China Whites???

We wish!!!

Having pretty much spent the last 3 days in airports, we arrived in Beijing shattered and headed straight to bed - sightseeing can wait!

A new day, a new city - the first thing we noticed was that the constant drone of mopeds had been swapped for the dulcet tones of throat clearing and nose blowing - not pleasant! Steve slipped on a couple of 'pavement oysters' before realising what was going on!

Beijing is certainly different and probably our biggest culture shock so far, especially as English is not widely spoken. Our first chore was to organise a trip to Xi'an (Terracota Army) so off we headed to Beijing West Station (biggest train station in Asia). We very quickly realised this was not going to be an easy task - thousands of people, hundreds of platforms and not a word (or number) in Western text! Time for a travel agent and what better place than the Chinese International Travel Association - errrm ..... maybe if you can speak Chinese!!! After two days of traipsing around travel agents we found one that could speak English, unfortunately the train was now fully booked until the day after we left!!!

Beijing itself is best described as big fat buildings set amidst big fat roads - everything looks the same here so it was amazing that we managed to get around the city without too many problems - despite one helpful chap trying to convince us to cross the road and catch the number 44 bus to the station that we were standing outside ....!

It feels likes the whole city has been bulldozed and rebuilt to get ready for the 2008 olympics, a shame as they haven't done it very well! You can walk for 4 miles (which we did) without coming across a single cafe/bar/restaurant or even ice-cream van! There is no atmosphere here at all, and even the infamous bicycles have gone - we hardly saw any! There are still a few hutongs left (traditional working class neighbourhoods), but having wandered around a couple and witnessing the conditions, it is easy to understand why the chinese aren't sorry to see them gone. However, once they are the city will have lost all it's traditional identity.

We managed to eat pretty well, although more by luck than judgement as our choices were made by pointing at pictures and hoping for the best!!! And we were very lucky given that the chinese are renowned for eating anything with 4 legs! We spotted weasel on the menu, along with a few other strange items! They also don't like to waste anything - pigs intestines (fed with special foods just before their death) or fish head soup.... anyone?! Alternatively, how about whole roast piglet or fried duckling, complete with head obviously??? Ali has taken to making packed lunches to save us eating anything weird!!!

So the touristy stuff:

Tiananmen Square - much smaller than we imagined and flanked by the History Museum (whose exhibits and explanations change depending on the latest party line and therefore it is rarely open) and the 'Great Hall of the People'.

Mao's Mausoleum - actually we didn't bother with this as the queue was nearly a mile long!

Forbidden City - Disappointing as most of it was being renovated and surrounded by scaffolding. They did have a very impressive imperial coffee house there though - hadn't realised 'Starbucks' had been around so long ...

Jingshan Park - Renowned for its views from the top - which were marred by yet more renovations! This was the site where an emperor commited suicide by hanging himself from a tree - the tree was later punished by his successors for its part in the suicide, by being mannacled with an iron chain!!

Beihai Park - Beautiful but a shame the giant pagoda, winter palace and dragon pavillion were closed for refurbishment ...

... are you spotting a theme yet?! It's a bit like going to Disney to find 80% of the rides closed but being charged the full admission and not being warned about the closures! The moral of this story is to visit a city after the Olympics are held there and not just before!!!

Summer Palace - very impressive and much more like we expected the Forbidden Palace to be. Easy to spend the day wandering the gardens, lakes, temples and pavillions - a beautiful but much ignored tourist attraction as a few km out of town.

Ming Tombs - errrm... took 3 hours to get here by bus; cost loads to get in; and was the biggest waste of space ever! Not even convinced they were the original tombs given the chinese tendancy to reconstruct everything!!! We spent an hour there, and that included stopping for lunch! Incidentally, you haven't experienced public transport overcrowding until you've been on a Beijing bus during rush hour - a 30 seater bus was crammed with at least 120 people! Ali managed to get a seat around halfway back which gave her an excellent vantage point to spot the local fashions - hot of the catwalk for men seems to be vests rolled up to look like a sports bra; boxer shorts; socks pulled up to the knees; and slippers (preferably purple)! Women are simpler as anything seems to go, as long as it's teamed with ankle stockings/pop socks!!!

Great Wall - we decided against visiting the closest parts of the wall at Badaling or Mutianyu as they've been so heavily reconstructed apparently there's not much of the original wall left. Instead we followed the advice of various tour guides and headed to Simatai around 3 hours drive from Beijing. We paid a 'man in a van' £6 each to drive us there, wait around for 4 hours then drive us back and it was the best £12 ever spent!

Simatai was amazing, we climbed to the fourteenth tower, at which point things were getting too dangerous to carry on, and the views were fabulous. They were only restricted by the clouds drifting through the towers - we climbed through and above the clouds at one point which was quite spectacular! This was definitely the highlight of our trip so far!

Tea House Theatre - A chinese cabaret with endless servings of tea and sweets, quite cool and we both had a great evening! The show featured Peking Opera - lots of symbols clanging and drums beating; chinese magic - ala Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee; the birdmen of Beijing - 2 old men making bird noises; geriatric comediens - the chinese chuckle brothers; some live music from a Celine Dion soundalike with her twangers; and topped with rythmic juggling and an acrobatic martial arts display - very crouching tiger / hidden dragon!

There's a couple of things that have to get a mention before we sign off from China - the first is the (empty) water bottle thieves! It seems that empty bottles of mineral water must fetch a premium as we've had a few stolen - the most memorable was someone walking into Starbucks and nicking the bottle from Ali's hands!!

We should also tell you about the payment system here. Everything has to be paid in advance which can be a little strange in restaurants as you have to pay before you actually see the meal! It all works by vouchers, so if you haven't paid enough in advance you can't order what you want!!!

Finally, the mosquitoes here are clearly insane, they've bitten Steve's armpits and feet - eeeuuuuch!!!

All in all China has been a great experience (in many ways!!!) and our final goodbye to it was someone throwing-up over the back of Ali's chair as our flight landed in Hong Kong - a fitting send-off!!!