Mao, you Bum
Well, I 'tihnk' the picture you are seeing is of Mao gesticulating stridently, but futilely, at a giant MTV screen in sunny Dandong, China
Thanks to state censorship, I cannot actually view the images I put on to my Flickr site, and I can only 'blog' sort of, through the Flickr interface - someone let me know this is working!!
China is just crazy. Especially in the country, we get stared at like you would not believe. I keep on checking whether my fly is open. The women are astounded by my feet, and the men are gobsmacked by my boobs, as hey, there they are right at eye level and all.
This does get wearing after a while, although mostly it's just genuine curiousity, and we get super big smiles and nods, but....sometimes you just want to walk down the street, you know?
We have managed to make it through the North - from Harbin, to Qi'QI Ha-er for the famous Crane (bird) reserve; to Shenyang for the UNESCO World Heritage Sites of the Imperial Summer Palace (wow) and....then to Dandong to gawk at North Korea (it's the closest you can get, and it's really close - maybe 20 metres) and to go to the end of the Great Wall of China
Seeing the Great Wall was really something, especially as it was largely deserted - which is really something to savour in super crowded China. This is the real ass end of the Wall - it ends bang right at the North Korean border.
Climbing the Wall as really something too, especially in the heat and sun, at the time I called it the Son of a Bitch Wall, actually, but it was really worth it.
Sitting up in our posh little hotel in Dandong, later, looking over to the sparsely lit shores of PRNK (People's Republic of North Korea) I was struck by how the town had spun their proximity to one of the last of the world's closed societies into a mild but robust tourist industry.
I can't decide whether the Chinese are sympathetic, or smug.
