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Hello all,
Sorry I haven't had a chance to provide you with any updates in a while but internet use in China is proving difficult and slow. Right, enought about that. What has happened to us in Beijing so far? Me and Liam have been mistaken for brothers on at least 5 separate occasions. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Maybe if my face had been scalded by a hot shower or I'd been in a similiar disfiguring accident I'd understand. I'm having a tough time forgiving the Chinese for that faux pas.
On the train from Ulaan Baator to Beijing we met 5 Dublin lads. Liam immediately felt an affinity with them. As he's worked in Dublin for the past 5 years, he feels it's now his adopted home and these were his brothers. They chatted about Croker, nightlinks and the merits of unshod vs shod piebalds. The lads and Liam safely navigated the dangerous streets of Beijing from the train station to the Far East International Hostel where we were all staying. We strangely encountered no problems along the way. I think the locals recognised that Liam's posse were the meanest dogs in the whole dang town. The hostel was situated down a side-street (hutong) and was an ideal spot for bargains and to springboard from when checking out the rest of Beijing. Word on the hutong was that the Dublin lads would be staying at least as long as us. They had to negotiate the minefield of applying for a Vietnamese visa from Beijing. They found the most difficult part of the whole process was turning up to the embassy on a day when it wasn't closed. Who could have predicted everything would have been shut for Chinese New Year, and the day after that and the day after that. You'd think they would have had the foresight to check when the embassy would be reopening when they had first scoped the place out ... but no. The lads confessed to me afterwards that they went to the embassy each day in the hope that they might find an open window somewhere, process the visa themselves and make off with the office supplies.
The first sightseeing activity we took in was the Great Wall. We had decided to get dropped off at the portion of the wall which was the second farthest from Beijing ¨C Jingshan ¨C and then walk the 9km to the third farthest entrance ¨C Simaotai. This was the most impressive thing I've seen on the trip so far - apart from Liam's deodorant collection. I'd recommend the route we took to anyone planning to go. You start off in a fairly sturdy section of the wall and as you go along it begins to crumble so that you can see it as it was in it's heyday and also how it has deteriorated over time. There are one or two hairy bits - aside from Liam's ever increasing mullet - along the way which require you to climb down a watchtower and jump onto the section of wall remaining below but it's what makes it so memorable. At the end of our hike we had hoped to get a zipline from the wall, across a valley to the pick-up point below. As luck would have it the zipline was closed 2 days of the year - Chinese New Year's Eve & Day. We were there on Chinese New Year's Eve.
We had booked the Great Wall tour with a friendly Chinese girl across the road from the hotel. She also helped us with tickets for the Chinese Acrobatics. This was excellent and well worth a visit. I was glued to the performance despite Liam's jaw repeatedly hitting the floor beside me during the 70-minute long performance. At least I hope it was his jaw! If you see anything in Beijing it must be the Great Wall and the acrobatics.
The day we arrived at the Forbidden City it was bitterly cold. Everything appeared to be going well until we arrived inside the front gate, did as our Lonely Planet Bible suggested and looked for the Roger Moore audio tour. The one we got was 40 Yuan (about 4 Euro) each with a total 200 Yuan deposit. As soon as we started it playing though, I could see Liam's face turned from gray, to white, to red and then a colour I'd never seen before. He'd expected to hear Roger Moore's soft, soothing, steamy tones to be licking his ears. Instead Roger's voice sounded strangely Chinese, feminine and digitally generated. Now in another place or time, in the privacy of Liam's own home, such a recording might have appealed to him but not just now. I thought to myself "Oh no, someone's going to get fired!". Liam stormed up to the counter where we'd purchased the audio tour and demanded to know why Roger Moore's suggestive wink and elbow language wasn't filling his ears. They calmly explained that the Roger Moore tour was available, in plain sight, to the right of their stand. Their tour was an alternative English audio tour. Liam was having none of it and insisted on getting his money back so that we could purchase Roger. Such a hulla balloo was created that Forbidden City officials came to mediate. I hung back waiting to see what would unfold. I did think to myself at the time that if Liam got arrested for public disorder would I continue on the trip solo? 'Definitely', I concluded. It would be what Liam would have wanted. After all, he would have agreed it would have been of no benefit to me to stay hanging around Beijing. I came back to reality when I heard Liam explaining to the official that English was his second language. He was Irish. Irish was his first language and English his second. He could understand '007' because he had seen him in such films as "The Spy Who Loved Me", "Octopussy" and "For Your Eyes Only". I felt embarrassed for the lad. He'd clearly lost it. As I shrugged my shoulders and made helpless gestures behind Liam's back the officials spotted the feverish glint in his eyes and relented, giving him his money and deposit back. Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth I piggy-backed on Liam's sound argument and told them that I had difficulty understanding the foreign-sounding language on the tape also and, as I too was Irish, could I please have my money and deposit back? They obliged and we skipped over to the Roger Moore stand like men who had just seen the sun after a 20 year stint in solitary. I gave my drivers licence in the form of my ICYC card as security for the Roger Moore tapes and in we went in.
I wasn't too impressed with The Forbidden City'. Maybe it was the cold or the hundreds of Chinese tourists who were there for Chinese New Years Day but I think really that despite all the tourists the place seemed dead and empty. You could only peer inside the buildings in the City. You were not allowed to enter them so you couldn't get a feel for what they would have been like at the height of the various Chinese Dynasties. Supposedly, it wasn't unheard of for an emperor to have as many as 27 concubines housed in the City as well as his wife. Those were the days.
I'll sign off for now. Hopefully I'll provide a further update a bit sooner than this one next.
Dec.
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