Thoughts on China

Beijing, the city of the famous hock-a-loogie:

Men here hork like you've never heard before. The weird thing is that they usually don't acutally spit out out... eww.
It is totally gross.
I thought that everyone that lived here was just immune to it (because it happens all the time) but last night a man did it and a Chinese woman went 'Uck!' and shook her head. It made me happy.

Chidren have slits in their pants and they don't wear any underwear. I'll try to get a picture. The first time I saw it I thought the pants were ripped... the second time I saw it I wondered what was going on, and the third time I realized that this was no accident! They wear them for the squat toilets! Easy access.

Yesterday was my first day being forced to use a squat toilet (when we were in the mountain village).
Let me tell you, if it didn't smell foul, there was no urine on the ground, and you didn't have to put your dirty tp into a garbage can, it wouldn't be all that bad.... but it does, and it was.

Things you'll likely see being sold in the streets:
-Skewers of all sorts of meats
-deep fried bread
-sponge toffee (so good!)
-steamed buns full of... who knows what (but boy do they smell good!)
-T-shirts and bags of Che Guevera
-T-shirts of Obama wearing Chinese stuff
-Paintings (that I thought were niceish, but apparently are a dime a dozen)

There are stores that sell T-shirts for 15 RMB (like 2.50 CDN)... but Stuart and I didn't have time to go in them.

I read somewhere that Beijing was the bicycle capital of Asia but I think that's totally off. Shanghai was bicycle CRAZY! Way more bikes and way less cars there than here.

Here's something interesting:
The sidewalks are all fenced off from the road and almost all of the crosswalks are underground in Beijing.
In Shanghai, walk signs mean nothing. People (and cars) pretty much go whenever they want to. I almost got hit by a motorcycle a few days ago.

The Subway stations are really nice in both Shanghai and Beijing and the cost of where you are going depends on how many stops you'll be taking. A trip that takes three stops will set you back 2RMB (about 30 cents CDN)

It's pretty cheap to get around here... even if you take a taxi. Taxi rides usually cost about 25 RMB, but Stu and I are too cheap to take them. We have yet to go in a taxi though in some instances it would be soo much more convenient.

Tonight (or tomorrow... we have to decide still) we will be heading on a night train in a hard seat (all they have left) to Xi'an which we have heard is totally awesome.


Fin.