how many weeks does it take to post pictures aaron?

Too many, I know. But sometimes I try and pretend I have a life, ya know? Anyway, let me continue. I left off in Xi'an right? After 3 nights there we took a morning train to Lanzhou, a city out West that ended up being about a 6 hour train ride away. It was somehow surreal, comfortable, and annoying all at once. surreal because the landscape was made up of almost completely arid mountains dotted with little caves, some of which were obviously inhabited. I guess this was the central/western Chinese version of crappy train track towns. Comfortable because I splashed out on the 1st class sleeper train, for the 1st class price of about 30 dollars. the cattle car class is only a few dollars, but it really did look like a cattle car. But the ride was annoying because our train car was filled with old Japanese tourists who were with a fairly large group. Generally Japanese people are too polite and quiet to be that annoying, but something about being out of Japan must have made these people feel like no manners at all were necessary; they were loud and pushy and unwilling to stop taking pictures for 2 seconds to let us through with our big bags or when we had to go to the bathroom. A bit mind-blowing as surely these people would have spent most of their lives trying as hard as possible NOT to be in peoples way.
After hours going through fierce looking desert landscapes, we heard over the loudspeaker that we were approaching Lanzhou, a city of about 3 million people. But out the window was still nothing but desert mountains. Then we went through a mountain, and came out into some factories, and then a minute later into a bustling city center with a fairly modern looking train station. It was pretty unbelievable how sudden the transformation took place. Unfortunately Sigma missed her flight to Lanzhou, so we had a bit of the day to kill before she would arrive on the next flight, so we went to find our hotel. Even though it was twice the price as the backpackers' we stayed at before, it was about half as good. So note to china travelers on a budget: all the private rooms at the youth hostels I stayed at were quite nice, and the one "nice" hotel I booked a room in was smelly and moldy.
Anyway, we were in Lanzhou to celebrate New Years, and celebrate we did! After eating dinner with some of Sigma's peace-corp volunteer friends (whom we didn't know, but were ridiculously friendly) we went to a club that looked like it was in the middle of Times Square. It was still doing my head in that 5 minutes outside the city was nothing but desert and mountain huts, but here I was surrounded by cars, neon, lights, fashion, and all those other city things. Weird.
Below is stuff from Amber's camera, which I just stole off of her:

Here's us with some clappers at a Tibetan Bar.

Amber took this vid from the train between Xi'an and Lanzhou. It was like this pretty much the whole 6 hours.
This is Amber asleep on Sigma's couch (way back in Taiyuan.) I couldn't resist though, because Amber hates cats so much but there we are sleeping like a happy family. Sigma obviously enjoyed it too and happily took our photo.Here's an example of some Chinese Muslim food vendors that gave me so many yummy things. I rarely had any idea what I was eating, and I was constantly anticipating terrible gastrointestinal problems, but I was and still am fine. Incredible.

The last two photos are me showing off a fake Vivienne Westwood Jacket I bought. Real Vivienne Westwood Jackets apparently go for well over a thousand dollars, but I fetched this baby for about 13 bucks. Amber thought it was just the right amount of gay, though sometimes I look at these photos and think maybe it is a bit much. But I really liked it after a food vendor we were buying from pointed at my jacket and starting singing "Beat It" by Michael Jackson. I now refer to it as my Michael Jackson jacket.
This is me and Sigma and a big ant! This is at a bird "sanctuary" in Taiyuan. I think I talked earlier about how gross it was though... But Sigma looks so happy on the ant, and that's all that matters.
Here's a picture of a dead weasel or some such animal from that sanctuary that Amber took. Must've been there a while.

Amber has more pictures on Facebook if you're so inclined and happen to use that website too.

Our last two nights were in Beijing, but were mostly unremarkable. Amber succumbed to some horrible but brief feverish haze the day before we left unfortunately. I took care of her for a bit, but while she was sleeping I snuck off to go stand in line to see Mao's corpse in the middle of Tienanmen Square. It took quite a while, but eventually I got to shuffle pass the enormously (in)famous man, who didn't look particularly real. Though I guess who could after being dead for about 30 years? I was gipped of my chance to see Lenin when I was in Moscow because of body renovation, but at least I got Mao in. Next is to Vietnam to gander at Ho Chi Minh! I wonder why Communists like preserving their dead heroes. Has anyone else in recent history kept preserved dead people out for extended periods of time in order to be honored?
After Amber recovered from her disease, we did what all Westerners must do in China; shop. We both planned on picking up a bunch of stuff before heading back to expensive Japan, but in the end only Amber ended up with stuff. I certainly had plenty of opportunities, but I just wasn't interested in the kind of fashion stuff they had for guys. Similar to Japan, the guys tend to pick either a more gangsterish bent, or a very metrosexual bent. While China isn't nearly as all-out as Japan, it had the same basic feeling. And besides my hot new Michael Jackson jacket, it's not quite my thing. But for girls, also similar to the Japanese, Chinese girls want to look super cute. Thankfully Amber also wants to look super cute, and does so in cute asian clothes. Lucky Aussie!

Of course nearly a month has gone by since my return, and I've been up to a few things. I'll write about those shortly, and this time I mean it. Just putting up pictures takes time, so I get lazy. I don't mind writing at all!

Take care everyone and sorry again for taking so long...
Aaron

Oim back!

My friends Ben and Alex are pretty good spitters. They are phlegmy people and aren't afraid to let people know. But they have nothing on the Chinese. On one of our first days me and Amber were standing behind a twenty-something year old fashionable Chinese woman on an escalator, and watched as she leaned a little to the side, covered one nostril, and blasted snot out the other one right onto the escalator. This was merely the first of many many "snot rockets" (American English; "bushman blow" in aussie English) we witnessed in our 2 weeks in China. Even more common was the spitting. These weren't just little "ptoos" but real mucus digging loogie hockers, complete with sounds like a cat throwing up a hairball.
According to my guidebook it used to be even worse. Apparently China's gradual opening to the West has prompted some "civilizing" campaigns from the government in order to stop grossing out polite little Westerners. This took some adjusting coming from just nearby Japan, where even blowing one's nose into a tissue is considered a bit of a no-no (I've definitely done it more times in my year and half at school than all my other 36 coworkers combined).
By the end though, I was starting to understand the phlegm launching. Chinese cities are pretty gross in a lot of ways, and the air is particularly bad in some places. Some expats in Lanzhou (a city to the West) told us that they check the pollution count from some weather service website, which counts the amount of carcinogens floating around in the air. 100 is the maximum for decent living according to the World Health Organization, and the count goes up to 500. The expats in Lanzhou said that often the count in Lanzhou was listed as "500," which in fact means off the charts. Crazy.
Me and Amber went to so some pretty bad cities pollution wise, but were spared the worst I think. Beijing was definitely smoggy and gray, but except the first night (the air was thick) the days probably weren't too much worse than say a bad day in New York. Taiyuan, are next stop, was a bit worse when we got there. But on our second day there, a strong and bitterly freezing wind pushed the pollution away and left mostly blue skies. Our third stop was Xi'an, where I didn't notice any particularly bad smog, though I wouldn't call it fresh air either. Lanzhou, our last stop, has a reputation for being one of the most, if not the most, polluted cities in the world. The days me and Amber stayed were actually quite nice though. The people we met there described that as a bit of an anomaly, and said we were lucky we weren't there during the days when you can barely see 100 feet away. Gross.
My dad says that somewhere there are pictures his father took of China in the 1940s. The whole world is of course a very different place since then, but I think China in particular has turned into an entirely different animal. Probably almost nothing I took a picture of existed back then, or at least not in the way it does now...

Here's 4 shots of Beijing from our first full day. It was actually a fairly stressful one, though really it was our fault. When I went to Thailand last year I knew I had to keep an eye out for charmers and scammers, and for the most part I successfully avoided problems. But for some reason I wasn't in the same mindset for this trip. Maybe I thought Chinese people were working too hard to scam tourists? That's probably true for most people but of course there are plenty of others working hard TO scam tourists. Anyway me and Amber figured that out the hard way when some Chinese "students" recommended a tea-house/restaurant after we chatted and walked around with them for about an hour. After a nice meal in a small private room we were given a totally insane bill. We paid about 1/5 of it in the end, but it was still totally ridiculous the money we dished out. I still look back and get really angry at myself for not just giving them what I think the meal was worth and walking/running away. But I guess I've been in Japan too long and these sort of defensive measures in my head have been totally turned off. But I guess a lot worse things could have happened, and it was the only real snag of trouble me and Amber encountered.
In the first picture you can see Mao's beautiful famous picture just north of Tienanmen Square. I believe it's been replaced more than once due to (organized) vandalism, and I'm sure the government has more copies waiting to go up when someone else throws something at his now very symbolic head. The second picture is one of many sino-communist themed statues throughout the country. I do think that Russia had more of these types of art works around than China though, even though it's not even Communist anymore. I wonder why? Communist or not, I guess it still boils down to money...
The third picture is of a "hutong," a popular word to use when talking about Beijing these days. A hutong is a small alleyway that used to define life in Chinese cities, but are slowly being demolished to make way for housing developments and various other construction projects. I've read very little about the matter and spent only a few days in Beijing, but the only pleasant hutongs that I saw were preserved because of their proximity to cultural relics or to look pretty for rich Chinese people/foreign tourists. The "real" hutongs that I saw were hidden behind walls and would be refered to in the West as "ghettos." I wonder if the hutongs people nostalgically recall exist anymore? Not that concrete high-rises are so nice either. Most American cities could warn China that putting large numbers of poor people from patchwork alley-ways into low budget high rises doesn't really solve a lot of problems. Maybe China is getting around that problem by not "putting" those people anywhere, except away from the construction site. I don't think they care who moves into these high-rises, as long as they pay the rent. But I guess we'll see if China makes the same mistake American cities did in the 60s and 70s. Maybe they'll make an entirely different set of mistakes. Or maybe they'll create paradise. Though Beijing didn't exude the atmosphere of the latter option...


These pictures are from a park near the center of Beijing. Pretty nice! Too bad it's the dead of winter and everything is gray and cold...






These pictures are from the "Forbidden City" just north of Tienanmen Square. It was really really impressive. It's a square kilometer or two of preserved Qin dynasty courtyards and palace grounds. It's Chinese-style preserved though, which means chipped paint, uneven bricks and hilarious English. But somehow it actually adds to the atmosphere of walking around real old Imperial grounds. Definitely the most worthwhile tourist attraction in Beijing. If you can spend one day in Beijing, see the Forbidden City, not get ripped off, then that's a good day.

The next day was to the Great Wall!




I don't think I really need to introduce the Great Wall... It's incredibly impressive, though the many vendors at the bottom are pretty irritating. It was not a very clear day, which was unfortunate, but it definitely could've been worse. Making this day more impressive, we met a Russian couple on the way, who really showed us how to bargain. After the public bus trip, we needed to hire a private van to take us the couple dozen kilometers. The original offer they gave us was 100 yuan (15 dollars) or so per person (there were 4 of us). The Russian guy demanded 70 total for all of us. After a few minutes of somewhat harsh bargaining, we settled on 100 for all of us. I was ready to agree when they seemed stuck on 105, but the Russian guy wouldn't cave. He refused to go above 100, and he won. And after the price-fight, the guy said ok ok get in the car, but the Russian guy said NO, first I smoke, then we go. And we waited for him to leisurely smoke a cigarette. Pretty classic. Even though he was an engineer in Korea, and so probably had a good salary, he was ready to bargain to death for the equivalent of about 80 cents (between 4 people). I swear it must be something in their blood.

That night we took an overnight train to Taiyuan, a city a few hours southwest of Beijing. My good buddy Sigma lives there, and we aimed to be there a day earlier than we actually arrived, but trains leave infrequently in China and sell out quickly. The train ride was actually pretty fun though. Me and Amber shared a sleeper compartment with a really cute old Chinese couple that were even shorter than us. The woman took her husband's clothes and carefully folded and hung them, and they had their little thermos' of tea. Amber used a dictionary to write our names and where we're from, but besides that we were totally unable to communicate. We arrived about 7am and met with Sigma and promptly enjoyed an early morning breakfast at McDonalds.

Here's Sigma and Amber on the streets of Taiyuan. Amber sure is enjoying the candy coated fruit sticks that are all over Chinese streets. They are pretty yummy. We did some shopping and eating, and more eating that day we came with Sigma, and made plans for the next day. But the next day was so cold it was basically impossible to do anything. On the plus side the freezing wind blew the pollution away! We went to a nice park in the morning and to a bird "sanctuary" within the park. It was probably the most disgusting treatment of animals I'd seen in an official place before, but I'm told that is the standard for Chinese zoos and similar establishments. The most disgusting part was a bird cage filled with maybe 10 dead, and one live and going crazy sparrow. Sigma felt sorry for the bird and wanted to free it, so started untying the wires keeping the cage closed. I noticed the cage was made out of thin wood, so I just snapped some of the bars off, and the birdie flew away. I then doused my hands in antibacterial alcohol gel. Definitely a necessity in China.
We wanted to play bumper cars and see a few other things, but it was one of the coldest days I'd felt in a long time, so instead we just hung around watching movies and playing with Sigma's cat, which I like to call "bitey."
Here's the litttttle tiny plan me and Amber flew from Taiyuan to Xi'an. At least the company was a name we all trust: Grand China Express. At first I regretted buying these tickets instead of the (14 hour) train ride, but in the end the flight, service, and punctuality were all perfectly fine.
For most foreigners, this is what Xi'an is really famous for: the Terracota warriors. It's about an hour bus ride outside of town, though the large majority of people (chinese and foreigner) seem to come in tour groups. Round trip tour groups with a guide and lunch are quite cheap (30 dollars maybe?) but me and amber elected to take the public bus there, which is about 1 dollar each way. I feel frustrated thinking about how that hour plus bus ride was ONE dollar, and I have to pay about 5 dollars in Japan to take a bus to Takasaki train station, 8-9 kilometers away. A normal city bus is about 1 yuan, or 18 cents per trip. A taxi across a city is between 1-5 dollars, and even to a far off airport is usually less than 15. In contrast, taxis in Japan are ludicrously expensive. It costs over 30 dollars to go those 8-9km to Takasaki station from my house, and in Tokyo thats about how much a relativly short trip can cost as well. Actually even New York taxis are a bargain by Tokyo standards... Sigh...
Anyway, the Terracota warriors are beauitful. The emperor really felt he needed thousands of bronze statue warriors to protect him in the afterlife, and dozens of bronze horse drawn carriages , each equipped with hundreds of bronze arrows and weapons.




More pictures of the warriors and of a crazy painting I liked. My favorite is the one of Amber behind the headless warrior. Cutest warrior ever. Supposedly the warriors are actual sized, so I guess Amber is about the size of a Chinese warrior from 2000 years ago. Aw, 5 foot tall soldiers...

At this point I started taking less pictures, because Amber was going crazy with the photos, so I felt she had it covered. So I'll update the last part of our trip when I steal pictures from Amber. I've already spent too much of a day doing this. So you'll have to wait until the riveting conclusion!


Until next time...