Miscellaneous
Grown men fly kites, like in Tiananmen Square. And I've seen little carts owned by people selling a fruit or vegetable, or candied fruits, or whatever. And I've seen two old men sitting on upturned crates, outside in the cold at night, playing Chinese chess - and the next night, several men standing around playing cards on the same crate. And people playing casual badminton on the street. How can anyone voluntarily be outside in that cold?
In China, you put your used toilet paper in the bin, not toilet. [The plumbing system can't cope with it.]
And some people huck up loogers on the street - that is, spit. With a maximum of preliminary 'huchkkkkk' noise. ^_^.
I have yet to see a single woman spit, but it's quite common among men.
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There are three distinct smells in Beijing that you don't get in Australia. One is a kind of diseased smell - I got a whiff of it now and then in a street. Another is the toilet smell, the smell of accumulated used toilet paper in bins. The third is much more pleasant, it is the smell of delicious Chinese food cooking, emanating from the many stalls and restaurants.
Some buses run on electricity, their tops are attached to a series of long wires like telephone wires, kind of like a bumper car attached to the ceiling. And there are cool traffic lights that count down so you know how long you have to wait until it turns red or green.
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And we met this cool guy, Chang Ping, who worked at the ice sculpture place. Now this is a good example of Chinese vs Australian culture. We met for half a minute and then he and Mei were joking around, insulting and teasing each other like brother and sister. I only understood the few bits Mei translated (her insulting the sculptures - "that's a cactus? it looks like a pineapple!", saying he was pretty pathetic and scrawny security, him pretending to do kung fu on her) but the atmosphere was just lighthearted and fun so I laughed with them a lot. There was also a nice girl from our tour group who had decided to come to the ice place, and Ping's coworker, another nice girl.
The two ice workers guessed whether I was older or younger than Ping and found I was just a little younger. Ping then called me 'little sister'. They asked me to show them my Chinese (about three phrases - "it's better than his English!" said Mei), asked me what I thought of China... Ping also asked me what I thought of *him*, said I have a beautiful smile, and that I keep smiling like that I'll be ten years younger (or something like that - it's a proverb). His partner shyly said that I was a beautiful foreign girl. (Oh, the lady organising our tour in Beijing said I look like a doll - that I have a perfect face. Of course I don't but I like being told I do. ^_^.)
Anyway, we had a lot of laughs, and then they were nice enough to walk the three of us to our bus stop, which was about 15 minutes away. Mei said that's another Chinese culture thing - it's not so uncommon to go walkabout on the job or to be lazy (we've seen workers in a factory just sitting there with their feet on the table, reading magazines and smoking). It was good they did; it was a dodgy area so I felt safer. I really enjoyed that hour, it was nice to get a taste of this good, friendly side of Chinese culture, and to kind of meet someone.
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There are hundreds of bikes parked alongside the roads.
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Good food, cool sights. I'm really enjoying this trip so far. Mei has been *so* helpful, and Beijing is a very interesting place, with a lot of history. Yeah, it's *very* cool to visit, but I wouldn't want to live here. The people's lives are hard - they work very hard, long hours, their incomes are low, pressures are high, the weather is so so cold, people don't trust each other...
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There are soldiers around, plenty of them, in green uniforms. Their job as I've seen it is to stand around guarding cultural relics. They can stand so stiffly and look so grim. But I've also seen them walking along casually, swinging their legs and laughing with their friends, like any normal young men.
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Our hotel room is an oasis of warmth in a cold, cold city. The cold is not so unbearable, especially when you're walking around - it's just that it's ever present and all pervasive, you can't forget it, everyone is so rugged up, so the city seems uncomfortable. It's foggy in Beijing, everywhere is foggy and cold in the morning, misty and cold in the afternoon. It's all white and bitingly cold, everything is shrouded and backgrounded by white to some extent. But the air is dry - I get dry, cracked lips and skin flaps on my fingers.
Because of the white, the cold and the darkness (sun rises lateish and sets early), I get a kind of negative overall impression of life here - of course there are many good things about Chinese life and culture (eg filial piety, friendliness, availability of bargains, good food, interesting history, strong, unique culture, etc) but I keep thinking "this is great to visit but I wouldn't want to live here" because I see people in padded coats riding their bikes home in the cold and dark, students with heaps of homework... Of course everything is WAY less bleak and cold in the other seasons.
The only other thing I don't like is the dirt - after a day out you just *feel* dirty and I only have one pair of trousers. You have to rinse some crockery with tea before eating from them, don't put your bag on the floor, sometimes the floor of squat toilets is just gross, there's dust in the air (although you can't sense it when you're breathing), there are gobs of fresh spit on the ground, your nails become caked with grime, etc. When you wipe your nose the tissue is laced with black. You just don't feel very clean.
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Our tour got cut short by two days, so we can sleep in tomorrow. They crammed five days of activities into three days. But we got a better deal than anyone else on our tour, so who are we to complain? [Also, there wasn't much we could do by worrying about it. For about $140 we got three days packed with sights, five nights in a hotel and several meals. It was a shame that we had so many activities in a shorter time, because at some places we had to kind of rush through, but I didn't really mind because a couple of restful days sounded attractive.]
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We went to take the train to Xi'an. So it was goodbye to Beijing, the city with the many large buildings and the white sky, against which could often be seen the silhouette of a flock of flying birds, or a string of kites.
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