DATELINE: BEIJING (beginning a journal of our trip to China)

okayyyy, so myspace blog is being a fiasco to load, so i must type in the blogger site instead - so, yeah! Here's the quick rundown of the beginning of our trip to China.

Friday, regular day of work - I wanted to finish up the section I was working on, since I would be gone for a couple of weeks (...) I left the office at 2am that night, then came home to clean up my apartment and get ready and all of that. Since our flight was gonna be a long one, May and I decided to just stay up all night so we could sleep on the plane. Long story short, we were both pretty exhausted all night (especially me!), got out the door at a reasonable time and boarded the plane for our flight @1:30 saturday afternoon. The flight was longer than any I'd been on before - about 15 hours to get to Shanghai, then chill at that airport for a couple of hours, then get our connecting flight to our final stop at Beijing (another 2-3 hrs). So, yeah, it was a long mother of a day! I guess I slept about half of the travel time, I didn't wanna knock out for the full trip since we had to get to bed as soon as we reached our hotel anyway (it was past 2am) - and we had to get up today, Monday, for our first day of the tour.

So that's what went down. We got up, met the tour group in the lobby, loaded up the bus and headed over to the Forbidden City for a couple of hours. Very interesting! This is basically where the Emperors of past dynasties would live, and keep all of his thousands of concubines, and address his people and so forth. As the morning wore on, so did the dry humidity, and there was tons of walking and picture taking to do. After some hours of that, we blasted across the street to Tianman Square, walked around a bit more, then headed over to a slightly beat-up looking part of town to get a ride on the rickshaw bikes (some old guy rides a bike with a two-seater attached behind it). We were all lined up in a row, it was pretty crazy. We checked out this old-fashioned style of Chinese apartment, Hadouen or something - basically four separate apartments jammed into one another surrounding a courtyard.

Then it was off to eat lunch at the de riguer Chinese restaurant. Food was tasty, reminded me very much of the Empress Pavilions back home, very much so. Getting to know our tourmates a little bit, devouring tons of food, yadda yadda. As we eat, it poured outside, so we went to get a foot massage (of all things!) afterwards. That was odd, to say the least! In my head it sounded good, some hot asian chick lotioning up my foot and ladeling attention all over it, yeah I could think of worse ways to spend my vacation time. Well, this turned out not to be exactly what the tour had planened. Instead we all got led into this room, and this business woman starts to lecture us about reflexology and how all the major organs have nerve connections ending in the foot, and likewise in the hands, and how eastern medicine prefers to go this route as opposed to the chemicals like the west uses. Then all these people (mostly dudes) come into our room with big wooden waterbasins, boiling water with some herbal mixture in there, and we soak our feet as she lectures... then the dudes massage our feet for the next 45 min or so while they bring in a bunch of official-looking professors and other people to read our palms and look at our tongues and tell us about all of te things that are wrong with us (bad hormones, bad liver, bad spleen, don't work too much, etc etc). Basically trying to get us to buy hundreds of dollars of funky herbal medicines. Yeah, it was weird! Just a big sales pitch for some useless bullshit that no one needs, but then, that's what these types of meetings are known for. Trying to scare you into buying stuff! I was not psyched to have the poor guy working on my feet for that long, if the massage was good I guess I wouldn't complain about it, haha. Whatever, we left a little rudely (didn't buy anything) just thanked them and split.

After tha, the day was getting on but we still had another major area to hit - The Temple of Heaven (there's lots of places with names like that in Beijing). Basically the place where the Emperor would go to have his audience with god -- This place was basically a national park, smack in the middle of a built-up section of the city. So it was pretty crazy to shift from all the packed industry into sort of wooded forest area so suddenly. Anyway walking inside, there's a bunch of little cabin-like areas (sort of) setup with tons of old people playing cards, very excitedly. Then there's little groups of old people playing hackey-sack - their hackey-sacks are different than the American Beanbag style, theirs are just little pointy things with a bunch of colorful feathers sticking out. Further still we heard some weird operatic singing, I thought it was being piped over a PA but it was actually little groups of people practicing their wailing (again, older people). Yeah, very very weird! On top of all of this, the place smelled sort of like what you'd picture the Midway on Ooney Island would smell like, sans the fish or beach (kinda stale popcorn-y smell). We got past all of this to the actual Temple area itself, which just seemed old and outdated - but it was pretty weird, also as the skies were dark and menacing with booming thunder. It felt ominous and strange, and everyone was eager to get outta there before the next downpour came.

Next up we hit a little Peking Duck place for dinner - supposedly this dish is all the rage in Beijing. Well, the food was alright, they stuck us in these little claustrophobic rooms in the basement of this very tourist-catering restaurant (at this point in the tour, I am starting to become quite wary of the scheme!) The food was passable, I have had much better Roast Duck at Sam Woo BBQ in Van Nuys. Mostly, no one was that hungry for this enormous meal as we'd just had a rather filling lunch merely a few hours ago. As we wrapped up and left, dozens of other (obvious) tourists filed into the same place.

No! The day was STILL NOT OVER! After all of that, we bussed over to "The Red Theater" to see a Kung-Fu show. Again, this place was filled with 90 percent Whitey - most of them older, at that. The show was alright, it was a live stage show, a bunch of guys performing crazy ninja posturing and acrobatics. It sounds cooler than it was, though it did have its impressive moments. Basically by this point in the day I was very drained and tired of doing touristy things and wanted to get the heck out of there. And after that, we headed home.

I was planning to go and explore the city a bit tonight, find some random club to go be a little wild in - but the night got late kinda fast, and obviously it has been a LONG day following another few long, long, LONG days, so I guess I am chilling for a night to try and get a little better synched to the local schedule, I gota try and keep my stamina up you know? Tomorrow night one of May's local friends will take us around, so I can get my fill then..

Anyway China is very cool! There is so much to see here. Visiting a different culture is always weird and fun. I am still kind of shocked to be so-suddenly thrust into it, but what the hey. More good times to come, then...

Tomorrow is (ulp!) the Great Wall..