rough guides, jumpers and outer mongolia

now then, my turn. 7 days in beijing coming your way.

first things first.... bring on the arsenal, aj for england, there's only one ian dowie.. 11 points from 11 games. if we keep that up then it'll be a second premiership season for the first time ever.

believing our all important game away at the home of judas to be a 3pm kick off, i agreed to go and see some bobbins tourist opera to keep courtney happy - safe in the knowledge that i'd be on the internet by kick off to follow proceedings. then earlier in the day i realise that the game was a) an early kick off and b) likely to be on tv over here, china. anyway, never a man to go back on his word, i sat through the opera, which was even more bobbins than i had imagined - so bad it was almost good. this is where the story takes a turn for the better.

after the opera had ended we went up to our danish friend's (we've become quite international) hotel room. being the polite guy i am, i immediately turned the tv on without even asking. lo and behold, there was andy johnson running out for the second half - beijing tv was even showing the game on a 20 minute delay so that i wouldn't miss much. travelling doesn't get much better than this.

after some initial confusion as to which team was winning 1-0 (did the chinese show the away team score first?), we settled back to watch that w**ker bruce get his just deserts. even with my limited chinese i could tell the commentators hated him as well. knockout.

anyway, before those in canada really start to get confused i better get back to what a super time we are having in china. though i bet he wishes he'd done his usual walk out on birmingham to join newcastle now... give me dowie anyday.

okay, so beijing. well, we've been here 7 nights. our hotel isn't the friendliest place on earth. in behaviour of etchellesque proportions, we've managed to move rooms 3 times in a week till courtney found one she thought didn't have cockroaches in.

one evening, tired and weary, we tried the hotel restaurant. it was getting quite late by beijing standards and the staff seemed less than pleased to see us. still, they took our order of 4 dishes and rice. 10 minutes later they chose the waitress with the worst english to come to our table. eventually we managed to understand that despite apparently being capable of making our 4 meat and vegetable dishes, the restaurant had no rice and we couldn't have any. cue scenes straight out of fawlty towers and the waldorf salad...

'what do you mean you haven't got any rice?'
'this is china ffs. you must have some rice'
'sorry, no rice'
'get me the chef. if he's forgotten to reorder the rice than i want to see this imbecile for myself'
'sorry, no rice'
'but you're a restaurant in china, you can't run out of rice'
'sorry, no rice'
'tell him it's celery, apples, walnuts, grapes...'

at this we lost the waitress totally and settled for noodles. we didn't eat there again.

what else? well, yes jim, interest rates have risen here for the first time in 9 years. this managed to lead the news 3 days running - day 1 it was going to happen, day 2 it was happening and day 3 it had happened. there wasn't any indepth analysis either. still, at least it made top billing. bin laden's new video had to take 2nd place to the big news story of the day - a chinese interior minister was visiting kenya. for the first time since 2002 would you believe.. as for gauging local opinion on the interest rate hike - the only locals that can speak english are these supposed art students that hang around on street corners and want to take you to their special exhibitions to see, and inevitably buy, their great works of art.

we've hired bikes - blending in with the locals and all that. cycled around tiananmen square and out to the summer palace. the bike lanes are about 10 yards wide and everyone goes at about 2mph (though courtney still reckons she's exhausted after a mere couple of hours).

did a day out at the wall with our international friends. we chose the non-touristy part which meant driving almost back to moscow it took so long. non touristy meant good in that we had it almost to ourselves but bad in that what few souvenir sellers there were had noone else to badger but us. quite why they built the wall in the first place was beyond me. any army capable of getting up the mountain to the wall in the first place was hardly going to be held back by a 20 foot stone wall at the top.

beijing? well, it looks a lot like america and not much like you'd expect china to look like. the part that does look like china - the hutong area - is rapidly being knocked down in preparation for the 2008 olympics. talking of the olympics, anyone would think they are next week judging by the amount of coverage they get. item 2 on the news yesterday was the opening of the 3rd meeting of the olympic tv committee. you get the picture.

anyway, i always moan at courtney for writing too much (noone will bother reading it if it's too long etc etc) so i'd better wrap this up soon. we've been to most of the sites - your forbidden cities, temples of heaven and summer palaces etc. i went for a jog one morning which, with the pollution and getting lost halfway round, did rather more harm than good. if the opera wasn't much cop, then the acrobatics that we saw definitely was. one hour of the most amazing stunts and balancing acts.

thanks to bo, xenia, arthur, trudi and dave for making our stay here so good. we'll miss you guys and best of luck with the rest of your trips.

from here, it's off to some place pingyao, which looks about 50km south but is apparently taking 11 hours on the train.

oh, and in a city where you can eat dinner for $5, the laundrette wanted $40 to do our bag of washing. can you believe it? i couldn't. i insisted we went back to the hotel and handwashed it in the sink.

till next time.