Kyrgyzstan is ace. China is rubbish. Here's why.
I got a 20 hour overnight train from Turpan to Kashgar with Crystal from Canada and Theo from Holland. We grabbed a taxi in Kashgar and the driver asked us all where we were from. "Ah, Canada. Very big country," he said to Crystal. "Well, China is a very big country," we ventured. The taxi driver turned slightly in his seat and with a wink and a smile said, "You're not in China." Damn right. Kashgar was at the crossroads of the old silk road. A meeting place for traders and travelers from east Asia through to Europe and back again. It was the Hong Kong or Singapore of it's day and it still reeks of a bygone age with markets and bazaars, donkeys and car horns, kebabs and mosques, dust and dirt and the Chinese army in abundance none of which will be appearing on any postcards very soon. Kashgar is Kashgar.
On the Friday that i was there me and two other English fellas, James and Martin, went for a wander around Kashgar taking in markets and alleyways and people and sounds. We came back to the centre of town to see a row of about 15 jeeps all armed with huge guns, side arms and even bayonets lined up in front of the main square and the mosque. The men in the jeeps were casually pointing their guns at the market and shoppers on the other side of the road where we stood. It was a very provocative sight. A mosque, a town square, a load of jeeps with guns, a road, shoppers and then us stood there with our cameras. Just as i was about to take a picture, a group of policemen appeared and shouted at me and James. They took our cameras from us and looked at our pics and then handed my camera back, with looks of disapproval, before taking James to the police station. We met up later and giggled like school kids who'd been caught doing something wrong. The whole time we were in Kashgar we saw dozens of police or army patrols on foot or in massive trucks, always armed and always telling tourists not to take pictures. They are extremely paranoid and obviously have orders to stop any demo or violence, whatever size, and to minimise any publicity, however small, from the area.
China needs Xinjiang province more than Xinjiang province needs China. Uighur people have been there for centuries (since the Silk Road and probably before) but as China's economy booms it needs the oil and gas and minerals flowing out of central Asia which borders the province. So they're modernising it, building roads, train lines and hospitals and apartments that nobody really asked for whilst destroying the old alleyways and markets and marginalising the culture in favour of development, trying to include Xinjiang and Uighurs into China Inc. with the rest of the country. It's strange and quite sad to see a kind of economic colonialism in action but who am i to criticise? I'm British.
Anyway, enough of all of that political human rights boring crap. I saw a thousands of goats on a Sunday morning in the drizzle. Kashgar Livestock Market is uniquely unique. Farmers and herders from, well, from everywhere, bring goats, sheep, cattle and donkeys on foot, jeeps, trailers and tractors to a market on the outskirts of the city and then shout and haggle over the price of animals that will be turned into a load of kebabs or hand bags or milk or whatever it is you make donkeys out of. Animal mayhem every week.
At 10am on Monday i got a bus from Kashgar to Osh in Kyrgyzstan. Actually, that's a lie. We left at 11.30 as the passengers on the sleeper bus were secondary to all the cargo that was loaded onto it. Pipes, boxes, TVs, chairs and massive amounts of food was the real cargo. We got in the way really. The bus took 20 hours to get to Osh and we climbed out of Kashgar (after fixing two wheels and a puncture at a mechanic in a village) and arrived at the border in the late afternoon. We all piled into the large immigration building to be confronted by some angry looking border guards. All the foreigners (about 10 of us) had to line up and hand in our cameras. They were all looked at. Three of us had pictures of the Chinese army including me. They took our passports and memory cards, copied and deleted the pictures that they deemed "illegal" and then allowed us to pass through. I didn't care much as i'd copied all my pictures to CD-ROM at a travel agents in Kashgar but it was strange seeing the lengths the government is going to try and hide what's happening in Xinjiang. The border guard gave me my camera back. I asked if i could take his picture. He didn't really see the funny side.
I find China intoxicating. It's people, landscapes, cities, foods and drinks all fascinate me but i won't care much if i never go back. I've had enough. And to emphasise just how OTT the officialdom of China is we crossed into Kyrgyzstan to be greeted by yet another man in an army uniform who stepped onto the bus and looked blankly at us. Then he grinned a huge grin and said in a loud proud voice, "Welcome! To Kyrgyzstan border! Come on!" and waved his hand toward the door and three ramshackle green corrugated bungalows that passed for immigration. We lined up by the side of the the first green structure waiting to hand our passports through a window where a man was sat at a desk with two computers humming along to Baby Don't Hurt Me by Haddaway and smiling for no reason. Then we had to have a "medical examination" where a man in a mask in another corrugated house asked me if i had swine flu whilst pointing to a cold sore on my face. When i assured him that it wasn't swine flu but a cold sore on my face he lifted up my t-shirt and looked at me stomach and then rubbed my arms to double check which must be some kind of swine flu testing procedure i'm not yet aware of. A man from Austria who had long hair and a large beard was asked if he was Jesus. Martin got told he looked like a movie star. I'm sure if there are any highly contagious diseases making their way across the Chinese border to Kyrgyzstan that they will be detected with extreme efficiency.
I guess when somebody mentions a country that ends in "stan" people think one of two things. War or Borat. Kyrgyzstan is neither. We arrived in Osh early that morning to find a happy and friendly little city with hustle and bustle and colour and kebabs. Endless kebabs. The next day i got a shared taxi to the capital city Bishkek with two people who were on the bus from Kashgar, Trish from the USA and Aki from Japan. The journey was 12 hours and passed through some majestic scenic mountains and lakes. I was sat in the middle of the back seat whilst Aki spent the almost the whole trip sleeping to my right and Trish read War and Peace to me left and all the time i gazed through the taxi's windscreen which had a crack in it like a lightening bolt. The driver was a huge gruff man who sat next to Casper in the passenger seat who was a student from Osh and asked us questions like "How hot is Miami?". I like Kyrgyzstan a lot.
Bishkek is a cute little city and somehow i'm staying in a guesthouse in an old Soviet apartment building with a Muslim and two Israelis. I managed to get a Uzbekistan visa here the other day so i'll be there in a few weeks and i also did something that i didn't want to do but had to - i bought a plane ticket. I fly from Tashkent in Uzbekistan to Baku in Azerbaijan at the start of October as visas and boats across the Caspian Sea were too much of pain in the arse and time consuming. And it means that i'll have more time to see the mountains and the mild craziness that is Kyrgyzstan. I can hardly wait.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Osh
It's been a while. Due to the long arm of the Chinese government i haven't been able to use the internet for a while as it was shut down in Xinjiang province in western China. But now i'm in Kyrgyzstan.
I left Beijing from the gargantuan Beijing West Train Station (airports are smaller) on a train bound for Langzhou. I had only a seat for the 21 hour journey and the train was full to bursting with hundreds of lunatic people pushing, shoving and shouting to get a bag space and a place to stand. I got sporadic sleep through the night and woke up to see a small girl opposite me shit herself and make the whole carriage stink of baby shit. I got chatting with a friendly man, who bought me two beers, and Ping Mei, who was a student at Langzhou University. As the train rolled through a dry yellow scabby mountain landscape Ping Mei told me that her university had a guesthouse where i could stay for 10 yuen a night (about 1 pound). Unfortunately it was like an underground prison with communal showers (in a completely different building two blocks away), hideous toilets and beds that creaked like old ships at sea. Still, one pound.
Langzhou is an industrial smoggy city with 3.2M people in the middle of a valley and has buildings that seem to want to compete with mountains that surround it on the banks of the Yellow River. I had a proper tourist day avoiding any "funny" sounding museums and instead sticking to cable cars and parks and temples and shops and food. The faces of the people were changing as i came west from Beijing too. There was a huge mosque in the centre of Langzhou which was a taste of things to come. I met an idiot in my dorm who was a Chinese student at the university. We went for some noodles and he asked me what i thought about Taiwan.
"Well...erm...i think it's complicated," i said trying to be diplomatic.
"Yes, me too," he said to my surprise. "If Taiwan want to be independent country...there must be war," he said happily, making it very uncomplicated quite quickly. We argued over hot tomato and egg noodle soup. I would say that it was wrong to erode people's cultures and languages. He would agree. I would point out that China was doing exactly that. But it didn't matter what i said, even if he agreed and contradicted himself he would always end with the same conclusion - he would shrug and say, "But it is China." Tibet. Maccau. Xinjiang. Taiwan. Hong Kong. But it is China. Fuck everybody else. If China wants, China gets.
Xinjiang has been in the news recently. You may have heard about the riots in the city of Urumqi on July 5th. Ten years ago 90% of the population in the huge western province of Xinjiang was Uigher, a predominantly Muslim population who were officially taken over as part of China earlier this century. Now the population is less than 50%. The Chinese government has encouraged people to resettle to Xinjiang giving them financial support to make the Han Chinese population grow and supplant the Muslim Uighers who speak there own language and have there own distinct culture. It has, obviously, caused huge problems. The Koran and the Call to Prayer are banned. Their language is not compulsory in schools. Uighers feel that their culture is being eroded and taken over by the Chinese. It is. So they eventually rioted and burnt buses and businesses and people and generally tore Urumqi up for a day or two. There were revenge riots by Chinese against Uighers. China doesn't do riots. China doesn't do demonstrations. Hell, China doesn't even do strongly worded letters. The internet was shut down throughout the whole province. International phone calls were banned. The army was called in. I knew little of the situation there and bought a sleeper ticket for Turpan, slap in the middle of Xinjiang.
The journey to the old silk road town of Turpan was an uneventful plough through the edge of the Tibetan foothills and through desert lunar landscape for 19 hours. When i got off the train i was shouted at for using a bin that was on the same platform as a slow oncoming goods train. I got passport checked as i left the station. I got my bags x-rayed when i wanted to buy a ticket and was told to take out the nail clippers from my bag. I chucked my bag in a corner and told the fat security woman to piss off. What did she think i was going to do? Start trimming complete stranger's nails without consent instead of buying a train ticket? I'd been in Xinjiang province for five minutes and i felt like lobbing a few Molotov cocktails about myself and i'm an English atheist.
Turpan is the hottest place in China and the third lowest depression in the world. It was also a dull Chinese city. Any historic or cultural aspect of the city from Silk Road trading days were gone and neatly replaced by a one-size-fits-all Chinese architectural uniform that could've been in any city in the east of the country. I hired a taxi for the day with Halik, a nice man who nabbed me at the station, and saw the sites that were left for the benefit of Chinese tour groups from the east bringing money and a superiority complex. There was a wonderful old village called Toyoq covered in dust and history. We went to Jiaohe ruins which, 1600 years ago, held 6500 people in the middle of a desert and when i went it contained a tour group of Chinese policemen who seemed quite content to use the millenia old rocks and decayed buildings as a climbing frame for picture posing. Halik invited me to have some food and drinks with him and his friends that night which is how i came to find myself eating spicy chicken and knocking back shots of Muslim fire water (which isn't something you can do everyday) and i seem to remember throwing up in a hedge before getting a taxi back to a smelly dorm in a cheap hotel.
In the cheap hotel i met a bunch of other travellers who i met up with again in the amazing city of Kashgar where we got shouted at by the police, had guns pointed at us by the army and pictures deleted from our cameras as we crossed the Kyrgyzstan border last night high up in some mountains. But i'll tell you about that in a few days as i've already written way too much.
I left Beijing from the gargantuan Beijing West Train Station (airports are smaller) on a train bound for Langzhou. I had only a seat for the 21 hour journey and the train was full to bursting with hundreds of lunatic people pushing, shoving and shouting to get a bag space and a place to stand. I got sporadic sleep through the night and woke up to see a small girl opposite me shit herself and make the whole carriage stink of baby shit. I got chatting with a friendly man, who bought me two beers, and Ping Mei, who was a student at Langzhou University. As the train rolled through a dry yellow scabby mountain landscape Ping Mei told me that her university had a guesthouse where i could stay for 10 yuen a night (about 1 pound). Unfortunately it was like an underground prison with communal showers (in a completely different building two blocks away), hideous toilets and beds that creaked like old ships at sea. Still, one pound.
Langzhou is an industrial smoggy city with 3.2M people in the middle of a valley and has buildings that seem to want to compete with mountains that surround it on the banks of the Yellow River. I had a proper tourist day avoiding any "funny" sounding museums and instead sticking to cable cars and parks and temples and shops and food. The faces of the people were changing as i came west from Beijing too. There was a huge mosque in the centre of Langzhou which was a taste of things to come. I met an idiot in my dorm who was a Chinese student at the university. We went for some noodles and he asked me what i thought about Taiwan.
"Well...erm...i think it's complicated," i said trying to be diplomatic.
"Yes, me too," he said to my surprise. "If Taiwan want to be independent country...there must be war," he said happily, making it very uncomplicated quite quickly. We argued over hot tomato and egg noodle soup. I would say that it was wrong to erode people's cultures and languages. He would agree. I would point out that China was doing exactly that. But it didn't matter what i said, even if he agreed and contradicted himself he would always end with the same conclusion - he would shrug and say, "But it is China." Tibet. Maccau. Xinjiang. Taiwan. Hong Kong. But it is China. Fuck everybody else. If China wants, China gets.
Xinjiang has been in the news recently. You may have heard about the riots in the city of Urumqi on July 5th. Ten years ago 90% of the population in the huge western province of Xinjiang was Uigher, a predominantly Muslim population who were officially taken over as part of China earlier this century. Now the population is less than 50%. The Chinese government has encouraged people to resettle to Xinjiang giving them financial support to make the Han Chinese population grow and supplant the Muslim Uighers who speak there own language and have there own distinct culture. It has, obviously, caused huge problems. The Koran and the Call to Prayer are banned. Their language is not compulsory in schools. Uighers feel that their culture is being eroded and taken over by the Chinese. It is. So they eventually rioted and burnt buses and businesses and people and generally tore Urumqi up for a day or two. There were revenge riots by Chinese against Uighers. China doesn't do riots. China doesn't do demonstrations. Hell, China doesn't even do strongly worded letters. The internet was shut down throughout the whole province. International phone calls were banned. The army was called in. I knew little of the situation there and bought a sleeper ticket for Turpan, slap in the middle of Xinjiang.
The journey to the old silk road town of Turpan was an uneventful plough through the edge of the Tibetan foothills and through desert lunar landscape for 19 hours. When i got off the train i was shouted at for using a bin that was on the same platform as a slow oncoming goods train. I got passport checked as i left the station. I got my bags x-rayed when i wanted to buy a ticket and was told to take out the nail clippers from my bag. I chucked my bag in a corner and told the fat security woman to piss off. What did she think i was going to do? Start trimming complete stranger's nails without consent instead of buying a train ticket? I'd been in Xinjiang province for five minutes and i felt like lobbing a few Molotov cocktails about myself and i'm an English atheist.
Turpan is the hottest place in China and the third lowest depression in the world. It was also a dull Chinese city. Any historic or cultural aspect of the city from Silk Road trading days were gone and neatly replaced by a one-size-fits-all Chinese architectural uniform that could've been in any city in the east of the country. I hired a taxi for the day with Halik, a nice man who nabbed me at the station, and saw the sites that were left for the benefit of Chinese tour groups from the east bringing money and a superiority complex. There was a wonderful old village called Toyoq covered in dust and history. We went to Jiaohe ruins which, 1600 years ago, held 6500 people in the middle of a desert and when i went it contained a tour group of Chinese policemen who seemed quite content to use the millenia old rocks and decayed buildings as a climbing frame for picture posing. Halik invited me to have some food and drinks with him and his friends that night which is how i came to find myself eating spicy chicken and knocking back shots of Muslim fire water (which isn't something you can do everyday) and i seem to remember throwing up in a hedge before getting a taxi back to a smelly dorm in a cheap hotel.
In the cheap hotel i met a bunch of other travellers who i met up with again in the amazing city of Kashgar where we got shouted at by the police, had guns pointed at us by the army and pictures deleted from our cameras as we crossed the Kyrgyzstan border last night high up in some mountains. But i'll tell you about that in a few days as i've already written way too much.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Beijing again
I'm leaving China's captial later today on another over-crowded train to central China. After being here for over a week i'm ready to move on again.
Beijing is huge. Massive. Really, really big. Six lanes of traffic cut through mammoth glass and stone buildings spread over colossal areas. It's an imposing place designed to demand attention and awe. But for all its size it's not actually big enough. The new metro trains and stations cannot cope with amount of people. There aren't enough ticket windows at the cathedral sized train stations. Buses don't run frequently enough, restaurants have too few tables, roads are not wide enough, temperatures not cool enough, prices not cheap enough, people not quiet enough. It's a city of excess all the time. Perhaps it's because there are millions of domestic tourists here on holidays clogging everything up. Perhaps there are just too many people. Whatever, I would recommend Beijing hugely to anybody but don't touch the place in summertime.
The best way to see the excess is by bicycle. There's nothing quite like cycling around Beijing using the wide, large (of course) cycle lanes that pass along all the roads and then ducking down an old alley way or hutong and getting lost, finding a park or big (again) temple, pagoda or another oversized building site.
Smoggy days here are weird. You can't see the sky or the sun or even clouds but you're sure it's above the pollution somewhere. There are times when the air seems to hang from the chunky new buildings and stick to your lungs. People in Beijing, and China at large, have a tendency to hawk their lungs up and spit parts of it out onto the floor. I joined in. It was the only way i could breathe peoperly.
I saw the now iconic Olympic Stadium and Aquatic Centre which are both awesome and best seen at sunset when they are lit up and make the whole area look slightly alien and unreal. I found some of the silly museums here as well. The Police Musuem was full of guns and propagander and the laser shooting range was closed which was the only reason to go really. The Underground Musuem was closed (maybe they filled it in) which was a disappointment. In the 1960s Mao fell out with the Russians and ordered tunnels to be dug under Beijing in case of, well, i'm not really sure why as he was as mad as a bag of badgers but the musuem was a tour of some of the old tunnels. Was. The Tap Water Museum is impossible to find and the Red Sandlewood Musuem can stay where it is at the end of a metro line as i've decided that i'm crap at finding stupid musuems. It didn't work in Seoul and it's failed here as well. I should just stick to being a normal tourist.
I stayed in a friendly hostel and got drunk almsot everynight with a collection of other travellers and holdiay makers including an English fella who was cycling around the world, a Finish guy who fell down a man hole and all sorts of other drunks and sweaty backpackers swapping stories and having fun. It was light relief from the Uzbek embassy hunt that i eventually completed. I found out that i needed a Letter Of Invitation (LOI) from Uzbekistan and these cost 35 dollars from an online central Asian travel agents who need all kinds of documents. So i started an Internet Cafe With A Working Printer Hunt and then a Fax Machine That Actually Fucking Works Hunt and i'm still no closer to getting a LOI needed to get the visa. I wanted to get across central Asia without using a plane but Turkmensitan can go screw and Azerbijan visa laws give me a headache so i'm going to have to get a plane from either Kyrgyzstan or (if the visa gets sorted) Uzbekistan to somewhere in eastern Europe or Turkey as i want to travel in China not spend all my time dicking about getting visas for countries nobody's ever heard of. Ah well, it could be worse. I could still be working for idiots in Seoul.
But i'm not. I'm going to Lanzhou later today which is famous for being one of the most polluted cities in China (and, therefore, probably the world) and then further west onto to the silk road cities of Turpan and Kashgar. I should leave China on the 24th of August for Kyrgyzstan so i'll write more crap between now and then.
Beijing is huge. Massive. Really, really big. Six lanes of traffic cut through mammoth glass and stone buildings spread over colossal areas. It's an imposing place designed to demand attention and awe. But for all its size it's not actually big enough. The new metro trains and stations cannot cope with amount of people. There aren't enough ticket windows at the cathedral sized train stations. Buses don't run frequently enough, restaurants have too few tables, roads are not wide enough, temperatures not cool enough, prices not cheap enough, people not quiet enough. It's a city of excess all the time. Perhaps it's because there are millions of domestic tourists here on holidays clogging everything up. Perhaps there are just too many people. Whatever, I would recommend Beijing hugely to anybody but don't touch the place in summertime.
The best way to see the excess is by bicycle. There's nothing quite like cycling around Beijing using the wide, large (of course) cycle lanes that pass along all the roads and then ducking down an old alley way or hutong and getting lost, finding a park or big (again) temple, pagoda or another oversized building site.
Smoggy days here are weird. You can't see the sky or the sun or even clouds but you're sure it's above the pollution somewhere. There are times when the air seems to hang from the chunky new buildings and stick to your lungs. People in Beijing, and China at large, have a tendency to hawk their lungs up and spit parts of it out onto the floor. I joined in. It was the only way i could breathe peoperly.
I saw the now iconic Olympic Stadium and Aquatic Centre which are both awesome and best seen at sunset when they are lit up and make the whole area look slightly alien and unreal. I found some of the silly museums here as well. The Police Musuem was full of guns and propagander and the laser shooting range was closed which was the only reason to go really. The Underground Musuem was closed (maybe they filled it in) which was a disappointment. In the 1960s Mao fell out with the Russians and ordered tunnels to be dug under Beijing in case of, well, i'm not really sure why as he was as mad as a bag of badgers but the musuem was a tour of some of the old tunnels. Was. The Tap Water Museum is impossible to find and the Red Sandlewood Musuem can stay where it is at the end of a metro line as i've decided that i'm crap at finding stupid musuems. It didn't work in Seoul and it's failed here as well. I should just stick to being a normal tourist.
I stayed in a friendly hostel and got drunk almsot everynight with a collection of other travellers and holdiay makers including an English fella who was cycling around the world, a Finish guy who fell down a man hole and all sorts of other drunks and sweaty backpackers swapping stories and having fun. It was light relief from the Uzbek embassy hunt that i eventually completed. I found out that i needed a Letter Of Invitation (LOI) from Uzbekistan and these cost 35 dollars from an online central Asian travel agents who need all kinds of documents. So i started an Internet Cafe With A Working Printer Hunt and then a Fax Machine That Actually Fucking Works Hunt and i'm still no closer to getting a LOI needed to get the visa. I wanted to get across central Asia without using a plane but Turkmensitan can go screw and Azerbijan visa laws give me a headache so i'm going to have to get a plane from either Kyrgyzstan or (if the visa gets sorted) Uzbekistan to somewhere in eastern Europe or Turkey as i want to travel in China not spend all my time dicking about getting visas for countries nobody's ever heard of. Ah well, it could be worse. I could still be working for idiots in Seoul.
But i'm not. I'm going to Lanzhou later today which is famous for being one of the most polluted cities in China (and, therefore, probably the world) and then further west onto to the silk road cities of Turpan and Kashgar. I should leave China on the 24th of August for Kyrgyzstan so i'll write more crap between now and then.
Saturday, August 8, 2009
Beijing
I've been in China for a week now and i'd forgotten just how funny this place is.
I was in Yantai in 2007 and it was a friendly dump by the sea but i put that down to the fact that half of it was being knocked down and rebuilt. Now it's almost finished and it's still a friendly dump by the sea. I sat in a small park/town square and watched Yantai pass by. In one corner of the park square there were a group of old people (probably three times my age) doing tai chi exercises which invloved holding their arms out and saying "aaaaahhhh" or patting themselves on the legs and body. In the other corner of the park a small group of people were practising their numb chucking skills. Yes, numb chucks. Six people just playing around with numb chucks. Then a guy set up a stereo next to me and some middle aged people paired up and started doing some kind of rhythmic ballroom dancing in time to the music. All the while kids ran around with plastic kite things and two woman rode around on wobbly skateboards. I didn't really know where to look.
The 14 hour overnight train to Beijing wasn't much fun but it was worth it. If Seoul felt like a coat i'd not worn for a while then Beijing felt (and looked) like a friend you haven't seen in ages whose moved up in the world, got himself a new house and car and lots of money and isn't ashamed to flash it about. But underneath all the fancy new buildings and cars that friend is still the same. It's quick with a smile and a frown, enjoys getting drunk and shoving all kinds of food in it's mouth and will probably always have unhealthy traffic flowing around in veins and arteries whilst welcoming anybody to come to the party to continue the fun. Beijing is a unique place in a unique country. The rate of change here is huge. Since i was last here in 2007 there are four new metro lines, completely new massive hotels and gargantuan shopping centres and sometimes just whole postcodes flattened and rebuilt again. Who knows when or if it will end.
I've spent the past week here waiting and then getting a visa for Kyrgyzstan and also wandering the streets failing to find the Embassy of Uzbekistan which aren't activities that will appear in any day tours or guide books anytime soon and with good reason. I did managed to see an area of the city called Factory 798 which contains a load of disused factories that have been converted into art galleries for Chinese modern art. Some of the galleries still have old machinery bolted to the floor and exposed pipes running overhead. It was a great way to spend an afternoon away from the Uzbek embassy hunt which is still ongoing. Hopefully next week i'll find it along with the Beijing Police Musuem (where you can fire laser guns at stuff, apparently), Beijing Underground City, The China Red Sandlewood Musuem and the Beijing Tap Water Museum. I'll try and do all that and write some more pretentious crap before getting a train heading west next Friday.
I was in Yantai in 2007 and it was a friendly dump by the sea but i put that down to the fact that half of it was being knocked down and rebuilt. Now it's almost finished and it's still a friendly dump by the sea. I sat in a small park/town square and watched Yantai pass by. In one corner of the park square there were a group of old people (probably three times my age) doing tai chi exercises which invloved holding their arms out and saying "aaaaahhhh" or patting themselves on the legs and body. In the other corner of the park a small group of people were practising their numb chucking skills. Yes, numb chucks. Six people just playing around with numb chucks. Then a guy set up a stereo next to me and some middle aged people paired up and started doing some kind of rhythmic ballroom dancing in time to the music. All the while kids ran around with plastic kite things and two woman rode around on wobbly skateboards. I didn't really know where to look.
The 14 hour overnight train to Beijing wasn't much fun but it was worth it. If Seoul felt like a coat i'd not worn for a while then Beijing felt (and looked) like a friend you haven't seen in ages whose moved up in the world, got himself a new house and car and lots of money and isn't ashamed to flash it about. But underneath all the fancy new buildings and cars that friend is still the same. It's quick with a smile and a frown, enjoys getting drunk and shoving all kinds of food in it's mouth and will probably always have unhealthy traffic flowing around in veins and arteries whilst welcoming anybody to come to the party to continue the fun. Beijing is a unique place in a unique country. The rate of change here is huge. Since i was last here in 2007 there are four new metro lines, completely new massive hotels and gargantuan shopping centres and sometimes just whole postcodes flattened and rebuilt again. Who knows when or if it will end.
I've spent the past week here waiting and then getting a visa for Kyrgyzstan and also wandering the streets failing to find the Embassy of Uzbekistan which aren't activities that will appear in any day tours or guide books anytime soon and with good reason. I did managed to see an area of the city called Factory 798 which contains a load of disused factories that have been converted into art galleries for Chinese modern art. Some of the galleries still have old machinery bolted to the floor and exposed pipes running overhead. It was a great way to spend an afternoon away from the Uzbek embassy hunt which is still ongoing. Hopefully next week i'll find it along with the Beijing Police Musuem (where you can fire laser guns at stuff, apparently), Beijing Underground City, The China Red Sandlewood Musuem and the Beijing Tap Water Museum. I'll try and do all that and write some more pretentious crap before getting a train heading west next Friday.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Yantai
My passport has been stamped again. My body is sweating. I just ate some strange yet very tasty street food that was a combination of fried bread, egg, lettuce and spicy red sauce. I'm sat in a dank internet cafe surrounded by young men wearing no shirts playing computer games and chain smoking. I have an overnight train ticket with no seat reservation. I can only be in China.
I finished last week in Japan. I wanted to see the Japan All Star Baseball Game in the Mazda Zoom Zoom Stadium in Hiroshima (who wouldn't?) but the tickets were sold out and so i got a train to Fukuoka instead and stayed in the same little guesthouse that i stayed in the first night i was in the country. The next day i left Japan by high speed ferry promising myself to one day return and see more of it, meet up with Muto and maybe hike somewhere.
I'd only been away from Korea for two months but somehow it seemed longer. Korea felt like an old coat that you've not worn for a while and it was great to meet up with friends, get drunk and eat Korean bbq again. I stayed with my mate Sang Min and his wife Soo Min in their apartment. I wasted a few days whilst waiting for a Chinese visa by doing all sorts of useless stuff. Me and Sang Min went swimming in the sea at the beach with a load of Koreans who either couldn't swim or were swimming in their clothes both of which make no sense at all. We went to a baseball game in a stadium that was only a quarter full and so the best entertainment was when a player hit a foul ball into the stands and we could sit and laugh at a dozen or so people clambering over empty seats to get to the ball first, shoving each other out of the way as if the ball was made of gold or diamonds. I asked Sang Min if he'd ever caught one and he said no, never. Two minutes later the next batsmen skied the ball, it hit the flood light behind us, bounced off an empty seat, bounced off the floor, hit Sang Min on the shoulder and landed in the safe hands of a fat man sat in front of us. So close. Sang Min was not happy. And then his team lost.
I wanted to see some strange museums in Seoul. In Tokyo i managed to find The Tokyo Parasite Musuem where you can gaze at dead parasites in small jars or large cases (one was 8.8m long and was found in a human) and Seoul is home to lots of silly museums and art galleries (i once went to the Seoul Museum of Chicken Art) so i went to the Lock Museum but it was being refurbished and then i found the Robot Museum but it didn't have any robots - just toys that looked like robots. There was also a Kimchi Musuem and a Quilt Museum but i didn't have time to visit these due the amount of alchohol that i was putting into my body. It was a bit of shit search for musuems really. I guess i'm trying to make myself look cultured or intelligent but the truth is all i really did in Seoul was get shitfaced with alarming regularity. Everyday actually. It was great.
Yesterday i got a ticket on a 14 hour overnight ferry from Incheon to Weihai acoss the Yellow Sea (which isn't yellow just in case you were wondering). The ferry was bursting full of people and all the sleeper berths were booked up already so i had to sleep on a matress on the floor of the ferry convention centre sandwhiched neatly between two Chinese guys one of which snored quite loudly and kept reaching out in his sleep and touching my shoulder and then quickly waking up and trying not to look embarrassed. I have no idea why a ferry has convention centre (who the hell would have a convention on a ferry between Korea and China?) but i do know that it looked a little bit like a makeshift refuge you see on news reports after a natural disaster somewhere. This morning we sailed into Weihai and i landed in China ready to travel through it for a third time.
I got a bus to Yantai and then i bought a ticket on an overnight train to Beijing. Unfortunately it seems that there are yet again no sleeper berths or seats left and due to a bit of a communication error i bought a standing room only ticket. The 12 hour train journey starts at 11pm. Should be interesting. China normally is.
If you're really bored and want to see some pictures of Japan then hopefully this link will work http://davelearoyd.shutterfly.com/
I finished last week in Japan. I wanted to see the Japan All Star Baseball Game in the Mazda Zoom Zoom Stadium in Hiroshima (who wouldn't?) but the tickets were sold out and so i got a train to Fukuoka instead and stayed in the same little guesthouse that i stayed in the first night i was in the country. The next day i left Japan by high speed ferry promising myself to one day return and see more of it, meet up with Muto and maybe hike somewhere.
I'd only been away from Korea for two months but somehow it seemed longer. Korea felt like an old coat that you've not worn for a while and it was great to meet up with friends, get drunk and eat Korean bbq again. I stayed with my mate Sang Min and his wife Soo Min in their apartment. I wasted a few days whilst waiting for a Chinese visa by doing all sorts of useless stuff. Me and Sang Min went swimming in the sea at the beach with a load of Koreans who either couldn't swim or were swimming in their clothes both of which make no sense at all. We went to a baseball game in a stadium that was only a quarter full and so the best entertainment was when a player hit a foul ball into the stands and we could sit and laugh at a dozen or so people clambering over empty seats to get to the ball first, shoving each other out of the way as if the ball was made of gold or diamonds. I asked Sang Min if he'd ever caught one and he said no, never. Two minutes later the next batsmen skied the ball, it hit the flood light behind us, bounced off an empty seat, bounced off the floor, hit Sang Min on the shoulder and landed in the safe hands of a fat man sat in front of us. So close. Sang Min was not happy. And then his team lost.
I wanted to see some strange museums in Seoul. In Tokyo i managed to find The Tokyo Parasite Musuem where you can gaze at dead parasites in small jars or large cases (one was 8.8m long and was found in a human) and Seoul is home to lots of silly museums and art galleries (i once went to the Seoul Museum of Chicken Art) so i went to the Lock Museum but it was being refurbished and then i found the Robot Museum but it didn't have any robots - just toys that looked like robots. There was also a Kimchi Musuem and a Quilt Museum but i didn't have time to visit these due the amount of alchohol that i was putting into my body. It was a bit of shit search for musuems really. I guess i'm trying to make myself look cultured or intelligent but the truth is all i really did in Seoul was get shitfaced with alarming regularity. Everyday actually. It was great.
Yesterday i got a ticket on a 14 hour overnight ferry from Incheon to Weihai acoss the Yellow Sea (which isn't yellow just in case you were wondering). The ferry was bursting full of people and all the sleeper berths were booked up already so i had to sleep on a matress on the floor of the ferry convention centre sandwhiched neatly between two Chinese guys one of which snored quite loudly and kept reaching out in his sleep and touching my shoulder and then quickly waking up and trying not to look embarrassed. I have no idea why a ferry has convention centre (who the hell would have a convention on a ferry between Korea and China?) but i do know that it looked a little bit like a makeshift refuge you see on news reports after a natural disaster somewhere. This morning we sailed into Weihai and i landed in China ready to travel through it for a third time.
I got a bus to Yantai and then i bought a ticket on an overnight train to Beijing. Unfortunately it seems that there are yet again no sleeper berths or seats left and due to a bit of a communication error i bought a standing room only ticket. The 12 hour train journey starts at 11pm. Should be interesting. China normally is.
If you're really bored and want to see some pictures of Japan then hopefully this link will work http://davelearoyd.shutterfly.com/
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