wild goose chase

chef in the Muslim Quarter,
originally uploaded by vfowler.

Money comes and money goes and goes. Yesterday's tour put a dent in my budget, so I skipped breakfast. Down in the Muslim Quarter I took up an English menu and ordered a garlic sauced meat dish which arrived as a spicy chilli dish! Perfect for taste and clearing the nasal passages, all without being too hot.

Browsing the market, I needed a small day pack for lugging around the mass of the China guidebook and water carrying. A fake North Face one should do the job nicely.

All 12yuan (AUD$2) at the Great Mosque was starting to sound a bit stiff. I struggled to find anything of interest. A bunch of Muslims were all gathered around the prayer hall, muttering in chorus. Then a woman started wailing and crying, spurring a chain reaction as they all followed a blanketed corpse out. I later bought some new sunglasses in case it ever happened again.

musical water fountain show,
originally uploaded by vfowler.

Strolling past the Drum Tower, I met Sally and Chris, some friendly Chinese people, who wanted their photo taken afront the Bell Tower. Together with Sally's brother, we taxied down to the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, ate some food, then took up a position for the musical water fountain show - apparently this is the biggest one in Asia! A great day spent random exploring in Xi'an.

a whole lot of holes

kneeling archer
Originally uploaded by vfowler.

The price of the Eastern Tour jumped faster than Jim Beam could update his brochures. 285 yuan is today's price for a bus load of tourists wanting to see thousands of statues. Ask yourself, why take a tour?

Elen, our tour guide, cut loose with her immense knowledge in a spiel that lasted all the way to... the first of the morning attractions. Some museum place inside an old Tang dynasty? architecture building with a pair of stone lions - that look more like dogs with fleas; - patting various parts brings love, wealth, beauty, etcetera. The Huaqing pools once were working hot springs. Nowadays they're just a whole lot of holes! Some crappy jade factory was next, followed by a stop at a tomb where we watched a song and dance. Then lunch in the rather bad service restaurant.

Finally we arrived at the excavation pits of the army of terracotta warriors. If you paid attention in history class, watched the Hero movie or did any research on UNESCO world heritage sites, you'd find the first emporer of a unified China is the one and only Qin Shi Huang. Uniting the states, standardising the currency and the written script, and linking city walls (starting The Great Wall), road and canal networks are some of the impressive feats acheived during the brief Qin dynasty.

wrecked Xi'an arrival

Train station touts bore me at three in the morning. Some kind of sleep, then a shower and I feel like I have a bad hangover. My guess is over 15 hours of passive smoking is not healthy. That's my experience of hard-sleeper trains. A day of R&R : recovery and some research.

long track learning

train talk,
originally uploaded by vfowler.

Kyla helped again with the necessary language at the post office. After paying the extortionate postage for just a small, light box to nearby Japan, I have declared to post nothing more!

I'm forming a bad habit of making it just in time for planes, trains and buses. It reminds me of Scott just making it in time for the ferry to Tasmania many years ago. This time I'm riding the hard sleeper, which is cheaper, has 6 bunks instead of 4, lacks a door to the corridor where there are fold-down hard seats paired around little tables, smoking instead of air-con, and a great opportunity to mix with the locals.

The train changed motion directions several times throughout the journey. This confused the hell out of me as to where we could actually be at any given time. Around midnight we must have reached a major station because a lot of people got off. Thankfully the ticket masteress woke me up before Xi'an, in good time to say Zaijian to a travel companion.

I have no idea about 99% of what this 19 year old girl from Zigong (near Chengdu in Sichuan province) was on about. I did appreciate her patience and insistance with crash-coursing me through some ridiculously fundamental Mandarin. I felt like a total language moron for hours. I managed to find out that she'd left Beijing and was taking the train home because her boyfriend of 2 years got together with another woman.

I have a very long way to go with this tonal language... That's okay though. I'm sure to have plenty more opportunities to practice.

China has one of the biggest and busiest rail networks in the world, and trains link almost every town and city. The best Chinese trains are very safe, modern and comfortable.

I climbed The Great Wall

That's what it says on my new T-shirt. As we discussed on the bus ride, it's great to give souvenirs to friends and family. However, at the end of the day, you can't give your experiences, and you certainly can't give such a T-shirt to any friend that hasn't had this experience.

Given the postage cost is more than 8 times the postcards themselves, you'll be lucky to get them anytime soon. Sorry folks.

Jessica and Kyla are the replacements for the Finnish guys in our dormitory. While I munched down breakfast, the weather forecast popped up on the big TV: sunny - I gutsed the rest of my breakfast down, hoping to catch the girls before they left. Together we squeezed into a subway, onto the 980 bus to Miyun, packed another 2 French girls into a 4-speed sedan with our Chinese driver to Simatai.

Simatai is definitely the less touristed and more adventurous of The Great Wall sites. The actual flying fox looked cool but it was located just a little too near the starting point. The section we visited was only 19km long but still could be seen stretching from horizon to horizon - totally awesome. A grand day out. Definitely the best I have had in China so far! W-hoo!

From the #8 watch-tower, the options for our return were three-fold: back the same knee or ankle joint destroying way we came; walk down a path then via the personal open-air gondola cable-cars; or start with the mini-train, a useless and short distance down the hill all the way to the cable-car! It's not hard to choose, really...

culture cat and Peking duck

Alice showed me on my deteriorating map, where the Oriental Plaza is located. Passing off the usual array of cap selling, map toting, art dealing and tea stealing touts across Tiananmen Square, I found the western monstrosity. Inside the materialism is oozing from brand market goods shops that are... largely empty of customers...

My mission was to try the local cinemas on tight-arse-Tuesday in hope of catching Jet Li's final kung fu movie, but much to my disappointment it wasn't showing! Harrison Ford doesn't really cut it as Chinese cultural enlightenment, but Firewall was a good movie (and available in English).

At 5pm a friend from the dorm, Dan, and I dined at a 2-star restaurant after walking out of a 5-star. For some reason Dan thought we could afford a luxury dinner - Ha! Instead we each invested Y50 in shear gluttony, including some delicious Peking duck.

We waddled to the nearby Qianmen Hotel and bought the cheapest tickets to Beijing opera at the Liyuan Theatre. It was something very unique to say the least. The melodic English speech introduced the show, then the first act launched with a singing story about an empress and her emporer. Playing the empress was an actress with a rather intriguing vocal ability. She sang with 2 distinct voices: one sounded like a Chinese version of Mickey Mouse; the other like a cat.

Finally some more martial arts, the second act was about a cheeky monkey king that gets away from the authorities, performed entirely through gesture and acrobatic action. A great night of entertainment. There'll be no need for the Adult Toys from the Fear East International hotel's coffee bar tonight!

living lungs go to Heaven

So everyone spits on the ground, no big deal... Until everyone in this city counts over 13 million people. Can you blame them? Well, let's see... Even I had to blow my nose for the first time today. Beijing is said to be making an attempt to stamp out this habit of everyday life before the Olympics comes to town. Good luck! Is it really a problem? Well if you're on the street you are standing in spit, it's just a question of how fresh.

More of a problem for me is the chain smoking phenomenon. I was grateful to spend today in Temple of Heaven park where I could breathe clean air for a few hours without choking at all. It was fantastic, a much needed relief from the everywhere every moment cloud of crap filling me with cancerous filth. Which is probably one contributor to the spitting habit.

For just Y15 you can get into some clean air and even some trees and grass in TianTan Park. Forget about the historic and religious aspects (the main building is under-going renovation anyway) this park is loaded with active citizens of Beijing. Ballroom dance practice amongst the trees (sounds rather hippy); flowers blooming; artists painting; Chinese style violin practice with vocal accompaniment; racquet and tail ball swirly; harmonica, singing and dancing impromptu jam session; stringed top spinning; feathered kind of hacky-sack; it's all on!

I met Kitty and her daughter Janette in the middle of it all. Living in Boston, Janette speaks less Mandarin than me! Kitty translates while they are here in Beijing visiting her parents.

Plugging in to the network of street vendor food stalls gives a fresh new experience every time. I tried a couple on my walk back to the hotel: spicy sausage on a stick and something like a baked pita bread stuffed with... stuffing - simply scrumptious!

Alice, a tour guide who works at the hotel, took me to the Kung Fu show at the Red Theater. Wow! A spectacular presentation of a simple story, with an excellent atmosphere and great acting. Probably the most exciting theater production I'll ever see. It wasn't expensive which made it all the more enjoyable watching from the top tier in my front row seat.

losing my religion

The first world buddhist forum was recently held in Beijing. Is China opening up to the world or is it a temporary diversion from the introspective past? Since 1982 the Chinese government ammended its constitution to allow freedom of religion.

Since it is reputed to be the most colourful temple in Beijing, a visit to the Lama Temple was on. Inside each of the halls are various massive Buddha images, however no photography is allowed.

monks hanging out,
originally uploaded by vfowler.

To be honest I find it difficult to believe it is the most colourful temple in the city. One thing that did strike me as interesting though were the small male and female figure statues in the museum hall: they were shagging! I've always maintained that if I ever take up a religion, that Buddhism sounds the best.

Reading this, you probably know that the Internet is making more of a global impression than any single religion. I haven't attended church / temple for a service other than tourism and friends' weddings. China will have 300-million internet users by 2005. For China however, the catch is censorship.

If you are a fan of incense, at the Lama Temple there are many decent bins full of the firey sticks burning away and kneeling prayers afront each. Breathe it in!

Forbidden places

From the hotel door, through the hutong, then the commercial district, to Tiananmen Square, I marched right up to Mao Zedong's fresh mural and snapped a picture of the 2 of us. Then got shoved aside. I'd had my chance. More than just a few others want the same photo. Not much point in acting tough in front of the world's largest population. Especially now that Jet Li is Fearless!

Even on a weekday, it seems like the whole world wants to go through the Gate of Heavenly Peace. There's a pair of stone lions here that didn't manage to keep the peace so well - one has a bullet wound in his belly.

Visiting the Forbidden City, yes that's right it's no longer forbidden, they should change the name to The Unforbidden City or something like that. Both the Ming and the Qing dynasties of emporers hung out here most of their entire lives. I must say that I am impressed at the shear size of the place. In fact it's so big at the Meridian Gate, that it's impossible to stitch just one row of photos together into a panorama.

After taking too many photos, my camera battery died just on closing time. Two kindergarten teachers walked me to the camera shop and got the standard discount for me. In a Chinese style tea ceremony, we tried half a dozen different teas. Next door the ladies showed me through a big Chinese herbal medicine shop - I didn't realise until I checked later, that it is the famous Beijing Tong Ren Tang Pharmacy (from 1669 A.D.) - the remedies inside were being sold by the gram!

Tiananmen touts

knocker,
originally uploaded by vfowler.

7AM and the 14 hour journey was completed in just 12. Despite practicing some of my first Mandarin questions on my neighbour, I had absolutely no comprehension of her answers. I'd call that a 50% effort (which is a pass in my books). Before even leaving the giant Beijing station, touts began ramming hotel brochures in my face.

The funny thing about boarding the metro is that everyone queues up outside the train doors, they open, then it's as if the music has stopped and whoever hasn't acquired a seat within 1 second is out of the game.

After checking in to the dungeons of Far East International Hotel, I forked out for the buffet breakfast and had my first cereal in over a year. I thought I'd check out the Far East International Youth Hostel across the road before commiting further nights.

The morning chill got me lost in the neighbourhood hutong. After using a public toilet in the area, deja-vu, I smacked my head fair and square on the doorway. Through the fog I found Tiananmen Square, and some creative touts found me. The university art students wanted scholarship funds and tried selling me artwork - I agreed to a free viewing as I was not in a sight-seeing mood in the crap weather. It seems like the 4 seasons are a popular theme. Some Americans were purchasing so I didn't feel guilty for sipping the tea and passing the time in their warm exhibition space.

Another tout tried selling me tickets to the acrobatics show. In the end I found some interesting people that just wanted their photo taken with a foreigner. I returned the request and we all got pictures of the countdown to the Olympics. Then we had touts pushing tours to the Great Wall. Our cold weather turned to light rain. Touts selling umbrellas appeared out of nowhere. I dived into a Japanese restaurant to escape and eat.

Walking back toward the hotel, I stumbled upon a big pharmacy shop. Maybe they have the Head and Shoulders shampoo that is impossible to locate in Hiroshima. As the only customer, I greeted all the staff standing at attention in their medical green uniforms: that's a Ni hao x 12! Found that shampoo and, as I am fumbling with the language and the currency, I asked Doushao qian?

A came back to the hutong later in the evening for a photographic exploration. I also found the really cheap internet cafe that I can't plug any USB devices into, so no camera uploads were possible. Sorry for the delay, things aren't as tech savvy here as I'd hoped. A lot of things just go up in smoke.