Saturday, December 20, 2003 @10:19 PM
It's 10.30 in the morning! Oddly enough I can't sleep, so... >__<;;
1. The Beijing airport sucks. It's a case study in Liebenstein's X-Inefficiency. When they tell you to be at the airport 2 hours before departure to check in, they mean it.
2. CW: Horrid airport security confiscated my penknife! I hate them :(
3. Beijing toilets smell like shit. Really.
4. Beijingers aren't exactly Shanghai sophisticates, so don't even try English there. Honestly. Even CW/Sheryl/Cat/ES would be better off attempting Chinese rather than having them try to speak English to you.
5. I am the proud owner of a copy of
Mao Zhuxi Yulu, aka
Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, aka
The Little Red Book.
6. Someone actually said "
Ni de guoyu jiang de man bucuo de" to me. Me!
7. I could write a book archiving the English spelling mistakes in public places aroung Beijing. A few favourites include a signboard congratulating Beijing's "Olympic Commottee" for a job well done, a warning to passengers displaying symptoms of "athpical pneumonia", and an arrow pointing out a "dinning hall" near the Great Wall.
8. Go to Tianjin. The Gulou Wenhua Dajie there is so pretty! Contrasted with the Forbidden City/Summer Palace/Jingshan Park which looked terribly subdued, kinda overwhelmed by all the modern-ish buildings surrounding it... okay so they're old and the street in Tianjin is new, but I kinda liked the bright colours and polished exteriors, revelling in its artificiality/its "authentic" recreation of a busy Ming street. As opposed to the "real thing", which was cracked, peeling etc... faded remnants of obscene excess, looking rather like out-of-place anachronisms rather than monuments of royal extravagance and splendour, which was what they were supposed to be. Not that I disliked The Forbidden City entirely. You could sit in the place for a day and write lovely poems about it. But I'll leave that to Mel/Em/ZH etc.
9. Skating on (frozen) Kunming Lake sounds cool. One of my things-to-do-after-As!
10. The enterprising members of youth wing of the CCP run a business conducting tours around Wangfujing Street. Apparently it gives them some extra money during their vacation. Oh my Mao Zedong, as Kai would say.
11. Chinamen like to spit an awful lot. I was both appalled and amused when with the proud ardour of only a true Chinese patriot, a guard at the Great Wall expelled phlegm onto China's largest national monument. The only other spectator to this was a falling-apart statue of a Ming soldier, who stared in stony disapproval.
12. I HAVE to climb that stupid wall again, dammit! I got humji halfway up when the horrible wind started blowing so strongly the flagpoles along the wall started bending, and you could feel your legs nearly swaying everytime you lifted them to climb the stairs. The flagpoles vaguely reminded me of ES, somehow;) I grabbed a railing and hung on for dear life and made it down as quickly as I could, which was no mean feat 'cos some of the steps were over a foot high (Hmm I thought people as tall as ES were a recent phenomenon). Ordeal. Do not go if you're scared of heights;)
13. My General Wu story was confirmed by a guide at the Great Wall :) The guide was Manchurian, just like Sheryl!:)
14. Beijingers built an underground city to hide from the Russians! So cool, it can hold 3 million people. Anyway. All along the tunnels hang portraits of Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi (Funny. I thought they jailed him. The picture must be really old.), Hua Guofeng (Er... Gang of Four?), Zhu De, Lenin, Stalin, Marx, and... wait for it, Frederick Engels, who my mother nearly mistook for Castro:) I couldn't remember for the life of me what an Engels' good was. What is it?
15. In Beijing, senior citizens gather every morning at the Summer Palace and Jingshan Park to sing. On weekends they're joined by various youth choral groups, and their tunes bear an uncanny resemblance to my school song, which I found rather unsettling.
Women qingai de zhuguo was ringing in my ears for the entire day after that >__<;;
16. Starfish are edible. They taste like ikan bilis. Don't ask.
17. If you're in Beijing in winter and your ears are stinging, your cheeks slapped senseless by howling wind and your fingers numb (Yes I was wearing gloves), it's good weather. Have a nice day!
18. If you live in Beijing, are male and over eighteen, you either a) smoke, b) drink, c) spit, or d) all of the above.
19. I love the fluffy baby panda at the zoo. He's adorable!
20. (This for Sheryl/Pet only) Guy watch: a) cute reflexologist from Henan at Chinese Central Olympics Training Centre b) statue of good-looking soldier at Chairman Mao's memorial hall.
