I`m having an awesome time here, the day trip to the great wall is easily one of the highlights of the entire trip so far. I`d signed onto the trip through the hostel. I originally just wanted to it on my own but it didn`t cost much more and at least it meant everything was sorted, the start time was 5:50 though which didn`t fit quite so well with my now somewhat lazy routine.
The walk was around a 10k hike between Jinshanling to Simatai, i didn`t want to do the usual Badaling bit as it just sounds horribly overrun with people and street sellers. I wanted to actually feel like i walked a bit of it rather than just go get the postcard style photograph, than come back. Also this was far more remote and the extra effect it would take would mean no chance of the dreaded "American family"
The ride there is just over 3 hours, and not the comfiest 3 hours either, about 10 of us cramped in this pretty tiny van, then add in some insane driving.
The walk itself was stunning, i mean really stunning, for such initial high hopes the fact i was in no way disappointed is testament to how cool this place is. You got to walk on original wall and at times had views from in front and behind where you couldn`t see a single person. By the end you where genuinely knackered and this huge zipline that you take to cross the river was a ridiculous amount of fun. They also chucked in a quick buffet before the 3 hour return journey.
We got back for half 7 and the hostel was having its daily event sort of thing. Monday (today) they have a free BBQ, Thursday is a sort of tea party and Friday `walk day` it was dumpling making, so we got the chance to fill up on these amazing dumplings. This, as food and beer usually does, drew a bit of a crowd and got everyone chatting and having a laugh. We`d also had a few beers by this time so when the suggestion to go to wangfujing market to eat scorpion came up it sounded like a pretty good idea. I tried pretty much everything put in front of me from, snake skin to sheep penis, scorpion was actually the only one that had a decent taste as all the others just made me want to vomit.
Back at hostel we all stayed up chatting about the nights events and then 24 hours after waking, i crashed out on my bed. Definitely a good day.
I was too tired to do anything the following day so apart from going for a Chinese hotpot with a lad from the hostel i really just sat around and enjoyed a day off.
The guy serving us did give us a proper laugh though as he came over and said i looked like "big ham" we obviously had no idea what that meant, but the guy was persistent and kept saying "big ham" "big ham" i tried helping him out by saying "like a pig?" (not sure why i said that?) but he then pointed at his feet and said "footballer" "ahhhh, beckham?" "yes, big ham"... quality! i was happy with that, despite the lack of any truth in it, he became my favourite person for a short while :)
Oh actually i did so something, Ben, a roommate who`d just checked in said he was off to a couchsurfing party and if i`d like to come with. So i ended up playing guitar hero at some girls house, drinking this 56% rice/vodka wierd drink, at some point dancing in a club and making it home alone. None of which i can really remember, and i`m only able to write this as i`ve been informed since with pictures and videos of the night from ben.
The 2 of us sat around in pain for the entirety of the next day with only a trip to the Olympic stadium to get a change of scenery from the hostel. Today we`re doing the summer palace and then the city almost shuts down for the start of the national holiday.
First off the hostel here is the best i`ve stayed in, which is a good job considering i`m stuck here till the 6th of October. For some reason i`m the only person who didn`t get the memo about Chinese national holiday, which means every train, bus and plane, hostel and hotel is booked up. The Chinese don`t piss around when it comes to holidays, all 1.7 billion of em get up and go somewhere.
This obviously means i`m in Beijing for the parade on the 1st which will be insane (check out the far superior pictures than mine on boston.com) but the place is in overdrive at the moment and there`s a proper buzz around the place. Security's at a maximum and it`s the 60th anniversary so it`s going to be huge. A few people have warned saying to keep a low profile as it`s a really strict festival and one i don`t think touristy, photo happy foreigners are all to welcome to. Sure i`ll be fine though...
My first day which was spent in a very tired state was at the forbidden city and the surrounding areas, it`s a good job it`s hugely impressive as anything less than stunning and i would of been found asleep on the floor. Like everything in Beijing though it`s epically big, i`d always thought it was a single square, the one you see in every film set in ancient China. But it`s not, there`s like 7 of them, then hundreds of corridors coming from them, then a huge garden area as well.
I slept like a baby that night, well till 5 o clock at least, when my alarm went off and i had to get ready for the great wall trip.
The following 12 hours have the potential to topple the Milan train journey, I`ve been guided into the shanghai waiting room along with a hundred others like cattle to the slaughter. I`ve got an hour till boarding but for the fact it`s a 110 yuan (11 quid) train journey that travels across half the country to Beijing, i`m somewhat sceptical about the quality of my journey. When you purchase your tickets there`s the usual class difference to pick. Soft sleeper; as in 4 bunk beds, toilet etc, Hard sleeper; 20 odd beds in one carriage 3 bunks high, Soft seater; which i`m guessing is something like a regular seat, then hard seater; which again as i`m yet to use a train is only off hear`say but seems to be a school bench running the length of one carriage. Obviously being the Cheap skate i am and my love of pain, i went with the hard seat.
I`ve been in Shanghai 3 night/4 days now.. i ought start with the boat and go from there i guess.a
We all stepped off the boat, happy to be back on steady ground again and had decided to all meet up after finding a ATM and chucking our bags in the hostel. Mine the "Mingtown Etour Hostel" wasn`t to bad to find and was shortly back at the meeting spot for the others. Some had a little more trouble than most, but eventually we all pretty much met back up and allowed kev to show us around. Kev was the Chinese Japanese/English speaking dude and had said he`d take us to get some good food. He first led us to the old town, it`s the place in the pictures with plenty of red lanterns and was my first experience to Dim sum. Although i`ve now been told it`s not really unless it`s in a soup or something like that!! But there basically little pork filled dumplings with a oily sauce inside. There Amazing (i know i`ve been saying allot things are amazing recently but these things really are, and for 6 it came to like 40 pence)
The old towns pretty cool, quite touristy but plenty of good street food and a bunch of souvenir shops to have a gander at. I can`t remember where we got took for the night meal, i was unable to re-find it over the following days, but i do remember that 11 of us split 11 meals, 15 or so bowls of rice and 22 beers and only had to cough up something around two pound ten each. After japan this was a god send. Oh crap, we`ve gotta go through ticket inspection, guess i`ll pick it up either on route if i have room or after arrival when there`ll probably be tear stains on this page :)
The train journey really wasn`t that bad, i didn`t get much sleep but i least had a seat this time, and was able to watch 30 rock on my lappy.
Ok next day, and rain! nothing but rain, not even umbrella copeable rain but the sort that makes it virtually impossible to go out in. I did venture out at one point to the modern art museum which was kinda part cool, part completely up it`s own arse... There was the video game flower on display, projected on a big screen in a large white room with a PS3 pad available to mess with. That was neat to see it given a spot in a place like that and at the night i went to visit Sarah a girlfriend of a ex-work colleague, well actually i went to meet her twice as i`d forgotten to change the watch from japan time and arrived an hour early first time through.
The next day and more rain, it was a real bummer not being able to go and explore, and this was now my last night. I`d met a Scottish couple the other day and spent most the time chatting and drinking with them, and after grabbing some lunch (which wasn`t great) i headed off to the station.
Talking of food the night before i went into a random restaurant with no English menu or person and after pointing at other peoples plates and saying chicken quite allot she went away and came back with just a fried chicken, feet head, everything! i poked it with chopsticks for a bit and in the end resorted to dumplings from a street market.
I was expecting the boat to be like the flight over, days of just me rambling in this thing for company, not many other foreigners and alot of boredom.
The reality is it`s been as good as any hostel I`ve been to. There`s about twenty of us English speaking lot from all over the globe and it`s been a proper laugh, we stayed awake drinking on deck, doing karaoke, and having dinner/breakfast with one another. The sea has been steady for the most part and honestly if I got told I`d have to stay a few days longer I wouldn`t mind in the least. We`re all gonna grab breakfast after dropping our bags in the hostel and there`s a British couple doing the same route through china so I may be tagging along with them for a little while.
We`ve been having Chinese lessons off a guy called Kevin and I`m really looking forward to China now, I know the basics of the language and got a good list of things to see and do, and a bunch of cheap as chips hostels to stay in along the way.
I know this is only a short entry but it`s still a boat when all said and done and mainly all I`ve seen has been water... we did do karaoke last night which i really wish i had a camera for. I didn`t sing but one Chinese guy did one of the greatest versions of Jon Bon Jovi`s "it`s my life" which had ever muscle in my body creasing up to stop me from crying with laughter. So you`ll just have to look at one of the sunsets we where there to witness instead.
I can see Shanghai now and it`s been cool to actually feel the distance rather than flying here in an hour from Tokyo, anyway tanoy says we`ve gotta go.. cya
Mainly as a way to entertain myself on this boat here`s a won`t/will miss list of Japan.
WON`T - The cost of this place! it`s ridiculous, even doing it as cheap as possible, eating once a day, skimping on activities it`s still 4 times the cost of anywhere else I`m visting (bar europe)
WILL - Politeness; with a very limited vocab you never feel helpless over here, people are quick to run to your side, give u directions etc... saying that at the same time it is hard to get past that point with them, to have a conversation is really difficult on the whole, even when they`re able to speak english, their amazingly introverted.
WILL - Food here has been really nice, I`ve tried all kinds of new stuff, certain sushi which I`ve never seen back home, the otoymaki, taky yaki (octopus dumplings) ramen
WON`T - Food here is also massively lacking in meat, veg, it`s to expensive to buy fruit and the portions are a little small for my comparativly much larger appitite.
WON`T - Crossing a road here is a very organized affair. The street can be the width of a car, a gap small enough that I could jump from pavement to pavement and yet there`s a green man crossing, there can also be no cars coming either way for as far as the eye can see but yet the queue will grow until the little man pops up and then everyone crosses together. The times when I`ve thought sod it and just quickly walked over have resulted in a look of shock from the locals as if I`d offended Budda himself.
WILL - Transport isn`t just the most effcient, clean and quick, but it`s also the most polite.. nothing like a little song when you arive at your destination and then a electronic "thank you" from the ticket machine as you go through.
WILL - I can`t imagine a cleaner place the world over. I saw a few pieces of litter in a month, and that was a real effort to search out. It`s not even like they have a good number of bins it`s just they have enough respect to just not launch it on the floor.
WILL - The amount of arcades and easy access to manga. I should of been born in Japan really, comics, games, movies, gadgets, cool design... it`s like listing my hobbies and interests.
I`ve officially left Japan now, we`re a night into our boat travel and the next thing we`ll be seeing is shanghai. I`ve really enjoyed myself the past few weeks. Japan was always `thee` country I wanted to visit and was as insane and attractive as I`d hoped. Their attitude to holding onto the countries history and yet embracing future technologies is something that`s lost on many parts of the world and something to be admired.
If I had to name highlights it would probably include...the gundam model which was amazing, the goverment building night view, the karaoke in shibuya, everything about tokyo i really enjoyed. The stumbling onto the festival in Nara was as cool as it was surprising and the giant budda in Todai-ji temple was quite something. Hiroshima and the sunset at Miyajima hold fairly strong memories as well.
I`ve put together a collection on flickr of an overview from Japan, so basically anyone who hasn`t been arsed to click through all the photos can see an overview here (yes I`m on a boat and a wee bit bored)
Rough guides opening line on Osaka is "Japans equivalent of the elephant man", and it`s true. The first day or two I strolled around, it`s impossible to think anything but this place is ugly. Compared to Fukuoka or Tokyo this place is like a street market. The shops are amazing mind you, some of the most desirable things I`ve seen throughout all japan, but as i lacked the budget to go shopping it was somewhat wasted on me, as was the number of places to eat and drink, as again I really didn`t have to budget to treat myself to expensive foods nightly. The people here as well had a slightly different attitude compared to the rest of the places I`d visited, people crossed roads on a red light, people bang into one another, fashion is taken to a new level of extreme, girls even showing shoulders, which although none sound like a big deal, for japan it really goes against the grain.. everyone has this slight edge to them and with it also came the first littering I saw since arriving (on a side note Osaka has the best looking population of any place I`ve ever visited, the place is a cat walk of a city)
But yet the more time you spend here, the more u grow to have a soft spot for the place, if I could pick up any city and stick it to the side of the UK, it`d be Osaka.............no that`s a lie it`d be Tokyo but it`s that sort of place. Love to live here but to sight see it`s a no-no.
For that reason the day before leaving for China I popped over to Takarazuka, the birth place of Tezuka who created Astro Boy and therefore the birthplace of Manga and Japanese animation (anime) It`s a tiny place and I`d only gone to see the manga museum really but the sun was out and as a trip away from Osaka it was a nice half day, plus on my return I checked into a capsule hotel, it was my last night and I wanted to give it a go you know. I mean watch the video, but I slept awfully. I`d once again bumped into the couple from Hiroshima who were doing the boat ride tomorrow and had a drink with a few other Brits as well, but in terms of sleep, no way! It reminded me way to much of hospital, the hard bed, the crappy pillow and especially the scrub like robes you have to put on. Probably not the best thing when you know you`re spending the next few days on a boat but it was a laugh and an experience.
I left Hiroshima amidst the baseball frenzy of a carps home game, i hadn`t watched any sports since leaving England and was gutted not to be going. I was considering if it might be possible to go to Fukuoka to check in, then return to watch the game and grab the last train back afterwards. But after doing that journey for the 1st time my desire to do it another 2 times over became a little less appealing than it initially had been.
I checked into this cool hostel `the khaosan fukuoka` and while he was entering my details i had a skim through this free city pamphlet, and there it was, hawks vs eagles, still baseball just a hell of a lot closer, 6 o clock start at the yahoo dome! I dumped my bags and shot off on a 45 minute bus journey to the match.
The ticket was only a thousand yen, that`s like 6 pound 50, and for a country this expensive i thought that was pretty good going. Obviously the cheap seats meant i was the furthest from the game, our seats had no backs and the band was directly behind us, but seeing as the extent of my knowledge extends to `three strikes and you`re out`, i`m pretty sure i wasn`t going to understand anything for the next three hours wherever i sat. It was really just a chance to get to experience the atmosphere of sports in japan, and quite a strange one at that.
Maybe "strange" isn`t the right word as it kinda implies it wasn`t fun, which it was. They just definitely have their own way of doing things over here, that`s all. For a start no-one claps, everyone has these hollow plastic sticks to bang together, then they have these crowd conductors (guess u probably call them that) who orchestrate what songs/chants are sung. But it`s the chants themselves that are the strangest of things. They`re just so overwhelmingly complicated, involving waving, pointing, twirls, singy bits... the video doesn`t show it off to well, but it`s like a more complicated `Macarena dance` and just about everyone in the crowd knows it. Well actually it wasn`t even an `it` there was loads of them. Each one had it`s own routine and singing section. I mean back home we can shout a chant out together, maybe not perfectly in tune. But imagine if you gave us all sticks, you could probably see within seconds everyone holding there head because there mate next to them will of decided to hit them with it instead.
It was a quality night though, everyone came and left with a smile despite in the end losing, and although i didn`t have a clue what was going on, and couldn`t join in with a single dance thing (this was despite the efforts of the two girls sat next to me and a 4 year old who couldn`t help laughing at my rubbishness) i`d spent the money i`d saved on the ticket on a nice few beers. So i quietly got a bit merry while everyone else sang there way through the game.
Oh i also had the nicest dinner here, in the way Hiroshima is known for its Okonomiyaki , and Tokyo for it`s sushi, here was for its ramen soup. Ramen`s like a noodle soup, slightly spicy (well it can be) plenty of spring onions and usually a couple slices of pork, and yeah it was delicious.
I slowly walked the shops and arcades, i even stuck my head in the inhumanly loud pachinko room and just before resorting to the cinema i took a look outside to find the rain had just about stopped and the sun was starting to shine again. I thought i might as well give the festival a go if the weather was to continue like this
The pictures from here probably do more to show what it was like than any ramblings from me, i wasn`t sure what they were celebrating, it was alot of people dressed in white and banging drums and bells. Have a look here for pictures and here and here for the videos
My return to the common room of the hostel was greeted with a lot of people speaking English and quite a few of which were drinking. They where off out to some 3000 yen all you can drink rock club, and i quickly took them up on their offer to join. Now i don`t have any pictures from the night and the fact family are probably reading this means it`s best if i just say i had a few more than your recommended daily amount and that i got the metro back at 2pm the next day, in a state that i think looked as though i`d just learnt how to walk for the very first time, sooooo.... next!
Well actually there wasn`t a next, i got myself 4 hamburgers and a bag of bread to toast and apart from a short walk in the afternoon, the day was spent mainly in a state of pain and tiredness.
My rail pass officially dies today so it`s a short wait now until the boat pulls in, then i`m off to China.
