A quick trip through China....
Ni Hao!
That's "Hello" in Mandarin Chinese and is pronounced 'Neehow'. The discovery of this word means I now have a useful collection of 7 Chinese words at my immediate disposal, the other 6 being "Kung Fu", "Feng Shui" and "Chow Mein". The fact that I am here writing this blog after 2 weeks in China is evidence enough that you really don't need to learn anymore unless you're trying to show off.
So, it's just under 3 weeks since my last update and a very scary 12 days until we finally arrive home again to England. Tomorrow morning (Wednesday 7th February) at 07:40 we step on to a train at Beijing Central Train Station and 6 long days later we arrive in Moscow. With the return of our passports yesterday from the Mongolian Embassy that means the last of our visas are now secured. All parts of the Russian leg of the journey are also booked and paid for. We're just about ready to go. All that's needed is a quick trip to the shops later on for a bottle of vodka, a copy of Tolstoy's "War and Peace' and a few jars of caviar in case we get peckish en-route and then we're sorted!
But before all that I guess you'll want to know what's happened since my last update from Hong Kong. The answer is not alot - but I'm sure with a bit of effort I can stretch it out into another lengthy read for you....
We originally planned to leave Hong Kong on Friday 19th January but when we arrived at the train station the day before to buy our tickets we found out the train only ran from HK to Shanghai every other day and Friday was one of the no-train days. So, we could leg it back to the hostel, hastily grab our packs and return equally speedily and just about make it onto today's train or leave on Saturday instead. We returned to the hostel, paid the nice owner, Mr. Fat, for an extra couple of nights and then went to the cinema instead. The next day, our newly acquired last full-day in HK, we sauntered around the park enjoying our last day of t-shirt weather until probably sometime in June and then meandered down to the shopping plazas for a final stroll amongst the smart, designer-clad shoppers of this affluent city and feeling rather out of place in our grubby trekking gear that's seen far better days after so many dodgy laundrettes and weeks of hard use.
The train from Hong Kong to Shanghai is comfortable and Lynn and I have a 4-berth cabin on the soft-sleeper coach all to ourselves for the entire 25 hour journey. The carriages are always warm but as evening turns to night the heating system is cranked up to full and this turns each cabin into an inescapable sauna for it's unfortunate occupants. No amount of begging or pleading will make the attendant reduce the temperature and the windows are all locked shut. We dribble and perspire our way into Shanghai...
We spent 3 days in Shanghai and to be honest, it was probably 2 days too long. We stayed at the Captain's Hostel, all decked out like a ship with metal stairs, life-buoys hung on the walls and fishing nets hung from the ceiling. The weather here is very depressing - grey skies, lashing rain and a biting wind. The temperature is down and into single figures and, more depressing still, we know this is the warmest it's going to be now until after we arrive home.
Shanghai isn't somewhere we felt inclined to stay long in. The best thing about the city is it's phenomenal skyscraper-skyline when viewed from across the Huangpu river on the riverfront promenade known as 'The Bund'. The most distinctive building is the Oriental Pearl Tower which is shaped a bit like the Eiffel Tower but with baubles at the joints. The best views however are to be had from the Jinmao Tower which, at 420m, is currently the 4th tallest building in the world.
Finding an internet cafe in Shanghai was a real headache. Our guidebook says they're everywhere but unfortunately it doesn't elaborate further by actually giving you the address of any which isn't much use. On our second day in Shanghai we zig-zagged back and forth up and down every street for about 2 hours in our quest to find one and had absolutely no luck whatsoever. We started asking people - "Ni Hao, feng shui, chow mein, kung fu?" but they didn't seem to understand what I was on about. We were just about on the verge of giving up when a security guard through very good use of sign-language made us understand that he knew where there was an internet cafe but unfortunately couldn't leave his post to show us where it was and we'd never find it on our own. Sensing our desperation he instead collared a mate to take us across the road, down a little street, into a clothes shop and through the back to the service lifts (nobody seemed to mind) - up to the 4th floor, past a load of boxes and other stuff, up steps, down corridors, left, right, down steps, up corridors until finally we emerged at some aircraft-hangar-sized room filled with about 400 computers mostly in use by young, bleary-eyed, Chinese guys online-gaming and chain-smoking cigarette after cigarette behind ashtray mountains of fag-butts. A couple of emails and a lack of oxygen induced headache later we emerge back into the rain-soaked streets of the city.
Despite many attempts, we hadn't managed to find a good Chinese restaurant in China yet and were beginning to think that anyone natively Chinese with even the tiniest amount of culinary know-how had long since departed the country to set up a greasy little take-away in the West. We didn't find a good Chinese restaurant in Shanghai either but we did come across a Brazilian Steakhouse with unlimited barbecued steaks that were to die for. For a set price of 76 yuan (about 5 pounds in English money) you got all the food you could scoff and when it's as good as it was there, that's a fair bit!
We left Shanghai on an overnight train on Wednesday 24th January heading further north - destination: Beijing. It's a 12.5 hour journey and this time we have to share our 4-berth cabin with 2 others. One is Michael, an Irish guy who is only 2 weeks into his year away. The other is a middle-aged Chinese man who wore 3 pairs of trousers despite, yet again, the sauna-like conditions that kept the rest of us tossing and turning and perspiring like crazy all night.
We arrived at a Beijing train station on-time at 07:30. I say "a Beijing train" station because there are 4 of them and our first task was to find out which of these 4 main stations we'd arrived at. Was it Beijing Central? Beijing North? Beijing South? or Beijing West? All the signs were in Chinese and nobody at the station knew what we were babbling at them. The guidebook helpfully pointed out that we'd arrive at one of the four stations but couldn't be any more specific. The reason it mattered so much is that the hostel we want to stay at is almost directly opposite the Beijing Central Train Station and we didn't want to look foolish by standing in the taxi queue for a place that was on the other side of the road if you knew which of the million unreadable neon signs to look at. After scanning the multitude of signs several times and getting no luck whatsoever we decided we were definately NOT at Beijing central so let's get in the taxi queue. The queue is quite long and huge steel barriers usher you back and forth in a zig-zag until you finally reach the front. After 5 minutes of waiting, forward a couple of paces, wait again we are about 4 people from the front and that's when Lynn spotted it -
"Isn't that the place we want over there look?"
"I don't know, I can't quite read it. Could be."
"I'm sure it is. Look, it says half a ladder with a 't' next to it followed by a television with only 3 legs under a pointy roof followed by a plate of spaghetti and then a man with a long willie and a broken leg...." [Yep, that's how Lynn and I read Chinese hieroglyphics, I'm afraid]
Amidst much cursing and groaning from everyone else we battle our way back through the queueing masses, knocking everyone aside with our flailing bags as we attempt to extract ourselves from a one-way only barrier system full of people and their suitcases and back to freedom. Finally we make it out and much to our relief we find it is the City Central Hostel that we can see. All the way we were battling our way out I imagined finally escaping the hordes, looking up, realising it was a bank or something and then having to embarassingly rejoin the queue!
That was Thursday 25th January and 12 days later we're still here. The City Central Hostel is absolutely, perfectly placed for our needs. It is opposite the Beijing Central Train Station where we need to go when we leave on the Trans-Mongolian train tomorrow morning. The cheap and easy to negotiate Metro system has a station that is right outside the front door which is very handy. There's a supermarket on one side, a post office on the other and an ATM machine just up the road. Marvellous!
The next day we took our passports in to get our Mongolian visas and they were finally ready for us yesterday. That's the main reason we got here so long before we leave on the train to Moscow, we had to make sure we arrived with enough time to get our Mongolian visas issued. It's also just about impossible to travel in China without your passport as you need it to check in to hotels and buy tickets and even use the internet so with all that to contend with, it was always going to be 2 weeks in Beijing.
As you can imagine, we've just about done the rounds of everything worthwhile that there is to see and do in the city by now. We've been to Tianenmen Square a couple of times. The last time we went it was absolutely freezing, about -10 to -15 with the windchill factor. I am so glad I bought a michelin-man style, padded, goosedown coat in Hong Kong! Tianenmen Square is apparently the largest square of it's kind in the world. In the middle of the square is Chairman Mao's Mausoleum so we went to have a gawp at his waxy dead body along with the rest of China. Well, we'd seen Ho Chi Minh's in Hanoi so we thought it would be rude not to go and see Mao's too! From a taxidermist's point-of-view they'll be disappointed to know that despite being older (as in dead longer), Ho Chi Minh's body was in far better nick than Mao's. The hideous yellow lights in Ho Chi Minh's tomb were exactly the same in Mao's aswell so he too looked like a character from The Simpsons. Infact, Chairman Mao looked uncannily similar to a certain Mr. Burns!
We went to the Forbidden City which lies at the northern edge of Tianenmen Square. For over 500 years this Imperial city within a city was off-limits to anyone outside the imperial household but in 1949 it's doors were finally opened to the public. To be honest, it was rather disappointing. Lots of red buildings with closed doors and vast, empty courtyards. Most of the main structures were surrounded by scaffolding and shrouded in safety netting as they are spruced up for the inevitable influx of visitors during next year's Olympic Games.
We've been to the Lama Temple, Dongyue Temple and the White Cloud Temple - red buildings; vast, empty courtyards; big buddhas and lots of burning incence basically sums them up.
We've been to Jingshan Park, Beihai Park, the Summer Palace and Prince Gong's Residence - Bare, frozen parks and gardens, very rocky and barren in the depths of a freezing winter; occasionally dotted with more red buildings and vast, empty courtyards.
We've seen a few galleries and museums and visited the 'Underground City'. In 1969, with a Soviet invasion and a possible nuclear war on his mind, Chairman Mao urged Beijing's residents to start burrowing underground. A small part of this vast labyrinth has now been opened to the public and so we took the opportunity for a quick delve into Beijing's underworld. There's a big shop underground that sells the usual tacky souvenirs to visitors and as we made our way through the tunnels we passed signs to cinemas, hospitals and the Forbidden City giving an idea of just how enormous this tunnel construction actually is. It's a pity we weren't allowed to take any photos though.
My favourite 'city visit' though was to a place called 'Factory 798'. Basically, Factory 798 was an old electronics factory built in the 1950's, abandoned, left to rot and then fairly recently taken over by a huge group of artists and creative types who have turned all the buildings within this factory compound into studios and galleries for their work. The whole complex is now some sort of giant art zone, it was superb! From the outside the place still looks deserted as no work appears to have been done to spruce up the exteriors but it's on the inside that the artists have really gone to town transforming the place. You can wander at will where you like and if you see see a gallery or something that takes your fancy you just open the door and wander in.
Of course, no trip to this part of the world would be complete without a visit to one of the wonders of the world: The Great Wall Of China. We take a coach to Jinshanling early one morning and from there walk 10km along the wall to Simatai. The air is bitterly cold and there's patches of snow on the ground in places but under the fierce sun and with the hard work of trekking along this often steep section of the Great Wall we are soon sweating and gasping. The big coats come off and get tied around our waists and the hats and gloves that we started in are soon deposited away in our daypacks. The air is crystal clear and the sky a bright blue as we march along and the views are simply breathtaking. To see the wall zig-zagging over the mighty hills infront of you, tiny turrets jutting up into the sky every half a kilometre or so, it's just beautiful. Of course, once you get to them you realise these tiny turrets are enormous fortifications that usually have a staggering incline leading up and down to them that you need to negotiate. I took about 200 photos that day and have taken nearly 1,000 since arriving in China about 4 weeks ago!
And that pretty much sums up all the interesting bits of our last 3 weeks in China. So, like I said at the beginning of this blog, there's now only 12 days to go until we get back home which means I'll be sitting at my own computer in the upstairs office back home when I send you the next and, sadly, last installment of this incredible year of travelling for Lynn and I.
I really don't know if I'm looking forward to going home or not.
I get post-holiday blues after 2 weeks abroad so I can't imagine what I'll feel like after a year away - I guess I'll soon find out though. Sitting at a desk doing the 9 to 5 thing is not one of the things I'm looking forward to doing again. Of course, I've got to find myself a job before that happens but I'll give myself a week or two to sort myself out first before I start putting all my efforts into that.
And after all the good weather we've had (with a few brief exceptions) I'm not exactly looking forward to arriving back to England in Febrary either. I don't think anywhere in the world has weather quite as dreary as the UK. Other places have it hotter or colder or wetter or drier or whatever but I don't think anywhere has it quite so depressingly mediocre and for longer than England does.
But there are a few good reasons for going home again too.
It'll be nice to be living in one place again, to not be living out of a bag and having only a few tatty clothes to choose from. It'll be nice to see family and friends and relive all the best bits of the trip with them. I can't wait to sort out all my photos. I dread to think how many there are but 10,000 is probably a very good guess. Once saved to DVD and parcelled home I haven't been able to see them again so looking back through all those memories will be a momentous but enjoyable task. We've sent so many parcels home filled with things we've bought and it'll be like Christmas when we get home and unwrap them all. And then there's the post too. Have you ever wondered what a year's worth of post looks like? Well, I'll take a photo and put it on this blogsite so you can have a look. It will include 36 magazines to read as I have 3 annual subscriptions running so that'll take a few Sunday afternoons to get through!
I can't wait to play football again either. I haven't kicked a ball (or a shin) for the entire year and the day after we get back there's a Monday night 5-a-side game which I can't wait to get stuck into. Watching the football on TV I've also missed. Of course, some countries have atleast as much Premiership coverage as we get in England but the time-difference means it's not always possible to watch them live and some places, like China, I haven't seen any football at all. Thank the lord for the internet so atleast I can get the scores, I'll say that!
Food wise it'll be nice to tuck into some Crunchy Nut Cornflakes again - definately the coinosseur's cereal of choice! And I really miss proper cheese, the stronger the better. Most countries seem to think cheese is that thin plastic stuff that comes in slices and McDonalds slap on top of their burgers! Those people need to try some Stilton, if you ask me! I envisage buying a block of the stuff and just eating it straight out the pack with a spoon when I get home, Mmmm!
So that's it from China. As I said at the beginning, we board the train to Moscow at 07:40 tomorrow morning for the last leg of the trip. I know none of you will be able to join me physically for this momentous journey but perhaps instead you could join me in spirit. I have an idea. All you need to do is go outside to your garden shed and clear it out so that it's completely empty. Next, put a camp bed in there and a rucksack full of clothes. Then get yourself a good book, an MP3 player, a pack of cards and a few nibbles and throw them under the bed. Oh, and don't forget your passport too! Once this is all done you need to find a nice snowy landscape picture and selotape it to the outside of the window so the winter scene is visible from the inside of the shed. Now, I think you're ready! Tonight when you go to bed, don't forget to set your alarm early so you don't miss the departure then at 07:40 tomorrow morning when you've woken up go in to your shed, close the door behind you and enjoy your next 6 days on the Trans-Mongolian experience. See you in Moscow! Hey, and don't forget - you've got it good, you've got this nice space all to yourself. I'll have 3 others squeezed into my "shed" with me!
See you soon!
Rich
That's "Hello" in Mandarin Chinese and is pronounced 'Neehow'. The discovery of this word means I now have a useful collection of 7 Chinese words at my immediate disposal, the other 6 being "Kung Fu", "Feng Shui" and "Chow Mein". The fact that I am here writing this blog after 2 weeks in China is evidence enough that you really don't need to learn anymore unless you're trying to show off.
So, it's just under 3 weeks since my last update and a very scary 12 days until we finally arrive home again to England. Tomorrow morning (Wednesday 7th February) at 07:40 we step on to a train at Beijing Central Train Station and 6 long days later we arrive in Moscow. With the return of our passports yesterday from the Mongolian Embassy that means the last of our visas are now secured. All parts of the Russian leg of the journey are also booked and paid for. We're just about ready to go. All that's needed is a quick trip to the shops later on for a bottle of vodka, a copy of Tolstoy's "War and Peace' and a few jars of caviar in case we get peckish en-route and then we're sorted!
But before all that I guess you'll want to know what's happened since my last update from Hong Kong. The answer is not alot - but I'm sure with a bit of effort I can stretch it out into another lengthy read for you....
We originally planned to leave Hong Kong on Friday 19th January but when we arrived at the train station the day before to buy our tickets we found out the train only ran from HK to Shanghai every other day and Friday was one of the no-train days. So, we could leg it back to the hostel, hastily grab our packs and return equally speedily and just about make it onto today's train or leave on Saturday instead. We returned to the hostel, paid the nice owner, Mr. Fat, for an extra couple of nights and then went to the cinema instead. The next day, our newly acquired last full-day in HK, we sauntered around the park enjoying our last day of t-shirt weather until probably sometime in June and then meandered down to the shopping plazas for a final stroll amongst the smart, designer-clad shoppers of this affluent city and feeling rather out of place in our grubby trekking gear that's seen far better days after so many dodgy laundrettes and weeks of hard use.
The train from Hong Kong to Shanghai is comfortable and Lynn and I have a 4-berth cabin on the soft-sleeper coach all to ourselves for the entire 25 hour journey. The carriages are always warm but as evening turns to night the heating system is cranked up to full and this turns each cabin into an inescapable sauna for it's unfortunate occupants. No amount of begging or pleading will make the attendant reduce the temperature and the windows are all locked shut. We dribble and perspire our way into Shanghai...
We spent 3 days in Shanghai and to be honest, it was probably 2 days too long. We stayed at the Captain's Hostel, all decked out like a ship with metal stairs, life-buoys hung on the walls and fishing nets hung from the ceiling. The weather here is very depressing - grey skies, lashing rain and a biting wind. The temperature is down and into single figures and, more depressing still, we know this is the warmest it's going to be now until after we arrive home.
Shanghai isn't somewhere we felt inclined to stay long in. The best thing about the city is it's phenomenal skyscraper-skyline when viewed from across the Huangpu river on the riverfront promenade known as 'The Bund'. The most distinctive building is the Oriental Pearl Tower which is shaped a bit like the Eiffel Tower but with baubles at the joints. The best views however are to be had from the Jinmao Tower which, at 420m, is currently the 4th tallest building in the world.
Finding an internet cafe in Shanghai was a real headache. Our guidebook says they're everywhere but unfortunately it doesn't elaborate further by actually giving you the address of any which isn't much use. On our second day in Shanghai we zig-zagged back and forth up and down every street for about 2 hours in our quest to find one and had absolutely no luck whatsoever. We started asking people - "Ni Hao, feng shui, chow mein, kung fu?" but they didn't seem to understand what I was on about. We were just about on the verge of giving up when a security guard through very good use of sign-language made us understand that he knew where there was an internet cafe but unfortunately couldn't leave his post to show us where it was and we'd never find it on our own. Sensing our desperation he instead collared a mate to take us across the road, down a little street, into a clothes shop and through the back to the service lifts (nobody seemed to mind) - up to the 4th floor, past a load of boxes and other stuff, up steps, down corridors, left, right, down steps, up corridors until finally we emerged at some aircraft-hangar-sized room filled with about 400 computers mostly in use by young, bleary-eyed, Chinese guys online-gaming and chain-smoking cigarette after cigarette behind ashtray mountains of fag-butts. A couple of emails and a lack of oxygen induced headache later we emerge back into the rain-soaked streets of the city.
Despite many attempts, we hadn't managed to find a good Chinese restaurant in China yet and were beginning to think that anyone natively Chinese with even the tiniest amount of culinary know-how had long since departed the country to set up a greasy little take-away in the West. We didn't find a good Chinese restaurant in Shanghai either but we did come across a Brazilian Steakhouse with unlimited barbecued steaks that were to die for. For a set price of 76 yuan (about 5 pounds in English money) you got all the food you could scoff and when it's as good as it was there, that's a fair bit!
We left Shanghai on an overnight train on Wednesday 24th January heading further north - destination: Beijing. It's a 12.5 hour journey and this time we have to share our 4-berth cabin with 2 others. One is Michael, an Irish guy who is only 2 weeks into his year away. The other is a middle-aged Chinese man who wore 3 pairs of trousers despite, yet again, the sauna-like conditions that kept the rest of us tossing and turning and perspiring like crazy all night.
We arrived at a Beijing train station on-time at 07:30. I say "a Beijing train" station because there are 4 of them and our first task was to find out which of these 4 main stations we'd arrived at. Was it Beijing Central? Beijing North? Beijing South? or Beijing West? All the signs were in Chinese and nobody at the station knew what we were babbling at them. The guidebook helpfully pointed out that we'd arrive at one of the four stations but couldn't be any more specific. The reason it mattered so much is that the hostel we want to stay at is almost directly opposite the Beijing Central Train Station and we didn't want to look foolish by standing in the taxi queue for a place that was on the other side of the road if you knew which of the million unreadable neon signs to look at. After scanning the multitude of signs several times and getting no luck whatsoever we decided we were definately NOT at Beijing central so let's get in the taxi queue. The queue is quite long and huge steel barriers usher you back and forth in a zig-zag until you finally reach the front. After 5 minutes of waiting, forward a couple of paces, wait again we are about 4 people from the front and that's when Lynn spotted it -
"Isn't that the place we want over there look?"
"I don't know, I can't quite read it. Could be."
"I'm sure it is. Look, it says half a ladder with a 't' next to it followed by a television with only 3 legs under a pointy roof followed by a plate of spaghetti and then a man with a long willie and a broken leg...." [Yep, that's how Lynn and I read Chinese hieroglyphics, I'm afraid]
Amidst much cursing and groaning from everyone else we battle our way back through the queueing masses, knocking everyone aside with our flailing bags as we attempt to extract ourselves from a one-way only barrier system full of people and their suitcases and back to freedom. Finally we make it out and much to our relief we find it is the City Central Hostel that we can see. All the way we were battling our way out I imagined finally escaping the hordes, looking up, realising it was a bank or something and then having to embarassingly rejoin the queue!
That was Thursday 25th January and 12 days later we're still here. The City Central Hostel is absolutely, perfectly placed for our needs. It is opposite the Beijing Central Train Station where we need to go when we leave on the Trans-Mongolian train tomorrow morning. The cheap and easy to negotiate Metro system has a station that is right outside the front door which is very handy. There's a supermarket on one side, a post office on the other and an ATM machine just up the road. Marvellous!
The next day we took our passports in to get our Mongolian visas and they were finally ready for us yesterday. That's the main reason we got here so long before we leave on the train to Moscow, we had to make sure we arrived with enough time to get our Mongolian visas issued. It's also just about impossible to travel in China without your passport as you need it to check in to hotels and buy tickets and even use the internet so with all that to contend with, it was always going to be 2 weeks in Beijing.
As you can imagine, we've just about done the rounds of everything worthwhile that there is to see and do in the city by now. We've been to Tianenmen Square a couple of times. The last time we went it was absolutely freezing, about -10 to -15 with the windchill factor. I am so glad I bought a michelin-man style, padded, goosedown coat in Hong Kong! Tianenmen Square is apparently the largest square of it's kind in the world. In the middle of the square is Chairman Mao's Mausoleum so we went to have a gawp at his waxy dead body along with the rest of China. Well, we'd seen Ho Chi Minh's in Hanoi so we thought it would be rude not to go and see Mao's too! From a taxidermist's point-of-view they'll be disappointed to know that despite being older (as in dead longer), Ho Chi Minh's body was in far better nick than Mao's. The hideous yellow lights in Ho Chi Minh's tomb were exactly the same in Mao's aswell so he too looked like a character from The Simpsons. Infact, Chairman Mao looked uncannily similar to a certain Mr. Burns!
We went to the Forbidden City which lies at the northern edge of Tianenmen Square. For over 500 years this Imperial city within a city was off-limits to anyone outside the imperial household but in 1949 it's doors were finally opened to the public. To be honest, it was rather disappointing. Lots of red buildings with closed doors and vast, empty courtyards. Most of the main structures were surrounded by scaffolding and shrouded in safety netting as they are spruced up for the inevitable influx of visitors during next year's Olympic Games.
We've been to the Lama Temple, Dongyue Temple and the White Cloud Temple - red buildings; vast, empty courtyards; big buddhas and lots of burning incence basically sums them up.
We've been to Jingshan Park, Beihai Park, the Summer Palace and Prince Gong's Residence - Bare, frozen parks and gardens, very rocky and barren in the depths of a freezing winter; occasionally dotted with more red buildings and vast, empty courtyards.
We've seen a few galleries and museums and visited the 'Underground City'. In 1969, with a Soviet invasion and a possible nuclear war on his mind, Chairman Mao urged Beijing's residents to start burrowing underground. A small part of this vast labyrinth has now been opened to the public and so we took the opportunity for a quick delve into Beijing's underworld. There's a big shop underground that sells the usual tacky souvenirs to visitors and as we made our way through the tunnels we passed signs to cinemas, hospitals and the Forbidden City giving an idea of just how enormous this tunnel construction actually is. It's a pity we weren't allowed to take any photos though.
My favourite 'city visit' though was to a place called 'Factory 798'. Basically, Factory 798 was an old electronics factory built in the 1950's, abandoned, left to rot and then fairly recently taken over by a huge group of artists and creative types who have turned all the buildings within this factory compound into studios and galleries for their work. The whole complex is now some sort of giant art zone, it was superb! From the outside the place still looks deserted as no work appears to have been done to spruce up the exteriors but it's on the inside that the artists have really gone to town transforming the place. You can wander at will where you like and if you see see a gallery or something that takes your fancy you just open the door and wander in.
Of course, no trip to this part of the world would be complete without a visit to one of the wonders of the world: The Great Wall Of China. We take a coach to Jinshanling early one morning and from there walk 10km along the wall to Simatai. The air is bitterly cold and there's patches of snow on the ground in places but under the fierce sun and with the hard work of trekking along this often steep section of the Great Wall we are soon sweating and gasping. The big coats come off and get tied around our waists and the hats and gloves that we started in are soon deposited away in our daypacks. The air is crystal clear and the sky a bright blue as we march along and the views are simply breathtaking. To see the wall zig-zagging over the mighty hills infront of you, tiny turrets jutting up into the sky every half a kilometre or so, it's just beautiful. Of course, once you get to them you realise these tiny turrets are enormous fortifications that usually have a staggering incline leading up and down to them that you need to negotiate. I took about 200 photos that day and have taken nearly 1,000 since arriving in China about 4 weeks ago!
And that pretty much sums up all the interesting bits of our last 3 weeks in China. So, like I said at the beginning of this blog, there's now only 12 days to go until we get back home which means I'll be sitting at my own computer in the upstairs office back home when I send you the next and, sadly, last installment of this incredible year of travelling for Lynn and I.
I really don't know if I'm looking forward to going home or not.
I get post-holiday blues after 2 weeks abroad so I can't imagine what I'll feel like after a year away - I guess I'll soon find out though. Sitting at a desk doing the 9 to 5 thing is not one of the things I'm looking forward to doing again. Of course, I've got to find myself a job before that happens but I'll give myself a week or two to sort myself out first before I start putting all my efforts into that.
And after all the good weather we've had (with a few brief exceptions) I'm not exactly looking forward to arriving back to England in Febrary either. I don't think anywhere in the world has weather quite as dreary as the UK. Other places have it hotter or colder or wetter or drier or whatever but I don't think anywhere has it quite so depressingly mediocre and for longer than England does.
But there are a few good reasons for going home again too.
It'll be nice to be living in one place again, to not be living out of a bag and having only a few tatty clothes to choose from. It'll be nice to see family and friends and relive all the best bits of the trip with them. I can't wait to sort out all my photos. I dread to think how many there are but 10,000 is probably a very good guess. Once saved to DVD and parcelled home I haven't been able to see them again so looking back through all those memories will be a momentous but enjoyable task. We've sent so many parcels home filled with things we've bought and it'll be like Christmas when we get home and unwrap them all. And then there's the post too. Have you ever wondered what a year's worth of post looks like? Well, I'll take a photo and put it on this blogsite so you can have a look. It will include 36 magazines to read as I have 3 annual subscriptions running so that'll take a few Sunday afternoons to get through!
I can't wait to play football again either. I haven't kicked a ball (or a shin) for the entire year and the day after we get back there's a Monday night 5-a-side game which I can't wait to get stuck into. Watching the football on TV I've also missed. Of course, some countries have atleast as much Premiership coverage as we get in England but the time-difference means it's not always possible to watch them live and some places, like China, I haven't seen any football at all. Thank the lord for the internet so atleast I can get the scores, I'll say that!
Food wise it'll be nice to tuck into some Crunchy Nut Cornflakes again - definately the coinosseur's cereal of choice! And I really miss proper cheese, the stronger the better. Most countries seem to think cheese is that thin plastic stuff that comes in slices and McDonalds slap on top of their burgers! Those people need to try some Stilton, if you ask me! I envisage buying a block of the stuff and just eating it straight out the pack with a spoon when I get home, Mmmm!
So that's it from China. As I said at the beginning, we board the train to Moscow at 07:40 tomorrow morning for the last leg of the trip. I know none of you will be able to join me physically for this momentous journey but perhaps instead you could join me in spirit. I have an idea. All you need to do is go outside to your garden shed and clear it out so that it's completely empty. Next, put a camp bed in there and a rucksack full of clothes. Then get yourself a good book, an MP3 player, a pack of cards and a few nibbles and throw them under the bed. Oh, and don't forget your passport too! Once this is all done you need to find a nice snowy landscape picture and selotape it to the outside of the window so the winter scene is visible from the inside of the shed. Now, I think you're ready! Tonight when you go to bed, don't forget to set your alarm early so you don't miss the departure then at 07:40 tomorrow morning when you've woken up go in to your shed, close the door behind you and enjoy your next 6 days on the Trans-Mongolian experience. See you in Moscow! Hey, and don't forget - you've got it good, you've got this nice space all to yourself. I'll have 3 others squeezed into my "shed" with me!
See you soon!
Rich
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