Peking Duck

Beijing :: PRC(Note: published late due to GFWoC issues)

Replacing history with a concrete facsimile of history, one block at a time.

Places: Beijing & Mutianyu

Coolest thing I did: Not only walked and climbed along the Great Wall of China but also rode a wheeled toboggan back down to the car park, like those ones at Jambaroo.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Chinese followed the Soviets lead and decided to preserve their glorious leader under glass in the middle of town. It's a pity Mao isn't as in good shape as Lenin these days, perhaps Russian mortuary technology is more advanced.

When you live in the capital of modern China you face such dangers as uncross-able roads and air that could only be described as viscous. Back a few hundred years ago the big issue was Mongols. Horse back mounted barbarian archers running about the place looting and pillaging makes going about your daily business difficult, and despite a few attempts at building defences to keep the buggers out by about 1600AD it was getting beyond a joke. So how do you keep out Mongols? You build a bloody great long wall along the north border of your country. Did it work? Well, all I can say is the whole time I was in China I wasn't harassed even once by Mongols, so I guess the proof is there.

The Great Wall of China. What can you say about it that people don't already know? It's very photogenic, slithering along the mountain tops and as a result, you've probably already seen pictures of it. It's really long, it's got turrets and watch towers and, as we've already discussed, it's the most effective anti-Mongol defence system ever devised by man. Like most really famous things, it's covered with large Americans panting their way up and down it, and for some unfathomable reason, lots of French people too. It's very steep in places and walking along the wall was probably the best work-out I got the whole time I was away. I liked the bits that haven't yet been restored, with trees growing out of the top of the wall, but for sensible reasons you aren't really supposed to walk along those bits. You know, in case you break the wall or fall off it.

The Great Wall was the only thing we visited by tour, however it was a pretty casual tour. There was only three of us so we went with a driver who spoke no English except the names of NBA basketball teams and players and a guide who spoke quite good English but didn't really waste our time with all that guiding nonsense. We drove out to the section at Mutianyu, which as a chair lift to take you up to the wall itself and, more importantly, wheel toboggans on a metal track, like at Jambaroo Recreation Park to take you back down to the car park. There's nothing like taking a historical relic and turning it into an amusement park ride.

Beijing itself bears the scars of a city that has recently hosted an Olympics, with everything having recently been demolished and replaced with the kinds of streets that project the image the hosting city wants the world to see. The traditional alleys that surrounded the Forbidden City in the middle of Beijing, the hutongs have mostly been razed to make way for straight, wide streets and the process seems to show no signs of abating. Some of the old streets have been kept for the tourists, with the people being moved out to live in high rise further out and the houses being turned into shops. It's given the whole place an inhuman scale, the stories of everyone getting around by bike replaced by the facts on the ground, with the car firmly in control of central Beijing now.

The most visible legacy of the Games in 2008 is the Birds Nest stadium, a short subway ride from the middle of town. Having been to a few things out at Homebush I can say without a doubt that the stadium built for the Sydney Olympics is dull and uninspiring when compared to Beijing's. At every angle, from both inside and out, the criss-crossing girders make the Birds Nest a much more interesting building to look at. Right across the road is the Water Cube, the pool used for the games which is basically a big cube textured with a blue honeycomb pattern, which is also an impressive building. I take it the Chinese looked at Sydney and went "we can top that", and in both cases they did.

The strangest thing at the old Olympic site was without a doubt the wax museum of the Secretaries General, past and present of the Olympic movement. Why anyone would want their picture taken with a lifelike statue of Jacques Rogge or Juan Antonio Samaranch is beyond me, but it's still got Chinese people lining up for a photo.

There are touts in Beijing, which we hadn't seen anywhere else in China, but they really don't put in much effort when compared to their Egyptian or South East Asian counterparts. I amused them all greatly by waiting until they'd walked right up to me and then putting on the big left foot step and running away at top speed. They thought it was hilarious and forgot they were supposed to be selling me kites.

The various Emperors maintained a couple of residences in Beijing, the Forbidden City right smack bang in the middle and the Summer Palace, a fairly arduous subway ride away. Both are oversized and impressive and take half a day to get around. The Summer Palace is set on a lake that was resized at great effort by a whole load of Chinese peasants and has an impressive view of all of Beijing, mostly because Beijing is really flat. I can just imagine the Emperor standing on his terrace, looking out over the city and saying things like "I got a crook stomach from some dumplings from that place in district 7, go burn district 7 to the ground", and then being able to see it was being done.

The Forbidden City is known as such because back in the day you couldn't get in there unless you were the Emperor or part of his entourage of ministers, concubines and the like. You don't really get a feeling for the size of the place walking around it, that's better done by looking down on it from the pagoda at the top of Jingshan Park, preferably at sunset. That gives you a view of the whole thing in one sitting, and out over Tienanmen Square to the the immediate south of the palace. However walking through Fob City from the North Gate has you going against the general flow of traffic and makes the whole thing a lot easier - especially if you, like us went a bit silly in the bars Sanlitun the night before and weren't in the mood for fighting with the crowd.

If you're like me, and you're too young to really remember the Cold War and spent your very formative years growing up during the collapse of communism and wondering what the whole fuss was about, then Tienanmen Square only really conjures up one image, that crucial moment when the Chinese Government discovered how bad a look it is to drive tanks over student protesters. Funnily enough there is absolutely no indication that ever happened, the same government having mastered projecting the image they want overseas in the meantime while keeping complete control over what the local populace get to see and hear. The north border of the square is dominated by the south gate of Fob City, the quite wonderfully named Gate of Heavenly Peace, and the massive poster of Chairman Mao hanging over it, and right in the middle is the mausoleum that holds big Mao's earthly remains.

Visiting Mao's body, which is out on display under glass is an experience so full of irony that I can only assume the Chinese have an Alanis Morissette view of irony. On your way into the mausoleum you have to pass a stall selling bunches of flowers to put in front of the Chairman's grave, which look suspiciously like they're being gathered up and being resold. Then, on the way out there is so much Mao-based merchandise you have to wonder how a man that spent his entire life trying to drive capitalism and all it's works out of his country would make of it all.

At some time in the past everyone in the West called Beijing 'Peking', for some reason involving French Missionaries I don't quite understand. As a legacy of this the most famous food that comes out of the mean streets of Beijing is Peking Duck. I had two shots at eating this while in town, once at the 5 storey Duck megaplex owned by the oldest chain in the city, Quan Ju De and once from the more modern interpretation at the Da Dong Restaurant. While I did enjoy eating in a place that allowed you to pay extra to pick your own duck, I don't know if the extra condiments and, more importantly, the extra lean duck was the way to go. I liked eating the crispy skin dipped in sugar and the option of more than just Hoisin sauce and spring onions in your pancake but the authenticity of feeling your arteries harden due to the high fat content that may have made Quan Ju De's a better duck overall. You want to lose weight? Peking duck might not be the food for you.

Due to an unusually long time spent in Beijing, as opposed to every where else I stay in China, I had time to spend an afternoon seeing what people do in the park on a lazy Saturday afternoon. The park surrounding the Temple of Heaven seems to be the place to hang out if you've got nothing else to do. There's people in their 70s kicking around a shuttlecock (and doing it far better than most young people at home would), people singing in big groups and lots of people playing that Chinese instrument with one string that makes all songs sound sad. Even Twist-n-Shout would come out sad. Every time I went past one I wanted to say "play us a happy song!" but realised it probably can't be done. My favourite was the old bloke with a long brush doing calligraphy on the footpath in water. There's nothing that says you're in it for the transient art than the fact the mark you've just made on the world is going to evaporate in the next few minutes.

That's something you notice about the Chinese in general: they tend to get out of the house a lot and socialise. I guess because up until now they've lived in such tiny spaces that getting out into the street and chatting with the neighbours saves your sanity a little. We saw numerous groups of people practising dancing and playing instruments in the streets all over the country, with varying level of talent and skill, but you do feel like it kind of beats TV. Especially if all that's on is communist propaganda and basketball.

Beijing was also the first place since the Hong Kong Sevens that going out and drinking with the kids was an option. The bar district of Sanlitun looks unpromising on the surface, with the first spot you see a long string of bars with what can only be described as bad Chinese karaoke. It's not until you drop back into the narrow streets behind the Sanlitun Village (which looks a lot like it's been transplanted from California - same shops and all) you start to find bars with cheap beers and a comfortable mix of ex-pats & Chinese students. What I like most about drinking in China is the fact they never take the bottles away after you finish. If you, like most of the Chinese kids, decide to stay at the same table all night it's possible to see how drunk you are in 3D.

As happening as Sanlitun was on a Saturday night I built up a bit more of a soft spot for the redeveloped hutong just north of the hotel, Nan Luo Gu Xiang (or NLGX). For some inexplicable reason you can drive cars down it, meaning on a Saturday afternoon it's rammed solid each time a taxi tries to make it's way down, but it's full of food you recognise, little bars that wouldn't look out of place anywhere else in the world and has a fairly high proportion of young Beijingers, as opposed to white people. It's a fair bit more low-key than Sanlitun but it doesn't look as planned, which is a nice change where absolutely everything in the country actually is planned. It was the place we became acquainted with Chinese hipster fashion, which strangely enough seems to involve wearing big black geeky glasses with no glass in them. You get the nerd factor without the crazy side-effect of actually being able to see any better.

Something that I never quite got about China was the need for Chinese people to have their picture taken with you. I was quite chuffed the first time it happened, when I got my picture taken with a whole group of Chinese school girls, but it became a strangely common occurrence. I had my picture taken with husbands, wives, grandparents, kids, whole families, everyone you could possibly think of. I can only imagine how many times I've been tagged on Chinese Facebook as 'lanky looking white bloke'.

Keep digging

Beijing :: PRC(Note: published late due to GFWoC issues)

Looking at stuff made out of rocks.

Places: Xi'an & Luoyang

Coolest thing I did: Made up for not seeing about a dozen terracotta warriors in the British Museum by seeing about 1,500 of them instead.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: There's also a tomb of the first Emperor of China near Xi'an which they haven't dug up yet. Only a absolute dictatorship could stop archaeologists from digging something like that up.

So it's the mid-70s and you're a Chinese peasant out there in your field with a few mates digging a well. Pretty normal day, as being a Chinese peasant goes, until you hit something hard, and work out it's a head made out of the same stuff as your roof tiles. You keep digging and work out there's an entire scale model of a bloke in armour attached to it. You do the right thing, tell people more important than you and before you know it they've dug up rows and rows of the bloody things. I take it you have to dig your well somewhere else, not to mention having archaeologists walking all over your cabbages. Still, you get a pretty unique story out of it. Probably never have to buy your own Tsingtao again.

Xi'an is a town of some 4 and a bit million souls, and it's a pretty standard looking mid-sized Chinese city. It has both a drum and a bell tower (as you find out after a while they all do), surrounded by 4 lanes of traffic. It does still have a wall, but that wall has pretty obviously been restored and creates total traffic chaos. It has air you can see, which is why after a couple of days there you start to sound like you've been smoking a pack a day. It's putting up high-rise at a scary rate, and on you bus ride out to the only reason you'd ever visit the place you pass through a landscape that is flat and dominated by coal-fired power stations and high voltage power lines. Really, had the previously mentioned anonymous Chinese peasants not chosen that particular spot to dig a well you would have very likely never heard of the place, but it was well worth all these things to see it's main attraction.

Basically about 2000 years ago China wasn't actually China, but a whole lot of small countries peopled by Chinese people and run by warlords who spent most of their time making everyone fight each other. Then one of those warlords, a bloke called Qin came out on top and united everyone in the core of the first Chinese state. If you don't want to read about it, then go and watch the movie Hero, which is just like history only with Jet Li and heaps more martial arts and sword fighting.

Like most rulers at the time Qin decided that he needed a pretty damn impressive burial so he got a whole bunch of the most talented sculptors around and got them to spend decades making a scale model of his actual army, including their horses and (quite confusingly) acrobats. They estimate there was a total of 6,000 statues buried down there, and as of this time they've dug up about 1,500 or so. At the current rate there will be jobs for graduate archaeologists for quite a few years yet. In fact, on the day we were there, there were a whole bunch of blokes digging one up while we watched.

Xi'an is a pretty harsh place, cold in winter, hot in summer and generally living under the haze of pollution so the Chinese decided that the best thing to do was build an aircraft hanger over the whole site to protect the excavation site from the elements. You walk into something the size of St Pancreas in London and see row after row of happy terracotta men, all about 5 and a bit feet tall and every one with their own unique face and hair style. This was in the days before mass production and some bloke would have had to sat down and mould each one by hand. I especially liked the fact that the officers were a bit fatter than the soldiers and the generals were a bit fatter again. Nothing like a bit of honesty in art.

I also liked the fact they put a big arrow over the spot where the well was, right at the front of the first rank. It's amazing to think that if they dug that well about 10m to the left they might have missed the whole thing.

On the road between Xi'an and Beijing is a town called Luoyang, which is much like Xi'an in it's scary wide roads and rapidly breeding high rise buildings and is only really visited by tourists because it's a good base for exploring a couple of really old sites nearby. The first is the White Horse Temple, which tradition has it is the spot where the first Buddhists settled in China itself. It's a sprawling site full of open fronted shrines and statues of various important people in the Buddhists Parthenon (there's a whole load of them apparently, not just the big B), and right at the back the stelae that supposedly are the oldest copy of the Buddhists scriptures in all of China. Which is pretty cool. Apparently the blokes that brought Buddhism to China brought them in riding white horses, hence the temple's name and the rather tacky fibreglass white horses outside you're supposed to get your picture taken on.

However the reason pretty much everyone comes to Luoyang is to go and see the Longman Caves. I'd never heard of these before I came out to China, but it's basically a cliff face over a river where people started carving statues of Buddha and his mates in various sizes into the rockface and didn't stop for about 500 years. There is one cave where 1,000 tiny Buddhas have been carved into the wall, but the showpiece is the roofless Fengxian cave where the figures all stand about 17m tall. It's amazing to walk up the steps and see these massive heads looking benevolently down at you, you know, because Buddha always looks at people benevolently. He's that kind of guy. It also taps deeply into that Australian love of going on holiday to places where the only landmarks are big things, like bananas, and rocking horses.

Since the Taliban blew up all the similar caves in northern Afghanistan about 10 years back this site has taken on even more meaning, one of 4 similar sites in China but by far the most accessible for us Westerners. You simply get on the same bus that people take to work, or bring their groceries back from the shops on and go right to the end, and there it is. I liked that about China, you really didn't have to bother with tours, the government just put on the local buses to take people to these kinds of places. I guess that is in part because there were definitely more Chinese tourists than Westerners, which isn't something you often see in the third world. I would put that down to the fact that the Eastern parts of China that I saw were mostly looking far more middle-class than most 3rd world countries I've visited. I'm sure there are like a billion poor people west of where I visited but I got the feeling that China has crossed a boundary into being no longer poor. Seeing as most Chinese people aren't allowed to go overseas lots of them seem to be spending their new found disposable income on seeing their own history.

I generally have been pretty cavalier about travelling around countries where I don't speak a word of the local language and surviving the experience, and generally China wasn't too much of a problem. Sure practically no-one spoke English but lots of restaurants have menus with pictures of all the food and I've always found that if you're trying to spend money in people's shops they go the extra mile to make sure you can. The exception to this rule was train stations. Trying to buy a ticket with the masses was pretty much impossible. The Chinese generally don't have a great respect for queueing but at the ticket counter it's every man for himself. By the time you've elbowed your way up to the window, boxing out people cutting down the side of the key for the sneaky rebound along the way, you'd better have what you want written out in Chinese otherwise they'll just wave you away. I would normally have considered it a defeat to have to resort to hotel staff or finding someone that spoke English to help out, but there was simply no other way to get on a train in the whole country. I was literally starting to have nightmares about trying to buy train tickets.

The peak of train chaos we saw was changing trains in Zhengzhou on the way from Luoyang to meet the overnight train to Beijing. It was the start of a 4 day long weekend and the massive square out the front the station was packed with people, due to the fact they couldn't all fit into the station itself. And just to show how quickly they're taking to capitalism there was blokes walking through selling little collapsible chair so you don't have to sit on the cold concrete. Not bad for people who grew up without a functioning market economy.

It was also another example of how white people generally get away with anything out there. Everyone gets their bags x-rayed, get metal-detected and ID checked before getting into the station but we were waved through. That kind of thing happened alot. I guess they don't have a problem with ex-pat extremists quite yet, most Westerners that care that fanatically about Tibet being too busy acting in Hollywood to cause many problems at Chinese train stations.

One comment Dee made which hit me was on the bus ride into Zhengzhou, in between trying not to notice the bus driver overtaking people by driving on the wrong side of the road, quite often while texting on his phone. She said China looks like a war torn country, all along the multi-lane highways you see buildings that have been smashed to pieces, roofs missing and windows knocked out. The difference is, most of them are scheduled to be replaced with several identical blocks of flats. The rate of change the country is seeing is amazing, every city was a construction site. I think the thing that kind of scares me is not how much they've already built, but the amount they've got to keep building, just to keep up. And no-one there seems interested in just keeping up.

Chinese sleeper cars on night trains smell strongly of cabbage soup.

A good good night (Mazeltov!)

Hong Kong :: Hong Kong

Rugby in very tiny pieces.

Places: Hong Kong

Coolest thing I did: Experienced the madness that is the South Stand during the Hong Kong Sevens rugby tournament.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: One of the theme songs of the tournament is Blitzkrieg Bop by The Ramones. I mean, come on, The Ramones!

Even though I barely knew the rules of Sevens Rugby before I started planning my China trip, the decision of when to go revolved totally around being there for that tournament. I'd been hearing rumblings of how good a time it is to be in Hong Kong from various random people for years and when I flipped a coin and chose China over South America for a big trip this year then I was always going to try and be there.

What I wasn't really expecting was to end up yelling at people for crowd control about two hours after I landed. It's unsurprisingly hard to get people who have been drinking for 8 solid hours to check to see if they have a band around their wrist letting them in for free, or to get them to successfully fish money out of their pockets to pay an entrance fee. My choices on arrival at Dee's place on Friday night were to either sit around and wait for her to finish volunteering to work for her rugby club's beer tent, or to put on a polo shirt to mark me out as a Steward and get free beer afterwards. Really wasn't much of a choice. I also now am the proud owner of a polo shirt that says Steward on the back that is big enough for three of me to wear. I don't quite have rugby shoulders.

So if, like me, you did no research into the tournament you wouldn't have known that the South Stand of Hong Kong Stadium is converted into a lunatic asylum for 3 days. Or that the vast majority of them with show support for their national team by getting dressed up in fancy dress that does nothing to identify who they are going for. I, instead, wore my Wallabies jersey. With hindsight I now know this was just going to direct torrents of hate at me. I suppose I should have guessed that in a former British colony most of the ex-pats wouldn't be barracking for either us or the Kiwis (there were a surprisingly large number of South Africans there though) and as I'd clearly marked myself out there was going to be a whole lot of yelling in my direction. Quite thankfully after about 1pm I couldn't really understand much of it, and to be fair most of them probably couldn't understand what they were saying either. I did get a fair amount of beer spat in my direction though.

The costume thing does add something to it, I guess it's kind of permission to go a bit more stupid than you would have otherwise. Dee and her women's rugby team were dressed as construction workers and I got one of those insights most blokes never want to have when they end up alone in room full of women getting ready: they spend quite a bit of time planning how they will eventually wee while wearing a harness, when the time comes.

So once the South Stand is full everyone's task becomes to drink beer served in 2-pint plastic cups until they feel ready to roam the stands and make new friends at random, have joyous reunions with people they haven't seen in a couple of hours, and if you live in Hong Kong, bump into people you don't recognise because they're dressed as Jesus and they don't usually wear a fake beard to work. There are only really two other things that are mandatory - to sing like you're playing Wembley Arena when one of various pre-chosen theme songs come on (Hey Ho! Let's go!) and to yell and scream like you've got tourettes syndrome when the Hong Kong team plays. The rest of the day is really your own free time to engage in drunken antics.

My favourite costume of the day was the bunch of blokes dressed as the guy from The Hangover with the baby strapped to his front. Of course they all had fake babies and by late afternoon the game had become to give the baby a punch if you walked past one of them. The day after I had to try really, really hard to remember not to do that in real life. It would be seen as far less funny.

Truth be told the party itself is far more interesting than the actual rugby, and with the 7 min halves quite often you get distracted and when you next look at the field there are two new teams almost finished their game, quite possibly with another game in the middle you didn't even notice had taken place. Very few people seemed to be there to experience the pinnacle of Sevens Rugby. While the fragments I actually watched were very fast and high scoring, to be honest I think you have to be from the Pacific Islands to really appreciate it. The big guns from both hemispheres are replaced by places like Fiji and Samoa in the global pecking order in this form of the game, which adds a whole lot of unpredictably as to who is going to win. Once you add into in the fact there are at least three tournaments taking place on one field, each with their own trophy and I'll be buggered if I could work out what was supposed to be happening most of the time.

On the Sunday there was a bit more wandering around to see if sitting elsewhere in the stands would work, but most of the seats on the other three sides of the pitch are either corporate boxes/seats of various plushness or non-drinking sections, I guess for people who actually want to watch the rugby or not expose their kids to several thousand rabid fans of being drunk and wearing fancy dress in public. The atmosphere in the stadium was always good, thanks I guess to it being only 40,000 capacity and having big curving roofs on two sides to channel the noise onto the pitch, but I suspect the roar you could hear was mostly coming from the south. It was better to be able to feel that noise splatter right on you and run down your back than it was to hear it from a distance.

Best pitch invasion was the guy dressed in a teddy bear costume who managed to not only evade all security but managed to climb the goal posts and stand on the cross-bar. When you think of how it is to climb goal posts while a) drunk and b) wearing a bear costume then it's highly impressive when you can combine the two.

The nights seem just as big as the days, my trusty Sherpas making sure I managed to get out to the designated drinking zones of Wan Chai and LKF after the matches on different nights to experience the crowds. I remember Hong Kong being far more fun to be out at night in than Singapore in the days I used to go to both for work, but I never remembered it being as packed as it was on the Friday and Saturday nights for the Sevens. One thing I learned about Hong Kong is you can not only buy beer from 7-Eleven and drink it in the street, but you can also take those beers in a taxi cab and drink them on the way. You can even take jugs, though the taxi driver will ask you to not attempt to pour from the jug to the cup while the taxi is in motion. Which is fair enough.

So on this trip to Hong Kong, I did nothing you're supposed to do as a tourist. I didn't climb Victoria Peak, go shopping or visit Macau. Which was exactly what I wanted, because I'd hated to have missed a second of the Sevens. It was with heavy heads we passed through Shenzhen airport on Monday morning into China proper, the result of way too much fun compacted into such a short space of time.

I'll just at this point mention all these China posts came much later than they were actually written due to the fact The Great Firewall of China (GFWoC) blocks most blogging sites and fairly regularly most web-based email as well. The Chinese Government is famously heavy-handed with their attempts to control information and having people being able write whatever gibberish comes into their head kind of goes against that.