A very big city
Trip Start
Sep 2005
1
46
52
Trip End
Sep 2006
Beijing,
China
Friday, June 16, 2006
I´ve been in China 10 days now. Sofa so good, as they would say over here. The food is a permanent adventure. I'm getting a lot better with chopsticks. The secret is to use the cheap wooden ones as they grip the food better. Using them I knocked about 3 minutes of my rice krispies in the morning. I can now eat my krispies in less than half an hour. I guess that's one advantage of the chopsticks, in that it forces you to eat your food more slowly, so your food gets digested better. Another advantage is that the clean end makes an excellent implement for picking your nose, after the meal of course.
I managed to stay in a bunker for the end of the world on 06-06-06. It's actaully what's called a U-tel. The "u" must stand for underground
01.Downtown hideaway
. It's 4 floors beneath ground level, maybe not great if you're claustrophobic. Needless to say there's no windows on the rooms. On a positive note it's great for sleeping. Maybe it's something to do with being so far underground, but every night I've been there it's like you sleep the sleep of death. Which also makes it good for watching the world cup. As it doens't matter what time you go to bed at, it's always pitch black once the lights are out. It's also extremely cheap. (World cup coverage is dire. They do Karaoke for the build up to the game. No replays at half time, just computer-game type simulations. The show is presented by a wee fat chinese man who looks like he never kicked a ball in his life. No atmosphere, and too many chinese men and women supporting england.)Beijing is a huge city. Everything is miles apart. I was looking for a gym the other day and there were three on the same street, at numbers 1,7 and 9. Numbers 1 and 7 were over 2 miles apart. It's like the city was designed with small man syndrome. They aren't a huge race after all. I haven't made it round to mausoleum (Maosoleum?) to see what size chairman Mao was, but I'm guessing he was no giant. Aparently he's very well preserved, or pickled. The official party line on him is that he was 70% right and 30% wrong. A bit similar to Irelands view on poor old Charlie Haughey in the end
02.Gates to Temple of Heaven
. The language isn't as big a barrier as I thought it would be. I'm still trying to learn a word a day though. Actually if you stuck with it, it wouldn't be that hard a language to master I reckon. There is practically no grammar, no tenses for the verbs, no articles like "the" or "a" and no genders for nouns. The building blocks of the language are one syllable words which combine together to make words of new meanings. For example, you join the words for east and west together to make up the word for thing. Even the symbols start to look familiar once you are exposed to them all the time.
Two words I must learn next are beer and emergency. Foodwise I moved into unchartered territory the other day. I got a dish called spicy chicken in a Sichuan restaurant(Sichuan is known for being spicy). When the dish came it was a mountain of red hot chillies under which a few pieces of chicken were buried. After about 3 pieces of chicken my lips felt were fizzing like a sizzling platter. What's worse was the waiter had forgotten to bring the beer. Only after I had done lots of frantic sign language did the guy disappear and come running back with ice-cold Tsingtao. Beer never tasted so good. The words of the Johny Cash melody "ring of fire" haunted me for the rest of the day.
Crossing the road can be good fun too. The little red man is the same as ours, meaning don't even think about it. The green man means have a go if you think you're quick enough. It still doesn't stop the cars. Some of the lanes keep flying on, and you just have to weave your way through.
03.Stariway to Heaven
I love the guys who work as security men. You'll often see them practicing their martial arts moves when they've nothing to do. Especially the nightwatchmen. Actually I've seen quite a few fights. In Tianamen square two women slugged it out before one of them ran off the other ones handbag, right in front of a policeman who did nothing. He really didn't want to see anything. At the airport at the customer complaints desk for one of the airlines an angry mob gathered. Tensions were high and they soon started fighting amongst themselves. There were a few westerners there who managed to get behind the counter for safety. Then some of the chinese got behind the desk and started punching it up in there. Meanwhile lots of chinese tourists stood by taking photos. The biggest punchup was on the subway. I couldn't even get a look at what was going on because of the crowds, but it sounded like there were at least a dozen of them going full at it. YOu could still hear all the screams, chops and roundhouse kicks flying.
There's lots of scammers over here in Beijing. There's also lots of genuine students who just want to talk in english to you to just get some practice in for free. So you're never short of company just walking down the street. Interestingly 90% of the scammers claim to be artists. Most of them are pretty crap and would need to work on their scams a bit more before the Olympics come, but I did meet one American guy who'd got a lot of stuff knicked from his rucksack as he walked down the street. Saying that he knew something dodgy was going on with this woman who plagued him and kept grabbing him but he didn't really try to get rid of her.
