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Once my friend Owen flew into Beijing we started our journey to Japan. The ferry from China ran once a week from Shanghai to Osaka so we caught an overnight train to Shanghai, his gave us a day there to check out the sights.
The train was brand new, including air conditioning, and TV's at the foot of our beds. We arrived early the following morning well rested, an ready to go find our hostel. There again the tube system cost a matter of pence to use, and after a bit of figuring out we found our way to the hostel, that was in a pretty nice area of the city.
One thing you find in China is that the cars will always beep to tell you they're close to you, so it gives you plenty of warning, but when you consider the sheer millions of bicycles going around the cities, you soon realise they're more deadly than the cars, they're like 2 wheeled ninjas that come out of nowhere, so you find that you start looking everywhere you go, out of sheer paranoia, either way, we survived with no injuries.
Shanghai whilst we were there was as people described it to me, very very smoggy, so smoggy infact you couldn't see the tops of skyscrapers most of the time. Then on top of that, an most likely a result of the smog is the unbearable humidity mixed with the high temperatures. It was not something I was used to and I'm glad I wasn't there long, because it really affected me.
We managed to find the ferry terminal and get on the ferry the following morning. The ferry was pretty well equiped, it had a restaurant, lounges, shop etc... It also had a bar that was open in the evenings, with one drawback...it was a kareoke bar!
I'm not the best singer in the world, actually lets rephrase that I'm about as talented at singing as...*insert funny anocdote here* Well you get the point.
So the nights were filled with moving back and forth from the bar to a lounge seating area, we'd get a couple of beers then the sound of drunken Japanese people singing would over power you (and your eardrums), so you'd retreat to the lounge area and wittle the evenings away.
On the boat there were a selection of books that previous travellers had obviously dumped there, the only one which was in English happened to have two copies there, it was a fiction novel called Twilight, it happens that it was made into a film not long ago, so I thought it'd be a good way to use up some of the time on the ferry. It was an interesting book about vampires, but definately aimed more at the teenager/young adult market, little did I know that when I read this first book there were a further three sequels that had been published, and that I'd suddenly have an desire to read them, because they all end on cliff hangers. This story continues in Japan, so you'll have wait and see what happens.
We met a couple from Chile on the ferry and a German student studying in Japan, we all spent an evening exchanging travel stories and plans for Japan, so was a nice way to spend our time there.
Before we knew it the ferry journey was over and the time not only passed pretty fast it was also pretty enjoyable.
Only one thing caused us trouble on te ferry, and it was very annoying! Every morning over the tannoy system they'd annouce in a variety of languages that breakfast was available, this would inevitably wake us up, but just to drive it home and make sure that at 7.30am you were definately awake they'd play really bad melodies over the tannoy system, loud enough so you couldn't possibly get back to sleep. This wasn't just for a minute or two, oh no, a whole 20mins, they were making sure that on a boat where there's very little to do, that you enjoyed as much of that time as possible!
So other than the unneeded wake up calls all was fine and dandy, so we made it to Osaka, Japan 9.30am two days after we first set off. Ready to take in the land of the rising sun!
Thursday, 17 September 2009
Beijing
Since getting to Beijing we've found some lovely places to eat, we've visited places like tianimen square, and the forbidden city. Mike and 2 of the girls in the group both flew back after a few days to the UK, so it's just me an 2 other guys I know from the rally now in Beijing, and they're staying with me until my Birthday and then they're flying back that day.
We've checked into an awesome hostel, its actually a hotel but the top floor is a hostel with bar etc so we're pretty pleased, it also has free wifi etc... The only problem is that I still can't get my photo's off my bloody camera, its definitely their computers not the memory cards, but most annoying!
One day we ventured down to the silk market in town, it was only a few stops on the tube, and definately the best market I've even been to. Just outside we were asked by a film crew whether we'd be willing to talk to them, after a moment I thought why not, who's going to see it anyway. It was a weird interview, I was asked many questions about the "monkey king" not having any idea what they were on about I presumed it was some kind of Kungfu thing. I jibbered on about how I'd heard about him on the Internet and as predicted the interview was pretty short haha. All in all a good start to the morning.
At the market, as you're walking through all the sellers who obviously have a set english vocabulary try to pull you in to their stores etc, but nothing too agressive. All the goods there are fake, but the best fakes you'll come across. We were already told that what ever the starting price they ask, you should try and settle at about a sixth of that price. My shopping by the end of the day included an I "heart" BJ t-shirt, a tag heurer carrera watch and all three of us picked up somewhat an impulse buy of a Chinese fighter pilot helmet each, we each have different colours and after some deliberation our call signs are chop sticks, chow mein & crispy duck! All in all a great day!
On a variety of nights I ventured out to several suggested night spots. They varied from a largely ex-pat area with many small bars and a couple of cool roof terraces. To a Local clubs, that we stood out as the only westerners there (that and I'm taller than the vast majority of the populus), they all had dj's playing western dance music varying between classics, new tracks and as always with a few timeless Michael Jackson tracks mixed in. The local clubs are interesting, I'm not sure whether it was because we were westeners or if this was normal practice but we were shown to a table where you get table service for your drinks and they watch your stuff as you dance. Another strange thing, is going to a club and seeing people not buying shots of alcohol but instead buying whole bottles, and then leaving most of the bottle on the table and walking off, an group of girls next to us had about a tenth of a bottle of Jonny Walker Blue, then left.
We also ventured to a club that was Russian owned, it was very much Russian in it's decor, such as the shiny gold urinals and tables etc... We didn't feel entirely comfortable so left after one drink, after meeting some pretty dodgy people in Russia this had much the same vibe.
Beijing was an interesting place, you quickly realise it's pretty smoggy, and very few people speak English, mainly because with nearly 2 billion population, why should they!
It's staggering how big everything is there, and how much construction is still happening. When you consider it costs just 16p for a single underground trip anywhere in Beijing, and that an hours taxi journey cost about £4, it puts it in perspective with the UK. All the modern ammenities are available in Beijing, and obviously there's a wide range of variances with the West, it's definately taking the better pieces of the west, then putting their own slant on it. You could almost say they've reverse engineered the city from the likes of New York & London. There's still alot to happen in China as a whole, but Beijing is somewhere that I could potentially see as good place to work; but not a place I'd consider a long term relocation.
It's appears very much a case that China is the next big player, and not a world power to be laughed at. I for one, welcome our new Chinese Masters!
We've checked into an awesome hostel, its actually a hotel but the top floor is a hostel with bar etc so we're pretty pleased, it also has free wifi etc... The only problem is that I still can't get my photo's off my bloody camera, its definitely their computers not the memory cards, but most annoying!
One day we ventured down to the silk market in town, it was only a few stops on the tube, and definately the best market I've even been to. Just outside we were asked by a film crew whether we'd be willing to talk to them, after a moment I thought why not, who's going to see it anyway. It was a weird interview, I was asked many questions about the "monkey king" not having any idea what they were on about I presumed it was some kind of Kungfu thing. I jibbered on about how I'd heard about him on the Internet and as predicted the interview was pretty short haha. All in all a good start to the morning.
At the market, as you're walking through all the sellers who obviously have a set english vocabulary try to pull you in to their stores etc, but nothing too agressive. All the goods there are fake, but the best fakes you'll come across. We were already told that what ever the starting price they ask, you should try and settle at about a sixth of that price. My shopping by the end of the day included an I "heart" BJ t-shirt, a tag heurer carrera watch and all three of us picked up somewhat an impulse buy of a Chinese fighter pilot helmet each, we each have different colours and after some deliberation our call signs are chop sticks, chow mein & crispy duck! All in all a great day!
On a variety of nights I ventured out to several suggested night spots. They varied from a largely ex-pat area with many small bars and a couple of cool roof terraces. To a Local clubs, that we stood out as the only westerners there (that and I'm taller than the vast majority of the populus), they all had dj's playing western dance music varying between classics, new tracks and as always with a few timeless Michael Jackson tracks mixed in. The local clubs are interesting, I'm not sure whether it was because we were westeners or if this was normal practice but we were shown to a table where you get table service for your drinks and they watch your stuff as you dance. Another strange thing, is going to a club and seeing people not buying shots of alcohol but instead buying whole bottles, and then leaving most of the bottle on the table and walking off, an group of girls next to us had about a tenth of a bottle of Jonny Walker Blue, then left.
We also ventured to a club that was Russian owned, it was very much Russian in it's decor, such as the shiny gold urinals and tables etc... We didn't feel entirely comfortable so left after one drink, after meeting some pretty dodgy people in Russia this had much the same vibe.
Beijing was an interesting place, you quickly realise it's pretty smoggy, and very few people speak English, mainly because with nearly 2 billion population, why should they!
It's staggering how big everything is there, and how much construction is still happening. When you consider it costs just 16p for a single underground trip anywhere in Beijing, and that an hours taxi journey cost about £4, it puts it in perspective with the UK. All the modern ammenities are available in Beijing, and obviously there's a wide range of variances with the West, it's definately taking the better pieces of the west, then putting their own slant on it. You could almost say they've reverse engineered the city from the likes of New York & London. There's still alot to happen in China as a whole, but Beijing is somewhere that I could potentially see as good place to work; but not a place I'd consider a long term relocation.
It's appears very much a case that China is the next big player, and not a world power to be laughed at. I for one, welcome our new Chinese Masters!
Thursday, 10 September 2009
Downtime in UB then onto Beijing
I ended up staying in UlanBatar for 10 days, mainly waiting in the Chinese Visa I needed to head on the next step in the journey onto Beijing.
UlanBatar was a nice relief from the constant need to drive and make up miles. But it is still a city in the making. It has essentially a single main road running through the centre, from which everything else spreads out and meanders away.
We managed to find a guest house called the golden gobi which was in the very centre of the city. As with many of the guesthouses if they are full they offer you a place in one of their sister guesthouses (most likely run by a friend of theirs) which is near to them. So we ended up staying with a woman named Betsy, who happened to teach Russian and as she put it she "thought she might as well learn English as it's helpful". She spoke absolutely perfect English, which might sound like we were being judgemental, but after nearly 4 weeks of broken English at best, it came as a complete suprise an somewhat a relief.
We stayed there one night and then the next day we had already booked into another guesthouse when we were back in the UK, so we went searching for the Mongolian Steppe Guesthouse. I say we went "searching" because this was literally it, the system of addresses in UlanBatar is clearly still in the process of being determined, as it's very much a case of checking quite a few different places before getting a clue as to where you may have to head. Just as we were at the point of giving up we wondered up a staircase and found a sign for the Mongolian Steppe Guesthouse, this landlady, Eiggy, was also very good at English and she had to show us down the road to where we'd booked our bedrooms. As it turned out we had an apartment to ourselves which was awesome. The shower was also a godsend. However, UlanBatar has one centralised hot water system, so when they have to work on a section of the system they shut down entire streets and districts. This meant we had a whole 2 days of hot water, then we quickly our hopes dashed by having the remainder of our stay there with cold water showers, not just cold showers though, it felt like the coldest water any of us had ever been in. It was so cold that your arms and legs would turn blue, and as soon as it hit your body you'd have uncontrolable breathing spasms, so a nice challenge to the cleaning process.
We had fun trying to get a tourist visa for China, the office are only open from 9.30am-12pm on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. So not the most flexible of opening hours.
We got to the office early knowing there are issues with the amount of people all trying to get visas, so we were one of the first there. Then at 9.30am when the door opened to let a set amount of people through, there was a surge as everyone tries to get in. Luckily for some reason westerners such as ourselves were given priority, so that combined that we were at the front anywy ensured we got in with the first lot. After only 20mins of form filling and chatting with the clerk we had all of the paperwork sorted and had to come back on the Wednesday to pick up our visas for the princely sum of $50.
With this in hand we had to then go and book our train tickets. The transiberian railway which runs from Moscow to Beijing runs once a week, and unfortunately was fully booked till September. So our only option rather than flying which was about $270, was to take a Mongolian train to the Chinese border and then take a Chinese train from there.
So we got the train from UB to Jinjing this took about 24 hours, we were all in a sleeper carriage with 4 to a room, it was clean and well designed, if not a little old. All in all it was a good journey, and we all slept pretty well. The next section however was interesting. So the first train actually ended up running earlier than planned. So we got to Jinjing, and we had 5 hours to kill, but it was about 7pm, so we decided to go and grab some food, and even try an Internet cafe afterwards. After some interesting ordering from a menu completely in Cantonese, we got some lovely food including noodles, duck, rice and various meat dishes....and there was way to much to eat, we'd picked up some people from the train by this point as well so there were about 8 of us in the restaurant. All the food and a couple of beers later we came to settle the bill and it all added up to about £5 each, so we were all pretty impressed!
We left the restaurant with full stomachs and still had about 2 hours to kill, so we headed down the road lead by one of the waitresses to an internet cafe tucked away in an alleyway. It's weird as you walk around what is obviously not a tourist haunt, and where westerners are relatively rare, everyone stares at you, but not in an intimidating way just and inquizative way, people going past also like to shout hello as they cycle past etc...
We got to the Internet cafe, and were hit by one annoying realisation, all the computers are in Chinese, and to top it off, China has a huge firewall controlling what the Chinese public see on the Internet, including Facebook, so for the next week or so, I'll have no access to my blog, or facebook or even a variety of other seemingly harmless websites that are considered offensive.
Anyways, after attempting the internet, we headed to the train station to await our train at midnight, we were under the impression this was another sleeper train, but unfortunately it was not. In China there are 2 main classes of seat....hard seats....or soft seats. We luckily had the latter. But that doesn't stop the pain! As it turns out hard seat tickets just mean you dont actually have a seat at all, instead you stand or sit in the aisle for the entire 7 hour journey! So we had very uncomfortable seats, and surrounding us were hundreds of Chinese people all standing and sitting where ever they could purch, this ended up meaning that one Chinese guy crawled under my row of seats and feel asleep, there was no leg room at all because you're in bays of 6 people facing one another, and I was sat in the aisle facing a guy who resembled Buddha! Only he snores worse than anyone I've ever met! So after an entire day on the go, and no sleep the following night we all got to Beijing at 7am, all a little grumpy/hungry & tired.
We then had the fun of trying to find the travellodge-esk place we'd booked ourselves into, only to find that the hotel details were on my phone that had conveniently run out of power on the journey, so we frantically roamed the station looking for a power point, I did managed to find one in the toilet in the station, the only problem being it was above head height so I had to stand holding my phone above my head as people did their business around me. I was there about 1 mins, and a cleaner who obviously though I was trying to recreate a George Michael toilet situation ushered me on.
We managed to get into a taxi and then I used the cigarette adapter to charge the phone as we headed to where we thought the hotel was, and all worked out well, we got to the hotel, and for only £10 a night it was awesome.
UlanBatar was a nice relief from the constant need to drive and make up miles. But it is still a city in the making. It has essentially a single main road running through the centre, from which everything else spreads out and meanders away.
We managed to find a guest house called the golden gobi which was in the very centre of the city. As with many of the guesthouses if they are full they offer you a place in one of their sister guesthouses (most likely run by a friend of theirs) which is near to them. So we ended up staying with a woman named Betsy, who happened to teach Russian and as she put it she "thought she might as well learn English as it's helpful". She spoke absolutely perfect English, which might sound like we were being judgemental, but after nearly 4 weeks of broken English at best, it came as a complete suprise an somewhat a relief.
We stayed there one night and then the next day we had already booked into another guesthouse when we were back in the UK, so we went searching for the Mongolian Steppe Guesthouse. I say we went "searching" because this was literally it, the system of addresses in UlanBatar is clearly still in the process of being determined, as it's very much a case of checking quite a few different places before getting a clue as to where you may have to head. Just as we were at the point of giving up we wondered up a staircase and found a sign for the Mongolian Steppe Guesthouse, this landlady, Eiggy, was also very good at English and she had to show us down the road to where we'd booked our bedrooms. As it turned out we had an apartment to ourselves which was awesome. The shower was also a godsend. However, UlanBatar has one centralised hot water system, so when they have to work on a section of the system they shut down entire streets and districts. This meant we had a whole 2 days of hot water, then we quickly our hopes dashed by having the remainder of our stay there with cold water showers, not just cold showers though, it felt like the coldest water any of us had ever been in. It was so cold that your arms and legs would turn blue, and as soon as it hit your body you'd have uncontrolable breathing spasms, so a nice challenge to the cleaning process.
We had fun trying to get a tourist visa for China, the office are only open from 9.30am-12pm on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. So not the most flexible of opening hours.
We got to the office early knowing there are issues with the amount of people all trying to get visas, so we were one of the first there. Then at 9.30am when the door opened to let a set amount of people through, there was a surge as everyone tries to get in. Luckily for some reason westerners such as ourselves were given priority, so that combined that we were at the front anywy ensured we got in with the first lot. After only 20mins of form filling and chatting with the clerk we had all of the paperwork sorted and had to come back on the Wednesday to pick up our visas for the princely sum of $50.
With this in hand we had to then go and book our train tickets. The transiberian railway which runs from Moscow to Beijing runs once a week, and unfortunately was fully booked till September. So our only option rather than flying which was about $270, was to take a Mongolian train to the Chinese border and then take a Chinese train from there.
So we got the train from UB to Jinjing this took about 24 hours, we were all in a sleeper carriage with 4 to a room, it was clean and well designed, if not a little old. All in all it was a good journey, and we all slept pretty well. The next section however was interesting. So the first train actually ended up running earlier than planned. So we got to Jinjing, and we had 5 hours to kill, but it was about 7pm, so we decided to go and grab some food, and even try an Internet cafe afterwards. After some interesting ordering from a menu completely in Cantonese, we got some lovely food including noodles, duck, rice and various meat dishes....and there was way to much to eat, we'd picked up some people from the train by this point as well so there were about 8 of us in the restaurant. All the food and a couple of beers later we came to settle the bill and it all added up to about £5 each, so we were all pretty impressed!
We left the restaurant with full stomachs and still had about 2 hours to kill, so we headed down the road lead by one of the waitresses to an internet cafe tucked away in an alleyway. It's weird as you walk around what is obviously not a tourist haunt, and where westerners are relatively rare, everyone stares at you, but not in an intimidating way just and inquizative way, people going past also like to shout hello as they cycle past etc...
We got to the Internet cafe, and were hit by one annoying realisation, all the computers are in Chinese, and to top it off, China has a huge firewall controlling what the Chinese public see on the Internet, including Facebook, so for the next week or so, I'll have no access to my blog, or facebook or even a variety of other seemingly harmless websites that are considered offensive.
Anyways, after attempting the internet, we headed to the train station to await our train at midnight, we were under the impression this was another sleeper train, but unfortunately it was not. In China there are 2 main classes of seat....hard seats....or soft seats. We luckily had the latter. But that doesn't stop the pain! As it turns out hard seat tickets just mean you dont actually have a seat at all, instead you stand or sit in the aisle for the entire 7 hour journey! So we had very uncomfortable seats, and surrounding us were hundreds of Chinese people all standing and sitting where ever they could purch, this ended up meaning that one Chinese guy crawled under my row of seats and feel asleep, there was no leg room at all because you're in bays of 6 people facing one another, and I was sat in the aisle facing a guy who resembled Buddha! Only he snores worse than anyone I've ever met! So after an entire day on the go, and no sleep the following night we all got to Beijing at 7am, all a little grumpy/hungry & tired.
We then had the fun of trying to find the travellodge-esk place we'd booked ourselves into, only to find that the hotel details were on my phone that had conveniently run out of power on the journey, so we frantically roamed the station looking for a power point, I did managed to find one in the toilet in the station, the only problem being it was above head height so I had to stand holding my phone above my head as people did their business around me. I was there about 1 mins, and a cleaner who obviously though I was trying to recreate a George Michael toilet situation ushered me on.
We managed to get into a taxi and then I used the cigarette adapter to charge the phone as we headed to where we thought the hotel was, and all worked out well, we got to the hotel, and for only £10 a night it was awesome.
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