Hello. I'm tired.
Let me tell you something that Stuart and I saw one day:
1. A man washing his hair in a bowl in the middle of a store
2. A woman dumping globs of fat down a drain in the street
3. A man with at least 10 propane tanks in the back of his vehicle throwing them carelessly out onto the street.
(That was Beijing)
On to other things...
Yesterday was.. HOT. VERY hot. Maybe too hot.
Here's the thing. Usually, I think that nothing is too hot.
I love hot.
I live for hot.
I drop it like it's hot.
But hot in Beijing is not just hot. It's hot, humid, stinky, and thick with pollution.
Beijing hot is nauseatingly hot.
In the morning Stu and I ate some breakie at the 365 and met a guy from Mexico.
After that we got packed up (because we had to check out of our hostel by 12 noon) and headed for the zoo.
The zoo was... sad almost.
Lions and tigers were in concrete cages smaller than my bedroom just pacing back and forth.
I think all the animals just looked sad.
I'm not even a freaky animal rights person and it depressed me.
The grounds were beautiful though. Some of the animals were in nice wide open spaces (like the zebras). They were totally cool. I love zebras!
Besides getting a killer tan, we were also getting killer tired from the smoldering heat. We were at the zoo for about three and a half hours (it's a big zoo!)
Stuart caught a few people taking pictures of us (because we're white, duh!) which I think is hilarious.
I don't know if I mentioned this in the blog, but when we were on the Bund in Shanghai, these guys were taking a picture of us and then they saw that we saw them and we all got our picture taken together, then about 10 more people jumped in the picture.
On another side note: Chinese people fricken love to blast english Christmas songs. Lots of Mariah Carey Christmas, and lots of Auld Lang Syne!
Back to yesterday:
After that we jumped on the Metro to go to this electronics market that Stu had heard about that was "close" to our house. It ended up being super far away. We wandered around for about 20 minutes, exhausted, until it closed.
Then he wanted to go to this Peking Duck place that was recommended to us by this girl that we met from Prince George. The place was semi-far away and VERY expensive. We were so tired and so hungry... but I just couldn't do it. It was like 198 yuan just for the duck. In my opinion, so not worth it.
We jumped BACK on the metro to try and find some other place, but after walking around aimlessly, realized it was a lost cause (plus we didn't have much time to get to the train station for our night train, as it was already approaching 6:30pm).
Getting back to the metro, tired, frusterated, starving, boiling, stressed, I started crying. (I'm such a girl, right?!)
Finally we got back near our house and found some restaurant where we ate lots and lots for about 80 yuan. (2 egg fried rice, 2 rice, kung pow chicken, and ... PEKING DUCK!)
The duck was just a duck.
Duck is just duck. Chicken is just chicken. Rice is just rice.
I don't know what that's supposed to mean, but it's how I feel right now because I'm delirious.
We caught our night train which was the WORST! We were in 'hard seats' which meant that we were sitting in the worlds crappiest chairs that didn't recline and had no leg room, across from three people who also had no leg room.
Lights were on the whole time, people were talking, music was playing, babies were screaming, and people were standing and sitting in the aisles because they were on stand-by to get a seat. It was virtually impossible to get a proper sleep.
After a long 11 hours, we were in Xi'an!
---- more to come ----
No comments:
Post a Comment