Andrew and Kathleen

The China Experience In A Nutshell

Wow! What an amazing three weeks away! What an amazing country! What amazing sights and experiences!

As you can probably tell, we had a great time on our holiday in China and Hong Kong. From the modern metropolis of Shanghai to the Terracotta Soldiers at Xi'an to the Great Wall to Beijing and Tianenman Square and the Forbidden City to the unexpected and unbelievable riverbank show Impression Liu Sanjie at Guilin and Yangshuo, it feels like the past three weeks have just flown by.

I could write and write and write about all the things we got up to, but for the time poor, here are Our Top 5 Best China Experiences:

Our Top 5 (Actually 6!) China Experiences

1. Climbing the Great Wall at Badaling near Beijing. We fought our way through the tourists on the lower two sections, to the higher parts where a lot of tourists fear to tread.
2. Impression (Liu Sanjie). This was without a doubt the most incredible thing that I have ever seen. Impression is a show based on the legends in the Yangshuo region, set on the river amidst the famous limestone mountains of Guilin.
3. Seeing the terracotta soldiers of Xi'an.
4. Walking through Tiananmen Square and seeing the Forbidden City in Beijing.
5. An unscheduled night expedition in Xi'an, where we saw the historic South Gate and walls lit up. Nearby, the locals gather to hold spontaneous dances in the public square - such an amazing constrast to Australia, where so much living seems to happen behind closed suburban doors. And at 9pm on a Sunday night!
6. Visiting the beautiful and laid-back river city of Guilin. We even saw people doing tai chi the next morning by the riverside (The image of peace and tranquility was broken by the elderly instructor stopping halfway through to check his mobile phone)!

Best Meals

Unfortunately, the tour catered for a fairly unadventurous palate, and we tended to have organised lunches and dinners at large restaurants and hotels. I guess that's the trade-off with travelling with a large number of Westerners. However, we did strike off on our own a few times:

• On our first night in China, before we'd joined the tour group, we ate dinner at a busy little noodle place in Shanghai where luckily they had a menu with pictures so that we wouldn't have to embarrass ourselves with poorly-spoken Mandarin.
• Earlier that day, we wandered past a restaurant where they were steaming Chinese dumplings in Shanghai (famous Shanghai dumplings!). We had to try them! We walked in, and were struck by the indifferent attitude of the staff, who evidently felt that the bother of trying to interpret us asking for 6 dumplings was just too much bother. They gave us 4. 4 beautiful, juicy pork dumplings, golden brown on the bottom. We liked them so much we went back the next day, too.
• Halfway through the tour, in Xi'an, a majority of the group felt homesick for Western food. The uncultured savages! The tour guide took them to a hotel for a western buffet. Not us, though! Armed only with some dishes we'd read about written down for us by our tour guide, and the phrase "What would you recommend?" we wandered across the road to a local food court, and tried the food that Xi'an is famous for - yangrou paomo. The meal was fantastic, spicy and flavoursome and cost less than RMB20 ($4) for 4 dishes. Just what we needed after two weeks of bland hotel-style Chinese meals!
• We attended a Chinese cooking class in Yangshuo, which we found out about ten minutes before. We were walking through the town, looking for something to do to beat the heat during some of the 'free' time alloted on the tour. The humidity was killing us! And we came across this restaurant that had a sign advertising daily cooking classes, between 4 and 6pm! And it was 3.50pm! So we went along and (I won't say learnt since we both know how to use a wok) cooked a home-style meal of braised mushrooms and tofu, and kung pao chicken. The class was on the roof of the restaurant, admidst these fantastic limestone mountains - it was like being on a cooking show on location!

Other Cool Things

• Riding Shanghai's ultra high speed maglev train from the airport - we reached 430km/h!
• Seeing the city of Shanghai stretch on and on into the distance from the top of the 88 storey Jin Mao tower.
• Attending Hong Kong's Cheung Chau Bun Festival, featured in the animated film My Life As McDull.
• Being in Hong Kong with Steph and Eva and Dickson and Lucy was fantastic fun, and we caught up with Kathleen's aunties and uncles there, whom we haven't seen for years. Her cousins have grown from cute ten year olds into surly teenagers with diamond earrings, cool hair and an attitude to match.
• Crying children on an overnight flight home to Australia... oh hang on, no that sucked quite a lot.

A China Trip In 11 Photos

posted at: 22:25 | permanent link to this entry

Off To China

OK, a tonne of things to do before we head off this afternoon (little things, like changing money, and packing), so this'll be a quick one.

The Wendy Wu (Woo-hoo!) tour group we're on gave us some Lonely Planet Mandarin phrasebooks. Now we'll be able to go up to random strangers over there and never be stuck in situations that demand the use of phrases such as:

• "This drug is for personal use" (Zheige yaopin shi siyongde)
• "I won't do it without protection" (Meiyou fangbei wo bu laiwan) and its following statement "That was weird" (Gangcai zhen youdian qiguai)
• "You're just using me for sex" (Ni zhi shi yongwo fang qingyu)

Thanks, LP, for spending valuable space and ink on such useful phrases!

Huitou jian!

Or, since we're heading to HK for a few days after China, joi gin!

posted at: 07:38 | permanent link to this entry

Japanese

You might have read recently one of those wacky, offbeat stories that the online media loves, about how a scam substituting cheap sheep for expensive poodles is targetting naive Japanese. The inference made by the story was the Japanese are too silly, sheltered or naive to realise that the 'poodles', which cost top dollar in Tokyo, are actually sheep. According to the article, the scam only really came to light when a famous Japanese actress complained on a talk show that her 'poodle' didn't bark or eat dog food. Apparently, she was very embarrassed when told her poodle was not a poodle.

On the surface, it's one of those stories that just sounds a little too far-fetched. I mean, come on, surely no one is that dumb to not be able to tell the difference between a sheep and a dog.

Which is why I wasn't surprised to find that the story is quite obviously a massive beat up.

And then, ninemsn owned up to the hoax.

Tokyo resident Sakurako Sugata said she had not heard of the story before today. She said she didn't believe a word of it.

"Buying a sheep instead of a poodle? It's ridiculous!" Ms Sugata said.

"If you want to keep the sheep and cut it up and eat it, then that would be a good idea, but that story's just stupid."

"No-one with any intelligence would buy a sheep instead of a poodle."

Lazy hack journalists.

I think I prefer this story out of Japan, which was running on boing boing yesterday, about an annual competition in which sumo wrestlers hold babies and compete to make the other wrestler's baby cry first:

But the last story from Japan for today has some link with Australia:

Inspired by Australian Juan Mann, who has earned international fame through the internet by standing in central Sydney with a sign reading "FREE HUGS", the Japanese students are determined to shake up a culture famous for its reserve.

They spend weekends in trendy Harajuku holding their cardboard replica of Mr Mann's sign and throwing their arms around anyone who takes them up on the offer.

But is it working? Well, not really. Japanese people, as a rule, are not really touchy feely.

But the people who accept hugs are nearly all foreigners, with most Japanese looking away. Two Japanese high school girls chill the mood as one approaches the campaigners and asks: "Are you some sort of a cult?"

posted at: 21:20 | permanent link to this entry