Olympics and Chopsticks
on Mel and Steve in Nepal (Nepal), 11/Mar/2008 13:33, 34 days ago
Due to travellers’ time lag, we are a few days behind ourselves so this blog is about China even though we arrived in Kathmandu, Nepal, on Saturday. Hopefully we will catch up with ourselves soon.Beijing was a highlight of our 17 day journey and not just because we were glad to spend some time off the rails. After Moscow, Beijing initially appeared chaotic but a more regimented side soon became apparent. There seemed to be almost as many people in uniform as not, although they were friendlier than Mel remembered from her previous visit and didn’t have guns.There was no escaping that the Olympics will be held in Beijing in a few months time. There were logos, fresh coats of paint and building work everywhere we looked. Contrasting this was the beautiful traditional architecture. Our favourite was in the Forbidden city (a walled town which only the Emperor and his family and friends could enter for hundreds of years). There are hundreds of temples, palaces and other intricately designed and decorated buildings.A more modern‘Forbidden’ area for us, for most of our stay, was the area known as Tiananmen square and the surrounding government buildings. On a few occasions we had to walk a kilometre or two out of our way when officials directed us away from the area. The hostel staff told us that there was a ‘political conference’ which meant that the area was closed off to the public (not so different to Parliament Square and Downing Street in the UK).We loved the little alleyways and traditional streets called‘Hutongs’ which, despite lots of demolition and building work, can still be found around Beijing. We enjoyed eating street food, shopping with local traders and trying out our very basic Chinese.After a couple of days enjoying Beijing, we got back on track, this time a 24 hour journey to Chengdu in South West China. After having mostly had our train cabins to ourselves, we found ourselves sharing a cabin with‘Mr Leo’ who we fondly named ‘The General’. We are not sure that he was so fond of us and our strange English ways, as despite attempts to communicate and offer food, he disappeared for most of the journey, popping back for the odd chat and snooze. We enjoyed the gorge-ous Chinese scenery onthe way.The next day (in Chengdu), Lorna, who was able to get up early, went off to see the pandas at the panda breeding centre, while we had a lie in and a leisurely stroll around the Tibetan area and nearby park.We also visited a large Buddhist temple and monastery (having got slightly lost for a couple of hours) and finished with a meal at a Tibetan restaurant, where our Chinese and international sign language failed us miserably, with too few desserts arriving and then too many!The final part of our journey was by‘evil polluting skybird’ over the Himalayas. However, one advantage of this was the stunning aerial views of Everest and other snow-capped peaks. We arrived safely in Kathmandu. More about the capital of our new home country in our next blog.