China: Food Stalls, Great Walls and Beijing Bar Crawls

Hello. It has been a few days since my last post, so incidentally there is quite a lot for me to talk about. I'll cover a few days in Beijing here and then post a bit more stuff later.

First of all, just a quick note about chinese people in general. We have encountered a bizarre mixture of character types on our travels so far. It seems that Stu, Vinny and myself are treated somewhat as minor celebrities in China owing to our pale complexion. A handful of times already we have been approached by young couples who wish to take a photo of themselves with us. We have certainly obliged and posed with great gusto, making v-shaped peace signs, as is the custom across the country it seems. We are continually gawped at in the street, especially by young children. Also absolutely everyone who approaches us in this sense is wholly charming. Examples include- a three-year old girl (approx) who enthusiastically yanked on the pocket of my shorts, whilst on the subway and chimed "Ni Hao!" with great delight; and a young boy in a park at the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, who was fascinated by a 2 pence piece which Vinny produced at one point. We gave it to him and he was incredibly grateful. Furthermore, a multitude of people will just simply say hello in the street as we walk past, and people are always so unbelievably helpful with directions too. Obviously, there a few attempts at tourist scams too, but we are beginning to be able to identify such signals early, and we are also beginning to play the game ourselves. Haggling is becoming second nature now!

On our second day in Beijing, we slept through our alarms and slept until about 1pm. It seems that we neeeded our sleep after being awake for 36 hours. After we eventually left the hostel, we walked though a high rise shopping district to the Temple of Heaven and it's surrounding parks. After a relaxing stroll through the gardens, and having played a small chinese lady's guitar type instrument, we left and began to weave our way north through some of the Hutong (slum-like but quaint housing for the many poor people residing in Beijing). As Vinny pointed out, it was a little like an asian 'City of God', but it was exciting to experience a little bit of the 'real China'. From here, we made our way to Tiananmen Sq again and made it just in time for the flag lowering ceremony at dusk. Sitting on the square, as it got progressively darker, the city lit up before our eyes, and even the forbidden city became aglow with bright lights.

From here we went to the Night Market on Wanfujiang Street, a bustling food market with a plethora of food stalls, which sold a huge range of different foodstuffs. These ranged from your standard delicious Chinese delights, through to skewered kebabs with either locusts, grubs, seahorses, or live scorpions. We ate a squid kebab and some miscalleaneous meat kebab, which could have been anything including dog. But we thought it was pork most likely.

After an early night, we awoke to a hearty breakfast before a trip to the Great Wall. In order to avoid the big crowds, and to see the best views, we travelled to Jinshanling and trekked across the wall for 4 hours to Simatai. It was absolutely amazing. Possibly the most beautiful place I have been. Amazing. We finished our walk sweaty, and tired. But it was certainly worth it.

That night we made our way to the bar streets of Sanlitun. Here we managed to haggle our asses off. Our best deal was getting 6 beers for 5 yuan (90p each), whilst other people we met were paying the equivalent of 4 quid a beer. We met a whole bunch of people- 'Tony', a chinese chap who was a massive fan of "Snuck" (snooker) and was keen to get us to visit a nearby "lady bar". We incidentally declined (for the record- Mum and Kirstie). But he was charming all the same, and we had a few beers with him. Then we met Dirk, a ridiculously charismatic Dutch chap who smiled the entire time, and his girlfriend Margeruite (we can't actually remember her name - so we gave her one). We got drunk with them and then took them to an Irish bar to watch the Chelsea vs Barcelona game at 2.45 in the morning. This resulted in me and Stu going mental when Iniesta smashed in the winner, high fiving equally excited Chinese barca fans. Good times.

Jack