I am just a new boy, a stranger in this town

N 39 53.420 E 116 22.349 - 25 October - Beijing

A lot more pictures now, here and here and other directories in that same area. This should finish up Mongolia and gets us into China pictures.

Arrival in Beijing after a long train journey. Last night was a late night. The border crossing was tiring, they kept waking us up for different parts of it. Even then if you could sleep, the boogie changing (putting different sized wheels on the train) was loud and there were lots of jolts and bumps. One of them was so strong that it nearly knocked me off my feet when I was standing in the corridor watching and had knocked all sorts of things off the table in the compartment.

Our cabin mates were late sleepers which is a bit annoying, I had to creep up the window shade early in the morning and could only peer out a small crack at first and then a little more as we went along. I watched the sunrise and caught my first glimpse of China.

Then land is vaguely the same as the last part through Mongolia but the buildings have really changed a lot. No more gers and no more wandering flocks of animals. There is a lot of agriculture, mostly corn, and it seems to be harvest time since all that is left in the fields are dry stalks and there are yellow ears of corn stacked up, hanging up, spread out on the sides of roads, drying all over the place. There are a lot of adobe looking squat houses and when we go through towns, they are quite spread out and have lots whitish drab looking buildings.

At like 9 am, we start going past sections of the Great Wall. It is nice our cabin mates are sleeping but you really have to see this, so I open the shade the whole way and wake them up, look, the Great Wall. You know, the Great Wall is one of those huge attractions, so totally hyped, talked about, millions of photographs, but really, it deserves it. Even from a distance, the section we can see, a few miles of wall winding through the mountains and up and over, damn, that is really cool.

It disappears over a mountain range then after a while and we head on, into more hilly regions, through tunnels and past lots of terraced hill sides. The group of us share some beer and peanuts and practice counting in Chinese, especially the various hand signs for different numbers.

Then Beijing, we head through more industrial areas, more built up areas and eventually arrive at the station. I was sort of expecting a rather bewildering experience. Billboards, words, are all over the place. It is strange being somewhere that the words are just completely different. In the rest of the places, Russia included, they were all in different languages but at least you would work out what they say. Here, it feels like what it would be like to not be able to read at all, that letters and words are just strange squiggles.

Fortunately for us, the Olympics rolled in here a few months before and I don't know what Beijing was like a year or two ago, but I suspect it wasn't so English-izied. Most useful signs are subtitled, or at the least they are also in Pinyin. So at least instead of looking for a symbol that looks like a tv set with radiation coming off the bottom of it, you can just look for Chong Jie Tang, or whatever, to just throw some random words out there.

The thing that doesn't quite come across though from looking at maps and trying to work out how to get somewhere before you try it is just how big it all is. Roads are enormous and wide, public squares go on for miles, and walking what looks like a few blocks on the map takes a long time.

We take the subway a few stops, to the closest stop to the hostel, walk a really long way, get a bit lost since we are staying in a hutong and those are not on normal streets, and finally make it there quite tired. Hutongs seem to be unique to Beijing, the sort of neighborhoods that a large percentage of people live in in the city. They are small little streets off the main streets, like little worlds hidden back out of view from the main streets. The fronts have shops and restaurants, people are out front playing cards or games with big round pieces, pushing around carts of food, bicycles and mopeds are racing down the streets weaving around everything, and behind it all, in courtyards are lots of residences. I think a lot of Beijing Bicycle as we walk around these areas over the next few days.

But our hostel is right in the center of one of the hutongs (I think it means 'similar whiskers' but I'm not completely sure, it might have some other meaning) and we spend lots of time wandering around them. We pick a restaurant at random, have a very nice waiter who speaks English fairly well, who tries to correct our really bad Chinese and help us out a bit, and order far too much food (although we eat it all) and pay not so very much for it. The food prices are fairly cheap but I suspect that if we spoke Chinese it would be even cheaper. The prices printed on the Chinese menus and the ones on the translated picture ones are different, we pay the tourist prices.

So, first day in China, it seems exciting, people have been really friendly and we are tired. There will be a lot to do and see.