Coffee

Typical. I'm here 7 weeks and the week before I leave we get a coffee machine in the office! Granted it isn't exactly high quality stuff, is one of those "plastic coffee" machines you'd see in canteens and some restaurants, but is still better than the Nescafe instant crap I've been drinking since I got here!

Accommodation

I just got an email from the web site I booked my hotel in shanghai through.

"We refer to the below booking and was advised by the hotel that you did not check-in as reserved. As we did not receive any cancellation notification from you, the hotel will charge a one night no-show penalty to your credit card."

So, someone in the hotel screwed up and didn't process my booking properly. I'm pretty sure I stayed there, I mean I wasn't sleeping on the street or anything, but the hotel seems to think otherwise. I've checked my credit card statement and nope, there's no charge from the hotel for the stay. So, looks like I'm getting 3 nights in a 5-star hotel for the price of one! :-)

(and before anyone says that's dishonest and I should 'fess up, this place had the nerve to charge me 50 quai admittance to the resident's bar and then slap a 15% service charge on an already expensive drink!)

And speaking of accommodation, for a while there it looked like I was going to be left dangling in the wind re: a place to stay for my last few nights here by my company. The boss was asking me to start filling in my expense report before I came back, and was annoyed to say the least when she saw the cost of accommodation. The problem I guess was that when I was coming over I put in my expense request based on me sharing an apartment with someone, and when I got here it turned out I was on my own in the place so the cost is double my original estimate. Also, seems that the rent on the apartment is negotiated on a monthly basis, and April is twice as expensive as Feb was - nearly a grand from April 1st to 14th as opposed to slightly over a grand from Feb 1st to 28th (the fact that one of the guys here who knows someone in the building I'm in says that the "normal" rent on those apartments is about 1/3 what we're paying measn someone is getting screwed somewhere, but it's not me so I don't care).

And here's where the fun begins. the boss was quizzing me on why it was so much, and then said "but you're only there until the 6th right?" My reply was no, I'm there until the 14th when I fly out. Turns out that because it's so much, Sun are only going to pay my rent until the 7th, as that's how long I'm over here on business on, and once I get into my vacation days I'm on my own. Nice eh? I'm off to Japan for 4 days so I'm goign to be paying my own way there nayway, but for a while it looked like I'd have to go off and find a hotel for the 2 days after I come back from Japan and before I fly out. Luckily I managed to sweet-talk the HR person here into letting me have the 2 nights in the apartment for free, so I'm ok for accommodation, no thanks to the people who pay my wages back home.

Shanghai

Well, I'm back from Shanghai anyway. Interesting city, totally different to Beijing! Reminded me a lot of Hong Kong in some ways. Defintely a commercial city, the main activity there seems to be shopping!

Getting there was fun naturally. Managed to get out of work on time, and got to the airport with no problems. Even got through security without difficulty, didn't even set off the metal detector (which is unusual). After that tho, things got fun. Like a good little airline passenger, I was at the airport 2hrs in advance. the whole check-in process tho, from queuing to get the boarding pass to being through security and walking to my gate, only took 15mins tho - way faster than at home! Then tho, things got fun. Maybe China Eastern Airlines are twinned with Aer Lingus or something, 'cos 10 mins before we were supposed to take off, our plane landed on the inward leg, so we were about an hour late taking off. That got me into the airport in Shanghai around 10:30. I thought I'd be able to take the Maglev train into town as abit of a bonus (50km in 8 minutes!) but what I hadn't realised when I was booking my tickets was that the maglev went from Pudong airport, and I was landing at HongQiao, the other international airport (which is probaly why I got it cheaper). so, taxi time! Naturally there were some drivers in the arrivals hall trying to pick up/rip off gullible tourists, so I got approached by a guy saying "taxi rank no good, too slow, you come with me". I asked how much, and when I heard 150 kuai, I headed straight for the taxi rank! 30 mins and 55 kuai later, I was in my hotel.

Once the nice buzz of staying in a plush 5-star famous historic hotel wore off (i.e. 5 mins after i checked in), I decided to see what was around the area. The answer? At 11pm on a friday night? Nothing! It seems as a city that Shanghai shuts down around 10:30 - all the lights in the skyscrapers in Pudong were off and the streets were deserted. The only people I saw were beggars trying to get money off me and shady guys in suits wanting me to go into "beer bars" where "beautiful ladies" would give me "massagee". Not exactly the most inviting first impression of shanghai!

Well, things looked better the next day anyway. I headed out on the Bund (the old riverbank area) to start my sightseeing. it reminded me a lot of the promenade on the Kowloon side of Hong Kong strait, except for one thing - every 10 feet or so I had some guy trying to sell me a rolex, and one guy tried the tea ceremony scam on me! That pretty much set the tone for the next few days anyway. Seems the ppl in shanghai are a lot more pushy about selling stuff than they are in beijing. And "selling" is the opersative word there - if you're not into shopping, then there's not a whole lot to do in Shanghai. Once I'd finshed sightseeing on the Bund, seeing all the big impressive buildings by day that I'd seen the night before, I decide to see what the whole shopping lark was like.

First port of call was Nanjing Road. This would be Shangai's answer maybe to Oxford St, except add 2 or 3 stories more onto each building and add a whole load of signs that you can't read. Different enough in the type of shops to be interesting, but western enough to be fairly familiar. As a non-shopper, nice to look at but not much there for me. I decided to try out a more "traditional" type of shopping, and headed down to Yuyuan market.

Oh. My. God. Talk about packed! I'd thought the marketplaces in Beijing were bad, but this was something else! You lierally had to fight your way through the crowd to get anywhere, especially around the food stalls. IN terms of the shopping, again I was abit disappointed. I didn't really see anything much there that I couldn't haggle for in Beijing.

I spent the rest of the day wandering around ther eand the other big shopping street (Haihuai road), and as soon as it was dark I headed back to the Bund to do the river cruise by night. Prety impressive stuff, I finally saw all the sights lit up. after that I decided to see he view from the top of the Jinmao tower. This is the tallest building in china and the 4th tallest building in the world, 88 stories and 420m high. I wanted to get to the bar on the 87th floor, but to do so I had to take 3 differnt elevators. One (for some reason) to the 2nd flor, then one ot the lobby of the Grand Hyatt hotel ont he 54th floor, then a 3rd to the 87th. I knew the bar would be expensive, but I figured I'd get a drink there for the same price as the admission to the viewing platform one floor up - 50 kuai - and at least I'd have a drink. Only thing was, when I got there I realised it was 60 kuai a beer and a 2 drink minimum!

So, 120 kuai to the poorer but after having a nice chat with some germans I met in the bar, myself and one of the german guys decide to hit the bars. Unfortunately we got to the Metro station at 10:42 to be told that the last metro had gone at 10:40, so we had to take a taxi to the other side of the river. It had also started to rain - the first rain I've seen in 2 months! So, we ended up on Maoming Rd, in a bar called Windows which one of the guys in the Beijing office had told me about. Nice enough place (10 kuai a beer!), but not much action going on so we decide to bar-hop our way down the street. By 2am we'd pretty much seen all there was to see, so we called it a night.

Most of sunday was spent wnadering around in the French Concession part of town, all old buildings and stuff, then I decide to hit another market. I think the stall owners were shocked at the haggling skills I'd picked up in the Beijing markets, they were used to foreigners opeing at mayb half what they said, but I started at my usual 1/10th and always ended up much closer to my figure than to theirs. Sun nught was pretty relaxed, I stuffed myself in a Henanese restaurant I found (beef chilli hotpot, mmm) and then headed back for a while to a abr in a hostel we'd found the night before near my hotel. Monday then was a bit of a loss, I was planning on going to teh Science museum, but i forgot that museums he world over close on mondays! Ah well, at least it looked impressive from the outside...

I could possibly have dome with only the weekned in shanghai rather than taking the monday as well, but there we go. Not being a shopping person, I missed out on 90% of what Shanghai has to offer. One definite thing I'd recommend for any westerner heading that way tho is to get a badge or a t-shirt maybe that says in chinese: "No watches. No bags. No shoes. No DVDs. No massagee. And no, I am not your friend". It will save so much time in the long run!

6 weeks!

Wow, I'm just after realising that I'm here 6 weeks tomorrow! Last time I thought about it, was when I hit the month mark. The last 2 weeks have just sort of snuck up on me. Only two weeks left to go in Beijing!

This evening I'm starting the first what I think of as "real touristy" bit of my trip - I'm off to Shanghai for the weekend. Should be fun, if only I can get over the first hurdle - geting to the airport in time!

flights organized

Well, it took a while of to-ing and fro-ing, but I finally have all of my next few weekends planned out. the last two weekends i haven't really gone anywhere or done anything (apart from wearing a suit and getting drunk in a posh hotel for Paddys day), but I'm mkaing up for that now! This is my schedule for the next few weekends:

• This weekend - Shanghai for 3 days


• Next weekend - Xi'an for 2 days


• The weekend after - Tokyo for 5 days


• the weekned after - Back to Dublin

Booking flights over here ins't as easy as it is back home anyway - I found a website (elong.net) which I could get the flights off, but for the domestic flights I had to pay cash on delivery. So, I'd get them to send it to work, and then pick it up there and hand over a wodge of RMB notes - all very dodgy looking, but all above board!

Today's booking has to take the cake tho. I've talked about my problems with booking the Tokyo tickets before (expedia not wanting to take my credit card etc), so I finally got it through elong. To pay by credit card I had to call them up as the flights were coming up as e-tickets on the web but were still asking for a delivery address. There was a lot of back and forth and in the end to pay by credit card I eventually had to fax them my passport and the front and back of my card.

The kicker came tho when the tickets were delivered - I was expecting normal paper tickets like I got with the rest, but when I opened the envelope the courier had given me, I found a printout of an e-booking form from NorthWest Airlines (who incodentally had refused to take my card last week)! So, instead of emailing me the e-booking confirmation like anyone back home would do, they printed it out and sent it to me by cycle courier! You couldn't make this stuff up!

So anway, it's all sorted, I have the flights all in my posession (or at least the tickets), and all that's left is the acomodation. I'm still wating on booking confirmation, but it looks like I'll be getting a room in the 5-star allegedly very famous Peace Hotel in Shanghai for about €88 a night. Not too bad, altho probably ruinously expensive by local standards. What the hell, I'm on holiday! :-)

what does this mean?

Can someone please tell me what the hell this road sign means?

I've seen it in a few places now - "no blowing up cars" maybe?

Paddy's weekend

Well, this year I've been doing Paddy's day in style! No wandering out to the parade at 12 and then going straight to the pub after for me, this year it's all been official receptions and black tie balls! When I registered with the Irish embassy here when I arived, I automatically got put on the guest-list for the embassy Paddy's night party. After a bit of problem with getting the mailbox key off the landlord, I finally got the invite in my hands, so I threw on one of my new tailored shirts, grabbed a pair of good(ish) pants and headed along.

I was a bit surprised on the way in, I was expecting someone to be checking my invite and all, or maybe asking for some ID to prove I was irish, but I just walked in the door, no questions asked! I could have been anyone - I could even have been english! Apparently there's only 160 Irish ppl "officially" here in Beijing, but it seems that all of them came to the embassy and everyone brought a friend! The place was fairly busy, but it was a strange sort of party. You had maybe two types of ppl there, the official/business types in the suits who were there pretty much to network and who spent the whole time swapping business cards, and then you had the rest of us normal gobshytes who were just hovering around, shuttling between the buffet table and the bar!

I was expecting some sort of "official" part to the night, like a speech from the Ambassador or something, but there was none (he's not big into speeches at this kind of thing apparently). The party pretty much consisted of ppl wandering in, hobnobimng a bit, and wandering out again. Strange. Afterwards, a few of us headed out to Brown's down in Sanlitun (which seems to be becoming my "local" here!), where there was an Irish Music night. That was a bit more lively than the embassy do, and I ended up getting in around 6am :-)

Yesterday as a reult was fairly quiet. I went down to the Pearl Market again with Peter and arranged to get some stuff shipped home with Sandy, the owner of the shop we were getting all our pearls in. we went down to Dazhalan Hutong after, and I picked up a dirt cheap pair of pants for the Irish Ball which I'd gotten tickets for. This one is one of the big ex-pat social events of the year here in Beijing, and it was held in a 900-seater ballroom in the Kerry Center. It was a Black Tie do, so I should really have gotten a tux, but I'd brought my black suit jacket from ireland and decided that would do! :-) I could have gotten a tux tailored for me for about €100, but decided there was no point, how many times in my life will I be wearing one of them again!

The party was...... not exactly what I expected. It was packed full of ppl in suits of all shapes & sizes (even two guys in green velvet dresed as "Austin O'Powers"), all very fancy and all, and the decor was as you'd expect from a high-class hotel - a few shamrocks ad harps and flags, but all done very tastefully. The meal was excellent, 5 courses with the main one being a nice bit of braised steak (my only complaint on that one was lack of quantity!). There were a few speeches which were unavoidable but mercifully short, and then a resident MC whose really crap jokes we tolerated 'cos he was the one giving out the spot prizes, and then the band came on.

...And here's where things started to go slightly wrong. it was an irish band, so the first few songs were the expected jigs and reels, but then they started doing more "normal" songs, and the music drifted slowly towards wedding band teritory. At this stage a lot of ppl started drifting out towards the free bar, having exhausted the free bottles of jameson that were on each table, and that sort of set the tone for the rest of the night. Then, about midnight, the rugby came on, so the party definitely split into two halves - the people in the ballroom dancing and the people out in the reception area watching the TV! I sort of wandered in and out between the two for a while, at least until the Ireland v England game came on. By that stage, most of the people had left, and all that were left were the "die-hards" - the die-hard dancers in one room and the die-hard drinkers and rugger fans in the other! :-)

the band wrapped up about 1ish, ad most pple left then. After the game ended, everyone else cleared out, and a few of us headed off to try to find liveliness and drink somewhere else, but at 4am there was a shortage of both!

Weather!

This is crazy. On saturday it was snowing here, and today it's 20 degrees outside! What the hell?

It's official...

Well, after a few days of arguing with the estate agent and the landlord about getting the keys to my letterbox, I was finally able to get in and get my invitation to the official embassy do tomorrow night. Now all I have to do is to figure out what to wear........

how to count in chinese

I found this one when I was looking for something else a while back, it's something I learned soon after i got here:how to count to ten in chinese on one hand. Is a fair bit different to our one!



According to my chinese teacher, one of her students went into McDonalds and was trying to get two burgers, so he held up his thumb & index finger to show he wanted two, just like he'd do at home in the US. Well, you can see from above how many he actually got.... :-)

Irish Film Night

Well, our paddy's day celebrations started here last night. There was an "Irish film night" set up by a bunch of the Irish lads here. I'm not sure why, but they picked some place out in the ass-end of nowhere to have it - was a film center in an industrial estate, which during the day is supposed to be a lively arty hippy type place but at night is just bleak.

The main flick was your typical irish film - depressing. It was the one from (I think) last year about two guys in a whelchair - back home it was called "Inside I'm Dancing", but here the name was "Rory O'Shea was here" (for some reason). I'm not going to spoil it but don't expect a happy ending. There was one short flick tho which was good, called "Yu Ming is ainm dom", about a Chinese guy who decides to move to Ireland. Before he comes over, he reads that the official language of Ireland is Irish, so he goes and learns Irish. Then he arrives here and realises that everyone speaks english!

Was short but pretty funny, but the funniest part of it (for me anyway) is that at the end he's supposed to be heading to Connemara on a bus (I don't thnk I'm putting in a big huge plot spoiler here anyway...). Thing is, you see two shots of him heading down the "west of ireland" coastline, but they used Bonmahon, in Waterford, where I'm from! Small world eh? I'm trying to find some pictures to prove it to the lads here but there isn't any good enough shots up on the copper coast website of the locations they used.

Anyway, because I was the only one there flying the colours (had me rugby jersey on from Cardiff last year), I had to step in for quite a few of the photos for the event. So, I should be appearing up on IrishBeijing.org any day now.

I'm feeling a tad delicate after it tho, as there were only 20 ppl at it and they had a whole keg of Guinness which had to be drunk on the night. I'm not sure was my crap morning because of the Guinness (which I'd never drink at home), or the dodgy fish & chips we went for after, but for a while I was talking to God on the Big White telephone. I wouldn't mind but I had a huge big meeting with all of my bosses on the status of my current project (as in, the reason I'm over here) this morning. Ah well, I managed to get through it anyway (just about). Roll on the next event!

Under Construction

I always make fun of my mother whenever she goes on holidays for her famous remark on the Eiffel Tower: we I asked her after she came back from Paris what she thought of it, she replied that it was nice but "it'll be even better when they finish it off and take down all the scaffolding" :-) Well, these days you could pretty much say the same thing about Beijing. Seems most of the city is under construction, either building new stuff or repairing old stuff for the 2008 Olympics. If you go somewhere touristy, Chances are part of it will be fenced off and covered in scaffolding, like the pagoda at the top of the hill in Jingshang park, the Arrow Tower in Tian'anmen, the main hall in the Forbidden City, or the Hall of Prayer in Tiantan park.

Yesterday took the cake tho in terms of having things fenced off. I decided to go up and take a look at Beihai lake, just to the northwest of the Forbidden City. So, I got off the metro at tiananamen west, walked the half an hour or so up Nanchangjie (did I mention before that beijing is BIG?), paid my ¥5 to go into the park, and then discovered as soon as I got across the bridge onto Jade Island that 3/4 of it is fenced off and under construction! I wouldn't mind but it's the 3/4 that has all of the interesting stuff on it, like the Dagobah Temple and the Hall of Ripples! So, all that was left to me was a nice leisurely walk around the lake to see the Five Dragon pavilions or the Hall of Celestial Kings, but that was about a 1km walk and from a distance I could see hints of scaffolding on them too, so I gave it up as a bad job and went shopping down in Dazhalan Hutong instead!

So, if you're coming to beijing on holidays and want to see everything there is to see, I'd almost suggest waiting until September 2008 to come. By then everything will be all ship-shape, the olympics will be over and the prices of everything should maybe be starting to come back to normal after everyone has had their fill of gouging the olympic tourists!

shopping

Well, I didn't really do all that much in the way of touristy stuff this weekend (see the next post). I wasn't sitting around on my arse though. I had great plans to go off by train somewhere outside of beijing this weekend, but by friday I still hadn't picked a place. Thne my plans were slightly scuppered by two facts: one was that no-one had told me that you actually have to book train tickets at least a day in advance (as opposed to back home where you can get your ticket for the 1800 train at 1759 if you're a fast enough runner to make the platform). The other factor was the weather, there was apparently supposed to be a dust storm over the weekend, and even by friday evening all of the cars going along the road were covered in a light layer of Gobi desert dust and you could feel it slightly tickling the back of your throat as you breathed in. So I decided to not make any plans and see what happened.

What happened first was that it snowed again! Every time I think I can pack up my woolies and ship them home, the weather takes a nosedive and the snow comes out! I get up on sat morning and lok out, and there's a few flakes falling. By the time I get out to get the taxi to meet Peter it's a regular snow shower, complete with plummeting temperatures. So, rather than hitting the tourist spots in the cold and snow, we hit the nice warm indoor markets instead*!

So, now after the weekend I have 2, maybe 3 people crossed off my must-get-presents-for list, and I have a few things for myself too. I'm now the owner (or will be when they're done) of 3 custom tailored shirts (¥100 each), a pair of Oakley shades (¥80), a Rolex (¥150) and Spyder ski jacket and pants (¥200 and ¥120), plus a few other little bits and pieces. Granted the oakleys, the rolex and (most probably) the ski gear aren't exactly original manufacturer's models, but they're still good enough!

Of course the fun part of shopping here is the haggling. Rule of thumb, if you don't see a price tag, start the negotiations! Anyone who takes the first price they give you deserves to be ripped off :-) The rule seems to be they start ridiculously high, you start ridiculously low, and ye meet somewhere near the middle. if you're good enough, you'll meet closer to your price than to theirs, and if you're really good you'll meet pretty close to your original price! Normally I start at between a fifth and a tenth of their original price, depending on what the price is (if it isn't too expensive I'll start higher), and then when they pretend to be shocked and say "you're joking!", I just reply "well, you started it first". You pretyt much have to be pretty cheeky about the whole thign too - just remember, you'll never offend them 'cos they've been workign there for god knows how long, and they'll never sell it to you for below their cost, so keep on pushing. And the best trick to get a lower price: walk away! If they call you back, you can definitely get it for lower!

So, most of saturday and a bit of today was actually spent at the Pearl Market down by Tiantan park, as Peter (the german guy I met at work) wanted to get some pearls and stuff for his wife. So, on a tip from someone else in the company, we bypassed the main floor of the market (where a lot of the pearls are of dubious quality anyway) and headed up to the quality shops on the 4th floor. We spent quite a bit of time in Sandy's pearl store, and Peter spent so much money there over the last 2 days that this evening Sandy (the owner) and her boyfriend took us out for dinner and a foot massage! I'd never had a chinese foot massage before, all I can say is "wow"! :-)

(* - oh yeah, and the snow had stopped by around 2pm sat afternoon but by then we were in shopping mode!)

Making up for lost time.

Last week in work one of the irish guys was taking the piss out of me 'cos I'd been here in Beijing a month and hadn't been to the bars in Sanlitun (the bar street) yet. Well, I've definitely made up for it now! Since last friday night, I've stayed in on sunday and monday nights, and of the other nights, one was a 3:30am finish and four others ended between 4am and 6am (and the only reason for the 3am was that I had ot be up at 6:30am to go to the Great Wall). I've gone from not knowing where nay of the bars in Sanlitun were to knowing where most of the good ones are (i'm apparenly stil missing 2 tho), and I've drank more beer and gotten more girl's phone numbers in the last week than I have in the last year! I'm feeling a bit tired now after it all, so I hope I have a few quiet nights this week before Paddy's weekend kicks in.....

Great Wall pictures

Well, I finally have my Great Wall pictures up on flickr. They're at http://www.flickr.com/photos/miles-away-from-home/sets/72057594079596996/.

free drink!

I discovered last night that one of my local nightclubs does a special offer on weds nights: 50 kuai in on the door and then all the cocktails you can drink. Feeling a bit tired this morning as a result.

Where's Ireland gone?

I was just trying to book my trip to Tokyo on expedia.com, and noticed one small detail missing when it came time to pay online. When I went to enter my credit card details, I noticed that Ireland was missing from the list! There are places like Pitcairn Islands and the Vatican, but no Ireland! It's not under 'I' for Ireland, 'E' for Eire (which really only UK sites seem to use anyway), or 'R' for Republic of Ireland.

I thought this might just be the expedia.com site, but no, expedia.co.uk is missing its nearest neighbour too. Looking though the list, it seems that such other lovely places like Iran, Iraq, Syria and North Korea aren't there either. Have expedia heard something we haven't about Ireland being placed on the Axis of Evil list or soemthing? I mean, there are places I've never heard of on there - just where the fuck is Svalbard, or the Jan Mayen Islands, or Mayotte? It seems if I was from Kyrgyzstan or Eritrea I could book my flights, but not if I'm from the 26 counties!

Bit of a bummer too, since it was the only site I found which would actually give me decent(ish) flight & accomodation rates - I don't fancy paying Singapore Airlines 4 grand for a return flight for 4 days!

Update:

I emailed Expedia to ask them about this, and it seems that I'm not the only one who can't book:

"Unfortunately, Expedia.co.uk cannot offer services to customers who live outside the UK. Although it may appear that other countries can book, when you go through to pay, the web site declines this."

So why have the option there to pick other countries? Are they just trying to tease us or something?

My chinese name

I finally have a chinese name! We were asking our teacher the last day about what our names would be in chinese, so she told us today. Mine is apparently 柯福仁, or "Ke Fu Ren". I'm not sure what the "Ke" translates as, but "Fu" is "Lucky" and "Ren" is something like "gentleman". So, I'm a lucky gentleman. Hmm.....

The Wall!

Well, I'm back from the wall. Whew! Was a tough day, but worth it. Like I said last night/this morning, I was up at 5:30 after 3hrs sleep to get to a hostel in Nanlogou Hutong for 6:45am to get our lift to the wall. Was a cheap enough day - 3hr bus trip, 5(ish) hrs on the wall, 3hrs back, all for 155 kuai, with the Great Wall Adventure Club! We got dropped off in a place called Jinshanling around 10am and then had a 9km hike along the wall to get to Simitai where the bus was to pick us up around 2:30ish.

Of course, the ad for the trip said "9km", but that was 9km as the crow flies, and as you can see by the pic we were going nowhere near as straight as that! Also, they never mentioned the 30min hike from where the bus drops you off to the actual wall, and the 20min hike at the other end in Simatai either! Simatai is a big tourist spot, one of the main places you visit the wall from so there's some facilities there. Jinshanling however is anything but! The only reason we stopped there was because it was a place where the road/dirt track went relatively near the wall.

We thought we had tour guides as well to bring us along the wall - as if you really need directions on a wall, all you need to know is which side is Mongolia and which is China, and we had that figured out in 30 secs. True enough, the "guides" only stayed with us until we stopped for lunch, and as soon as we sat down they produced postcards, books and t-shirts from their bags and started pestering us to buy them! Me and another guy got a t-shirt each in the end for 20 kuai, and as soon as it was clear we weren't buying anything else, our "guides" pissed off! According to the blurb on the website, " It is safer as the service in this section of Great Wall includes that one tour guide is responsible for one tourist, for his/her safety actually. When needed, the tour guides will go hand in hand to protect the tourists.". Only if they're buying stuff apparently! We didn't mind tho, as it was such a quiet part of the wall that they were the only ones really trying to sell us stuff - it's apparently pretty bad at the more "popular" spots like Badaling and Mutianyu.

As for the wall itself, well, wow. The first bit was easy enough, and the last bit (coming in to Simatai), but the middle 2-3km is pretty tough on the auld legs. You're talking maybe 70-degree slopes on one or two hills, and as it's a part of the wall that has never been repaired it can be tricky going as well (in one part the wall has collapsed and if you stay on the wall it's only 2 bricks wide for a dozen meters or so). And the steps! At home you think you're doing good if you take the stairs to say the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Sagrada Familia in Barca - I was doing the equivalent I reckon about once every 45min! You defintely start feeling it in your legs by the end.

Ah well, now I can say "been there, done that, bought the t-shirt!" :-)

Sanlitun - finally!

Well, I finally made it to the bar area here in Beijing. I was out last night in a nightclub called propaganda just around the corner from me here in Wudaokou, not a bad spot, some interesting people (some even of the opposite sex and all!). Now, I'm just back from a bar called Brown's. Not a lot of locals there, a lot of yanks in fact, but still good. We were meant to go to a bar called The Hidden Tree, but the taxi dropped us off the wrong end of Sanlitun Bailu and then one of the lads had to find a drinklink to top up. By the time we got the money we just wanted to get to the nearest place and get ourselvs outside of some beer! I wasn't overly impressed by it at first, sort of reminded me of so many dublin "look at me I'm one of the beautiful people" pubs, plus teh tsingdao being 30 kwai didn't help much, but it started to get livelier after about 12. It seems that dancing on the bar is not only allowed there, but encouraged in fact - if more then 4 ppl do it, the barman hands up a tray of free shots! I would have liked to have stayed a bit longer longer than 2am in the end, but I sort of have to be up at 5:30am to get to the place I'm taking the great Wall Tour from. Ah well, 3hrs sleep awaits...... :-(

I like dogs......

......but I couldn't eat a whole one. Yup, I've done what everyone was taking the piss out of when they heard I was coming over here: I ate dog! Contrary to popular opinion you can't get it just anywhere over here, we had to go to a special restaurant to get it. We went out playing pool last night (just like every thursday), then one of the guys asked me "So, have you eaten dog yet?" I said no, so we all hopped in two taxis and headed out to this special restaurant in god-knows-where.

I had this surreal mental image when we went into the restaurant of it being like when you order fish: all the fish swimming around in the tank and you point out the one you want (in this case, them leading a bunch of canines out on leashes and you picking one). We didn't get to see fido though until he landed on our plate! It was sort of done like the hot-pot I've had a good few times now: there's a big pot of stock in the center of the table with a gas ring underneath, and you dip the slices of dog in until they're cooked to your liking.

Now the question everyone'll ask: how was it? Well, it didn't taste like chicken for a start! :-P In texture and color, it looked a lot like mutton, and tasted a bit like it too, although it was a bit of a stronger, sharper taste. I guess tho that differnt breeds taste differnt, like a rottweiler would be a lot tougher than a poodle (not that there'd be much eating on a poodle!). I didn't have much of an inclination to ask what sort of dog it was I was munching down, so I can't tell you that one.

Hmm, so so far I've had scorpion, frog, sheep spine, rat (possibly, although I think Helen was joking about that in the restaurant the other day), and dog. Hmm, have to find a good snake place around here now! :-)