There are 9 million bicycles in Beijing

Well, it has been ages since I've written much. I had more to write about Mongolia, but I better move on now. I've been in China for almost two weeks and there is so much there to write about too. China has been really amazing, maybe my favorite place I've been on this trip. There is just so much to write about, I'm not quite sure where to start.

N 43 39.269 E 111 58.916 - 23 October 2008, somewhere over the Chinese border.

We caught the train early in the morning from Ulan Batar and rode most of the day across Mongolia towards the border. It was beautiful, the entire area was covered with a light snow. I was so used to seeing Mongolia all brown and dusty, the white really suited it. The landscape was slightly hilly and our train wound up and down a bit and gradually left the snowy parts and onto flatter browner areas again.

We had new people in our compartment, an English couple who were traveling until probably April. Our entire carriage was mostly western travelers, we were on the tourist train. Our other friends, who we had traveled through Mongolia and the end of Siberia were a few compartments down. When our compartment-mates produced some ayrag, the fermented mares milk we had been hearing about for a few weeks but never quite saw anywhere, we sampled some and passed it on to everybody else so they could experience that before they left Mongolia. I can't quite decide if it was vile or if it wasn't so bad. We had tried to find it all across Mongolia, but it seems you can only really buy it from kids on the street selling it in old reused plastic bottles. It was a funny last taste to leave in your mouth has Mongolia passed by for the last time.

We spent most of the rest of the journey all practicing Chinese, trying to be ready. Basic things like counting and hello and the rest of that. What a really difficult language. The characters are difficult enough, thousands of them (I believe that 8000 is the common amount the average person uses) which make up compound words but then the sounds are really difficult too. The sound 'ma' can be pronounced 5 different ways, with a rising inflection, downward then rising, high inflection, etc. Each of the inflections is a completely different word. In addition, each of the sounds (which maps to a character) usually has a bunch of different meanings based on the context.

Then the words themselves are generally composed of two characters, put together to create some sort of meaning. Bei-jing means north capital, lunch is composed of noon-rice, China is middle-country, America is beautiful-country, etc. Wow. At least the grammar is totally easy though. Translations into English you see commonly make more sense now, considering how sentences are usually composed in Chinese characters. Although I have been quite amused by them. I might have to compose a list of my favorites, I've taken loads of pictures of various ones.

I have to say, that I have been completely fascinated by Chinese though, I might try to learn it over the next few years. I would love to come back to China some day and it seems like it would be even better with a better command of the language, feel like it would make it more accessable. And you would be able to tell better when people are calling you a foreign devil or some such thing like that. Yeah, I'll still standout totally as a tourist, but even a little bit of Chinese seems to go a long way in conversations.

The border crossing was quite interesting. It wasn't quite as intense in terms of official stuff, searches and passports and stamping things as coming out of Russia. It was night by the time it started and was very late when it all finally finished. The customs man was quite nice and funny, knocking on the doors, please wake up, I have your passports.

The most time consuming part of it was the boogie shed. Mongolia and China have different sized train tracks, so before we cross over, they need to change the wheels on our train. It takes like an hour or so. They move the carriages into a special shed, like 4 parallel tracks with lots of lifting equipment, separate each of the carriages, bash them around back and forth for a while pulling them apart (we were still in the carriages, some people trying to sleep) and then they pick them up and slide different wheels underneath and put us back down again. It was fun to watch the different carriages on other tracks being lifted up and watching the Chinese workers dancing around outside (it was freezing cold that night). Finally by midnight or so, we had new wheels and our passports back and headed into China.

I'm hungry and we need to do some things in Xi'an today, so the rest of this will have to wait until later. But next stop, Beijing.