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 :-)