Beijing

It's Monday night here, I returned from a weekend trip to Beijing early this morning. It's a pretty incredible city. The trip began on Thursday night by catching a 12 hour overnight train to the capital. I was pretty nervous about this...I'd been warned that this was a pretty brutal trip. My fears were not allayed upon entering the train and finding how tightly packed together we were. Bunkbeds three high and considerably less wide than university dorm beds. When the train started it made some pretty intense noises too, like it was going to fall apart. But it turned out alright. I wouldn't want to do it in the day time but the overnight was okay. Friday in Beijing my travelling companion and amateur tour guide, Jesse, took my to the Temple of Heaven and then to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. The Temple of Heaven is one of the lesser tourist attractions in China but still very impressive. It's a place that Chinese emperors used to go to to pray for good harvests. The traditional Chinese architecture and gardening was quite something. Tiananmen Square was a letdown I suppose. I guess it's more exciting because of it's historical importance. This is where Chairman Mao declared the founding of the People's Republic of China. I was hoping that I would recognize it from the famous student riots that occured there but these days it's just a big square with people hanging out in it. Kinda dull :) The Forbidden City on the other hand was anything but dull. Upon entering I definitely had a sense of letdown...I was expecting to be immediately wowed but instead I saw portable basketball nets and tourist shops. It is however a site that just gets progressively better and better. The deeper you go the more amazed you are. I won't even bother trying to describe it, it's a lost cause. You could easily stay there for a week and not see all of it. It's stunningly beautiful. And hard to believe that it was just over a hundred years ago that it was still the home of an all powerful emperor.

On Saturday Jesse had to go about her own business for the day so I joined a tour group and went to visit the Great Wall and some other things. If I was impressed by the Forbidden City, I was astounded by the Great Wall. I know it sounds obvious but the thing is just so damned big! I was joined on the tour by a couple of Bostonians and we hiked up and down the Wall together for a couple of hours. There are places where the stairs are so steep that you've got to essentially crawl up them. The whole way the Wall is covered with Chinese people climbing as well. We're talking everything from 80 year old women to 2 year old kids. The kids are particularly cute. Some of the stairs are pushing two feet high and these little kids clamber up them, positively delighted with themselves. If they were my kids I'd be terrified that they'd slip and fall...it would be a nasty, nasty tumble on these stairs. The view is, of course, astounding. You can see the Wall winding and climbing for miles in every direction. The thing is built on top of a mountain for heavens sakes. It's the sort of accomplishment that when first suggested must get a lot of laughs for being an impossible task.

Sunday I was taken to the Summer Palace. This is another jaw dropping tourist attraction. It's a huge palace/garden in the middle of the city. It's centered around a huge manmade lake and is designed in the most clever way. The Chinese philosophy about gardens is that you should never be able to see the whole thing...it's supposed to unfold in front of you as walk through it. Time after time I would walk around a corner and be stunned by the view that suddenly appeared before me. The decadance and grandeur was just out of this world.

Among other smaller things, I saw the Olympic facilities, a silk factory, jade museum, cloisonne factory and traditional Chinese tea house. I'm not usually much of one for these types of tourist attractions but I quite enjoyed it this time.

The trip ended on a bad note unfortunately. I started feeling ill on Sunday afternoon and by Sunday evening when I got on the train to head back to Jilin I was quite sick. I think perhaps the water did it to me. The train ride was hell. 12 hours, a lot of which was spent in the bathroom (haha, and not a western bathroom! just a hole in the floor), cramped quarters, people smoking like chimnies. It's one of the worst nights I can ever remember having. I stayed home from work today and I don't regret it at all. I'm feeling better now but what an awful night. Once I feel back to normal I'm sure it'll be a good story though...just another part of the deal when you're in a developing country.

With regards to pictures, I have hundreds from my time so far in China which I'm dying to post. It's not easy though. Getting the pictures onto the computer is hard because the setup is all in Chinese and then posting the pictures is proving to be quite a trick because of all of the blocked sites here. I'm working on it, I hope to have them up within a week.

Also, I have Skype now and it works great so if you're set up for it you should log on from time to time.

Cheers from Zhong Guo (Chinese for China).

Jailhouse Rock

The learning curve remains exceptionally steep. On Saturday I signed a lease for an apartment to live in. I had been staying in a dorm but wanted something a bit more settled. This experience nearly landed me in jail today. Yep. Jail. It seems that it's Chinese law that you need to register your apartment within 24 hours of signing a lease. If not, jail. I escaped this fate on a technicality. The true owner of the apartment is the mother-in-law of the lady who used to live there. It was the lady who lived there that signed the lease however, thus rendering the lease invalid and me still free. Yikes.

Okay, I'm exaggerating a bit. I don't think they would have thrown me in a cell for a small misunderstanding like this but apparently they could have. The rest of the experience was also very different than renting an apartment in Canada...for example I had to pay the full years rent up front. That hurt. And bills work differently, it's backwards from Canada. In Canada the power company keeps tabs on you as an individual and has a file on you and sends you a bill every month. Here, it's up to the individual to keep track of the power company. They don't care who lives in the apartment, just that the amount owing is paid every month. Otherwise the power gets shut off. It's a good example of the old adage "there's more than one way to skin a cat". Which, come to think of it, is a really disgusting adage. Hmmmm.