Ecthy in China + Money Question

[Ecthy]

We came across 2 Chinese tourist groups, both of which has hot group guides. Didn't get a chance to take a pic of the other one though... They wqere the ones you could speak English to and who'd be funny and all. Too little time with them though, even though this one shared a hotel complex with us!

[Provost Harrison]

Originally posted by Ecthy
Don't mess with me. I might be smiling now, but my shirt and muscles tell more than a thousand words.

Yeah, the shirt is somewhat topical, but I am still trying to locate the muscles though

[Ecthy]

You'll find them in other pics, not on me though

[Ecthy]

Alright let's have some attempt at some kind of report.

Moscow for itself was a funny enough experience. We arrived there after only 2 and a half hours of flight, with Aeroflot being quite caring an airline, so we spend most of that time eating or being refreshed in one way or another So when we arrived at Sheremetyevo at 6 in the morning, we hadn't slept more than 1 hour the night before (left at Berlin at 1 AM).

Since we had 14 hours to wait for our next flight we thought we'd get visa instead and visit the city, so off we were to central Moscow. Our big luggage was checked through so all we had with us were light backpacks
We took a bus of which we knew was going to a useful subway station, which was one end of a line that led directly to the heartf of the city. Moscow itself had nothing too exciting in it though, which might be partly blamed on us being overly tired and all, so we were out to get some coffee. Their coffee houses are called "kafe xaus" BTW, imagine that in cyrillic lettres. So all there really was t osee for one day was the red square, which was rather nice with the Basilius Cathedral that looks like it's in Disneyland, the Kremlin walls, the GUM (traditional mall) and some other buildings sealing it fof to the square next to it. Oh, and the Lenin mausoleum. All in all the red square is the only part of the city that's really worth visiting, most of the rest is concrete buildings from USSR times, not quite kept in good conditions. Oh, and the city is full of small orthodox churches, real cute.

At 6 in the afternoon we left to Beijing, arriving at 8 in the morning (again, this tiem with 4 hours of sleep). This journey was a bit less relaxed, but most of you probably know what long range flights are like. The weather in Beijing was hot and wet, 'humide' wouldn't quite fit it. Plus, the cloud cover was deep, thus keeping all the car and industrial smog below it. The air smelled after sulfur and car exhaust gases, was 35+ degrees C, and moister than YOUR lady. We jumped on a bus to get us to Central railway station, where we wanted to drop our luggage in soem lockers.
The bus was not a commie bus like the one in Moscow (I knew those from GDR times), but a real modern car. The airport was up-to-date and so was the highway to the city. The first impressions of the People's Republic of China were rather progressive and well-off. And as quick and superficial as those impressions appear here did they spring to me, still being underslept and all.
Even when we entered central Beijing did the city not begin to appear much more "Chinese" than in the beginning. It consists of grey concrete buildings mostly that seem very new and look exactly like they would in Europe. The fog/smog of course wouldn't let us see farther than 50 metres, so there might have been something hidden behind it. Only when we saw the first kitchens/small restaurants as well as groups of Chinese women practising their Tai Chi did we know where we were.
Near that central station we dropped our luggage in some less than trustworthy place, but my Chinese teacher who accompanied us told us it's alright, so we trusted them, jumped on a taxi and went to Tiananmen. At this point I must insert that our time in the big cities was always very limited. This was a journey with a pre-planning, alas, so very often we left places that we would have enjoyed to stay longer at.
Tiananmen means "Gate of Heavenly Peace". The old city gates are the only traditional buildings but the Forbidden City left in Beijing we could see. On the square is the huge Mao mausoleum (Mao-soleum as I called it), some government building, fog, millions of small Chinese people running around (especially in the line waiting for admittance to Mao), more smogfog and those gates. We went through Tianan Gate (you know the one) and had some brief look into the Forbidden City, didn't really enter it though.

After some hours in that city we went to Deshengmen which is another gate (men=gate), and from there to our hotel at some touristy site directly under the Wall. After an hour in the bed went to see the wall that evening. Nice little thing, but it looked exactly like on the pictures, especially with it being the touristy spot to see it. Also, the fig wouldn't let us see it approaching the horizon (yes, fog also 2 hours away from the centre. Weather in China is bigger than here). Of course it's hard to believe they built that thing 2000 years ago but then you never know which part was built when.

On the next day we already went on the train to Yichang, which left in the afternoon. So we visited one museum in one of those city gates, and then jumped on our train, which was a sleeper train. Before the journey I had heard rumors of the sleeper trains being equpiied with no toilets but only big rooms with some holes in the ground where all the millions of little Chinese people took their pooing at the same time. This one seemed to outdate those rumored ones by soem decades, it was absolutely alright except some bugs crawling around but as we later learned, that must have had to do with that individual train.

Anyone with a clue of Chinese geography will know say "wait a second, Beijing-Yichang? that's 1,000 kilometres or something" and yes it is, the train took 20 hours, half of which we spent of course sleeping (not being teenagers who run around all night, I speak out of experience I once went from Prague to Kosice on such a train when I was 14 years old - 10 hours). This 20 hours journey was much more comfortable and easier to bear than the 8 hours one from Moscow to Beijing. Of course, a train with a bed is 10 times nicer than a plane with narrow seats.
On thsi trai nwe met a little girl (9 years old?) that had just won a kalligraphy contest in Beijing, nationwide, and still had her kalligraphy on rice paper with her. she was very nice. guess what will decorate my room as soon as I changed the wall colour - spot on.)

Yichang is a rather small city of "only" 4 million inhabitants as we were told. Seeing the city from inside and generally grasping the dimensions of it, I seriously wonder where all those millions of little Chinese people would have to be, I officially doubt that figure. But then their houses might well be crowded with many more people than are our houses, so you never know. The reason we went to Yichang was the 3 Gorges Dam which is located only an hour to the west of the city if you go on a bus. This was the first thing after checking into our hotel. naturally if I went to China with friends I'd be very backpacker like and alternative, but this tour was kind of planned and quite un-alternative. Quite adult you might think.
So we went to that dam, on a bus tour through picturesque valleys. The dam is long past "project" phase. For 80 yuan (8 euros, 10 US dollars or whatever that course is nowadays,) you could go on the dam itself while the normal tour just went to some sightseeing spot next to it. We did that extra bit as did quite an amount of Chinese people. It being more like a monthly income for them they were quite elbow-ish and not very nice. Generally speaking I can say the Chinese are quite rough a people, wtih no sense for manners. Of course if you're already the "oldest civilisation" on Earth what need is there to actually behave in civilised manners. No, this is not a subjective European thing, these people act like stone age people. They forgot how to act in a cultured way in the moment they realised they were civilised, which WAS like 3,000 years ago.

So anyway, that dam doesn't look quite as high from the above. <--- that's Ecthy on the dam, in a miniaturised version for the avatar icon. The sun is shining, too. When we arrived at Yichang and left the air conditioned train we met 38 degrees in shadow and burning sun. Now, this 3 gorges dam is said to look extremely enormous if you look from a boat going through the multi-level watergate going next to it.

The same night we went eating at some restaurant. Ironically enough the guide hired for Yichang had ordered at a western restaurant, thank you We had our Chinese food in Beijing and on the train though, so that change was alright. When we left that restaurant, me and 2 friends decided to go out for a bit longer and look for a bar. At this point I should mention that we were 5 people. My Chinese teacher, Chinese course friend Rene, teacher's badminton fellow Cornelius and his sister Corinna. So it was Rene, Cornelius and me loking for a bar. On some lonesome intersection within the city of Yichang, we heard a voice speaking English - 2you guys need help?" Thinking it was some drug seller our first reply was a collective "No, thanks". Saying this we turned around and spotted - a westerner. A whie man so to speak, with no clue what nationality at first hand. He quickly introduced himself as Luke from Australia, who's obviously in that city on a year as an English teacher. He showed us his favourite bar, where we had some local beer with the locals and played some pool with him. A nice experience, finally outside of that narrow tour plan.

On the enxt day we went and did something very western, very pop and touristy - we went on a rafting tour. This was real fun, but I'll spare you the details since most of you probably know what paid-for fun rafting is like. All I'll say is we went in one bus with a Chinese tourist group. Cute and hot group guide #1 here. She lives in Yichang yet I never quite managed to date her up for that night. Outside of that group I might have but this way...

You guessed right, we left the city the day after the rafting. Took a train to Wuhan, which is one of the major industrial palces in the country. At this point I must say a word about the traffic in China. Many people drive cars there, and they have no idea how to do it in style. The streets are so crowded and at the same time the drivers' morals so low, the whoel traffic system consists of cutting each other off and honking/hooting at chicken, dogs and people walking in the middle of the road. Wuhan was different. The city was covered in "no honking" signs. Peope drove modern cars. Volkswagen, Buick, Citroen, the like. This was Wuhan, the automobile city of China, the yellow Detroit so to speak. This city is seeing a completely different kind of automobile culture in development.
We didn't stay long in Wuhan, just for lunch, then jumped on cars which were to take us to our residence for the next ten days - a hotel up in the hills on said Dabieshan range. Shortly before arriving there we stopped in some district capital called Luotian - and made a completely new China experience.

Beijing is their capital. Yichang is industrial and sort of rich and sees businessmen. if not too many. Wuhan is a given for westerners. And while the people on that provincial sleeper train might have seen us as strangers; while people on the trrain from Yichang to Wuhan studied our card game curiously as some exotic "deguode" card game (German), Luotian took it all to a new level - we were basically Martians.

To be continued, I need to pee. No, this is not pre-typed in notepad.

[Ecthy]

Ah, Luotian marketplace. Some of us went to the police station to copy our passports for the local authorities (must be somewhat normal in China). The rest of us spent the time on the central square hanging around and waiting. All the mamas with their children walked past us to show their little ones the "wai guo ren" (forenigners), which was real funny. It was like in books. Smaller ones were rather timid, older ones approached us and said soem stuff in English. Schoolbook stuff though, like "what's your name" in a well-practiced tongue, unable to grasp the reply. When we were ready to go I pointed at the Buick (we went in 3 new western cars, all Wuhan-made methinks, yet these people looked at them like at magic carpets), said "zhe shi wo de che". they laughed, and off we went. You must have education to grasp how this sentence can be funny for children. It had already turned dark and our driver had obviously never gone up a hill with that car. He drove the serpentines like a teenager would on a motorcycle. We were more afraid of dying than we would have been on a plane with burning engines.

Shortly after Wuhan we also picked up a 4th car with a special attendee... in Germany one friend of my Chinese teacher knows this person - a local and regional hero, a Chinese national celebrity. As I have mentioned before, the Chinese ladies practise Tai Chi in their free time. A real eco vegetarian alternative thing in the west, these wushu things have for long been a part of Chinese culture, just like pressing yellow slime from your paranasal sinuses through your throat and spitting out right in the hotel lobby. Now, this person is connected to exactly this part of Chinese culture. He's a grandmaster of the Wudang school of Kung Fu (whatever you spell this in pinyin, probably gung fu), has plans to open a school in Berlin and agreed on getting into contact with a group from Germany to practise some stuff with them. So the next ten days we spent in a hotel on a remote hill within an untouched range (OK, it's tourist-ised), enjoyed the nature and landscape, hiked around and practised Kung Fu and Tai Chi in a crash course with a regional grand master. In between we also went back to that city Luotian to play some football with soem local young ones, which was real fun (2nd hot lady, the sister of one playing with us. again, no time for real dating, just some flirting). Also, we were invited to the mother of some friend of my teacher that day for dinner, so it was alright. The food in the hotel up on the hill was funny, it was the same stuff every day.
For breakfast we had jidan (chicken egg you illiterates), niunai (cow milk, but this was a substitute), tu dao (sp? potato, cooked as a pancake)... for dinner it was always niu rou (beef) with garlic etc etc. Yet it was good food, and even though you got pretty much used to it it never really got boring or anything. Some nights we ordered beer and tried to drink, but even though it was only 3+% alcohol, the [i]shifu[/] as well as laoshi could never down more than one on a single evening. The Chinese like to drink their spirits, but they can't do even weak beer.
When that time was over we went back to Wuhan to take a train to Shangahi (another 20 hours), but not before being invited to eat in the Kung Fu master's town near Wuhan (Huangzhang IIRC, maybe Huangjiang). On that occasion we also met several of his disciples, some of which could even drink properly

The journey from Wuhan to Shanghai saw no kalligraphy girls but lots of westerners. There were these Canadians I taked of earlier (did I call them French?), and even one guy with Arabic looks who walked past greeting us in German. When he returned he explained: he's Egyptian, lives in Germany and these days works in Shanghai. How much more international can you get?

Shanghai was our last station. There we met my teacher's parents (he's from Shanghai), checked into our hotels, went to eat in a normal place (finally not some posh restaurants, the kind where all local guides had led us so far). Went to do the standard sightseeing tour there (Yuyuan, Bund, Nanjing Lu). I interrupted in between to be taken to some book store with Rene, who had been in Shanghai earlier this year, planning to meet the others on the Bund. That didn't quite work. Rene was off one place, the group was somewhere else. But hey, I didn't need the one guy to have fun, and the others could be quite a pain in the arse anyway.

So Ecthy alone in Shanghai night life it was.

I enjoyed myself in that flourishing city, and only after a bad experience with some "service-offering" people did I get home. Next morning saw an early rising and the run off to the airport. To get to the airport we used German technology: the Magnetic Levitation train, short MagLev is really the German Transrapid thing, which was never built in Germany but in China instead. The train runs on a magnetic track at 431 km/h.

And that was China. This report must compare to Roberts' Historys of the World in its brevity

Nothing interesting to say about the fligth back, apart from a near-crash situation during out landing approach to Moscow

[Urban Ranger]

Cool.

That woman sure have large frontial lobes

[Ecthy]

Oh, she was cute girl #3, the travel guide of some Chinese tourist group that stayed at our hotel for some days.