The beginnings of China!

Hello everybody,

Sorry we haven't updated in a while. In China many internet sites are blocked including our blogg and facebook so we just figured out how to get around that.

We made it to Beijing with no problems. We even got to share the train compartment with two generous Mongols (a Mom and her son that were both hair cutters and had competed in hair cutting competitions). We've recieved so much generosity from people on our train rides here; it's made me try to be more generous as well.

Beijing is huge! but the subway system is really easy and cheap so that really helped us get around. We stayed with a couch surfer named Zhao our first few nights and he was very kind to us. He helped us with our Chinese, helped me in the market, and we watched a movie about the history of Mao (China's Communist Party leader from 1949 to 1979). Quite interesting but hard to follow, that could be said for all three activities.

We went to the forbiden city which was also really big and there wasn't too many people there either which was nice, although at the entrance and exit we still got bombarrded with people trying to sell us stuff. Some parts of the forbidden city were really calming with large trees built into the architecture. There were many temples for all sorts of things like for the emperor to live, a resting place on the way to another place and other temples to get ready for certain occasions. Not all of them seemed so necessary. Often the emperors would never leave this place and it was only open to the public in (I think) the 1970's sometime.

We also went to the great wall which was pretty crazy. Some parts were built on a very narrow ridge of some high mountains. Kind of wonder why you would need a wall there but it looks really cool. In was neat to walk on the parts that hadn't be restored yet. We also went on a zip line from the wall across a river which was pretty cool.

We stayed in at a hostel for part of our stay in Beijing located in the hutong district which is a place with mostly single floor homes and cafes and very narrow passage ways. These places were very different from the almost futuristic scene we saw when we went out to the olympic stadiums. I think China if not just Beijing if full of these contrasts. There's also lots of people selling food and lots of other things on the street. We've been eating a lot of the food from these vendors. It helps us practise our chinese, at least the numbers, and also with the bartering, which I've been getting better at but often forgot about in the begginning. They've got baked yams, dumplings, crepe like sandwhiches, and normal hot sandwhiches with fried potatoes and vegies, as well as cobs of corn and soup which is serve in a bowl but with a plastic bag covering the inside of the bowl. Yeah, everything is given to you in a thin plastic bag. I've been trying to reuse these bags with the vendors though and it's been working not bad. We've also tried hot pot on numerous occasions and I've been trying to increase my hot spice tolerance but with the hot pot is usually gives me an extra tough spice work out. We also got a taste of the Beijing duck too which was really tendor.

I went to an improvization night to help support some local NGO's in Beijing that were working towards making Beijing's energy more sustainable and less polluting as well as working with migrant workers to increase there confidence and leardership skills in order to get better more fullfilling jobs. It made me want to get volunteering which I think will happen when we get down south. We plan to spend more time there.

The air pollution here may not be as bad as Ulaanbaatar but Kyle and I still have been waking up with soar throats. People mostly use coal for heating and cooking and you can see motorcycle trucks (a three wheeled motorcycle with a big box in the back for carrying stuff) carrying it around all the time. As well smoking is allowed almost everywhere including busses and trains so that has been paying its toll on our throats as well.

From Beijing we left for a "small" town called Datong south-west of Beijing. We've been finding that "small" towns in China aren't all that small, for example "small" town Datong has about 1.1million people! We went to the Yungang Caves which involved Kyle and I riding a motorcycle taxi together. The caves were built in the 400's to 500's and have all sorts of buddha statues carved into the stone in the caves. It was really quite neat; the biggest buddha was 17m high! The area around the caves was also interesting because there was a lot of construction going on, due to it being the off season, and they were planting trees everywhere. Not just sapplings, they were planting 20ft trees with a crain. They wanted the place to look good for next year. Makes me wonder how new some of the trees and other sites we've seen really are. We heard from some other people that tourist areas are really good at making new things look old. One place was planting grass in the roofs of houses so that soon it would look like the houses were so old and unkept that grass was now growing out of them.

We went to the Hanging Monastery, which is really just hanging there on the side of a really big cliff face. We also went for a special karaoke night with a couchsurfer which was quite a different experience from what we are used to. We went to a really fancy looking place and waited in the lobby to what seemed like a really fancy hotel. Turns out this building has hundreds of rooms just for a small group of people to come use karaoke and they were all full on a tuesday night so we had to wait awhile. Quite popular. We had fun in the end though.

Now we are in Taiyuan which is the dragon city (capital city) of the Shanxi province and staying with a nice couch surfer named Della who has been really fun. We went to a park that was the palace of the dragons (emperors) of Taiyuan and it was very similar to the forbidden city accept smaller. We also got to play PING PONG!, our first time in China. Strangely enough the place we went had more people playing pool than pingpong but we still had a good time. We also went to the museum here and learned that Shanxi is an area full of archelogical findings which they are able to say that humans and the written history here dates back to 20,000 year bc.

Now we are on our way to Pingyao, only 450,000 people! It's one of the best preserved ancient walled cities in China. Should be pretty cool.

Hope everyone is doing well. Today is the first sunday of advent so Kyle and I can now start singing christmas songs. Horray!

Peace,

Kelly