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so i have had an interesting couple of days here in beijing.
i'm almost used to the chinese people starting at me because i'm white and asking to take photos of me, i'm also used to them constantly spitting in the street ... and in the subway, and also used to seeing babies with trousers with open backs so they can just poo where-ever they are! china is a big culture shock ... but i love it!
on thursday i decided to go for a wander around the area where my hostel is. it is so beautiful and traditional and what i expected china to be like with little alleyways and people cycling around and cooking in the street. the government wants to knock these areas down, but they are the best part of beijing. i then ended up in a big built up area full of skyscrapers and kfcs which i did not like. oh and then i got lost! this is where i realised hardly anyone in beijing speaks english and communicating is very difficult. anyway i did evenutally find my way back to the hostel ... 4 hours later! i met some people at the hostel, there was 2 londoners and 2 americans and one of the americans had heard about this really good restaurant so we headed off to try and find it. and shock we got lost! getting around beijing is very complicated. after 2 hours of wandering around and trying to ask locals where we were, we finally found it. i was starving! had an amazing meal of garlic and onion chicken that was cooked right in front of me. surprisingly liking the food here, apart from the questionable meat dumpling i ate from a street vendor that same day! ha.
the subways here are also mad. they are so crowded and if there isn't enough room, one of the subway guards pushes everyone in so that the doors can close! not the place to be if you are claustriphobic.
yesterday (friday) was the day i fell in love with china. before that i wasn't yet convinced. me, one of the londoners and a new dutch girl decided to go to the llama temple and the temple of heaven. both were beautiful, especially the llama temple, which was buddist and had people burning insense and praying to the statues. took way too many photos which i'll try to upload soon. but at the temple of heaven you had to pay an entrance fee to the gardens and then they wanted more money to get past a gate to get closer to the temple and so we settled for seeing it from the gardens. in the gardens of the temple, there were people singing karaoke. now i new the chinese liked karaoke but i didn't realise how much! there were crowds of people watching this couple sing - i have no idea how the woman's voice could go that high! so we sat and watched them for a while. in the audience for this karaoke show was the happiest chinese man i've ever seen, in fact the happiest man in the world i've ever seen! he must've been the couple's biggest fan or something and so he sat right next to them smiling and swaying and he had these plastic hands for clapping everytime they finished a song. he was also very interested in us and kept clapping towards us. he was a legend. i have photos and a video of him!
after this we tried to find our way to the famous night market. on the way we passed little old men and women playing cards and chess in the street. we also passed a group of elderly chinese doing tai chi outside an office building. it's really nice how everyones so sociable in china and they all do things as a community. the night market was not disappointing at all - scorpions, starfish, centipedes, grasshoppers, caterpillars and seahorses on sticks! yummy! the horrible thing was the little scorpions were impaled on the sticks but they were still alive so every now and then they would wriggle their legs about! i saw a chinese man next to me munching into them, he seemed to be enjoying it but there was no way i was finding out how they tasted!
on the way back to the hostel we made a slight error in judgement ... for some reason no taxis would take us back that way. 7 of them refused us without any explanation so i'm not sure what their reasons were! so after walking miles that day and with aching feet we couldn't even face walking to the subway station. and so we saw this form of taxi which can only be described as similar to a tuk tuk but smaller and less stable. it was a homemade one out of a motorbike and a few planks of wood and metal. after haggling with the man for 10 minutes he agreed he would take us back for 20 yuan. so we squish on to the death trap and off we go! it was terrifying! it kept rocking back and forth, and going over bumps was awful! the driver kept turning round to us and laughing and speaking in chinese (and not looking at the road!) and it was at this point we noticed he was stinking of alcohol! this 'thing' was moving slower than cyclist and even some pedestrians. he then turned round again and kissed the dutch girls arm ... then he just stopped at the end of the road and said he wanted more than 20 yuan. when we refused he just kept going on and on. the london man told us to start walking away and he would deal with it. dealing with it cost him 50 yuan! so that was an interesting end to the evening and made us all realise how much we value our lives and will not get on such contraptions again! haha. and we ended up having to take the subway anyway ...
today i'm off to my other hotel before my tour starts tomorrow. i get to stay in a hotel rather than a hostel for a month so that will be lovely! i'm also on the hunt for some peking duck ...
hope yous are all well, will keep you updated on my trip to the great wall and the forbidden city in the next few days :)
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