scorpions, silk worms..too many bugs for me!
So I was told that it takes 6 months after leaving China for your lungs to recover from all the SMOG and air pollution!
I can’t get over the smog here! I thought it was cloudy when we first got here, but then I realized it’s the smog. You can feel it in the air too…
China is unlike anywhere I’ve ever been before. There are some interesting, and VERY strange customs here. Some really gross me out. Little kids don’t wear diapers here, instead they have slits in the bottom of their pants so they can just pop a squat whenever they have to go to the bathroom wherever they are, and I really mean anywhere, the middle of the sidewalk, the middle of Tiananmen Square or the subway train. There’s a lot of spitting here too, and pushing and shoving and the streets smell like pee! Speaking of pee..there are very few places that have western style bathrooms, most public toilets are squatters. Funny thing I learned is that when they started putting in western toilets the Chinese people stood on them thinking they were raised squatting toilets!
Besides that China is a really interesting place. We spent our first four days in Beijing. We walked around Tiananmen Square, which is huge (it’s the largest public square), visited the Forbidden City and the Palace Museum, and we tried to see Mao’s Tomb but it was closed this morning! On our first afternoon here, we were walking around the Square and two Chinese girls our age stopped us and said they would show us around they could practice their English with us - they are English teachers- so we did, and it worked out great because it was like having a personal tour guide. They took us to the oldest part of China which has a really cute street with lots of shops and restaurants and a tram that runs down the middle of it. That night we walked around Wangfujing Market. It’s the same market that Andrew Zimmern went to on his show Bizarre Foods. They sell everything there from glazed fruit to fried ice cream to chicken hearts to scorpions! On our first night we tried fried pumpkin and fried banana. The pumpkin didn’t taste a lot like what I expected, which was pumpkin pie! And I don’t know if there was actually any banana in the fried banana balls. I ended up trying snake and starfish two nights later with Alex from our hostel. He also tried Scorpion, seahorse, centipede, and silk worm! I was not brave enough to do that but it was definitely entertaining to watch him! We had a crowd following us and an old Chinese man ended up buying the centipede for Alex
I feel like a celebrity here! People stop me on the street and ask if they can take their picture with me! It’s so funny, but its fun to see how excited they get!
We spent a whole afternoon at the Summer Palace, and could have spent more time if we wanted to. It is huge!! (2.97 square kilometers!) The grounds are really pretty and there is a giant lake on the grounds too. We even got to climb a few rocks to get up to the top of the Palace.
Me at the Summer Palace
That night we went to the Chaoyang Theater and saw an acrobatics show. We paid 180rmb (about $26) for our 3rd row VIP seats! They did all sorts of acrobatic “tricks”, I really enjoyed it! They did mess up a few times and I thought one of the guys was going to fall on us at one point because we were so close to the stage. After that we went to the night market, there they have a lot of the same foods as Wangfujing and lots of souvenir and other types of shops & stalls.
We also visited the Pearl Market and the Silk Market. You can get anything fake you could ever dream of here!! They have everything - polo, Abercrombie, Gucci, Longchamp, Rolex, its endless! I bought a few things, but I’m saving my big shopping for Shanghai. It’s overwhelming at times because they literally attack you and ask you to look at their stuff and I was even grabbed and pulled into a stall by one woman! It’s fun to haggle with them though and when we walk away they come running after us and agree to our prices! It started raining on our way home that night so we got a ride in a rickshaw back to the hostel. The driver told me, about 15 times in our less than 5 minute ride, that I was so beautiful. I’ve also been proposed to by a street market vendor.
We were supposed to stay with a man named Kevin and “couch surf”, but the phone number he had given me was not his and we had no way of contacting him at the airport so we found a hostel instead. It actually worked out pretty well. The hostel was nothing compared to the one in Kyoto but it was in a great location and we met some really nice people; Carlos from Barcelona, Andy from Michigan who is living in China right now and Alex from St. Louis who is working & living in New Zealand. We also had a little old Chinese guy in our room too, but he kept to himself.
We learned the words for foreigner, loawai and wai guoren, which are derogartory here, and now that i know them I hear people say them all the time when we walk past them..
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