I'M MELTING…I'M MELTING!

It is quite funny, the people here really are afraid of melting. Not only do all of their cosmetics contain skin whitening ingredients, but also check out their shades. They don't wear the regular sunglasses like the rest of us…oh no! They have these things that look like welders masks that cover their entire faces, preventing even a slight tan.
Not to mention they all carry umbrellas to block out additional deadly rays (It really isn't that hot out here either).
Strange... but True!!

Mcdonalds Menu:

Spicy chicken burger
Grilled chicken
More fold over looking things
Radioactive purple contents of pies
Cream Soda (Coke with ice cream on top)

Overnight train

This was the one journey I was dreading. 12+ hours of being stuck in a sleeper cabin with two people we didn't know. I expected the most horrid stench ridden cabin with the most vile people on the planet. As I entered I found the cabin to be pretty clean, pretty small and a squeeze for the luggage, but pretty comfortable all the same I thought. Bobbi on the other hand was well annoyed at this point. The idea of being stuck up on the top bunks just didn't sit right. Added to that it didn't seem like they had given us the correct room number.

Anyways, we get settled for our journey and one hour in we are sitting reading and making the most of something unpleasant. Then it came! One of the guys turned on his laptop and began to play 'music'. Why oh why did it have to be country music? Then came the Bodyguard soundtrack, then some really shingaling like cheesy swooning music. Hell on earth I tell you. I did however nearly wet my pants with laughter when they both started to sing along. Didn't last too long luckily, laptop batteries and all that.

Journal - Beijing West Railway Station

As we are waiting in the soft waiting lounge, Paul is really beginning to dread our overnight journey to Xi'an which lies ahead. His impression of the Chinese population is people coughing & spitting everywhere, we are due to share our cabin with two others as we have booked a x4 softbed cabin.
I really dont think its going to be that bad so im not worrying at all, where on the otherhand my hunny is really panicking & oppose to admitting that, he keeps reminding me how much I shall be hating the journey -

Bike in a Box

Still not tired of shopping we decide to head further up town to a spangley looking mall. But how to get there we ask?
Hang on… what's this..? a bike in a box? Always up for an adventure we climbed in. It was a little like being taken away in one of those prison vehicles and really cramped too. Quite novelty though.

Snack in a pack!

The people out here don't half eat some weird stuff. As we checked out our mini bar at the hotel there was this weird dried up shrivelled, raw stinky beef in a packet, together with some other weird Ginger gunk, at least it felt like gunk. Eeeeeeooohhh!

CHINA'S ISSUES

No Lonely Planet guide to China
After searching around pretty much every bookshop in China (both national and international books), the Lonely Planet guide was nowhere to be found. We reached another shop and thought we would ask one last time. To our surprise we find out that China has a problem with the Lonely Planet guide to China hence they banned it. Nice one…cheers to China for stuffing up our holiday. However, lucky for us one of our tour pickup's was from a Youth Hostel and we spotted the L.Planet to China neatly displayed in their bookshelf. We've never been more pleased to see the guide.. Really felt lost without it here!

No Blogging! Or google!
Still raw from finding out that China doesn't like our reading material, we now discover that what is written is a problem also. We had problems viweing our blog here, no matter which hotel we went to. They even had us believing that we had screwed up our coding somewhere. It wasn’t till 1 of our praiseworthy bloggers informed us our blog was viewable, they're simply banned in China. Tough deal guys.!

Forbidden City &Tiananmen Gate

We were truly forbidden on the first attempt as we were too late. Instead we went into the Tiananmen Gate section. Nice décor, lots of royal kinds of things. Not as much on the wow factor as some of the other things we'd seen mind.

The following day as we walked around the main grounds of the Forbidden City we checked out the throne room, living quarters, all sections of the grounds. It was a pleasant enough experience, complete with loads of little museum sections showing loads of trinkets. Worth a visit, lots of history.
Oh and if you do go, you will see some huge flights of stairs. Bobbi decided she wasn’t doing anymore stairs as we had been to the Great Wall the day before, and gentlemanly as I am, ended up carrying her up those stairs as the crowds looked on. Very romantic if I dare say so myself.

The Great Wall

After a 4 & half hour coach journey we arrived at the Great Wall, our tour guide informed us that he would be waiting for us at the other end (we saw him nicking off through the hills for a short cut). We decided to take the scenic route in the form of a cable car (saves 30mins apparently). Well we didn't want to be the last to finish did we? As we looked out on the coming journey, it looked no less than EPIC! (in slow motion). When we got to the top, ready to start our walk, some of the others had already passed us by (save 30mins my eye!)
After passing the 1st tower and on approach of the 2nd we realised this was going to be harder than we thought. The pathways went from derelict to sometimes non existent, with almost a 70 degree incline to some of the towers. Where the towers were a mere ruin we were forced to take the dangerous cliff edge side walk. There was so much rubble & grit lying around on the ground that Bobbi slipped and fell three times, the most amusing one was right after I had just warned her to be careful not to slip (Bobbi: I wasn’t warned against wearing high heels...hee!).
It was pretty scary at times. We later read that the Simatai section of the wall was not for the faint hearted.
During most of our trek we were thinking to ourselves… I'm hungry… Oh and "Look at the positive side, we get through this (alive) we never have to do this again". The locals on the other hand did this every day, scattering themselves at each of the towers situated along the wall, selling drinks, books and T-shirts.

Each step we took across the wall, the scenery was breathtaking. We paused on many occasions for photie opportunities. We even spotted a snake, i only caught the tail end in the photie tho - it’s a shame we can't post them all.
The latter half of the wall just before we reached the suspension brigde was the restored section - which is what we were expecting the rest of it to be like, But the rawness of the wall sure does give you an edge to the trek. Literally!

It didn’t help that we had last seen food at 6am that morning, and were trekking off just fluids (bless the locals selling it at rip off prices). Our legs had turned to jelly and we had just reached the road that we so solemnly believed was the end and at it awaited a restaurant or food stall- we could've eaten anything that moved at this point.
We don’t see any of the team or guide and the locals selling more fluids direct us further along, where we spot our tour guide.
At last, the end! ……..Yeah right. We discover that there is another 30 minutes walk which lies ahead OR… we could take the zip line route.
On a normal day such death risking activities would be on the 'certainly not' list. After such a long walk however, both Bobbi and I were pretty much fighting to get into our harnesses so we could get to the end fast. As we went down on this thing we both screamed like little girls.
There was a boat waiting for us at the end - (It felt just like the Milk Tray ad), After the boat pulled up the opposite side of the what looked like civilisation. We managed to hobble along and drag ourselves in to the Café heavily sponsored by the Lonely Planet guide (as they had a huge banner hanging outside that you couldn’t even miss from the moon!) And stuffed ourselves for China!!!

Beijing 2008 Olympic Games

They are rather excited by the Olympic Games coming to Beijing in 2008 - they have a huge countdown to the date, up outside the Museum. Practically a monument in itself.

Calligraphy Exhibition

As we walked around on Tiananmen we were approached by the usual 'friendly' person. "Hi where you from, how can I help", the usual. Only this time it was from a couple of students who were studying at the arts museum (yin building opposite yang). For once we were happy to hear from one of these oppose to the usually pushy people, and went along to see there exhibition as it was the last day. As we looked around there was a load of impressive art work of very high standard. There were inks, oils, watercolours and calligraphy. One of the artists kindly offered to write our names and a message in Chinese style calligraphy for us.
Upon regular visits through Tiananmen Square we were approached once again, another student who was on his way to the museum and also offered us a visit to his University's exhibition as it was the last day, when its seemed to him that we were kinda adamant to go our way he offered to do us a calligraphy of our names too.
It soon came apparent this appeared to a regular stunt they pulled in order to get the public in to the museum in order to sell there art work.

Tiananmen Square

Thanks to the Holiday Inn we had a little 'Take me here card' with the Chinese translations of some of the sights. Tiananmen was one of the first I wanted to see because of the tragedy in the 90s. We arrived at this huge space (the largest of it's kind in the world so I'm told). It had a huge memorial to the people of China on the square its self and was framed almost, by two large buildings. They were both similar styles only male and female versions (yin and yang). There were plenty of troops walking around on parade which was also pretty novelty.

Language barrier.

Its near to impossible getting around without a phrase book out here, so bring your Mandarin skills with you if your considering a visit.
We didn’t get a chance to pick up a Lonely Planet guide for China prior to us arriving, and man we wish we had just brought the one we saw at Kuala Lumpur airport - however at the time we thought it would be cheaper to pick up in China itself, and

my… hand... slowly… reached... out... &... placed… the... book... back… on... the... shelf. - (can see it all happening again in flashback)!

Moving on, we got into China, and finding a bookstore without the lonely planet guide is difficult enough, luckily we drove past a huge building named Beijing Bookstore, and we thought - yes there is a god! At arriving at this glorious bookstore, which was absolutely huge… There wasn’t a single English book in the entire humongous beast of a building… is what we thought - at leaving the store glancing to the left we spotted a Lonely Planet guide whispering out to us. At approaching the section to our luck, they had em all except of course China! So we took our sorry asses out of the store and went on in the hunt of another bookshop.
There was a foreign language bookstore which we found in Beijing - we managed to pick up a Mandarin Phrasebook from here. But they didn’t have any Lonely Planet guides on China, but we felt we made some progress as we could now say:

"Yo.may.yo lor.ne.lee poo.la.nai.ter der lew.yo jir.nun shoo"

in Mandarin, which translates to: ''Do you have any Lonely Planet guidebooks?''

Journal - Arriving in China..

At leaving the airport, I found we were being huddled into a cab by the airport traffic control at asking them a simple question.
Not responding to my question of how much the cab was going to cost us as our luggage was being loaded into the trunk of the car. I had to shout "Stop" to catch his attention to let him know I wasn’t to be ignored. Immediately I found a man appeared from no where stating it would cost us 150RMB some huge drop to the initial 350-400RMB that we were quoted inside the airport!!!

We arrived at our hotel, was provided with our key card and no directions to where the lift was or verbally informed us of our room number.
At questioning she responded with 4th floor.
Absolutely exhausted at this point, hungry and sleepy - was looking fwd to just dropping our luggage into the room and heading for some food, to find when we arrived at our room, it was a twin - went down and she appeared to understand and gave us another key card. We checked out this room, and the next and the next to discover they were all twin rooms. And to our horror they didn’t have any double bed rooms in the hotel. Bizarre!! Apparently it’s the standard for China!
Quite clearly we cancelled our booking and checked in to the Holiday Inn, where as always our every need was catered for.
Of course this whole cancelling to stay with them process wasn’t the simplest, with no one at the hotel being able to speak English. The receptionist had a translator on speed dial who she kept calling and handing me the phone, not informing me of who I was about to speak to.

…..and little did we know that this was just the beginning. Welcome to China!!

Nee Hao from China People!!