First China stuff. (Kurt Scheibl)

This was written on my second day in China.

Beijing is obviously the only place I have impressions of just yet, and it's a thousand villages in one. I live on a hutong which is basically a network of ancient back streets... in the centre of Beijing. You come off this massive street, lined with cars and taxis and shouting people, and suddenly you're on a dusty road with people walking along quietly and small bars lining the place.

Today I went to Hoha (think I've misspelled it) which is basically the bar district of this part of Beijing; went to a place called the No Name Bar and I tell you it's beautiful. The district surrounds a small lake, on which there are loads of small and slightly less small motorboats, obviously filled mainly with tourists (it was like watching slow and elegant dodgems) and I was sitting on a nice chair looking out the window onto this lake and it was incredible. The kind of place you can sit for hours. Seemed like a million people were going past, too. The ambient noise in Beijing is different, too, lots of beeping is perfectly normal, loads of people talking loudly, the odd person enthusiastically sucking up what sounds like most of the contents of their throat to spit on the floor... certainly novel. I also went to Miyun today, and it was incredible in a different way. It's a "town" of five hundred thousand people, but it still seems small-town. We went to a place Smurf knows - he lived right near it for six months and ate there twice a day - and the people there knew him well, chatted, were deeply upset when he said he was going to Beijing... Same goes for the DVD shop we went in, and the supermarket by the restaurant... The kind of community you really can't get in London, regardless of where you go. Not to mention the fact that we had dumplings for lunch (with meat in) which were so amazing that when we'd finished off the first ten I demanded another ten more, and a chinese dish with a complicated name that translates to "chicken on rice" but is SO MUCH MORE for dinner. Ten dumplings cost... four quai! Or, in other words, thirty pence. And dinner? Seven quai. SIXTY PENCE. It's insane. The aforementioned DVD shop sold me (naturally pirate) four collections of DVDs with about twenty films in each collection for forty five quai, or three pounds fifty. So yeah. Cheap. Mind you, that fantastic bar charged me thirty quai for a glass of apple juice, which is still London cheap but China expensive.

Smurf has rather dropped me in at the deep end, unfortunately. On the evening of the first damned day that I spent in Beijing, I had to get a subway train and then a taxi by myself. Except it was pouring like it was the damned monsoon, and there were no taxis. Took an hour and a half to get a taxi and I'm only not dead from hypothermia because a really nice Chinese bloke held an umbrella over me, and, in the end, found me transportation in the form of a sort of motorcycle rickshaw of rickety death. I'm a bit homesick - everything's so different, and I've not had a proper holiday in a very, very long time (and I think after this I shan't have another), and I've actually got friends that I like that I've had to leave (novel, that) - and obviously frightened and overwhelmed by all the million and one things that are different. I really think this trip will prove to me that this kind of excitement ain't for me - I'm really looking forward to a relatively sedate ten days in Austria - because I can speak the language and more importantly I understand the country, at least a bit. I dunno. We'll see. The next stuff I'm doing is the Temple of Heaven tomorrow - which entails another taxi ride and subway ride on my own again, yay! - and maybe going to an electronics district on Monday to see if I can get myself a laptop and possibly a portable DVD player so I can use those DVDs earlier than England. On Monday evening we take a twelve hour train to see the Terrocotta Army, then another train to get to... somewhere.. on Thursday to go on the five day Yangtze river cruise. Not sure what's happening after that, though I do know that we'll be in Hong Kong for two weeks at some point. So, yeah. I could probably write a lot more - you know I like writing - but I think that'll do. If I can write this much after two days...

Oh yes, and Belarus was fantastically beautiful. The scenery was just phenomenal. Mind, the only dwellings were fenced-in groups of shacks that rarely seemed to have electricity - the ones that did were festooned with satellite dishes - so I think maybe it's best seen from a train. Not that I ever intend to get the Trans-Siberian again, not unless I'm in a group or I can speak Russian. So anyway, Belarus has that going for it.

Kurt