If you have any comments, please email:

If you have any comments, please send them to:
jamesandtimsworldtour@hotmail.co.uk

Facebook: James A Gray

Follow the journey by map

Thursday 22 November 2012

Wide open space

Tuesday, 20/11/2012 – 159 A.D.

It’s the 20th November, baby! In exactly one month’s time I will be back home in sunny Southport (or at least on the way). Where the hell did all that time go? It was slow to begin with, but since hitting Asia it’s just rocketed along. I probably shouldn’t get too deep at this point. Mercifully I am stone cold sober as I write this, so for now you’ve been spared the reminiscent whimsy.

The day started badly when blogspot refused to let me upload any pictures to my latest post. This is one of those little minor inconveniences in life that a person like me blows out of all proportion into a major issue. It didn’t help that this morning we also had to pack up our things to get out of the hotel. After doing a bit of research I found out that blogspot gives you one gigabyte of free storage space for your photos, and I’d just hit my limit. Well fair enough, I suppose, and it’s only a couple of dollars to pay for another 25 gigabytes. Last thing I want is for my cherished blog to lack further photos! But doubly annoying was that upon shelling out the cash, blogspot still refused to let me upload photos. What a p*sser! Therefore I decided to put the whole issue on the back burner and get on with my life, or at least calm down. As you can see, the blog currently resides on tumblr, the retarded younger brother of blogspot. Maybe some readers prefer the minimalist theme? Is this how musicians feel when they switch record labels? Anyway, for the short term, we’re here to stay. UPDATE - No we're not, we're back on blogspot! And hopefully for good.

We had about six hours to kill in the afternoon so we headed off towards the Old Town for more browsing and dawdling. As per the norm, a couple of scammers approached us asking for a picture of them with a big tower in the background, then tried to get a conversation going, but we held them off with massive disinterest. Seems the easiest way to play it. There is a chain of restaurants in China called Kung Fu which features a picture of the mighty Bruce Lee as its logo, so we thought we’d check them out. Unfortunately they had no English translation of the dishes pictured above the counter and, given that we had a long train journey coming up and wanted to know what we were dealing with, we left it. Please note, this is not the same as bottling it, merely a strategic stomach manoeuvre. 

["You can call it the art of eating without eating."]
[If you haven't seen Enter the dragon then that will make no sense!]

Back out on the streets, I left Tim doing some dodgy deals with scarves and woolly hats and strolled into a shop selling jackets. Upon trying one on (or rather, having one thrust upon me), I was shocked to find that the arms were actually long enough. First time in maybe 25 try-ons! And the style wasn’t bad either, the kind of youngish, cool college professor image that I’m trying to pull off. So I did a bit of haggling and walked away with what I hope will keep the Beijing chill at bay…jing. Upon reuniting with Timbo, he’d also bought one of those trendy body warmer-type things, and he pointed me in the right direction for getting a scarf. So, all in all it was a pretty successful visit to the Old Town, plus we know what you guys have been going through by stocking up for winter.

Late in the afternoon we retrieved our bags from the hotel and prepared to move it to the metro. Security is pretty high here and every time you go to board a train you have to first put your bags through the scanners. We’ve never had an issue with our day bags, but on this occasion we were both stopped and told to open them up. Okay, no worries, we know that neither of us has got anything illegal, but the security guards speak no English so we’ve no clue what they are after. Eventually, after much rummaging around and holding up various items to query if it’s what they’re after, the guy points to my Adidas can of deodorant spray. Ah, aerosols! Tim hands his over too, but I’ve also got another, the low grade spray that I picked up in Hanoi while trying to use up the last of my Vietnamese dong. The guard wants this as well, much to Tim’s delight. He cannot stand the stench it makes – when he would take his time before going out I used to spray it in the room to get him moving. And now neither of us have any deodorant sprays because the inflammable materials police have confiscated them – like we didn’t smell bad enough already before getting onto a 13 hour train journey!

[James takes out his frustration at losing his sprays.
"You can call it the art of fighting, but with fighting!"]
[Again, if you've not seen Enter the dragon...]

In China there are various trains of differing qualities. We usually get T trains (our train today was the T110), but there are Z trains which are a bit better, and C trains which are the cream of the crop and will get you from Shanghai to Beijing in four and a half hours. Not bad, eh? But they cost a pretty penny. As we entered the station’s various waiting rooms we saw some elegant-looking maroon couches for the passengers to rest their weary cheeks upon. But these were for Z train passengers – good old T-trainers like us were upstairs on the hard plastic benches! Wonder what C passengers get – gold, bejewelled thrones to wait upon? It could be worse – some trains don’t even have letters, e.g. train 1472. Apparently there are lots of rural people on these, probably travelling with their livestock in tow, and no aircon or heating. For us the grass may always seem greener if we look one way, but look the other way and it's definitely browner!

There weren’t any complications boarding the T110 train to Beijing, leaving 18:15, arriving 09:23 the next morning. After the (partial) success of our last journey we’d booked a couple of top bunks in a hard sleeper carriage. As I loaded first my luggage up there, followed by myself, I found I was a bit more accustomed to the lack of space and able to turn around a lot easier without banging my head or elbows. The only new issue was the presence of a TV screen between our pillows that belted out all kinds of nonsensical Chinese programmes. Hopefully it would go off around 22:00, like the lights. Below us we once again had four old fogies from China, but in a way that’s the easiest option as they go to bed fairly early and don’t make much noise.


After eating our pot noodles in the aisle, we settled down for a few games of cards before retiring to our bunks for the evening and putting some films on. A few seats along the aisle was a young Chinese girl standing up and looking out of the window. A couple of times she looked over at us, and I smiled back, naturally doing my best to boost the friendly appeal of Englishmen abroad. After a short while she came over, said she was interested in our card game (rummy) and asked if she could watch. We were happy to oblige, and after a couple of games we got her to join in. 'Haven' (her "English name") was keen to talk to us and learn about our weird and wonderful exotic ways and, etc., etc. - haven’t we been here before? Isn’t this the prelude to some kind of scam, a-la the tea rooms of Shanghai? Well who knows! As I said recently, our experience in Shanghai has made us extremely wary of any Chinese people who approach us. Haven was very sweet and easy to talk to and she seemed genuinely interested in getting to know us. Her story was that she was originally from Xi`an, graduated university, moved to Shizou to work and was on her way to Beijing to stay with one of her old classmates. She mentioned going to see the great wall and immediately our spidey-senses were tingling – we go with her to see great wall and lots of expensive problems happen? But what if we are being unfair to her? As I’ve also said before, not everybody in the world is out to scam us. We decided to use poor Haven as a test case. We chatted until about 21:30, at which point we decided we should probably retire to our bunks, given that we’d already been asked to move further along the aisle by someone trying to sleep who thought we were speaking too loud. This comment was a bit of an insult, given there were two blokes next to us who’d been practically shouting their heads off for an hour.

Come 22:00 they didn’t just turn the lights off in the berth, they turned them off in the corridor as well. That meant the only illumination I had for climbing down three bunks to the floor was the light of my laptop. Now I know why the railway staff were coming round selling torches earlier! Still, I made it okay, only kicking one of the oldies as I went down to have a last visit to the squat toilet that rocks you from side to side, and clean my teeth in the sinks that should not be given descriptive prose.

Wednesday, 21/11/2012 – 160 A.D.

I was awoken in the night, first by the oldies below me locked in conversation, then by my brother grumbling, “It’s not even four o`clock in the morning and they’re talking!” You see, that’s the thing with the elderly – they’re off to bed with the larks, but up with them as well. 4 a.m. is probably a lie-in for some of this crowd! Tim kept angrily groaning as they kept merrily chatting. I didn’t mind it so much, the women were quite softly-spoken, but there was one guy with a naturally loud voice who’d be quiet, then start speaking and jolt me awake just as I was drifting off. But they shut up eventually and I went off to the place where pixies and elves run about in a happy wonderland.


Neither Tim nor I said anything to the oldies upon getting up to greet the north east Chinese dawn, but it’s unlikely they’d have understood if we did anyway. Instead there was a bit of time to talk to Haven a little more before the train pulled in, getting more and more likely that she wasn’t out to scam us, especially as the previous evening we’d made a point of telling her how we got shafted in the Shanghai tea room. Leaving the station, we met the classmate she’d come to visit and he was good enough to get our metro tickets for us and show us which stop to get off at. This stuff really messes with one’s head, man! The words “benefit of the doubt” are starting to spring to mind…


[James meets random bird of prey on the way through the backstreets.]

["Turn left at the Kung Fu restaurant, Englishman. Sqwark!"]

Our hotel on this leg of the trip is called the Leo Courtyard. It wasn’t the best place we could have got, but in terms of value versus location it’s spot on. Right in the centre of the city it’s not far to walk to any of the main places to see. Plus the building is 350 years old and as the website’s spiel goes…

The Leo Courtyard is much more than just a hostel with a great location. This famous Ming/Qing Dynasty courtyard has over 350 years of history and is a government protected structure. The courtyard is most famous for being a former socialising venue for Beijing's rich elite, and sometimes even the emperor himself. In the evenings, hostesses would serve traditional meals and drinks, with musicians & performers in the background.

…yeah, it was more than likely a brothel at one point! Well that still beats a lot of the places we’ve stayed at! Inside it was actually a pretty cool place with a huge amount of character, though plenty of that Beijing chill that we’ve been warned about. Not sure quite how well the central heating worked during the Ming and Qing dynasties!


After a bit of farting about playing musical rooms, “Sunny” the manageress realised that she had a first floor room available that looked over the courtyard. Okay, sounds great, and to be honest it was pretty much okay, unique in one way – two twin rooms separated by an internal door and sharing a private bathroom! Wow – it’s like we’ve got separate rooms for the first time in five months! But after celebrating our new found sense of space, we looked a little harder amongst the cracks and saw that the cracks were actually quite large. Still, what do you expect from a building with “character”? Unfortunately the heater in Tim’s room did not work full stop and mine was like a cryptic conundrum trying to get it going with a remote control containing Chinese-only characters. And what’s wrong with this picture?


Yeah, I know, several things! But this wasn’t the worst. In some of the hotels we’ve stayed at we’ve dealt with some pretty dodgy plumbing, but this is the first place where the sign insists that we do NOT put any paper of any kind down the toilet. Oh dear. What would you do in a position like this? And if you’re currently having your lunch, I sincerely apologise! Let’s not dwell on the issue, as we didn’t, instead we headed out to sample a bit of chilly-but-pretty Beijing. And it is a bit of a looker, as classic Chinese cities go. Unlike Shanghai’s high rise landscape, Beijing is more of a low urban sprawl, given that it’s grown up over thousands of years. There is culture everywhere you look, spanning various dynasties and various architectural styles, virtually all of of which I regrettably know very little about.





We’re always a bit cream-crackered after an overnight train ride, so we didn’t want to do much in the afternoon, but the infamous Tiananmen Square was in walking distance, so we strolled over - via about four subways and two security checks. And we only got approached by the one student asking us after about a minute if we wanted to go with her to drink some coffee. No, no, luv, you have to build up to it slowly! Take your time, feel out all the bases, then make your move. What an amateur! Needless to say, we sent her packing.

Tiananmen Square is the biggest outdoor square in the world, and it is also the place where the massacre happened in 1989. A long time ago now, but it’s one of the big political events I remember from my childhood. Couldn’t really grasp the gravity of it back then, but felt a strange sense of how real it was as I strolled around. But I didn’t dwell on it, and neither do the Chinese government – type ‘Tiananmen Square Massacre’ into Wikipedia over here and The Great Firewall Of China will block access to the page. But leaving all of that aside, it’s certainly a striking place, especially given the low sun hovering overhead, its rays blocked by a thick layer of smog that gave the place a semi-misty aura.  




"来在您红色"

No comments:

Post a Comment