back in Beijing

hey all

I'll apologise now for what will be a long (but hopefully a littleamusing) email.

Chris and Flic's leaving party was great. I had Guiness (since itwas in the expat area), and discovered noone in China has ever heardof it, which led me to turn Irish and promote tasting of it allnight (I don't like it that much, but its a nice change from theChinese beers which all taste the same).

Subsequently I left with 7 others by plane to north-east China,where we arrived at the world's smallest airport (probably), to begreeted by some lovely chinese girls with flowers etc. well,truthfully, the welcoming party was for some 'famous' guy who was onthe same plane. Anyway, we crashed his photos and chatted to him(see my photos: http://www.imagestation.com/member/?name=adamlane).

We stayed in crappy old Hailaer, keeping alive through going toKaraoke, having been ripped off by some local taxi drivers and thenext day hired taxis for a 3 hour ride through barren grasslands. Wevisited one of Asia's biggest lakes (and were the only people there,which was typical of the trip), stayed in a relatively authenticMongolian Hut and certianly got authentic food. It involvedintestines, stomachs, muscle and other bits of animal best not tomention..mmmm

Subsequently we visited the Russian/Chinese border, explored thelocal hills (including pillboxes, for military lookouts and tunnelsunder the hills) and the rest of Manzhouli (lots of Russian people,architecture etc) -its weird hearing russian speaking chinesetalking to us in russian (presuming we are russian of course).

Then a 13 hour overnight train journey, 5 hour bus journey andanother 3 hours by minibus took us to 'mirror lake'. The journey wasnotable since we held an open auction at the city inbetween the 2bus journeys to get the cheapest ride onwards, resulting in somefights and an arrest (oops). Fortunately the taxi driver arrestedpromptly reappeared, and we presumed it was just the policemanhaving fun and demonstrating some of his power. The 'official' busthat we then were shepherded onto tried to charge us too much ASWELL as make us swith buses afer 10 minutes (from 4 star to 1 star!).

The lake was kind of average, and only interesting since we got acrap, cheap hotel without any hot water, argued LOTS, in BAD chineseabout this and lit a fire on the beach (stamped out by mad hotelpeople). the whole area was being rebuilt for the summer season andthe waterfall had no water in it :(

we then got yet another minibus 7 hours past fantastic scenery to aplace at the bottom of the Changbai Shan mountain range on theborder with North Korea. So we climbed to the lake at the top (whichwas frozen, and we were walking at -10 degrees through a blizzard,and in prepration for we had bought $2 army waterproofs), saw aspectaculr waterfall, laughed about the supposed nuclear test thatmight take place nearby anytime, met some koreans (who were wavingsome knives at us worryingly after our brazen comments) who wereliving in a tent there for a whole year (mad), and slid down the iceon the stairs going down the mountain (aoh, bum still hurts).

Finally we ate some dog in a local korean restaurant (easy to eat,not too much flavour, but quite nice), experienced the localnightlife (oh, dear! one of the girls danced like she was having afit!) argued with more hotel people (they are mostly nice, but wejust had some communication issues sometimes), visited theTiger 'sanctuary'(felt kinda weird when bus driver threw a livechicken out the window so we could see the tiger eat it), went for ahike and got up early to leave.

Thus after another 7 hour train journey, a KFC (well, why not?), arun up to a temple and yet another 17 hour train journey (we neverhad any beds), we returned to Beijing having missed 2 days of classand bonded tightly.

So a summary:
-8 day trip....2 and a half days spent travelling (exculding shorttrips)
-Met mad american, ex-marines 'teaching' (we think that translatesas 'hiding out') by the russian border
-Realised most chinese are nice, once both sides manage to handlecommunication issues, but some are still trying to take foreignersfor a ride
-Learnt new words (like deposit), made new friends and got littlesleep

there is lots more to say, but i guess this will do for now. oh, igot 43% in the listening test, but they added some % to it, since itwas so hard, so officially i got 63% (average ish) and got a 91% inthe writing/reading (yay, in top 5 of the class). Now you can allstop worrying about me being kicked out of Uni!

no update yet on job stuff, will update that later. still teaching,still organising aiesec stuff (conferences etc) etc. Also, theflatmate's sister has left, since she is apparently mentally ill andthus in hospital after destroying the flatmate's computer (no wonderafter sitting in a small room for 1 month solid with no job orfriends...)

China is beautiful, fun, developing and developed, both efficientand useless at the same time and very endearing.

ta-ta
Adam