoidance games that are necessary in Paris and Buenos Aires.

Smog: I had always heard about the smog problem in China but I don’t think that I was mentally prepared for what I was about to encounter. It’s not as if I feel like my health is in danger, but then again, I don’t live here. From my perspective, it’s just a little sad because of all of the beauty that I know I’m missing because the visibility is so low. It’s worse in the bigger cities, of course, but I haven’t seen a good place with respect to smog, either.

Trains: So far, I’ve spent a lot of time on trains here, particularly in the hard sleepers. During the first twenty-day leg of my journey, I spend 73-hours on trains, or a full 15% of the trip. Needless to say, they become important to me. The hard sleepers are cabins with six beds in them. Usually, there are about a dozen cabins per car. At the ends of each car are squat toilets of variable cleanliness. Of all the various modes of transportation, trains have always been my favorite. I can’t say that the Chinese trains have changed that opinion. From what I can gather, the worst part of the train rides is the glaring snoring that comes from a certain person all throughout the night. Having never heard it myself, I like to think that they are exaggerating the night terrors, but I sleep well.

Toilets: Most of the toilets in China, especially in public restrooms, are squat toilets. I still haven’t had the pleasure of enjoying one, but it’s just a matter of time. With respect to western-style toilets, I have learned that what they say about flushing toilet paper down the toilets is true. They clog at the drop of a hat. My roommate already has killed two in the two weeks I’ve been here.

Okay, it’s time for my boat tour, so that’ll do for now. I’ll let you know about the Li River later.

From Shanghai to Xitang

Okay, so I got TO the Expo. Unfortunately, I did little more than that. I went to the ticket stands to try and buy an evening ticket so I could walk around for an hour or two and see some of the exhibits. Unfortunately, the whole entry was a little too complicated and in Chinese for me to take advantage of the Expo. There were several lines for several types of tickets and I never did figure out for sure which line I was supposed to be in. I walked around the facilities and never found an entrance. These things, coupled with the negative reviews that I had heard about the Expo, influenced me to walk around, take some pictures and then return to the hostel. At the hostel was another night of drinking Tsingtao and Tiger until closing time at 2:00 am.

That ended my only full-day in Shanghai. The next morning, we boarded a two-hour bus to Xitang. Xitang is a city on a river delta with lots of canals and, thus, a lot of bridges. It appears to be very much the tourist town, though a tourist town with a difference. In the day/night that we were there, we didn’t see another non-Asian person, so it appeared that the majority of the tourists were Chinese.

There were a lot of little stands in the Old City portion of Xitang, which is also where the canals are located. The stands sold local candy and artsy-craftsy type stuff that is very common in little stands in tourist areas. Close to the entrance of the Old City were also a long string of bars, night clubs, cafes and the like. The tourist stands closed fairly early as I watched many of them shutting down before 8:00pm. The bars, of course, stayed open later.

After arriving in Xitang, we took a walking tour around the Old City and then went to dinner. Nothing out of the ordinary here: duck, chicken and beef in a variety of sauces with rice. Afterwards, a few of us took a cruise along the canals. Not quite a Venetian gondola, but it was a pleasant way to spend around 25-minutes to see the tourist spots from a different perspective.

The next morning, I walked around the Old City and looked around to see what it looked like in the daylight. For the record, it looks better at night with all of the red candle lamps glowing, but it was attractive enough for a group of Chinese art students to come by and paint the surrounding scenes. A class of about forty students lined the walkways in the early-morning hours.

I also walked around the new city to forage for food and other items for the upcoming 28-hour trek to Yangshuo. Shortly after noon, we boarded a two-hour bus from Xitang back to Shanghai. From there, it was a 24-hour train from Shanghai to Gullin. Lest we get tired of travelling, upon arriving at Gullin, we promptly hopped a bus from Gullin to Yangshuo. The trip, although long, was fairly uneventful. There was a late-night charge to the food car after we ran out of the rice liquor that we were drinking, but we were turned away. On the bus to Yangshuo, the most interesting part of the trip was watching the driver’s assistant break out some little blue stools for people to sit on once all of the seats in the bus were occupied.

At the moment, I am in my hotel room in Yangshuo, where I arrived yesterday evening. It’s Thursday, October 14, 2010 when I write this. At the moment, I have no idea when it will be posted, but I will start posting things when I get to Hong Kong, and have access to the blog once I reach Vietnam, so hopefully we’ll get up-to-date someday.

Getting Shanghai-ed

I just got off a 24-hour train ride from Shanghai to Gullin and am now on a bus for a 1.5 hour ride to Yangshuo. Or at least I will be when the driver finishes walking around looking for additional customers. Enough about that, though. My present is the blog’s future. Let’s see. Where did I leave off?

Oh, yes. It was the seventeen-hour train ride from Xi’an to Shanghai. Shanghai was sort of wasted for me. We only spent one full day in the city, so I didn’t really get to do much, and I had a bad string of not finishing what I had started. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the city. I just needed some more time.

We arrived around mid-day on September 9. We took a little time to get cleaned up and had lunch at the hostel in which we were staying. We followed this up with a little walking tour of Shanghai. We went out near the People’s Square and walked down a pedestrian walkway towards Pudong, where all of the skyscrapers were located. I have to say that the Shanghai skyline is one of the few that I’ve seen that compare favorably with New York. The highlights are the Pearl Tower and the World Financial Center, which is known locally as the bottle opener for obvious reasons.

We continued the walk to a famous market area. Not so famous that I had ever heard of it, or even remember the name of it, but we didn’t have much time and I just had a green tea at Starbucks, anyway. We weren’t there for long and we went on to a theater to see the Shanghai Acrobats. There were several acts including gymnasts, pole climbers and dancers performing from ropes hanging from the ceiling. The highlight of the show was at the end when five motorcyclists drove around in a steel sphere called the “Ball of Death.” In all, I’m not sure that I can say that everything that I saw is what I would call “acrobatics,” but I did have a good time.

Afterwards, I retired to the hostel bar for some Tsingtao and Tiger beer. Gradually, more people showed up and we went to the pool table. I beat everybody who wanted to play once; refused to allow any rematches, and went to bed as the hostel billiards champion.

The next morning, I got up for breakfast of cereal and fried dough sticks. The fried dough sticks were awesome, but I should have tried them with the soy milk. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize this until afterwards. I planned to try again the next day, correctly, but I overslept and missed breakfast. That was just one of my missed opportunities in Shanghai. We’ll get to the others in my next post.

Exit Xi'an

Wow, I’m actually getting caught up. At the moment, I’m on the overnight train from Xi’an to Shanghai and I’m up to today in my writings. Of course, I still am not sure when all of this will get posted, but I’ll see what I can do when I get to Hong Kong.

I intentionally played it slow this morning. I got up early, had some breakfast and then retired to watch some baseball and start packing. I finally left the hostel around 10:30 and started looking for a grocery store so I could get supplies for the trip to Shanghai. It took me longer than expected but I finally found one and bought some instant coffee and some Lay’s potato chips. But not the normal Lay’s potato chips. These were in a can. And they had a picture of a Chinese lady eating potato chips with chopsticks. And they were “Hot & Sour Fish Soup Flavor.” Good times . . .

After checking out of the hotel and moving my stuff and my roommate’s stuff into the day room that we had, I ventured out again. My first stop was to Starbucks because, you know, I like Starbucks.

After Starbucks, I decided that my last tourist stops of the Xi’an leg of the trip would be to the Drum and Bell Towers. These “sister-towers” are centuries old and, as you probably could have guessed, one of them features drums and the other features bells. I’m not going to tell you which is which.

The Drum Tower is in the Muslim Quarter and the Bell Tower is in the center of the city, though both of these sites are very close together. Both are about eight or ten stories high and give great views of Xi’an. Once again, however, the views were extremely limited by the smog. I have lots of pictures, but there’s not enough space here to post them. Eventually, I’m sure, however, most of them will end up on Facebook, so you can check them out there.

I took the rest of the day easy, watching some television (CCTV 9 is in English) and had some lunch. My main goal was just not to eat anything that might make the 16-hour train ride unpleasant. (I’m on the train now and so far, so good – knock on wood.)

We took the shuttle to the train station, but because of a severe lack of traffic, we got there early, so we hung out in a nearby hotel lobby because the train station was crowded. Some of the group went shopping and I tried some tiny crab snacks. They were chewy and sweet and spicy. A little too fishy for my taste, though. I thought I’d share that story with you because I have a picture and because I’m running out of things to write about. I just had a little Chinese lesson and I’m getting ready to go to bed. That’s it for me tonight. Later!!!

Bring on the Terracotta Warriors!!!

On my second day (first full day) in Xi’an, I woke up early and got some breakfast. Then I had to watch Roy Halladay finish his no-hitter against the Reds. (Phuck the Phillies!!!!) Then it was time for me to go out and do something. But what you ask? And thanks for asking because otherwise there would be no reason for me to continue this blog.

Since this was our only full-day in Xi’an, this was the day we chose to go to see the Museum of the Terracotta Warriors. The Terracotta Warriors are one of the oh, let’s say fifty sites that I’ve been to that claim to be the “Eighth Wonder of the World.” A little background is that some great emperor died around two thousand years ago and decided to have buried with him terracotta statues of around eight thousand soldiers, including generals, archers, chariots, horses and all kinds of other little trinkets. This fake army laid buried for centuries until a farmer trying to dig a well happened along them in 1973. Now, it is a huge tourist attraction.

To get to the site of the Terracotta Warriors, we needed to take a bus to the train station and then catch another bus out to the site. Getting out there wasn’t much of a problem, though the bus to the site doesn’t go directly to the site and we had to walk a bit to get there. No biggie, though.

The site itself is impressive, but I have to say that I was a little underwhelmed. There are three pits. Most of the soldiers in the smaller pits, Pits 2 & 3, are still buried because as soon as they uncover them, they have a habit of losing their color and they are trying to prevent that from happening. In Pit 1, you actually see an army of warriors standing guard for the fallen king. Don’t get me wrong. It is definitely one hell of a sight. I think that, maybe, I was expecting a little more. I shouldn’t hold that against them. It wasn’t their fault.

Getting back wasn’t a big deal, at least with respect to the first bus. Catching the bus from the train station to the hostel, however, was reminiscent of the evacuation of the American Embassy after the fall of Saigon. It was hundreds of people trying to rush onto busses as soon as the doors were opened, with pushing and shoving and probably some obscenities being uttered, though I don’t know enough Chinese to confirm that.

In the evening, I went walking around Xi’an with some folks and we came across a bar/restaurant-infested area. We decided to stop in an interesting-looking restaurant for dinner and it turned out to be a good idea. We got the menu and it was in Chinese with English-ish descriptions. None of the translations made sense and we ended up ordering “Hemp Flame Beef” along with another beef dish and pork dish. We didn’t know exactly what we were getting, but it turned out to be the best meal I have had in China so far. The Hemp Flame Beef turned out to be a cold, thinly-cut beef dish in a spicy pepper sauce. My favorite, though, was the pork dish, which was sort of like boiled bacon in a salty/sweet sauce with twisted bread sticks, onions and other vegetables. I was very, very pleased.

After dinner, a we walked into the Muslim Quarter, which is fun at night because it’s full of stands selling traditional street foods and a lot of stands selling touristy stuff. It reminded me of San Telmo in Buenos Aires a little bit except that food is much more important at the street market in Xi’an. I bought a souvenir or two, though I was full and didn’t try any more local foods.

That was pretty much it for the only real full day in Xi’an.

Welcome to Xi'an

I think I’ve come up to Xi’an in the trip stories. I am going to be on many overnight trains during this journey and the train from Beijing from Xi’an is the first. At this point, I’ve been on trains in over twenty countries but this was only the third time I’ve ever been on an overnight train, the other two times being in Egypt back in January.

On the trains in China, we are sleeping in cabins that sleep six. There are two rows of bunks that sit three high. I was in the bottom bunk and, even though I tend to be claustrophobic, there was plenty of room for me to stretch out and I was even able to get about five hours of good sleep, which is as good as I ever hope for on a train. All-in-all, I can’t complain about the ride. I guess I could complain about the semi-clean squat toilets, but there’s not much point.

When we arrived in Xi’an, we were shuttled to our hostel, which took around 45 minutes. It was still morning, so we met in the hostel restaurant and had breakfast and discussed what was in the city for us to do. The hostel was pretty nice and in a decent location and I was pretty happy with the food in the restaurant, though it was very westernized. There also was a bar in the hostel but, believe it or not, I never visited it. We only spent a few nights there.

We took a walk around the area in Xi’an in which we were staying and got oriented. We were pretty close to the City Wall, the Drum and Bell Towers and the Muslim Quarter, all of which I will discuss later.

After the walk, we were left alone to do what we wanted to do. Since the walk finished in the Muslim Quarter, I started my touring at the Great Mosque, which is one of the oldest and more famous mosques in China. It did not compare to the fantastic examples of architecture that I saw in the great mosques of Egypt, but it was certainly worth a visit. After the Great Mosque, I went back to my room at the hostel and rested for a little bit.

Xi’an has a wall that surrounds the old city. It is rectangular, sits around twenty-meters high and is eight-and-a-half miles in circumference. A popular past time is to go to the top of the South Tower, rent a bike and drive around for great views of the city. The problem with this plan, for me, is that I never learned to ride a bike. That didn’t stop me, though. I climbed to the top of the City Wall and walked around the entire structure. All fourteen kilometers. It took about three hours. Sadly, however, the beautiful views that I was promised were obscured by horrible, horrible smog. It was even worse in Xi’an than it was in Beijing. Oh, well. Mission accomplished as well as it could have been, I guess.

When I got back to the hotel, we went out for a traditional Xi’an meal. Xi’an evidently is famous throughout China for its food. One dish in particular is a mutton soup with pancakes in it. If I think of it, I’ll look up the name of the dish because I can’t remember it off the top of my head. (I looked it up. It’s called Pao Mo.) We had that and about a half-dozen other dishes along with some homemade pomegranate juice. It was really good, but . . .

After dinner, the group went out to a karaoke bar. Unfortunately, something attacked my stomach on the way over and I decided to forego the alcohol and singing for a trip back to my hostel and some relief. I hate to blame the Xi’an food, but the only other thing I had to eat that day was scrambled eggs and toast. All things considered, though, I’d do it again.

Some Random Passing Thoughts On a Train

I think I’ll finish off the Beijing section by combining it with the Xi’an section because I didn’t do a whole lot more in Beijing that I haven’t mentioned. The big thing was one thing I ate and I’ll try to transition that into some general thoughts that I have about China so far. (At the moment, I’m at the end of Day Nine in China and I’m on an overnight train from Xi’an to Shanghai.)

Food: This is a good place to start because the last thing I did in Beijing was to finally have Beijing Duck. You might call it Peking Duck, and I’ve seen it called both here, so I guess either are right. The Beijing Duck that I had was . . . you know . . . Beijing Duck. It had the sauce and the celery and the sauce and the duck. It was good, but I like duck and I don’t think it could have been bad. Generally, I have to say that the food I’ve had here isn’t significantly different from American Chinese food, but I think I’ve been a little shielded by the tour leader. The best experience I’ve had is when I have just randomly chosen things on a menu and tried those things. I’ll have a story about that in the Xi’an portion of the blog.

Traffic: I used to say that traffic signals in Buenos Aires weren’t rules, they were suggestions. Well, in China, traffic signals are dares. A red light in BsAs says to the driver: “I’d stop if I were you. But, you know, do what you want. I ain’t your mama.” In China, the red light says to the driver: “I don’t think you have the balls to keep going. Pussy. What are you going to do? Huh? What are you going to do?” People in China go through red lights like they’re offended the light is trying to control them. I assume its some communist protest thing. Seriously, here it’s legal not only to make right turns on red, but also to make left turns on red. Add to that an assumption that all pedestrians know the deal and you get really dangerous street crossings for those of us who have not been indoctrinated into the system.

Staring: People stare at me a lot. It hasn’t been done in a threatening way or in a way that’s offensive. I seriously get the impression that people are surprised to see an old white dude with a ponytail in their neighborhoods. It’s more funny than anything else.

Tourists: Beijing was full of tourists. There were a lot of foreign tourists, but the majority of tourists were Chinese tourists who were visiting Beijing for the national holiday. The holiday lasts for a week and travel is encouraged. In Xi’an, the big tourist attraction is the Terracotta Warriors. I’ll write about those later, but at that site, there were many more American/European tourists. We’ve also run into a lot of those at the hostels at which we have been staying. I can’t say that I like them very much. The tourists, that is, not the hostels. Maybe it’s because they’re young, but I think it’s because they tend to be spoiled and ignorant. Yeah, I’m going with that.

Okay, that’s enough of the random thoughts for now. Next up will be the continuing saga of Sheldon in Southeast Asia.

Great Wall of Pain

The following morning, I woke up early for a breakfast of pastries and cappuccino (yes, I went to a semi-western-style café) and we made an early-morning bus trip to Jinshanling. The purpose of this trip was to visit the Great Wall of China and the Jinshanling portion of the wall, though a little further away, is less crowded. The bus trip took about three hours and we got to our destination.

The views in this area were breathtaking. As I’ve mentioned earlier, Beijing typically contains a lot of smog, but the skies in this part of China were blue and, fortunately, cloudless.

We took a short path that led us up to the Jinshanling section of the Great Wall. Since this portion of the Wall is entirely on hills, we had to climb what seemed to be an uncountable number of steps to get up onto the wall. I thought this would be the rough section of the trip. I was sadly disappointed.

Once on the Wall, we walked for about six kilometers, stopping midway for lunch. Walking the wall consisted primarily of walking from watchtower to watchtower. The views were phenomenal and it was clear why this is such a great tourist attraction. It was also clear why it would be so difficult to (a) build and (b) attack. The walk from watchtower to watchtower was different each time, but some of the mini-trips were quite difficult. Especially for the out-of-shape fat tub of goo that I am. (See earlier post.)

Early on in the trip, I hired a Sherpa to take me to the top of the watchtowers. Okay, not really, but there was a little local woman who makes money by helping fat-tub-of-goo tourists like myself up the steeper climbs – and God knows I needed it. The deal was that at the end of the trip, I would buy some souvenirs from her, so I couldn’t resist.

And trust me, some of the climbs were difficult. There were two in particular that included climbs of over 100 steps that were much more steep than I had anticipated. It was similar to climbing parts of Mt. Sinai, but I believe this may have been even more difficult. Either that, or I’m a much bigger fat-tub-of-goo than I was in January at Sinai. In any event, though I lagged behind, I did finally make it to the end, with the help of my trusty Sherpa. And the souvenirs I bought from her at the end of the trip were worth the money, so it was a good trip overall. We had to go another thousand steps down a hill once we were finished, but downhill was much more manageable, obviously.

We spent the night in a tiny village close to the end of the trek. We stayed in what I’ll call a little bed and breakfast, but that is being quite generous. The entire group had some Tsingtao and what our tour guide called “firewater,” which was a rice liquor that was 56% alcohol and tasted like a fruity ouzo. Lights were out before ten a.m.

In the morning, most of us strolled around the village for the scenery and fresh air. We had breakfast of rice porridge, fruit salad, pancakes with chives and various other Chinese breakfast items and then it was time to hop the bus back to Beijing.

I guess I had more to say about the Beijing/Great Wall part of this trip than I had originally anticipated. I still have an article or two to go. Hell, I must really be enjoying myself.

More Beijing - Temple of Heaven and Summer Palace

My next day in Beijing was another free day so I decided to trust Beijing Top Ten (it’s a book) to see what two things I definitely needed to see. It told me that I needed to see the Temple of Heaven and the Summer Palace. I obeyed.

I went to the Temple of Heaven first. I rented the audio guide, but I still don’t know a lot about the place. I seem to recall that emperors from the Ming and Qing dynasties went there to pray for good harvests, but I could be wrong about that. If you can access this site, you can access Wikipedia, so look it up yourself.Anyway, it was a beautiful area with ancient cypress trees and beautiful architecture. Of course, I have pictures. Oddly, my favorite part, though, might have been the audio guide that included a map of the area with GPS, telling you where you were and automatically starting to tell you about where you were at as soon as you arrived. The deposit for it was 100 Yuan (about $16), so I almost kept it as a souvenir, but instead, I left it for another English-speaking tourist to enjoy on another day.

The Summer Palace is a bit out of the way, out in the outskirts of the city, but it is easily accessible by subway. Now, with respect to the Summer Palace, I truly have no idea of the significance.Presumably emperors went out there in the summer (makes sense, huh?) because the elevation is a little higher and the temperature is a little cooler. The area is surrounded by several acres of paths and is very wooded, so the area is used as a park by many people. The site is on the side of a lake and there is some beautiful scenery. The site also is on a hill, so it gradually elevates providing an opportunity to go up a ton of steps if you choose to enjoy the entire Summer Palace experience. Knowing that I was going to enjoy the entire Great Wall of China experience the next day, I opted to try to save my legs as best I could and so I stayed in the lower areas around the Summer Palace. (Note:After the fact, I was very happy I saved what little strength I have.)

That night I was on my own for dinner, so I hit a place that looked like a fast-food Chinese restaurant. I ordered crispy chicken and rice. It also came with a couple of sides, one was cauliflower and the other was unidentifiable – at least by me. The odd part of the meal was that even though the chicken was chopped, it wasn’t deboned, so I had to be careful of bones in what I was eating. (And when I say odd, I mean odd for western Chinese food. It’s common here.) It was enjoyable and everything together cost less than $4, so I couldn’t complain. I took a picture, but it came out too blurry to be helpful.

Nighttime meant another trip to the hostel bar. The hostel bar also had a restaurant, however, I never ate there. Another thing that the hostel bar had was a house bunny. A friendly rabbit hopped around the bar and took a liking to one of the women in our group so we played with the bunny while we drank. I can’t help but think that the poor guy is destined to be on the menu at the hostel at some point, but such is life. Or death. Or food.

That’s enough for this article. Next will be the Great Wall entry.

Beijing - Happy National Day!!!

As I sit on the twelve-hour train from Beijing to Xi’an, it seems like a good time to reflect a little bit on Beijing. What the hell else am I going to do? In my last article, I wrote up to my first morning in my hotel, before meeting up with my group at the hostel. Let’s start off there.

To begin with, I lugged my haul over to the Nine Dragon, Xinmao Youth Hostel. It was only a couple kilometers away and it was a level walk, so it wasn’t a big deal. I dropped off my stuff and, since I had time to kill before my meeting, I headed on to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. The only problem was that it was October 1 – China’s National Day – meaning there were literally hundreds of thousands of people at both. (Note: I looked it up afterwards. The total was about 100 thousand. It seemed like more, though.) I opted to start at the Forbidden City, but my trip wasn’t everything that it could have been because of the crowds. I took some pictures, but I would have preferred to have gone at a less busy time.

In the evening, I met the others in my group and after a brief orientation, we went out for our first Chinese dinner in China. To be perfectly honest, it wasn’t much different than the Chinese food I’ve eaten in the United States, complete with Kung Po Chicken. It was still good, though, and a few of us went back to the hostel for a little Chinese beer. Okay, it was a lot of beer, but we had a good time.

My next day was a free day with respect to the group and I went back to Tiananmen Square and this time, I made it under the tunnel to the actual square. It was pretty impressive. I understand that it’s the largest public square in the world and I can believe that. There are lots of impressive public buildings surrounding the square and gardens, monuments and statues within the square. Unfortunately, there’s no statue dedicated to the dude standing in front of the tank, but you weren’t really expecting there to be one, did you?

After heading back to the hostel to check on some baseball scores, I hopped on the subway (see note) and went to the Olympic center from the 2008 Olympics. If you’ve followed this blog at all, you have noticed how much I love Olympic stadiums (Rome, Amsterdam, Munich, Berlin . . .) so Beijing’s was high on the list. The National Stadium is known as the Bird’s Nest for reasons you can figure out from the photos. Across the open area in front of the stadium is the Water Cube, where the swimming and diving events took place. I took a tour of the Bird’s Nest and I have to say that the Olympic area is the most impressive of any that I have seen up to now, though that sort of figures since it also is the most recent. In any event, it is a beautiful area and I consider it a must-see if you happen to be in Beijing.

On the second night, we went out together as a group for a tour of a Beijing hutong, which was interesting. They are old neighborhoods of Beijing in very old homes with no working toilets and no heat. For this reason, the toilet reason that is, there are public toilets all over the place in Beijing. They are not necessarily the most fancy of places, but they do come in handy.

We had dinner as a group again and had . . . wait for it . . . Chinese food. Then we went to a bar and had good, old, trusty Tsingtao. It’s definitely the most popular Chinese beer abroad, and it’s likely the most popular Chinese beer in China, but there are plenty of others. (The picture is from the first night and I think I tried something other than Tsingtao. It's Chinese beer, though, so give me a break.)

That’s the first couple of days with the group and it’s probably enough for this entry. There will be more about Beijing shortly.

(Note: The Beijing metro is pretty awesome. There are ten lines (up from just a few lines five years ago), and they are expecting many more in the near future. Everything, including the announcements are in Chinese and English, so even though I only know one Chinese word (xie xie – thank you), I was able to get around everywhere I wanted with absolutely no problem. Also, it is very cheap with a ride costing only around thirty-five cents no matter the distance. I do love me a good metro.)

Flying into Beijing

As I sit in my hotel room, watching Manchester City play Juventus at 4:00 a.m., suffering from an epic case of jetlag, I thought I might as well start the Southeast Asia leg of the blog. Of course, by the time you read this, I will be well over that because I won’t be able to post this for at least three weeks, and that’s iffy, when I get to Hong Kong. Like Facebook, Blogspot isn’t tolerated in China and I am unable to access the site to post anything, but I will when I can. (For the record, at the moment, it’s 4 a.m. on October 1 in Beijing.)

I’d tell you about Beijing, but I don’t know crap about Beijing, yet. I got here around 8:30 p.m. and went straight to bed. I haven’t even eaten in China, yet. So this isn’t about Beijing so much as it is about getting to Beijing.

If you ever look at my Facebook updates, you may recall that this trip was RDU-PHL-JFK-PEK. I got to the airport in Raleigh at around 7:15 am on Wednesday. I was a little early, as I always am when I have the time, and, as always, it was completely unnecessary in Raleigh because I was at my gate with my bags checked within ten minutes of my arrival at the airport. I did have some Starbucks for the first time since my trip to Washington almost two months ago, though, so it was worth it.

Everything from Raleigh to Philadelphia to New York was pretty painless. Everything was on time and the flights are kind of short, so there’s nothing really on which to report. At JFK, I had to check-in for the international leg of my journey. The area for this at JFK is broken into eight sections with two to twelve foreign airlines assigned to each section. Some are nearly empty, while others are in complete chaos. My airline was at Group H. Group H was complete chaos.

When I got to Group H, the first thing I noticed was about 150 people in a line that had coiled around so that it looked like a rattlesnake ready to strike. And the vast majority of them were Chinese. This didn’t bode well. As I got close enough to the counter to see what the line was for, however, I saw that it was for a flight to Shanghai on Chinese Eastern Airlines. Not my destination. Not my airline. Not my problem.

I went around the corner to the other side of Group H and I saw three people working the counters for Air China’s flight to Beijing and they were all helping the same person. And there was nobody in line. Could this be my lucky day? It was. In retrospect, it seems kind of odd because I was there less than two hours before my flight and there had to be over 400 people on the plane, but I’m not one to spit in the face of good luck, so I got checked-in and went to the gate.

The main point that I want to make about the flight from New York to Beijing is just that thirteen-and-a-half hours is too long to be on a plane. It just is. It wasn’t a bad flight. I had an aisle seat and the seat next to mine was empty, so I could spread out, and there were meals. Overall, it wasn’t bad, it was just too damn long. (Note: At the moment, I’m in Hong Kong on October 20 and I have had train rides over 24-hours. A 13-1/2 hour plane ride seems luxurious to me at this point, but I digress.)

And it wasn’t like a day with a morning, and afternoon and an evening. The trip was thirteen-and-a-half hours of late-afternoon. The plane left at 4:50 pm in New York and landed at 6:20 pm in Beijing, having passed through a dozen time zones and the international date line. So, it wasn’t like a red-eye where you could get some sleep and still wake up in the morning at least a little refreshed. There was just no good sleeping plan that made sense under any circumstances. Not that it mattered because I’ve never been able to sleep on airplanes anyway. By the time I got to Beijing, I had been up around 46 of the previous 50 hours and just wanted to get to the hotel and get some sleep.

A note about the food on Air China. We had two meals, which I suppose is a good amount for a 13.5 hour flight, but they fed us within the first two hours of the flight and the last two hours of the flight, meaning I went about ten hours with nothing, although they did stop by with tea occasionally, which was nice. And it wasn’t like the second meal was worth the wait, though I have to say that the first meal was pretty good for airline food. We had options for pork and rice or duck and rice. Duck? On an airplane? GIMME DUCK!!!! Yeah, baby, I’m on Air China.

Getting through immigration was quick and painless and then there was the obligatory one-hour wait for my bag to make it to baggage claim. I swear, every single freakin’ time!!! I made it through customs without anybody even bothering to blink at me and caught a cab to my hotel.

This first night, I’m staying at Prime Hotel in Beijing. It’s really fancy, but I don’t think I’ve ever been in a hotel that nickled-and-dimed its guests so much. There are items all over the room with hyper-inflated price tags on them. It’s sort of like sleeping in a 7-11. As far as I can tell, nothing is complimentary except the soap and the toilet paper, and I’m sort of keeping my fingers crossed with respect to those.

(Side Note: Before my trip to Montreal, I weighed myself for the first time in years and confirmed that I was just a fat tub of goo. I just weighed myself here in my hotel in Beijing. While I’m still a fat tub of goo, it doesn’t seem so bad in kilograms rather than pounds.)

Well, that’s it for now. Or “then,” as it were, since I won’t be able to publish this for several weeks. At the crack of dawn, I’ll head out into the city a little bit for some breakfast and to find the hostel where I’m meeting the people with which I will be making the Chinese portion of my tour. That should be fun all in and of itself. Then I think I’ll go to Tiananmen Square. I’ll tell you about all that in a future post.