Pit 2

At the real thing, we were taken first into pit two. I was really disappointed. I had an image of thousands of complete warriors all neatly lined up, but here was half-dug site, littered with bits of broken pottery. At least it was a bit more than a series of small walls, but not much. This was the second biggest of the three finds, and the newest. It seemed to be more about demonstrating the archaeology process, but I was looking for the wow-awe experience I had expected. Next up was pit three, which was the smallest, but much more assembled that the previous one had been. This pit contains mostly higher ranking warriors: generals. It was also a bit underwhelming, but I felt a little rush of expectation with the rising tension.

Bits of broken warriors and horses in pit 2

Pit 3

The finale was pit one. This pit was also a work in process, but much bigger than the other two. Clearly this is where all my ideas of the Terracotta Army had come from but, we were told, it's archaeologically less interesting because the warriors are lower-ranking. It was certainly more impressive, but I wasn't blown away like I expected to be; for one thing it's not as complete as I thought, and for another, there just aren't as many of the warriors as I expected. After walking around for a bit I really started to appreciated the detail on the warriors, though: each of the warriors is individually made and they are all carefully crafted, rather than mass-produced despite the fact there are quite a lot of them.

Woo! Pit 1.

Semi-assembled warriors

Warriors facing the original entrance

You're all individuals

Yes, we're all different

I'm not

We managed not to be last out of pit one where we were informed that next on the agenda was sampling some real Chinese food. We had already had our fill of “real Chinese food” and suspected the lunch would be very expensive, but we followed along anyway just in case it was included. They were herding everyone to the tables, but had still not said anything about cost, so we asked our guide when we were assigned a table. It was going to cost about the same as our big splash-out Beijing Duck night had cost; just for lunch, and not including drinks, either! The food did look really nice: a westernised version of various Chinese dishes, but at this point we made our excuses and left, finding nourishment from the barbecued sweet potato stalls and others, along with all the Chinese tourists. In the restaurant there had been literally no Chinese people apart from staff and guides. That had been our first clue that we should do a runner. This is yet another reason, I remembered, for never ever going on tours: they try to railroad you into spending money at every turn, but we had won by denying them their commission!

We had wanted to get back home straight after the Warriors so, finally back at the hostel, we immediately escaped and headed out again to the Muslim quarter. The traffic in Xi'an was terrible and I saw why so much of Beijing was fenced off with underpasses: nobody pays any attention to green men and it is very hard to find a break in the traffic. But when we got to the Muslim quarter it all changed: there were occasional mopeds going up the road, but it was mostly stalls and people. I loved it. It had the kind of exciting market atmosphere completely missing from the UK and Japan. You get similar markets on mainland Europe but, for some reason, nothing so lively happens at home or in Japan. I sought a local speciality recommended in the guide book and found it, but it was mostly sheep guts I think, although the liquor was delicious and the way you eat it is to break one whole local bread into the broth. So we just soaked up all the juice and left the ugly bits. Stupidly, I had not asked for a price before we sat down, because I was a bit too excited at having found a place doing this dish. When we were leaving she showed me two fingers, which I thought was excellent value, but when her face filled with (feigned I think) horror and she began jabbering excitedly to her husband I realised she meant twenty Yuan. Not exactly a bargain, but not quite a total rip-off. I think it probably should have cost less than ten.

Market in Muslim Quarter

Tasty lamb guts soup speciality

The bread to break into the soup

The resulting bready soup

On the way home I saw a couple of leather wallets I liked and, bearing in mind advice we had received, planned to purchase some decoy wallets for South America. I entered into bartering but we could not agree on a price; after the food I was determined not to be ripped off again, but the girl on the stall would not lower her price beyond a certain point.
We were close though: I was determined not to go above 25 for a wallet and she wouldn't go below 30.

Chinese men do this when they are hot

Lamb leg stall

Some black stuff I drank, but have no idea what it was

Excellent stuffed bread stall

Moon over the Bell Tower

The South Gate at night

The next day we worked on our New Zealand plan and booked a flight from Queenstown to Auckland in time for our flight on to Chile. We sent loads of Couchsurfing requests off to Auckland, where we were arriving. We also finished off our organisation of China, booking a hotel in Lanzhou, where we were staying one night before our flight out of Hong Kong; this was not easy as many hotel in Lanzhou do not accept foreigners and the ones that do, don't speak any English. We also spent a lot of time researching everything we would have to do to get from Lanzhou to Hong Kong in time for our flight. It was quite an intimidating prospect as there were several stages to the journey. All this took almost the whole day.

South gate in the day

Building very near our hostel

That done, we headed out to the Muslim area again. Joanne finally found some shoes but didn't follow the haggling instruction I was whispering to her, so paid 50% more than I would have done :-p and I gave in to the woman selling 30 Yuan wallets, but also bought another pair of “designer” wallets from the same stall as Joanne's shoes. Hopefully we won't be robbed as enough times to need all the wallets, but at least we'll be prepared! On the way back I couldn't help buying more lovely Muslim food. Muslims always seem to have excellent cuisine.

Excellent quail eggs, chili sauce and tahini.

A quail egg stall

Kitted up, it was off to the train station for another overnight train, this time to Lanzhou.

written by  The Happy Couple on August 6, 2009 from Xi'an, China
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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An hour later we returned to the ticket office and there was already a long queue, and it was pouring with rain. We got our tickets to Lanzhou but realised later in the day that we had forgotten to ask for the top bunk so we had been given the bottom bunk which is the most expensive and, by all accounts, the worst.

In keeping with our plan to relax a bit more, we did not rush out to do anything touristy, although our hostel was just next to the city walls and one of the city gates. Instead I did a bit of blogging.

The next day we tried to change our train tickets to the top bunk but all the trains to Xi'an that day were completely sold out, so we were very lucky. We were both starting badly running out of clothes due to wear and tear, items going missing when we do laundry, and also we anticipated needing some warmer clothes when we arrive in New Zealand. We had asked at the hostel for a cheap place to buy clothes but the market we were sent to did not seem to exists, or else it wasn't on that day, or else we had got on the wrong bus. After that we went to the cheap high street shops we had been recommended but they were all out of our price range. I don't understand how clothes made in China for sale in Primark in Glasgow can cost less than supposedly cheap shops on the Chinese high street. Eventually we returned to the hostel exhausted but empty-handed.

Our plan had been to take a short break at the hostel then head out again to the market stalls in the Muslim area, but I was so knackered I didn't think I'd be able to face going out again. We walked through the reception into a little sitting area on the way to our room and just sitting there, leaning against a table in that room was a plastic bag with the words “Free clothing! Enjoy” written on it. There is a god! We picked it up and took it back to our room for a closer look. Inside were a couple of Nepal tourist tee-shirts (“Never End Peace And Love”), one pair of North Face walking trousers (presumably Nepali copies), some thick socks, other things we didn't want, and a Ganesh tee-shirt, so there is a god: Ganesh!

God provides

We had been planning to make our own way to the Terracotta Army but, discussing our plan, we soon admitted to each other that we were tired of everything being difficult and never doing things the slightly dearer, easy way. To begin with I had really enjoyed the challenges, but six months of Asia had worn me down a bit and Japan completely finished me off. So we booked a tour through the hostel. China outside Beijing and Shanghai is not as easy, so we couldn't be bothered with trying to do it ourselves.

Ooh looks quite nice. Maybe we picked well this time...

When we went out for dinner ordering was quite difficult too. Most of the time Chinese food just isn't very nice. It's always the meat that ruins the dish though. The problem seems to be that they don't have butchers in China; either that or they are all axe-wielding maniacs. They don't seem to have the concept of cuts of meat, in fact I don't know what they do with all the bits we would call meat, because the food always seems to be made from assorted grisly bits. The dish we ordered looked quite nice to begin with but, after a couple of fork-fulls, serving yourself was like dredging the canal for body parts. Probably the nicest animal product was horrible wobbly stuff, possibly gelatine flavoured with stock, but at least it wasn't all bone and skin like the rest of the meat. Soon, eating became, in practice, dredging bones from the dish and transferring them directly to the disposal dish.

Horrible wobbly bits were the best part

Mostly untouched "meat". The clean bone didn't start with flesh.

written by  The Happy Couple on August 4, 2009 from Xi'an, China
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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We left the hostel and caught the bus for the train station, from where plenty of trains for Suzhou leave, according to our hostel, just as the hostel in Shanghai had told us there was no need to book. On the bus we suffered a crisis of confidence and got off when we were sure we must have already gone way past the train station without realising it; because we hadn't caught the bus from the station, we weren't sure how close the bus would actually pass. No idea where we were, we had to resort to flagging a taxi again, but this time I was able to show the driver the Chinese for “train station” using the dictionary I had downloaded to my phone the previous day. The taxi continued in the direction the bus had been going for only a couple of hundred yards before arriving at the station. If only we'd kept our nerve!

At the train station we had difficulty being understood again, but I was becoming quite practised in copying Chinese character and I wrote out where and when we wanted to go. I had read that the dialect in Hangzhou is quite unusual, and people from neighbouring towns can't understand each other, but I was still surprised that saying “Suzhou” or “Shanghai” was not enough for them to understand where we wanted to go. After a few attempts I established that the next train to Suzhou was hours away and it was full, and the next train had only standing room remaining. Finally there was a sleeper that costs much more and got us in too late. Even the Shanghai train was full and the next one had only one seat free. So much for not needing to book because there are plenty of trains! We phoned the hostel from a kiosk to ask them to translate that we wanted the girl working at the kiosk to write down “Please take us to the East Bus Station” where we thought we could get a Suzhou bus. The girl at the hostel could not understand why we weren't getting a train and, very annoyingly continued to insist that there were plenty of trains. Nonetheless she did as we asked and we were soon armed with the necessary written request for a taxi.

The next bit went without a hitch and we got a taxi then a bus to Suzhou without any delay. Our arrival in Suzhou was met by lots of pushy taxi drivers, trying to charge us 40 Yuan to the hostel. But we had good directions to the hostel and, swatting the taxi drivers aside, we got to the bus stop where we only had to pay 1 Yuan to get us to the hostel. Of course, on the bus we were in the position again of not being sure how we would know we were in the right place, but then we noticed that the bus stops were named and, although we couldn't read it, we were starting to become quite good at recognising Chinese characters and were quite pleased when we successfully got off at the right stop. China was becoming a bit easier.

At the hostel it all fell apart again: they had given our room away. The booking form on hostels.com, through whom we had been booking most of our accommodation, had a drop-down box for approximate arrival time, which I filled in sometimes, but Joanne had always been leaving at the default, which is 11am. Apparently they had given our room away at midday and it was now 7pm. Joanne was furious: nowhere else had they paid any attention to that information and, after all, our booking was for that night and we had paid a 10% deposit online and you forfeit the whole first night's fee if you don't turn up, so they would have been paid twice for the room. The receptionist just kept insisting “but you are very late”, finally grudgingly saying that they had a single room we could have instead and I followed her to look at it. The bed was actually as big as some doubles we had slept in and this room was ensuite, whereas our room was with shared facilities. I started to cheer up, but when I insisted that we would not pay any more as I felt they should not have given our room away, suddenly everything changed: the manager appeared and apparently phoned the woman who had been given our room, then they explained that she had agreed to take the single room since she hadn't paid any deposit but we had. “You are very lucky” the manager said to us, patronisingly. I'd have thought getting your room when you've paid a deposit was more to do with rights than luck!

Our room in Suzhou

It wasn't a good start to Suzhou and we were very grumpy when we discovered that the cafe attached to the hostel was very expensive, and the street outside our room was very noisy at night. However the room itself was very nice, with a big four-poster bed.

Boating down the canal

Staying in Hangzhou only one night and all the stressful travelling we had done over the last few days had taken its toll. It felt like we had been trying to do too much in China and we couldn't really be bothered doing anything at all in Suzhou. We needed a rest after the terrible time we had in Japan, but China was nearly as difficult and we were just getting a bit sick of everything being so hard. We hadn't been spending enough time in one place so I'd had no time to read, little time to blog and I was far behind, and we'd had no time to play cards or backgammon.

Big pagoda

We forced ourselves to visit a pagoda not too far away but we didn't really want to and the ones we'd seen in Vietnam were much nicer. Again the shadow of the Cultural Revolution was visible in the pagoda: China has clearly not been valuing history and the pagoda was in a terrible state, yet it is one of the tallest in China and much bigger (of course) than anything Japan had to offer. Although Suzhou is promoted as the “Venice of the East” it is impressively ugly from above so the view was more like insult to injury rather than the reward you expect for climbing nine storeys. At the foot of the pagoda, though, was quite a pretty garden. Suzhou is known for its canals, hence the Venice comparison, and also its gardens.

Garden visible from the pagoda

The rest of Suzhou from the pagoda

Inside the pagoda

Incense. Everything is bigger and better in China.

The gardens next to the pagoda

[Sorry about this - I'd have made some of them thumbnails if it still worked]

Resident in the gardens

The gardens

A breather

We agreed not to try to hard and just rest a bit in Suzhou. While we were in the supermarket looking to save money on food, it started to rain. We felt pretty depressed and the walk back was treacherous: we first noticed it Bangkok when it was raining, but all over Asia the use paving stones for the pavements rather than tarmac. It looks very nice, but wet they become incredibly slippy, especially in flip-flops, which it typically what one wears in these countries. Since then we had spent many a walk cursing the stupidity of using such a material. It seemed only a matter of time until one of us sustained a flip-flops and paving related injury.

The fish counter at the supermarket. It's a tank.

The meat counter at the supermarket

Deadly paving stones

That evening we walked around our area discovering that it really is quite pretty. Venice is pushing it a bit, but it is nice.

Suzhou at night

The next day we chose one of the famous gardens to visit: Garden of the Master of the Nets. It is actually more of a stately home, incorporating a garden complex. There are loads of small buildings, each for a different mood or season, each looking out onto a different garden. The place is relatively small, but such a maze that we spent quite a lot of time there. Some of the gardens were beautiful, but many of them contained mostly rockeries. I had noticed these first in the garden in the Forbidden City; Chinese garden seem to feature quite a lot of rocks, but not interspersed with flowers as I would think of a rockery: just piles of stone, serving a function more like that of statue in a western garden.

Garden of the Master of the Nets

Funny stones in a part of the Garden of the Master of the Nets

The Spring Drawing Room (or something...)

Bonsai!

We finished off the day by wandering around the canals near our hostel to see what it looks like during the day. Our hostel was actually in a really nice area and we regretted not staying longer in Suzhou, probably missing our Hangzhou to give us the extra time. But instead, we had to leave, catching a bus to the train station in time for the sleeper train to Xi'an.

Suzhou's attempt at Venice

More Venicey stuff. Sort of.

Public toilets in Suzhou

Suzhou's Rialto Bridge?

In the taxi, the driver clearly did not believe that he had it right, or saw an opportunity to make some commission. He said what I am pretty sure was Chinese for “zoo”, looking rather confused, then he stopped briefly and put his hands next to his face in an imitation of sleep. Yes, I thought, he has grasped that our hostel is next to the zoo, but he soon pulled up outside quite an expensive looking hotel. I tried saying the word for zoo, but it didn't seem to work, so finally it occurred to me to say the name of the street that the zoo and our hostel are on. This did work and he set off again, retracing the entire route we had already taken, stopping only once to turn around and repeat the word for zoo, then going “grrrr” and making a claw, like a lion I guess. The zoo was about the same distance in the opposite direction from where he had first taken us, but at least we got there. It seems the further from Beijing you get, the harder China becomes. It was a bit annoying having to pay the double fare, but I was pleased the stress was over, saved by the lion gestures.

The hostel was really lovely and much cheaper than where we had stayed in Beijing and Shanghai. There was lots of barbecue food lying around, but it had been abandoned due to the rain which was now fairly persistent.

One of the sights you're supposed to enjoy at the lake

The next morning it was still raining and it wasn't really a day for walking around outside, however Hangzhou's main attraction is the West Lake, apparently the “best West Lake” in China and the one that all the other West Lakes in China are based on. We were only staying there one more night and leaving early the next day, so we had to see it that day. We started walking to the bank next to the lake because we also needed to draw money, but the rain just got worse and worse. Soon we had to take shelter along with all the other people out for a walk by the lake, and the wind blew stronger. By the time we reached the ATM it was proper storm weather and the idea of having a nice walk around the lake was ridiculous, so we had to admit defeat and take the bus home.

Lovely weather at West Lake

We arrived back at the hostel too early for food. The other places had been able to provide food all day, so we were a bit miffed. And hungry. We tried out on the street near the hostel but the first restaurant had no English menus and the useless phrase book let me down again. We left with no food and tried another. This time they did have an English menu which seemed to be only a small subset of the whole menu, featuring interesting sounding dishes like “Sauce Explodes the Pork” but, trying to save a bit of money, we settled for noodles for which we were overcharged, but that's what you get when you can't speak the language.

Lovely weather at West Lake

Back in the hostel I took a photo of Joanne's toes since so many people had been asking how they had been since the Nepal trek. Not too good!

Joanne's toes: no big toenails!

written by  The Happy Couple on July 30, 2009 from Hangzhou, China
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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World's fastest train

[Sorry the big photos are the only ones that still format correctly so that's all I'm going to use until it's fixed]

After the previous night's free beer and cheap Schofferhofer we were up a little later than planned, but we were still on time for the full-speed maglev. When we waited longer than expected for our train, it seemed like our return journey was probably going to be at the slower speed, but at least we were going to get one journey at 430km/h. It was absolutely fantastic! And the highest speed according to the display was actualy 431km/h which it hovered around for about half of the journey before starting to decellerate again. China really is the future, unlike India. And it blew away Japan's puny Nozomi! Everything in China is bigger, cheaper, better, and faster than Japan. During the acceleration phase I felt my stomach rising up into my throat. It was so smooth but noticeably extremely fast: cars on the motorway below us whooshed backwards past us.

Waiting to go

Full speed!

The world whizzing by

When we arrived at the airport 30km away just seven minutes later, we just got off the train and straight back on for the slower return journey. The timing is clearly a bit grey because the return journey was actually at full speed as well. I can't explain how much I enjoyed it. It's exactly the sort of thing I would love as a child, so I've obviously not changed much. Afterwards Joanne seemed quite excited too and admitted that she had surprised herself by really enjoying it too.

The French Concession

Next up was the French Concession. The guide book said it was like being in France, but that was quite an exaggeration. It did seem more European, but the Bund had already seemed quite European, and I'm sure both districts have large ex-pat communities as there are plenty of drinking venues that look like ex-pat places. The most French thing I saw were the trees lining most of the streets in the area, which I thought looked like the sort of tree they might us to line an avenue in France. There were lots of art shops, but that's not exactly French is it? We had hoped to find a cheese shop, but had no luck there.

Kittens outside the hostel

Back at the hostel we prepared for our night out, but some more detailed searching online revealed that the drink-all-you-can deals only run on certain nights and our last night in Shanghai was probably the one with the worst choice of all the nights we stayed there. The choice came down to a place offering five free drinks to women (it was ladies' night in many places) and 100 Yuan for men to drink as much as they want, versus a night called “Cheap Enough For You?” where the drinks were all 10 Yuan all night. The first choice would have won out easily, but it was also a hip hop night and we didn't think we'd be able to get drunk fast enough to tolerate the music longer than about ten minutes, so we settled for the second option as our big night our in Shanghai. It was a small place in the French Concession and clearly an ex-pat crowd who all knew each other. We succeeded in getting drunk, but it really wasn't the big night out I'd been hoping for. It was too quiet and everyone else there obviously went every Tuesday.

The In Crowd at "Cheap Enough For You?"

The following morning we made one last trip to the Bund to use the last two free beer vouchers to help soothe our hangovers. Pleased that we got full value from the bizarre two-for-one offer we headed off to catch the train to Hangzhou.

Another amusing sign

written by  The Happy Couple on July 29, 2009 from Shanghai, China
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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Ugly!

Sorry about the formatting of photos in this (and several preceding blogs) but the formatting seems to have been broken and I can't be bothered investing the hours it normally takes to make it look OK.

We had yet another morning of trying to organise transport, but we did have one small victory: the girl working at the hostel had managed to get us train tickets from Suzhou to Xi'an although she had been unable to book our transport onwards from there. Another dead end! Since hostels always seem able to book transport, we booked our accommodation in Suzhou and tried phoning ahead to them to ask them to book the train for us, but for the first time the hostel did not offer that service. Organising transport is very tricky in China; clearly you are meant to travel with a group

After Xi'an we intended to get the train to Lanzhou and onto Xiàhé by bus from there. We reckoned that it wouldn't be a very busy route so we'd be able to book that without any trouble when we arrived in Xi'an. That only left our return journey from Lanzhou to Hong Kong to consider. This leg of the journey was vital because we would miss our flight to New Zealand if anything went wrong. In the end we decided not to gamble on being able to get train tickets and decided to fly. We found quite a few cheap flights sites in English and filled in all our details on the cheapest one, only discovering that there was no actual online booking: we just filled a web form and someone would get back to us. Not quite the peace of mind we were looking for, but we felt we were edging towards being organised.

View from Renmin Gardens

Renmin Gardens

More modern buildings

Great lighting in the museum

The museum itself was great. We don't normally like museums much, but this one really appealed to us both. I think it was partly the way it was very atmospherically lit, and cameras were allowed which made it a bit more fun as well. It was mostly just objects, but somehow it didn't seem as dry and dull as that would suggest; perhaps it was the way they were arranged in chronological order, so seemed to take us through Chinese history as we walked around.

In the museum

In the museum

The Bund from Pudong

Big tower in Pudong

Pudong

Pushing on with the tourist agenda, we got back on the metro and took it out to the start of the maglev line to the airport. We had no reason to be in the airport, but the Shanghai maglev is the fastest operational train service in the world and I just wanted to ride it for fun. Inexplicably Joanne wasn't very excited about it, but maybe it's a boys toys kind of thing. When we arrived there I had a huge let-down. Apparently the full-speed service doesn't run all the time, and we had missed the last 430km/h train, leaving us only with the option of a pathetic 300km/h. The Nozomi in Japan goes at that speed, and our Shinkansen was almost that fast, so it would have been a waste of time. We would have to return the following day.

Free beer!

The Bund at night

A boat trip going up the river

Pudong trying to be Hong Kong at night

View from the bar

Another boat trip going up the river

Disgusting "omlette" from the hostel

written by  The Happy Couple on July 27, 2009 from Shanghai, China
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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Shanghai is modern after all

A European-looking building

We decided to see a bit of Shanghai and took the metro into the centre. Shanghai, it turned out, was every bit as modern as Beijing, it's just that our hostel was far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western side of town. The centre was full of tall modern buildings, but punctuated by older European-looking buildings which had not been a feature of Beijing. We were heading for the Bund, a street built by European traders when the city was an autonomous settlement immune from Chinese law. The buildings there do look quite oldish European, but across the river is Pudong, which is China's answer to Hong Kong. Apparently the Chinese government plan this to become the most economically active region of the country, so that it's no longer a former colony, but a newly built 100% Chinese venture across the river from an old European concession. Pudong is certainly modern and similar to Hong Kong, but it's not quite the techno-skyline Hong Kong offers, yet. However our view was slightly spoiled by the fact they are reconstructing the walkway on the Bund side of the river, and the works are hidden behind huge adverts all the way along.

Pudong from the Bund

It was our intention to walk all the way down the Bund and into the Old Town district, but I was distracted by a sign sticking out up a side street claiming to be Shanghai's oldest microbrewery. The beer was really quite expensive, but they had a two-for-one offer during the day. But there was a snag: this free drink could not be claimed on the same day; they just gave out vouchers valid from the following day. Sneaky! We had about three each of the nice German style beers. The brewery was only established in the 90s, but I suppose it was probably all state-owned breweries until then.

This character kept us amused while we drank

He was an obviously bored security guard

After we realised how much money we had spent we dragged ourselves back out onto the Bund, where we were almost immediately befriended by Chinese students wanting to practice their English etc., who wanted us to come with them to an acrobatics performance later. They didn't quite seem like the con men we were used to in Beijing, yet I felt instantly very uncomfortable about the whole thing. Near the end of the conversation I discovered that they were Christians. And I thought they had just been harmless con men!

Old Town

We made it down to the Old Town, but our hearts weren't really in it. One of the beers must have been stronger than it tasted. The Old Town looked a bit too reconstructed, but the lots of the buildings were quite pretty; maybe we didn't even make it to the real stuff, I don't know!

Old Town

Back at the hostel, Joanne's increasing antipathy towards Chinese food led us to ask at the hostel for a Western food restaurant. Burgers the girl stated. Fair enough, I suppose. On the way we worked out we'd been directed to a McDonald's and took evasive action; we had eaten once at McDonald's so far, a breakfast muffin, hung over at the airport waiting to leave Japan, and we had no intentions of aid the evil empire any further. We ended up walking into what I can only describe as a greasy chopstick, and failed almost totally to communicate with the staff. We ended up with dumplings and soup. Chinese soup is usually disgusting, consisting of nothing more than MSG-filled stock and bits of bone and gristle. The dumplings looked OK, though. In this case the soup was actually quite nice, just due to the inclusion of large quantities of fresh coriander. The dumplings were, however, just what you'd expect from a greasy chopstick: stuffed with fatty low-quality meat; not very nice.

Food from the greasy chopstick

Back in the hostel we made a decision to cut China short, because Joanne was keen to spend some extra time in New Zealand, which we'd only scheduled eighteen days for. Joanne phoned BA and rescheduled our flight, transferring four days from China to New Zealand.

Seaweed Pringles!

They're green!

written by  The Happy Couple on July 26, 2009 from Shanghai, China
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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However for me it was just another Asian travel nightmare: the aircon blew directly onto my forehead, which kept me awake, but also gave me an ice-cream headache; even though it was a non-smoking bus, people seemed to think they could get away with smoking in the toilet – and then they did, the reason only becoming clear when I saw the driver smoking at the wheel; the provided blanket was too short for it to cover my arms and feet at the same time; the bed was too narrow for my small bag to fit comfortably with me and there was nowhere secure to put it instead; when the driver wasn't smoking he was talking on his mobile, in fact usually it was both at once; and possibly worst of all, the passengers were constantly farting so that the bus was filled with noxious gas. It was a long journey though and, since we were lying down the whole way, I did probably get a reasonable amount of sleep once I thought of wrapping my krama around my head to protect it from the cold. The krama was a birthday present to me from Joanne in Cambodia. The Cambodians mostly use them to keep dust out of their faces when on the back of mopeds, but they use them for plenty of other things, and I had found several more uses since leaving Cambodia, but this was another one.

To compound the discomfort of the journey they played that other common Asian trick on us and did not drop us at the bus station, but at the side of the street, in some unknown part of the city. At first sight Shanghai was nowhere near as modern and pretty as Beijing, with lots of rubbly building sites and crumbly tower blocks which looked like they must be social housing, which I assume almost all housing in China is. It turned out we were near a metro stop, and we found our way to the hostel with no trouble at all.

At the hostel we returned to trying to organise the next stage of our trip. After the trouble we had escaping Beijing, we wanted to get the next journey booked as soon as we arrived. We were told that we couldn't book trains from Shanghai to Suzhou or Hangzhou because the train were so frequent there was no point in booking. After some debate they told us it might be possible to book a train ticket from Suzhou to Xi'an, which was great as it was the journey we were most worried about not being able to get. But we would have to wait until the next day to find out.

Taking advice from the hostel, we went to a fairly cheap nearby restaurant. The food was really good. Joanne especially had been finding Chinese food a bit difficult to take: the meat is awful. And offal, usually. I don't know why we were bothering ordering meat, actually, we really should have been ordering vegetarian food, because vegetables don't have bone, sinew, or fatty skin, which is all the meat in China seems to consist of usually. Anyway, this wasn't like that: it was proper bits of animal muscle and it was very very spicy. After the shock and disappointment of Thai and Indian food not really being hot at all, China provided us with by far the fiercest food so far. A bit of a surprise and it seems to be only certain regions that do spicy food: the restaurant we were in was a Yunnan restaurant and previously we had eaten very hot Sichuan food.

Yummy spicy Yunnan food

We had a bit of difficulty ordering in that restaurant as it wasn't a tourist restaurant, and it seemed that English was not as widespread in Shanghai as it had been in Beijing. I was really struggling with the language, and the phrase book I had bought wasn't up to the standard of the Lonely Planet ones we had usually bought, and I had thought those were useless. It's just the tones that make the language so hard. Even with the phrase book's system of Romanisation and accents I find it very hard to work out what the word is supposed to sound like. The result of that was that nobody ever seemed to understand even single words that I said, so managing a whole sentence was out of the question. In retrospect, we really should have bought or downloaded audio guides for countries with tonal languages; the few times that Chinese people said words for me to copy it was much easier rendering them comprehensible next time I used them, but words hardly ever sounded like I had expected from reading them. In common with most Asian languages, the grammar, as far as I could tell from the phrase book, seemed to be very easy. It had all the same components, unusual from a European language perspective, that every other language we had encountered had: quantifiers for counting objects and a far more complicated system of pronouns and conferring respect when addressing or referring to people.

I think Chinese would be great to learn, because learning it would teach the ability to grasp a tonal system as well as the grammatical structures that seem to be common to at least most Asian languages, but also it would teach at least a rudimentary collection of the Chinese characters used in several other languages, for example Japanese. These characters are another major obstacle to learning the language. I had always believed that they were purely pictograms, meaning that they each represent a concept and you just have to know the character to have any idea what it means or how it's pronounced. Several people had confirmed this to me, and it would mean the writing system was incredibly difficulty to learn, each character needing to be learned separately. However after arriving in China I looked at an online introduction to writing Chinese, which claimed that most characters contain elements which carry information about the meaning and the pronunciation of that character; they quoted a study which came up with a figure of 90% of characters not being pure pictograms. Thinking about it, the people I asked were probably all Japanese, so maybe there are no pronunciation clues for them since, although the meaning of a character is usually the same across languages, the pronunciation is usually very different. Nonetheless, we were having far less difficulty in China than we had in Japan, because they seem to be far more geared to tourism and their Romanisation system, pinyin is far more widespread than Japan's romanji.

written by  The Happy Couple on July 25, 2009 from Shanghai, China
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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After second breakfast we were joined by Sue, who had just come from her free breakfast, won after a battle of her own: she was in a class B double room, but only because they were not able to provide her the single room she had booked, and since she was paying the full class B tariff, she argued that she should at least get a breakfast for the extra money she was spending. As we talked we heard a murmer of “free breakfast” spreading round the room. Soon there was a queue of people at the desk and everyone on both side of the desks was looking rather agitated. “See what we've started”, Joanne said. When we returned later in the day the “Free breakfast not on the menu” sign had been taken down.

Qilin at the Summer Palace

17 Arch Bridge

Annoying bird whistle vendor

Lotuses growing in Kunming Lake

The Buddhist Fragrance Pavillion

Dragon boat on the lake

The bus journey there had taken up so much of the day that by the time our hour was up it was time for us to be heading back. The walk to the subway was a bit longer and we were harassed by rickshaw drivers the whole way, an experience reminiscent of SE Asia and India we had so far been spared in China. In fact apart from the “student” con artists, there isn't much hassle as a tourist in China.

We got back just in time to change before the minibus took us to the acrobatics show. I should say at this point that I wasn't that excited about the acrobatics show; for our last night it was a choice between that or a Kung Fu show, which I would rather have seen, but it was Joanne's birthday so it was her decision. The Kung Fu wasn't going to be a real competition anyway, just a demonstration, otherwise I would have ensured we made it to that on a previous day.

Honest we're really spinning them

The opening act featured some difficult balancing by one girl and lots of other auxiliary girls who didn't do much more than roll around the stage. Oh – and they were all spinning innumerable plates; it was obviously fake though and I felt quite embarrassed watching it. I was just thinking that the act would actually have been quite good if they hadn't bothered with the silly plates when one of the girls dropped a plate. Immediately I assumed it was to prove that the plate spinning was actually real, then noticed that the other three plates on poles held by the same hand were now all hanging limply, not spinning, but somehow still clinging on the the poles. Quickly the girl saw what they were doing and chucked the four sticks away off stage. The group of four sticks were obviously a unit as well; I wouldn't be at all surprised if the spinning was motorised.

Honest they're not stuck together

Guy running up a pole

Unicyclists

I did manage to shake off some of the cynicism and enjoy the remaining acts, some of which were quite entertaining, but every time they brought an element of balancing objects they were obviously cheating and I found it embarrassing. There was no need for them to do it: the acts were perfectly good without going that extra distance. Joanne enjoyed it more than I had, and neither she nor Sue had noticed all of the cheating, so obviously I'm just too much of a cynic to be looking out for that sort of thing.

Balancing act

To top off Joanne's birthday we had decided to go out for a hot pot, which we'd been told was a local speciality. The Lonely Planet recommended a couple of cheap places, but instead we asked at our hostel if they knew of somewhere locally. Unfortunately they must not have realised we were staying at a hostel because we were cheap and we were directed to a very expensive hot pot restaurant. Ah well, we decided, it's a birthday so we can splash out and ordered the beef option. We were a bit disappointed that they didn't give us any instructions, leaving us a bit confused about what goes where when, in fact the only service we got after ordering was five minutes after our food arrived when the waitress appeared out of uniform and told us we had to pay as they were closing. We were permitted to stay and do what we could, but being novices, we really made a meal out of it. A bit of a disappointing end to a nice day. At least she had loved all the presents I bought.

Disappointing hot pot

The next day, after sharing the remaining three free breakfasts, we had only one thing to do before getting an afternoon bus: get to the post office and post home Joanne's extra glasses and a few little things we had bought. We asked the staff in the hostel for directions and they showed us on the hand-drawn map behind them. It wasn't too far, so we would have loads of time to spare. When we arrived at the spot, however there was no post office. We tried asking some passersby, but could never be completely certain we were being directed to a post office, which we couldn't find, and not just a post box, which we did find. Eventually we gave up and went back to the hostel. This time they went online and called up Google Maps: look there's another one here, they said pointing at a map with only Chinese characters on it. When I complained that I could tell where it was, they went back to the wall map and showed me. This one was even closer, so we couldn't understand why they hadn't sent us there in the first place. Ten minutes later we were standing, holding our bags of things to be sent, outside a Post Office Savings Bank. Back again to the hostel. This time one of the staff kindly offered to take us to the one marked on the map. It was not where the map had said it was, but once we were there, what a contrast to the useless, slow, Indian postal service. We stood and watched as our fragile items were expertly and thoroughly wrapped until the girl was satisfied she could bounce each one on the counter without any danger of it breaking. This took a while though, and we were nail-bitingly fearing what Indian-style delays might be involved in the actual sending, but it was fast and easy.

Excellent service, but what a carry on it had been to get there. We had to get a taxi to make it to our bus in time.

written by  The Happy Couple on July 23, 2009 from Beijing, China
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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The eclipse!

We hadn't managed to get to Shanghai in time for the total solar eclipse, but there would still be a fairly full eclipse visible from Beijing, so we had decided to view it from Tian'anmen Square; it was nearby, it would be interesting because of all the people there, and there was enough space that tall buildings would not block our view of the sun.

The pollution was terrible

In the morning we had a look outside and the pollution was the worst we had seen it. We discussed trying to get out of the city where the air should be clearer, but we hadn't really got up early enough to realise any alternative plans, and we just accepted that we were stuck with the plan we had. We had to get within about fifty metres of Tian'anmen Square before we could even see it, but hopefully the sun would still be visible through the fug. There were plenty of people in the Square but most of them seemed to be waiting for tours of the Forbidden City to begin.

We could hardly see across the Square

Serve the People!

Our arrival was a short time before the start of the eclipse and there was no sign at all of the sun. Even the other side of the Square was partially obscured. Given the conditions I didn't expect to see anything until near the maximum of the eclipse, when I hoped we would at least notice it becoming darker. We waited and people-watched. As time passed, it seemed like it might be getting darker, but it was so gradual that our eyes were adjusting to it and it was hard to be sure there really was anything to notice.

Looking back towards the Forbidden City

People watching in Tian'anmen Square

The yellow troupe

They took a photo so I thought we should too

Charcter in the Square

The eclipse as Joanne saw it

At the opticians, with some difficulty, we were able to establish that the very reasonable prices on display were for everything, not just the frames. It really was a bargain, however I admonished Joanne for simply agreeing to the ticket price as the girl from the hostel who had given us the directions said we should definitely get a discount off the advertised price. But at 240 Yuan it was still a great price, I'm told. After a bit of coaching from me, she also chose a pair of polarising sunglasses and this time asked for a discount, claiming grounds that we had already bought something. They were very obliging and dropped to price from 120 to 70 with no argument. We were asked to come back in 45 minutes when the glasses would be ready.

Girl working at a tea shop we couldn't afford

Engrish

On the way back to the opticians we decided we should really take more advantage of the cheap prices, and get another pair of glasses for Joanne to post home, as well as a replacement for the dodgy spare pair of Joanne's sunglasses I had been wearing since I lost mine. Maybe to save us all embarrassment after our clumsy haggling earlier, this time we only had to ask what the price was and they dropped it considerably, and I walked away with a new pair of polarising sunglasses for 70 Yuan, and Joanne secured a second pair of glasses for 200. This meant another wait, so I took the opportunity to offer to pick them up after some shopping I had to do. It turned out Joanne had expected me to do any remaining birthday shopping at a market we had planned to go to earlier, but I was sure I would be fine locally.

Front Gate

No fun!

Top of the strange street

I couldn't get over the pollution

Green eggs (but no ham)

The tram appears at the top of the fake street

Back at the hostel we realised that the cheaper acrobatics tickets the hostel were selling was actually to the very same place we had visited earlier.

written by  The Happy Couple on July 22, 2009 from Beijing, China
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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