The Chinese have to be the most fit people ever. They seem to be constantly in motion - stretching and bending and moving moving moving
Every evening, the people seem to hit the streets to just exercise. I am particularly amused by the ones walking backwards. Which we tried and is great for the calves
And then there is this cool fan dance, as seen here in the Temple of Heaven Park in Beijing. Groups of mostly middle aged women, some in costume, many with fans I lusted after, would do this great little line dance
A band of brothers with traditional instruments would strike up and the dance would begin. And let me tell you, it exercises pretty much every joint we have.
I caused great delight by joining in, as it was really just a groovy line dance.
No wonder everyone looks so damn spry and the 80 year olds out pace me!
Generally, the Russians make me nuts. But then they come up with solutions to complex problems that stagger me because they are so simple
In the MIR Space Station, NASA spent a reported 12.5 million dollars inventing the Space Pen - the pen that writes even upside down, so that astronauts would be able to take notes in zero gravity.
Presented with the same issue, the Russians just shrugged and handed out pencils.
This beautiful simplicity was brought to me again at the Chinese Mongolian border. The Russians, with their huge country of largely undefended borders, were worried about invasion overland, particularly by train.
So, they made different train tracks. Fully 2.3 feet wider than any other train in the world, Russian tracks would be impossible to use by any other nation. With the notable exception of Mongollia, as Russia built the rail network in that country.
As a result, when we got to the Chinese/Mongolian border, each of our coaches needed to be brought into a special shed where the bogies (wheels) were replaced. It was fascinating, even if it was 1am and our coach was in eerily and very disconcertingly suspended in mid air while the wheels were replaced
Everywhere, the women of China cover up. Umbrellas or at least hats on every female in sight. And those who work outdoors, well, you can see the approach in this picture.
Every gardener, newspaper
seller, street cleaner, etc. covers up every exposed body part even on rainy
days such as this.
For the white collar girls, I was especially taken with the long cotton elasticated gloves, so that you can cover your arms and still wear that sexy shoulder strap top.
Meanwhile, I have been trawling every store I see looking for sun screen. The thing is, right, that the type sold in China usually has whitening (bleaching)
agents.
I continually amaze salesgirls as to why I don't want to bleach my skin. Why I would want to (lightly) tan is deeply puzzling.
Hell, they will probably have the skin of an 18 year old in their 80s.
This is actually the Temple for Bountiful Harvests - part of the massive and so beautiful Temple of Heaven park in Beijing.
Arranged on a north - south axis there was a series of temples and buildings through which the Emperor would, once annually, go to the Temple and take on the sins of his people.
Through sacrifice, penance and ritual (all done, it should be noted, to animals, acolytes and monks respectively) the Emperor would thus wash away the sins of the world. Sound familiar?
I did offer up big asanyas for my farming friends and relatives but mostly I was disturbed by the sometimes clumsy, sometimes very, very subtle but nonetheless massive restoration that had taken place at the Park.
Then Chris found the one and only photograph of the temples taken in 1971, when work to restore damage done during the Cultural Revolution was begun. And I began to muse on how many of the people now milling around as tourists would have been Red Guards 40 years old.
Imagining Mao, the great soldier - perhaps with a soldier's distrust and disgust of things creative, cultural and artistic - ordering all 'old things' to be purged. Temples, instruments, paintings, scrolls, jewellery, pottery, poetry and pots - anything at all 'old' destroyed or defaced. And the kids racing out to do it.
Even the birds, which we only spotted in the temples (as the monks are vegetarian ha ha) were driven from the sky by people banging pots or making noise so that they could not alight (and then eat the crops, you see).
Ah, it's a beautiful and sad place.
China is making me sad, lovely as it is...
I think after a month here, that I am glad of our upcoming mini-break to Mongolia - we arrive there on Chris's birthday (June 26) and will be staying right through for Nadaam!
Then it will be back for another couple of months in China....
I am hoping that democratic but still a little lacking on infrastructure Mongolia will let me blog and flickr at will :-)
see you then
The red headed crane is practically extinct (1500) so it was a real honour to be able to see them. The cages sucked big time though.
There are wild ones in this reserve - three flew so close to Chris I thought they were going to take him away! - but most of them are domesticated. I was interested to see them train the little baby cranes exactly as my Mom did the geese when I was a kid...
So they are living, and breeding well, but they are human-acclimatised. And at 230pm every day, they fly for the tourists - one lap of the lake and they return to the cages (notwithstanding me screaming GO! GO! at them).
We missed the minibus back to town (turns out the bus leaves when full, not to a timed schedule) but the parking lot dude arranged for us to hop on the (much more lux, airconditioned) Worker's bus hauling the staff home...
so we had time to kill while the park closed and got to see...a huge motorcade with black SUVs and police escort roll up for private tour of the reserve. And I note that they didn't have to walk in, either. And of course, they got a private fly by.
It was glorious. All the other cranes were let out at once, and they flew right to me and Chris all alone on our end of the lake...so close I could have leapt up and touched a rare bird with an eight foot wingspan.
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.
I was so determined that I would not be phased by eating unusual (to me) food.
But faced with this admittedly beautiful display of snack size portions of grubs, grasshoppers, beetles, etc. I bailed.
Shoot. Turns out I can't access this blog directly. When I try to log in, i am politely told that the site is not permitted. Nor is the BBC. But we can get the CBC. And the Sun! Go figure.
So apologies in advance, as I won't be able to review this blog, and the entries might have the odd typo, but at least I can still keep in touch!
These are two rare little girls, and cute as buttons, in Suifenhe, on our very first afternoon in China! We had to disembark the train for 6 hours in order to the train to have it's wheels changed.
Russian trains have a wider gauge than any other trains - their clever way to avoid being invaded via rail! This six hour wait was after we had to wait 4 hours just to get through Russian customs. They left us in a hall kicking our heels and then suddenly - freak out! - we had to rush through. Good thing we had met the charming Sue and her grandson Leon, all the way from Great Yarmouth, to keep us company!
After many adventures and countless stories; untold hours on the trains; more instant noodles and tea than a person should ever have to face and way more 'Nyets!' than we ever needed to hear, we are finally leaving Russia.
Hard to express what we both feel about the place. It's amazing. But, it feels really, really messed up. The ostentatious and over the top materialistism. The poverty, especially of the really elderly. And the overwhelming stench of mafia/corruption was pretty hard to take.
It's like Russia managed to keep the things that sucked about Communism - the bureaucracy, the queues, the hassle - but lost the good things - the safety net, the sense of community in the face of adversity, the welfare state, and the state of welfare.
Be curious to see how things go with this big, beautiful, sad country.
