Saturday March 31st

1 and 2: Forbidden city.
3: Dragon.
4: Starbucks inside the forbidden city.
5: Gaggles of Chinese tourists.

I got up early hoping to beat the crowds, but I should have learned by now that in China there is no way to beat the crowds. I got to the forbidden city at 08.30, just in time to take up position behind hundreds of elderly Chinese tourists in matching baseball caps. The forbidden city is huge, but luckily my very clever audioguide flashed little lights to show where I had been. I liked this one a lot more than the Xi'an one.
I can't imagine what it would have been like to try to live in the forbidden city, or live outside and always wonder what was behind the walls. I would hate to be the servant told, "the emperor wants dinner in the garden of contemplative delight," and trying to remember which one it is.
This took til noon. Tried to go to the summer palace - no such luck. The lonely planet is a pile of poo and the instructions to get there utter gibberish. I give up and go to the temple of heaven instead, which also takes forever to get there. I realise I'm on the south side of the temple and the map has the street labled on the north, bah humbug. The temple is huge, set in an enormous park and it's still stuffed with tourists.
In the evening Maria, Merce and I go for dinner at a restaurant near the flat and order a ridiculous amount of spicy food. Portion sizes in China are a bit different to Japan.

Friday March 30th

1:Maria and Rafaela.

2: The corner of the Forbidden City.

3: Statue outside Mao's mausoleum.

4: The gate outside the Forbidden City.

Sorry I'm a bit behind. China periodically stops access to blogs, the week I was there being one of those times.
Friday I got pushed onto the metro by a security guard (it was the only way I was going to fit) and disentangled my nose from a businessman's armpit at Dongjimen. I met up with Maria, my couch host in Beijing. She's a Porguguese freelance journalist, and said China is an easy place to work as long as you don't write about the wrong thing and you don't mind calling twenty different people to get a two minute interview. Her flat is in a Communist style block near Dongjimen subway station. She made me real espresso (the best cup of coffee I've had for a year) and it made me wonder if I was Europesick rather than homesick.
In the afternoon I walked around for a while and quickly discovered that Beijing is not a city designed for walking. I suppose this is what happens when 17 million people live in the same place. I did the first thing I always do in a new city - get very lost and spend the next two hours getting un-lost and seeing lots of the city.
In the evening Maria, Rafaela and Merce took me for dinner and it was delicious. We skipped some of the exotic items on the menu (duck chin, chicken feet, chicken neck, bull's penis) and settled on Peking Duck.

Thursday March 29th

Xi'an
looks like: thousands of terracotta warriors.
smells like: thousands of terracotta warriors (a bit like the art room at school, an old clayish kind of smell, but without the aroma of teenage armpits).
sounds like: an incredibly nasal, whiny, audio guide that I wanted to stomp on.
tastes like: beer at noon. Hic.
feels like: bloody hot.

I got up at 06.30 and tried to get my stuff together to leave quietly but THUMP BANG no such luck. I'm sure everyone else in the room wanted to smother me. I got the bus out to the terracotta warriors and had hoped to get there early enough to beat the crowds, but I should know by now that there is no way to beat the crowds. Chinese tourists like to get there early too, damm them. I had to wait for the staff to beligerently scuff across the plaza to come and rent me an audio guide, but immediately regretted it because the audio guide was horrible. "I will break the information down in exactly the same way each time. First, I will tell you how many parts there are to this section of commentary. Second, I will tell you many dull statistics involving square metres. Third, I will make you want to bite your own ears off with my incessant high-pitched whine and peculiar mangling of English."
I liked the labels in the museum that went along the lines of, "we turned to the guidelines of the Communist Party to inspire our work and dilligently complete our endeavors". I love communist signage, but the new industrial China's signs are pretty groovy too. Outside the museum, this was written on the wall: "terra cotta warriors international plaza, according to configuration all kinds of cermocial items linked with new creative industries, become a morden public culture - tour pooling place, froming pure culture and history visiting enpand to Assembly traveling service, showing, shoping, consuming and so on this whole industries chain and connect industrial morden practice travling industries item."
Well, indeed.

I liked the terracotta warriors, they're all different when you look at them closely. So far only about half of them have been excavated and the rest remain a fiendish pottery jigsaw. Outside I got talking to an American high school teacher who did a not too shabby impression of a Scottish accent, so we ate lunch together and walked around the nearby tomb of dead emperor.
Back in Xi'an, I caught the train to Beijing and hopefully walked up and down the train in search of company. This time I'd caught the Z train (nicer than the T trains) but once again, there were no tourists to be found and the people in my compartment didn't speak English and looked utterly terrified of me. Le sigh.

Number-crunching in China

50: times you will hear "hello miss, shoesbagswatch?" in downtown Shanghai in one hour.
0: pushchairs or prams in China. Everyone carries their kids in their arms.
0: nappies on Chinese babies. They have strategic slits in their trousers instead, and cold bums.
9000: rooms in the Forbidden City.
1: Starbucks in the Forbidden City.
32.66: cost (in pounds) of the train fare from Beijing to Shanghai (1463 km).
129: cost (in pounds) of the train fare from Aberdeen to London (841 km).
??: weight I've put on in China from eating too much Chinese food - I'd rather not think about it.

Wednesday March 28th

Looks like: grand old city with ever-present smog.
sounds like: "I give you good price..." followed by half an hour of haggling.
smells like: lilacs and cherry blossom.
tastes like: steamed dumplings, yum yum. 6 RMB (about 30p) for 10.
feels like: unseasonally hot.

In Lu Dao hostel I found a clean bed and someone keen to hang out for the day, so Sarah and I walked around Xi'an and tried to get a good price in the market. Not much luck. I liked walking around the Muslim Quarter with its wide streets, old men sitting outside their shops, bird cages hanging in the trees with sparrows or larks singing inside, food smells wafting down the street. We walked to Grand Xingshan Temple and admired their creepy halls full of plaster depictions of Buddhist hells. Poor souls were impaled, had their entrails eaten by dogs, eyes pecked out by birds, or boiled in big pots, all in glorious technicolour and fine detail. Grim but kind of funny.

Tuesday, 27th March.

Coco Ichiban! Hooray!


Shanghai.
Looks like: we're about 2 seconds away from a car crash.
Sounds like: still spitting.
Smells like: dumplings.
Tastes like: hot cakes filled with red bean paste, topped with burnt sugar and sesame seeds.
Feels like: I wish there was someone on this train who spoke English.

I got up early and left Nicky's apartment with just a slight aftertaste of absinthe from the night before. I walked to Fangbang road, walking through some of the surviving old streets. Most of them are being demolished to make way for shiny new apartment buildings. To be fair, I can see why. A lot of the old buildings are rotting, roofs have fallen in, and there will be one ground floor room (a shop) being used out of the whole building. It's odd to walk through winding, smelly streets, cross the road, and find yourself in a gleaming apartment complex. I wonder what they make of their neighbours.
Later I caught the train to Xi'an and wandered around hopefully looking for someone to talk to. No luck. Lots of people gave me funny looks, but I seemed to be the only hapless tourist on the train.