Day.... i lost count

So tonight I will post yet again another list of things that I want to write about later. I'm unbelievably tired. On the upside, I am uploading pictures to picasa online. More on this later. Tomorrow morning, we're not leaving for Wuxi until 11am, so I hopefully will have time to fill in the gaps.

Funny note: All these notes I wrote on the back of a receipt while waiting for check in time to roll around at the airport today.

Nate and I were up bright and early so that we had enough time to eat, check out, and be ready for our tour today of the great wall. I was ready 20 minutes early, so I went downstairs to try and check out. Unfortunately, I couldn't check out without the key that ante had, so I sat down by the tourist table and patiently waited. A little girl wound up walking up to the woman at the tourist table and kept staring at me. I smiled and after a while she said hello to my surprise. She was 7, so I guess she had started learning English. I started to talk to her, slowly asked her name, how old she was, etc. She was adorable because she kept having to get translations from the tourist table woman. After a while, she lost interest, and I got to staring out the window. After a while, Nate came down and apparently the little girl was leaving and said bye to me, which I didn't hear because I was lost in my thoughts, so Nate was like Katie, pay attention. So we waved bye to each other. Such a small and seemingly unimportant instance like that somehow always seems to make my day.

On a side note, I seem to be getting sick, or I'm developing allergies to the smog. More on this later.

Our tour guide came late this time, but when she came in, she was a ball of energy. She had better English than our tour guide the day before, so that made listening a lot more clear and easy. The group that day consisted of the same American couple as the day before, an Italian, some Chinese, some Brazilians, and an Australian father/son pair. This day, we went to the Ming tomb first, which again was absolutely huge. The entire place was super feng shui (supposedly) and also resided on the meridian line, like all the other important places in Beijing.

Sorry kids, got to pause here. Got to get dressed and pack for Wuxi.

Alright. Now I’m in Wuxi, just got done with lunch and am now “resting” until we go to Lake Tai (no idea how to spell anything around here unless I see it written). Back to the story if I don’t doze off first. I’m taking some Chinese pills for head cold, so they might be making me sleepy.

Back to the Ming Tombs. The Mings were some cool people, it sounds like. They got a lot of stuff done. For instance, one guy commissioned the moving of the capital from Nanjing to Beijing, had the Forbidden City built, and created these tombs. Mr. Productive, especially considering this guy also had to steal his power from his nephew who came to power in a roundabout way.

After the tombs, we went to the largest jade factory in Beijing. It was cool to walk around and see the different pieces of jade carvings, large and small, but we didn’t really get to see much of how jade it actually made, which would have been nice for my MSE eyes. But they did teach us about some of the properties and talked about the folklore. It turned out the place was actually just one huge show room for jade and everything we saw was for sale. And it was expensive. Really expensive. I didn’t see anything under 100 Yuan (~$15), not even little tiny trinkets. Needless to say, I bought nothing and wound up sitting down for most of the time we had available to browse.

Lunch was actually connected to the jade factory at a restaurant in back. The food was a little bit tastier than yesterday, but these two events still have been the low point of my culinary experiences here. I sat at a table with the American couple, the Australians, and an Italian intern in some city who just wanted to do some touring while he was here (I didn’t catch if it was an AIESEC internship or not). It turns out that the Australians were here for the games, and the first set of tickets they bought they found out recently they were fake. They were directed to some Beijing website months ago that was selling tickets, and they made over $80 million in profits. Luckily for the Australians, they had tix to boxing, baseball, and something else to occupy their time. The lucky ducks were also going to get Peking duck that night at the super famous place, which Nate and I never got to mostly because we forgot. Supposedly there’s a place in Shanghai, so maybe we’ll have it there?

Brb fruit break. They eat so much fruit here – I eat it at least 2 or 3 times a day. I love it.

After lunch, we loaded up the bus to go to the Great Wall of China. We found out at the tombs that the Badaling section we were supposed to go to was actually closed for the Olympics, so we had to go to a different section (no idea what it was called). As it turned out, they were going to close that section down, too, after a certain time because the road bike race was finishing there. I’ve got some cool pictures of the finish line with actual Olympic bikers riding the track (not sure who all was there, but I know I saw Chile and I think France). I even bumped into two Venezuelan sports news hosts talking about what was going on and all that jazz. It was so nice to finally hear a language here that I could understand other than English!

Anyways, we had the option to climb either the left side of the wall or the right side of the wall. The left side was a harder climb, but supposedly had better views, while the right side was easier with worse views. Nate had high aspirations to climb both sides in the 2.5 hours we had, but I wasn’t feel enough to do both at a fast pace, so I just went on the harder one at my own pace. I wound up getting farther up the wall than I could see from where we started, so I figure I didn’t do too bad. Most of it was a vertical climb up stairs, which made me feel a lot of pity for Seancy when he had to climb it for the marathon. By the time I got to my highest point, I was drenched with sweat, my heart was beating 90 miles an hour, and my legs felt like rubber. I had climbed the last 100 feet or so with the American man, and we chatted at the top for a while about Chinese hospitality since he was in a similar situation as Nate and i. We also tried to take in the view, which I imagine was astounding, if only it hadn’t have been foggy/smoggy. At least it wasn’t hot.

After a while, we came down and met up with his wife, who had a young Chinese girl from the tour following her around, since she spoke Chinese. Since I had been traveling with the American couple, she decided that I was going to be her new friend, too. She was a 14-year-old middle school girl named Rong Rong Chen – American style. At first, I didn’t think she spoke any English because she mostly just pointed at me or laughed or said, “go” to get me to catch up with the couple, etc. After a while, she asked if she could get a picture with me, which I said yes to. Eventually, I determined that she really could speak English, even if it weren’t the best. She understood a lot more than I thought she did, so I started yapping more. Once again, my idea of a personal space bubble was popped very quickly. Since the girl was alone on the tour, she started calling the American wife “aunt”, and latched on to me, literally and figuratively. There was a point or two where she grabbed my arm or hand and walked with me down the stairs (which was quite a feat on rubbery legs, let me tell you). Don’t worry, it wasn’t creepy, especially after I had seen so many people walking down the road arm in arm in a similar way in all the cities. I wouldn’t say it bothered me so to speak, but I noticed that my space was being invaded, and it was very strange to me that someone I had met 10 minutes prior would be so comfortable hanging onto a hot and sweaty me, who barely even could communicate. Anyways, once we got to the bottom, no one wanted to attempt going to the other side even though we had another hour, so we sat at this little rest area thing similar to the summer palace walkway and all just chatted. I got to learn a lot about school life in China from Rong Rong. It turns out that even in middle school, you take 11 classes a day (seven classes, some of them doubled up) from like 8am to 9pm, and on weekends you have no time for yourself because your parents make you trot from piano lessons to sports to whatever enrichment they deem necessary. She was in 8th grade, so she didn’t really have any idea about what she wanted to do. Anyways, during the time, she also started trying to teach me phrases in Chinese, which I sadly almost promptly forgot except for Yes and No; No sounds like “mayo” as in mayonnaise and Yes is something I never ever said right.

As we were walking to the bus to leave the great wall, I saw some men wearing Harley shirts from Beijing. Kirk wanted me to bring him one back from there if I found one, and I was hoping that since so many were wearing them, maybe it was nearby and I could quick run and pick one up. So I stopped one of them and asked where he had gotten it from, and he told me his story. He and his friends rode their bikes from Holland, through Germany, through somewhere else, through Russia, through Mongolia, and when they got to the Chinese border, they were stopped and not allowed in with their bikes. They currently have them in storage in Mongolia and had to drive a car in. When they got to Beijing, they went to the Harley store and told the owner their story, and he promptly gave them Harley Beijing shirts as a consolation prize. When I asked where it was, the guy looked at me with a blank stare and said his tour guide could tell us but that he had no idea and that it was not close. Sorry Kirk. Maybe in Shanghai?

Once we got on the bus, Rong Rong stopped me and asked if I wanted to try something. She didn’t know the translation for it, so she got the tour guide to tell me that it was duck tongue. Well, duck tongue doesn’t really sound appealing, but I was feeling brave, and it was packaged so I decided I’d give it a try. Rong Rong had never had any until recently on a plane flight, where she tried a little and thought it was kind of good. As it turned out, it really wasn’t all that bad in my opinion. It had a slightly strange texture, but that doesn’t usually bother me. However, once I got to the bone and started seeing weird things on the surface I stopped. But I got half way through!

We had about a 45-minute bus ride to where they dropped us off for the taxi. On the ride, Laurel gave me a call, as she had just gotten my email about me being in Beijing the night before. Since I was on the way to the airport, I couldn’t’ really hang out with her, so I had to say bye. I’ll send her an email at some point.

Speaking of emails, I still need to send Jerry one L

When we got to the airport, it was an hour before we could check in, so we checked out the different stores. They had a Kenny Rogers there, so we had to stop and see if it was really like it should be. Inevitably, it wasn’t and served noodles and other Asian deliciousness. I didn’t eat there, though. Ate a chicken sandwich at BK while I wrote half of this on a receipt.

Nate almost threw out his rings, but a server found them first. Our plane was delayed 30 minutes, and I felt crazy gross and dirty from all the walking we’d done that day, but managed to sleep. Anyways, battery is about to die. Adios!