Leaving Beijing. Next stop: Shanghai.

Transportation mode: Train. Bullet train to be precise. Probably you were not aware, but China has the largest bullet-train network in the world, having trains going faster than the more popular TGV in France. Yeah, go China
Most of the Chinese are traveling this and next week, so chances of getting tickets were quite slim. Luckily a friend of Klaus who lives in Shanghai, organized some tickets for us as well as a hotel, using her connections.
The train station most of all looks like a very impressive airport, and I mean impressive.
The first thing I saw when entering the station were that the entire commercial space was taken up by Nokia N9 ads. Taken into account that the CEO of Nokia declared MeeGo for dead and thereby I lost my job, kind of is weird to see this much space spent on the phone when they are not going to produce enough anyway. I kind of owe my trip to the phone on that poster, so we went and got a beer :-)
Security checks and quite advanced forms of ticketing systems, most more advanced than most airports I have ever been to, and much more efficient.
We find our train and it looks like something out of a science fiction movie, like a train and a fighter jet morphed together. We get inside and there it looks quite much like an airplane, just more comfortable, though smaller seats there is plenty of legroom.
This is my first time with a bullet train, and I can say from my experiences with IC3 in Denmark, that these trains are a little more impressive. Of course everything is still new, the line we went on from Beijing to Shanghai and opened just July 30th 2011. Just 2 months ago, one of these bullet trains hit another train stuck on the tracks after lightning struck it and it stopped. But statistically it is not going to happen again for a long time, right?
These trains are fast, really fast, and to prove their point, they have a speedometer available while driving. Really smooth ride, everything passes the windows outside like nothing. When things felt slow, I took a look at the speed, it showed 200kmh, still relatively fast I would say?
In rush hour the entire train system is designed to have these trains depart every 5 minutes, yes every 5 minutes. Imagine how many trains are needed and that they are all "Made in China" and the system to avoid accidents etc as well? Not exactly a proof of trust right there...? Well, hopefully they will get problems sorted out fast, to avoid anymore accidents.
We arrived to the Shanghai station, just as impressive as Beijing, grabbed a cab and was driven to our hotel. Shanghai is quite different from Beijing, just by watching out of the window in the taxi on the way to the hotel. The freeways are 20-30 meters up in the air, looks very futuristic.
The hotel we got is out of this world, luxurious I have to say and at the best price ever, as we are official some of her company's business connections (traveling with backpacks..?) It is probably the last hotel in a very long time for me with this kind of standard...
We met with Klaus's friends, went for dinner and had a few drinks. This city is for sure more pale-face friendly than Beijing, but now I suddenly think it is too much. So many German and British tourists everywhere, can't really tell that I am in China anymore.

Superstitions

An elevator in Beijing, notice anything weird?

Air pollution in Beijing

To give an example of the air quality problem Beijing faces, here is a view from Klaus's window from one day with fairly ok air, and the other from a dirty day. This is not fog or mist, just so fine dust particles it looks like it could be.

The picture I have is not really that bad I was told, it can get much worse. Not that I really want to experience that, I can already feel the lungs are full of stuff when having walked or biked around the city. Imagine people who live here?
When we went to the mountains, they showed me how the government had planted trees on all the mountains to the North and East of Beijing in an effort to try to minimize the dust migration from the North. This is a huge area, but look at the picture which clearly shows how these trees are planted.
This is to restore the vegetation around the area, which had earlier been used for firewood when things got a little too cold.
A lot of wind from the North, all the way in Mongolia, brings sand from the Gobi desert down South, also known as the Asian Dust. This is not only a problem in Beijing, but huge areas of China, Japan and Korea. The dust is even measurable all the way over the Pacific Ocean in the USA.
The health department monitors the air quality daily, and most days the air is categorized as hazardously, but life goes on here

Around Beijing on a bike

Got on the bikes and pedaled around the inner part of Beijing. Again I was on the smaller GoGo bike, which I guess looks funny, but after a full day of biking it became evident that this bike is not made for real biking nor aiming at 2x Chinese sized people.
One moment we were on enormous 4 lane roads with special bicycle lanes, the next moment driving around narrow alleys, with barely room enough for 2 bikes to pass, and still they were trying to drive cars around here, with people jumping left and right for their lives. People were playing cards everywhere, sitting outside their houses on the stones looking at all the pale-faces passing by. I was about to say, totally like the movies, but I guess it is actually the other way around?
At some point I am driving in front and around a corner I almost hit two other bikes coming from the opposite direction, when I get this weird feeling and stop the bike. They had done the same, and it turned out that it was friends of Klaus, Ronan and Yinyin, the guys we had gone to the mountain the week before. How big is the chance of running into them in a city the size of Beijing?
We drove around a lake called Houhai, and even though it is not very clean, people were still bathing in it as well as sailing, while around the lake there were so many people, either walking or biking tandem or 3 or even 4 persons bikes. All out to enjoy the clean air on a hot Beijing Sunday afternoon. The picture of the lake and the sun is taken around 4 o'clock and shows how polluted the air is.
We agreed to go to a bar for a refreshing drink, and they knew this place just around the corner. Half an hour later driving back and forth the same streets 2-3 times, we finally found it. I ordered a Mojito, but when I got it, it turned out I had ordered something from a section on the menu called Mocktails - alcohol-free cocktails. Who invented that stupid thing?
It had gotten dark and drove past the Forbidden City, where there was almost as many people now that it was dark as there had been the day I was there. The streets there offered around 20 meters wide bicycle lanes, and 6 car wide lanes in each direction, now that is big! But making it back in the dark without any lights on in crazy Beijing traffic is really nerve wrecking, not on my list of stuff to recommend

We also passed the opera, which was quite an amazing sight at night. The shape of half an egg, with half of the building in glass, located in the middle of a lake.

Chinese bureaucracy

Have you ever traveled around the world having to fill out those different forms at the hotel about nationality, length of stay etc? I had always thought that was just to keep track of who was in the hotel in case of some emergency. As I am not in a hotel in Beijing, but living in a penthouse apartment as a guest, I had to go to the police station and register my presence within 24 hours of arriving. This I figured out 2 weeks after I arrived...
Went to the apartment management, who sent me to their office. They took a few copies of my passport and sent me off to the police station around the corner. When I had to go to the consulate to get the visa, I read somewhere that people going to China would have to learn to stand in line anyways, so should not complain about a little bit of waiting time. Well, I got to try that one myself today.
Before going I was reading about their processing time had decreased from 10min to only 1min, so this would make less of an excuse for people not stopping by for registration. 10 minutes I thought, I would not have a problem waiting 10 minutes, why was that such a big deal? When I came to the police station, the time was 11:55 and it looked a little empty. There were around 10 counters with people sitting at some of them ready to "serve" the people. There was a big number on top of each counter so I was looking for a ticket machine so I could get my stuff done. There was no such machine and there was maybe 5 people sitting ready at their computers, but none of them as much as turned their heads with me standing just in front of them. They just kept looking at their computer screen at what ever it was showing.
I got eye contact with one guy standing a little in the background trying to look busy. I showed him my passport and paper work and asked where I could get this done. He looked at his watch and then me, he then gave me the sign of two. Two minutes, I thought, that's going to be really fast today, almost nobody else in there. I sat down and waited and then the guy finished his eating of whatever it was he was stuffing his face with. Every counter had a little scrolling display over it, and turned out that every counter was doing something different, and the counter number 2 was for temporary address registration. Hmm, could it be that he had been just giving me the sign of 2 as in counter number 2? Now I thought and got up, as he sat down at a counter, but I was surprised when he made himself very comfortable with shoes off and the back of the chair as far back as possible. I got his attention and he again showed me 2 and then he closed his eyes - to sleep! I sat back down and waited. More people came in, were totally ignored and left again. Now and then some new person apparently working there would come and sit down behind the computer and someone else would then leave. I figured so much that I had hit them on their lunch break, and they seem to take this very seriously! Ok, lunch would be half an hour, at the most an hour, it was already 12:20.
At 1:55 the office was suddenly flooded with people, and the line in front of counter 3 was suddenly 20 people long. No problem as I was heading for line 2 I was guessing so I got up and stood in line too. Turned out that the line 3 was for Chinese, and the line 3 was for foreigners... Now I was 20 in line or so. Crap. At around 3pm I got out of there with my temporary address registration card. Long live bureau-crazy

Foods in Beijing

Klaus is a vegetarian and I have had many chances of trying, what I would call, alternative foods in Beijing. No meat, means a lot of tofu and seafoods, the tofu however is not on my favorite list, supposedly it gives men soft balls and I take that very seriously? After a few weeks in Beijing I have to admit that the different kinds of tofu prepared with lots of spices and different sauces can actually be quite tastefully. Especially when considering that most other meats are served with bones chopped up, chicken, beef or fish. I so miss the feeling of chewing meat, not just liking meat off bones, a Western thing I guess.

Klaus has been very good at bring a lot of his friends with him to dinner in the evening, so that I could try to get some good meat dishes that he has never had himself. China is huge and covers very different climates, think harsh North versus lush tropical South, mountains on the West and Ocean on the East. People eat what they can easily get their hands on, so obviously there are many different dishes from around the country.

I like spicy food and have had my nose running a few times already. My favorite dishes are by far Sichuan, be it chicken, fish or whatever they can create that way. Basically the food is cooked in spicy chili oil, covered in dried chili, garlic, ginger and some very special pepper corns called Sichuan peppers. When they are crushed in the mouth, the tongue will start to buzz, the lips will go numb and the mouth starts to water, a lot. It is not super spicy, just the feeling of it is weird, almost like putting a 9v battery to your tongue. Horrible you might think, I find it quite amusing.
The other day I had some sausage, I could not believe it when I was told it was made from tofu. It actually tasted a lot better than the typical cheap American sausage. I could have lost a bet on this for sure.

Although I like spicy food, I don't think the Chinese kitchen so far has been super spicy. If anything, it is very greasy, which makes some of the dishes not so inviting at times. And no, I have not become a tofu man!

Beer in Beijing

Nokia's restructuring all over the world, meant that the Copenhagen office would close in not too long. While some people are embracing the opportunity of doing something else after many years in the company (was that too biased?) another group of people are seeking jobs within Nokia in other countries. One of these guys is Alexander, who is in Beijing at the same time as I, looking at what Beijing has to offer in terms of housing.
We agreed to meet for a beer and I started searching for places with some reasonable beer in Beijing. After searching for a few minutes I realized that there is a huge concentration of German bars and brewing houses where they make their own beer. Carlsberg is also a big part of the street view during night time. I never thought I would be drinking a Carlsberg again and enjoying it as much as I did the other day, but it surely beats the Chinese super light beers. Oh, another interesting piece of information you can't live without. Which beer sells the most in the world? Budweiser, Corona, Heineken, Carlsberg you might be thinking? Nope, it is a Chinese beer, called SnowBeer. Yeah, chances are you probably never heard about it, but it sells more as an individual beer than any other.
Turned out that this weekend a couple of these breweries had October fest celebration. That sounds about right for me, I thought. Klaus had some challenge ordering vegetarian food in a German beer place, where the specialties were meat, sausages, sauerkraut und so weiter. I however was on my home turf, yeah, I had gotten a special deal of the day, which consisted of a meat plate and as much beer as I could drink during the evening. I accepted the challenge and after 4-5 glasses of beer I lost count... Those were 1 liter glases though, haha
Klaus was the first to leave, the beer must hit harder with only veggies in the stomach. Alex had been out the day before and didn't want too much to drink. He kept saying that even after a few Jägermeister, but eventually I found myself alone in a German bar somewhere in Beijng, with no real idea where I was. The subway had stopped driving a long time ago, I had forgotten these small pieces of paper given by Klaus for the taxi driver. The phone was almost out of power and the GPS couldn't get a fix. I walked around and found a few places I had been to earlier, but since I did not know where they were relatively to where I was going, it didn't help. Just as all the beers probably had not helped either.
I finally came to a road I had been on a few times before and started walking. Playing around with the GPS for around 15min I finally got a fix and had an idea where I was. Turned out I had been on the right street, but walking the wrong direction.

The Forbidden City and the Heavenly Peace square

The two biggest tourist attractions in Beijing are by far the Forbidden City and the Tiananmen Square. They are practically next to each other so easy to get from one to the other.
The Forbidden city was the Chinese Imperial palace back in the old days. It was built some 600 years ago and was in use for over 500 years serving as the home of the emperors of China. As the name implies it was not accessible to the regular Chinese man, but today it serves as a museum and attracts more people than most other museums I am guessing. I went on a weekday so it was not as crowded as it could be during the weekend, but still so many people that I ended up getting a little irritated. The area that the Forbidden city covers is huge, almost 1x1km, and the amount of buildings and rooms is almost unreal. There is supposed to be almost 1000 buildings and some 8700 rooms and after some time I decided just to trust the information page and skip the counting I was doing. It is crazy big and even though maybe half of the area inside the city's walls is open squares, the rest is still unbelievably big.

When I got to the entrance I was greeted every few seconds by a Chinese who wanted to sell me a personal guided tour. I politely said no thanks, but after the 20th person asked me, I started just ignoring them. I got my ticket and entered the inner courts just to find even more people. The buildings in the middle had something interesting centered in the building it seemed, because people were flocking around those buildings. I went up there and being a head higher than most people served me well that day.
One thing I don't like about China though is that missing personal sphere. They don't mind walking all the way up to other persons and standing a few millimeters away. Even worse, in front of these buildings people were trying to get some pictures and they were pushing like crazy. There were so many tour companies with speakers and flags that shouted out loud all the time, really annoying. It became a diligent game of getting in between two groups, so being on my own there was actually quite nice.
At some point I was quite annoyed with some many people pushing me that I stood still and this guy kept running into me and he looked up when I didn't move when he pushed me. Then he stood there for a second or two and then gave up. A moment later, someone was waving a hand in front of my face, and I turned around and a woman was standing there. I thought it was another tour guide giving me yet another offer I could not refuse, but she just stood there and kept waving and smiling to me. After a 2-3 seconds of looking at her, she somehow seemed familiar to me, but could not place her. It turned out she was the woman that had sat in the bus to the Great wall behind me. Of all the places in the world, I did not expect to meet anyone I knew in the Forbidden city. We talked for a few minutes and both agreed that the hike had been a much better experience that this super crowded museum thing.
After 3-4 hours I had had enough and started walking out, which was only another kilometer, haha. From the outside the whole forbidden city looked just as impressive and quiet beautiful actually. A 50 meter wide moat surrounds the entire city, which then has walls 8-10 meters high, which is enough to impress me, having the Danish castles in my mind.
I got out and went over to the square in front of the forbidden city, the Heavenly Peace square or Tiananmen Square as the Chinese call it. The square is the largest city square in the world, and yes, it is quite big, but the biggest in the world? Most people probably know the square from the protests back in the late 80's that ended with the military crushing the protests killing hundreds of people. There were no descriptions of that event anywhere, no symbolic reminder of any kind to remember what happened, other than the video clip most people remember of a guy standing in front of a tank, trying to stop it using his body. Interestingly enough, it seems like young Chinese people don't know this as it is censored in China.
Maybe this square used to have a significant meaning back when the forbidden city was still forbidden and the country had an emperor, but now I don't see any other reason for this square than a place to have military displays.
I would say I am a little disappointed in both these tourist attractions, it seems a little bit too arranged all of it. The Forbidden City has some very beautiful structures and is in very good condition considering it is 600 years old and mostly from wood, but there is just something unappealing about it all, don't know what it is

Does cheap food equal bad food?

The neighbourhood that Klaus resides in, I would guess could be called very international. There is a street close by called Lucky Street, which looks like a small Las Vegas. It has a lot of restaurants from all over the world and probably caters mostly to foreigners who can't get along with Chinese foods.
Luckily I don't have that problem, so for dinner we went to some regular man's noodle place and it seemed to be very popular among younger people. The menu was on the wall, with only very few pictures, so I let Klaus do the ordering, as if it would make a difference, haha. I mean, if he is the picky one being vegetarian, he can do the ordering too and be responsible himself if there is meat. I had no idea what he ordered, but since I was paying and she only asked 51RMB from me, I got a little nervous that he had not ordered anything for me. It was all taken care of he said, when I saw the beer in the fridge and mumbled the only Chinese word I know, which is beer. I was happy, I had ordered something in Chinese, but that was already on our order, so in fact I had just rushed them to give me my beer NOW!
We sat down facing the kitchen which was halfway in a basement with glass windows, so we could follow the action in there through the dirty windows. The beers were on the table in seconds and after a minute or so, I got some kind of sandwich served, very similar to pulled pork. A little greasy and I grabbed for the chili at the table. The waitress immediately came to me and said something pointing at the chili, maybe she was warning me, I just nodded and smiled?
Through the windows we could see them make the noodles from scratch in just a few seconds. They pulled the dough a few times, hit it to the table and they had made noodles. He cooked the dish in a few minutes and that turned out to be Klaus's dish, looked and smelled quite good. The chef was preparing the second portion and we figured so much that it was probably mine. When the waitress then came and look at me still eating the rest of my sandwich, she started talking to me. She repeated the same sentence 5 times and talked louder and louder as if I was deaf or something. Again I smiled and nodded and took a sip of my beer (sponsoring the Chinese Space Exploration program) thinking she was asking if it was good. Turned out she was probably asking if I wanted my dish without meat too, because the chef was fishing something out of my dish before serving it and the noodle soup with pork that Klaus had order for me, had no pork. The dish smelled even better than what Klaus had gotten, and it tasted even better.
So, we got 2 dishes and a juicy pork sandwich accompanied with 2 beers, all for 51RMB, which is around $8. That's a pretty good price, especially taken into account that we had sushi the other evening which ended up being 10 times more expensive. Both places made us equally full...

We walked a few minutes from the restaurant and Klaus thought I should have a Steff Houlberg sausage, a Danish brand. I thought he was kidding me, but he had actually taken me to a hotdog bar. I was really full and couldn't eat more, so he said he needed to go to the bathroom and I should come. Ok, that didn't sound right, but I followed him around the corner, where there was a corridor to the bathroom. He stopped and pressed a button on the wall and the wall slid to the side and he walked in. A little surprised I went through and I was now at the FuBar.
That was some interesting bar entrance, but I guess it works to stand out sometimes. There was a lot of foreigners at the bar, which I could have been without, but we had a few drinks before heading back home. Being a pale face is not very exotic if the place is already full of them, right?

The Great Wall of China

Most people don't know too much about China, other than Chinese eat rice and they live in a country with a big wall around them. When I was a kid, our teachers told us that the Great Wall in China was one of the few man made things that could actually be seen from outer space and it stretched from the coast and surrounded all of China. Call me naive, but when seeing the pictures of the wall and how it stretched over mountain tops for as far as the clouds would allow you to see, it somehow did not contradict what I had been told. Well now, this was my moment to go and check it out for myself.
I decided that I did not want to go to the usual Beijing Great Wall spot, that most other tourists go to, but instead I found a website called Beijing Hikers that offered a full day hike to a part of "the" wall that not many people go to and which was in really good shape.
On the way to the meeting point where the bus was parked I crossed the street at a light with a 100 other people and a small Chinese girl approached me and asked if I was a hiker. Do I look like a hiker I asked, and she said yes and smiled all over the face. She was dressed in a little more outdoorish clothing and she then walked next to me and kept talking to me. 5 minutes later I was at the bus and it turned out that Suzie as she was called, was actually the tour-guide of today's trip.
There was about 2 hours drive out of Beijing after picking up people at another stop. Most people were quiet except a group of American's in the background who were blabbing loudly, impossible to get a little sleep. When we arrived we got to meet everybody and it quickly turned out that there were not many locals. Most people were traveling on their own and had been on the road for days, weeks or months already. I felt a little like a traveler virgin, with only 2 weeks of travels so far.
We climbed a lot of stairs and finally arrived to a watchtower, which was part of the wall. I have seen pictures of the Great Wall before, but standing there is something else I can tell you. The day was sunny with blue sky and the view was as far as the eye could see.
The wall just kept going over one mountain ridge after the other until it disappeared in the horizon. I can not imagine the amount of labor that had to be used to build this wall, just simply amazing to be there in person.
We walked approximately for 3 hours on the wall up and down super steep steps, through towers, down through almost crumbled stairs declining with up to 60 degrees. There are other parts of the wall that has an 85 degree incline, imagine how steep that is!
Now and then we bumped into Chinese people selling drinks on the wall, with a noticeable margin I should add. 10RMB for a water, which we had gotten for free at the bus already and this woman asked 50RMB for a soda. Probably the prices are for bargaining, but imagine you are really thirsty and don't care what it costs, they will be ready to sell you one of the most expensive sodas of your life.
On the way I learned a few facts about the Great Wall.
It is not one big wall, but consist of walls in Northern China, mostly towards the border of Mongolia. The Mogolian people were known to party a little too hard and the Chinese wanted to protect themselves. If you dig deep and think of Genghis Khan, then you know that the walls did not hold forever.
In fact there are 3 walls protecting Beijing, the one we were on today was called Jinshanling and was the inner wall, the last line of defense before entering the flats where Beijing was located. 

The myth about being visible from outer space, well, that is not true either. Go to Google, and search for "jinshan ridge great wall, china" then change to the satellite image and try to zoom out - it doesnt't take long before it is not visible anymore, in fact it takes quite some time to find it in the first place.

There were 3 of us in front, 2 girls and I, and the gap between the end of the pack and us became quite big at the end. We sat waiting for Suzie the guide, who had said we could go ahead and wait for her at this one watchtower of the trail, which was going to be the end of the hike.
When she came, she asked us if we were ready to go down, and the two girls were pretty exhausted it looked like. I said I could do some more and then she pointed at another watchtower on top of the ridge about 1 km away. It was part of the Simatai wall, which has been closed for renovation for 3 years already. And yes it was closed, but if I went into the bushes, I could get around it.
Off I went and some 20 minutes later I had reached the top of the ridge with the tower, which was in pretty bad shape. But from there I had the best view and there was nobody around,
The Great Wall, was it disappointing then? Oh no, just the opposite. This construction is truly impressive, especially not being able to see the end of it in the horizon, but only one watch tower after the other with the wall between them climbing over over one mountain top after the other. I got to go with a group of very interesting and nice people, all of them really talkative and friendly. Another huge plus was the fresh air out in the nature, so much better than the big city. We had a lunch together at a local restaurant on the way back and when the beers came on the table people started really talking.
Too bad it had to end at that point, but I guess I'd better get used to that feeling...

Traffic in China

The traffic here in Beijing is if not dangerous, at least very lively. Having to cross a street becomes a gamble with your life. The light I think is what makes it dangerous, it gives you false hope! Red light doesn't mean you can't try to go through the crossing traffic, it merely seems to indicate that most people will come from the sides the next few moments. Coming from the US where cars would stop 20 feet away afraid of getting too close to a pedestrian, it is a little different here. In China they also have the rule about right turn on red, but it is not exactly a safe implementation here, since no stopping of the vehicle is involved. At the most they will honk the horn and take a right turn, expecting all pedestrians to jump for their lives and give way. Add to that the deadly silent electrical scooters and bicycles that are everywhere, exciting!
 

When the light goes red, most people seem to stop, but after a few seconds people get impatient. Whether you are in a car, on a bike or scooter or just on foot, this is the chance of saving those precious 20 seconds of your life. Just outside the window here I spent a few minutes looking at the traffic, again and again I told myself that that situation is not going to end well. However I never saw anything happening, maybe it is an acquired skill to navigate through traffic? Talking about electric scooters and bicycles, that is huge here.

Whether people are transporting a lot of stuff on their 3 wheeled bicycles with a flatbed on the back, small bicycle taxis or even just regular bicycles, it is used widely. Comparing to usual mopeds and scooters, these versions do not pollute, neither noise nor any exhaust fumes. Beijing is quite flat, they must be getting the most out of these things. But even if you would live in cities with many hills etc, getting a little extra power going up over the hill would be welcome to many people. Braking on the way down the hill would generate power that could go back to the battery, just like they have in some cars nowadays. But they are deadly quiet. Add to the fact that bicycles and scooters don't drive around with lights at night as it supposedly confuses the car drivers!
A car will drive anywhere, and I mean anywhere. There are big lanes for bicycles, and I told Klaus that I thought it was quite good city planning having build most of the roads like this, away from the cars etc. That was until a car was behind me try to get by on the bicycle path. Oh well, I should have seen that coming. Later the same thing happened on the sidewalk, if the car fits, someone will go there!
I think the most impressive thing I have seen was a car coming to a red light, 3 lanes in front of him with cars. He takes the bicycle lane all the way on the right side and drives up to the pedestrians who are now crossing because they have a green light. He honks a few times and turns left crossing together with the pedestrians, until he can turn left again onto the bicycle path in the other direction, where he then parks. Too bad I did not get that on video, because it doesn't sound as cool as it looked

A weekend out of Beijing

What do people do on their weekends in Beijing? I have no idea. But we were going to the mountains with some of Klaus's friends, Ronan and Yunyun. Bring a warm jacket I was told. Huh? I thought I was going to spent the next few months in tropical temperatures, however I did bring my favorite fleece
First we had to shop for some mountain necessities like beer, chips and chocolate. I was brought to a place called Jenny Lou's, which turned out to be a foreign goods supermarket. I was amazed by the much better selection, quite astonishing compared to similar places I had been to in the US. I found several different kinds of Danish Lurpak butter, Danish cheeses, so many different kinds of real rye breads, real bakery goods, good chocolates and so on. I was surprised to see they had both Tuborg and Carlsberg brews, but had to look twice when Klaus pulled out a 1 liter 10% Faxe beer can from a shelve next to me. Even more surprising was it to see that I could buy the Rogue Dead Guy Ale and Rogue Amber Ale, two good US-West coast brews that can be hard to find even in San Diego. I know what you are thinking now, I can't go anywhere without having to have some American beer? Well, I have tasted Chinese beer and it doesn't taste anything, even more fizzier yellowish beer than Budweiser and Miller, light! I guess I will be visiting this place once or twice during my stay here in Beijing and maybe before leaving too.

Off we went towards meeting Yunyun and Ronan, who we were going to take us for some sightseeing this weekend. It turns out that Klaus has not really seen too much of China even though he's been living here for 3 years, so everything is new to him too.
First stop was Chuandixia Village, a very old village from the Ming and Qing dynasty (yes, I read that somewhere!) that is a big tourist attraction nowadays. I doubt that people lived in the houses we saw and they were just waiting for us to leave so they could go home too.



The sun was setting and we had to continue further up the mountains to find some restaurant to eat and a place to stay over night. An hour or so later we came to another small village, Hongshuikou, where we were going to have BBQ'ed lamb and stay overnight. Now, don't confuse this with an any-star hotel with restaurant that you have ever been to. It had quite spacious rooms, but the bathroom smelled so bad, was wet because the shower was dripping and the water didn't seem to go anywhere - no outlet in the floor, instead a mop in the corner and then empty the bucket to the sink I am guessing! But there was a toilet, a real one, which I should be happy about I was told.
We went down for food, but unfortunately they wanted us to reserve the lamb dinner 2-3 hours before dinner time, and since it was already too late, we ended up ordering some regular dishes of their menu. The restaurant lounge, haha, was a big room with tiles on the floor and quite dirty.
The huge round tables with room for 8-10 were covered with big table clothes and when we sat down I felt something under my shoe underneath the table. I looked down and found an old bone. There was a dog running in and out of the place, it had probably begged a bone from the neighbor table, they were eating the little BBQ'ed lamb. The food was ok, or maybe I was just very hungry? We brought our own desert, consisting of various bottled liquids.
Going to bed, we found that the bedding was quite dirty already, the mattress must have been 30 years old and I deeply regretted to have left my super tiny sleeping bag at home. The drinks had been necessary to make us not care so much, otherwise I bet it would have been quite difficult to fall asleep in that smell from the bathroom.

Next morning I woke up to a beeping phone, a text message from AT&T, that I had very high international data usage. I had hardly been using my phone, maybe I checked my mail twice to get an address or something. It is probably a good idea to contact Nokia and have my calling plan changed, just don't know the name of the guy who does it.
We got up and went down to eat some breakfast we brought ourselves. There was a guy mopping the floors in the restaurant and I joked that this was the weekly cleaning and now the bone must have been removed. I looked under the table, just to discover that there had not been a mop underneath that table for many many days. There were small piles of bones in there and other unidentifiable stuff that the dog probably didn't want to eat and left there. I think this most of all reminded me about indoor camping, except that I really think out camping trips have been a little cleaner and more comfortable than this "hotel". On the other hand, this is probably just the tip of the iceberg of what I am going to see the next coming months.

We drove up the mountains on narrow streets, where people drive like maniacs. While I might have been driving a little too fast here and there, I don't drive around way about the speed limit, while pressing the horn, going on the wrong lane in a blind corner. This happened again and again, and we had plenty of near-miss encounters that I will happily forget about.
We arrived at the foot of the Lingshan Mountain, and dressed up. Wow it was cold, 9 degrees Celsius and a cold wind from North, brrrrr. So much for bringing a wind proof jacket, maybe I should put that on my to-buy list. It is a ski-resort at wintertime, but still open to climb during anytime of the year. The ski lifts were on and it cost $15 or so to get half way to the top, but we decided to take the stairs and paths leading up there too.

A lot of old people were offering horse back rides to the top, they would then walk themselves pulling the horse while having people sitting on the horse, haha. Just a very light breakfast pretty quickly proved a bad idea, as the batteries were running low after an hour or so. Good thing I had found some chocolate in the store the day before, that now came in very handy. Half way to the top, we found a lady who was selling corn cobs that she was BBQing over open fire.
After almost 2,5 hours and we finally reached the summit at 2303 meters. There was a quite nice view from up there, luckily the weather was quite good so we could see very far.
On the way down from the mountain, we bumped into a lot of people who did not wake up as early as we did, maybe they had better beds? When I say, bumped into, I literally mean it. The courtesy of giving way for someone, doesn't seem to exist here. This personal sphere that most people have around themselves, is not really something they respect either.
At some point close to the end of the mountain, an old woman, most likely one of the horse pullers, was being cared for by a couple of the others. She had fallen it seemed to and was totally passed out and had been bleeding out of the mouth. They were shouting to her and she drifted in and out of consciousness, clearly not knowing what to do. We asked if they were going to call an ambulance, but no-one understood English. I think I will keep that in the back of my head. When around people who obviously have no clue how to help other people in need, I should maybe take it a little easy. I might have a good travel insurance, but that doesn't help me in the middle of nowhere with people who can hardly help themselves.

We made it down and was greeted by a lady who could see we were thirsty. She sat us down at a table and we ordered two beers, which came out from a strange door very fast. Too expensive, so we got up and walked away, she ran over and pulled us back to the table and had now lowered the price enough that we would pay, haha.

Back in Beijing we stopped at a market to buy some groceries. A long corridor with I would guess 50 vendors or so, selling everything, fruit, veggies, beef, pork, food, seafood, rice, all in special shops. I didn't know there were that many different kinds of rice and that shrimp actually jump like crazy when not in the water! In front of the shops there were guys chopping up meat on a old wooden budget chopping block, sometimes dropping the meat on the ground. Not exactly sure the Western world's health departments would be too happy about the treatment of foods here. What doesn't kill you just requires a lot of toilet paper the next day :-)