Beijing and onto Xian - Strange Lolly Ices

Strange Lolly Ice
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Ni Hao,  I am not actually in Beijing as the blog says so suppose i will do another page in a mo as i do like the little map with circle and trail this site does, makes me feel a bit like philleas fogg, the decent old film version not the crap new one with jackie chan.  I am in xian at the moment, We took the overnight sleeper from Beijing, we cleverly deduced the huge station our hostel was outside was a cunning decoy and we in fact wanted Beijing West which was a fair drive and an even bigger station, it was massive.  We got there and sat in the departure lounge, the only europeans there.   All seats were taken, everyone had brought their chinese pot noodles as there are hot water taps everywhere so i felt a bit left out of the pot noodle gang.

Strange tattoo
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The waiting room was absent of westeners mainly as most of them had been clever and waited in some luxurius lounge around the corner.  We discovered this just as we were about to go, anyway it was nice to blend in with the locals even if they were staring at us as we sat on the floor.  A little girl actually walked tentitively up to me and poked me in the arm and ran away but maybe me with a week old beard and the remnants of a scabby mouth post tooth-out scared her, i was fully expecting people to throw stuff at me when she ran back, pointing but that didn't happen thankfully.  So we waited 2 hours on the floor and finally they called our train in chinese. I was tempted to get some naan bread stuff from a counter at the side of the waiting room before we got going but the serving girl picking her nose kinda put me off.

Strange Lolly Ices

Strange Beast
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We thought it was our train anyway, we weren't 100% but when we saw a load of westerners suddenly flood in to a westerners queue with chinese-guide friends we new it was time to follow and see if we were getting the right train.  So i idled up to some american guy and said "excuse me is this train going to Xian?" , the train we needed was the Z19 so the guy pointed at my ticket where it said 'z19' and said "what does that say?".  I immediately punched his fat wife in the face, and kicked him in the nut bag and pointed at my size 11 "merrell" trainers and said "what does that say?", his mates came at me one by one, but a succession of kicks performed while running up the side of kiosks, throwing snotty naan bread and back flips put paid to them.

Actually i grinded what is left of my teeth and moved on but how rude! There was a queue of chinese people being made to wait in a queue as we got on the posh sleeper seats, not really nice that we get preferential treatment but thats the way it went.  Had no idea which carraige we were in either, i asked every attendant on the train and managed to assertain we were in carraige 3 of the massive train.  The compartments were "soft sleeper" these are 4 bed compartments with tvs at end of the bed, quite nice actually.  The soft sleeper i think means with decent mattress, hard sleeper is without and you can also get soft seat and hard seat for 12 hours which for some reason i didn't entertain as an option.

We were told we were in seperate compartments by some chinese bloke, i was in one and ruth in a compartment with the just the chinese bloke, ruth said she was going to cry..poor thing..it had been a big long day and getting all the bags, company split up was the final straw for her i think.  I put my bags up in my compartment and then thought i would check again with some 13 year old girl who spoke good english. Turns out i was in the bunk next to ruth after all, in her compartment with the chinese bloke, strange that eh? so i kicked him in the face...etc....

So arrived in Xian today.

Last few days of Beijing were packed full of sight seeing, perhaps too much in a short space but i was determined to see things i had wanted to see for ages.  On the saturday (assuming it is now monday?) we got up and went to The Forbidden City, this is after getting woken up by a spit-a-thon from the communal bathroom next door.  This is something we have to get used to, a lot of chinese do not just spit they take great delight in snorting everything up and firing it out at high volocity with the noise of someone screaming through a megaphone.

Ruth had to come back from cleaning her teeth this morning as some woman was firing away into the sink and ruth was going to be sick.

Anyway that was our delightful start to the day.  We went to the forbidden city which was a palace "city" complex where a succession of emperors stayed.  They could not leave this giant complex and instead had the hard ship of living there with their tons of wives and girlfriends, going to their purpose-built theatre which holds 1000 actors, looking at their massive temples and courtyards and generally mincing around.  So hard-life all round really.  The place is vast and very chinesey which you would expect being that it is situated in china, the architecture, you know, olde worlde china-type stuff, you get the gist.  You would be walking along a huge corridor and take a turn into a massive courtyard which would lead into another little maze which would lead to some gardens, then to a temple etc, it was very impressive.

We then nipped to Beijing zoo which again was a bit of a culture shock. Whereas in the UK all animals are definitely 'Do not touch/Do not feed' this was "Do not feed but we will give you some food anyway, just in case they fancy a little snack".  The giraffes were being fed, the zebras, little kids putting their whole arm in zebras mouths "Stop this is madness" i wanted to shout.  Under the heading "dangerous animals - do not feed" there was a woman feeding some giant bird that could peck right through her skull in one angry peck-moment.  So we carried on, not wanting to see the carnage, veered well away from the lions which were no doubt just roaming around the canteen with people feeding them burgers.  Talking of which we felt a bit hungry so got an unspecified meat burger from some stall, thanked them for it and immediately deposited them in the bin via 50 yuan as they were disgusting and very much random meat product.

We then went onto tht mythical chinese beast, the one i had always wanted to see, i refer to of course The Dog.  Yes there was a big section of caged dogs and cats from around the world all stuck in little cages and if you paid some money you can get one out of the cage and take one round an obsticle course.  Makes perfect sense to me, we were of course given some hay to feed the dogs with...it wasn't till we had force-fed the dogs some hay that we realised there were some ponies in the far corner looking confused.

It was too wierd, we left and headed towards the summer palace, giant summer residence of the emperor built around a huge lake called kunming lake, really picturesque park full of gardens, bridges, the marble boat which is a boat right and it is made out of...you are a step ahead of me here aren't you? It was built because the emporer's wife wanted one instead of the emperors idea who wanted to build a navy....no doubt she stated how much it wasn't a want that she had a giant marble ship in her garden it was a need, he never gets her anything, navy's are stupid anyway, go on, will make you breakfast in bed.  Anyway she got her way and very nice it is too.  As we were walking around i got myself a lolly ice.  I opened it and immediately knew i was meant to buy it.  When i was 18 i stupidly got a tattoo as did my mate.  My mate got Garfield the cat on his shoulder, he is now a 32 year old man with a tattoo of garfiled on his shoulder...ha ha ha.  Not that funny really as i got Odie, the dog from Garfield on my shoulder  To this day i do not know what possessed us but there on my lolly ice was my exact odie tattoo.  ...wierd eh?

After the summer palace we were ushered into a taxi , i stood my ground and insisted on a 'meter'.  To be fair this what i got, only a meter where the dials moved so fast you got dizzy looking at them.  We were ripped off royally.  Ruth mentioned that the car didn't in fact have a "taxi" sign on it at all.  It was 300 yuan, this is equivalent of about 15 uk pounds, considering the whole trip should have been 30/40, we were getting ripped off fantastically.  It is ok though because he let us off with the 2 so we just paid him 300, jolly decent of him.

The day after was our last in Beijing.