Sun's out, Guns out

Monday morning. Normally it would consist of an early morning wake up call proceeding a trip on the Northern line to complete my gym workout before heading to work to start the week. My Monday mornings now blur into one fantastic long weekend but to ensure a modicum of routine is maintained, a gym workout is still essential after my sleep in, to work off the alcohol (and ice cream, and rice and peanuts) from the night before.

After a nice long run to work off some of the deep fried Chinese cuisine consumed, I returned to our room to an agitated Jamie who was now trying to figure out why the wifi button on his phone was greyed out and not able to be turned on. After some searching on the yahoo search engine (God I miss Google), we were able to establish that it was most likely a hardware issue with his phone after dropping it on a marble floor the day before. With my phone somewhere between Scotland and New Zealand, we have now successfully reduced our cellphone quota and means of contacting the outside world via phone to zero. Technology and our collective gumbiness is certainly not our friend. After mucking round for what seemed like hours, we headed for our first meal of the day at 12.30 at our hotel restaurant which fortunately has some delicious Chinese food because we just couldn't be arsed anymore.

Counting the hours until we could leave China (everything is just so so hard), we headed to the train station to pick up our train tickets for our trip to Nanning the following day. Walking out of our hotel, we could hardly believe our eyes. After three days of horrendous Smog, we were greeted with bright blue skies i.e. a perfect day to have gone to the Great Wall and we couldn't help feeling both pissed off and sorry that Victoria, Emily and John got to miss Beijing relatively smog free. Not wanting to waste the beautiful blue sky, we made our way with haste to the station. The process to pick up our tickets was relatively quick and easy with exception to Jamie's ticket being booked using his NZ passport details, when his visa is in his UK passport. As this is an internal train, I reassured the increasingly agitated Jamie that it should be fine, but it didn't help that the ticket lady appeared puzzled and mentioned something about cancelling a ticket in her best pidgin English. The most important thing is that we left with 2 tickets to Nanning, in our respective names. For now that will suffice and we will see what tomorrow brings.

With the blue sky and day ticking away, we took the subway to the Lama Temple which came highly recommended by Victoria and Emily. On arrival, it appeared that this temple would be much easier to navigate than the Forbidden City and we breathed a sigh of relief. After collecting our free insence to pray to the Buddhist gods we made our way through the site to admire the beautiful Buddhist relics and statues. It turned out that we were in the esteemed company of Monk Royalty with the most senior monk in China (assumed) also visiting with his posse in the glare of TV cameras. I found it quite ironic that I got told off for taking photos of the Buddhist boss man when TV crews and monks galore, snapped away, happy as Larry.

A little bit over temples, we decided to walk to the Drum and Bell towers through the Hutongs - the small narrow residential areas which can only be navigated by scooter, rickshaw or bike. Our first observation was the large number of public toilets which dotted the streets. We assumed this was because most properties do not have access to toilets and that these would be communal for the local residents to use. These restrooms have no seperate cubicles, with just a few holes in the ground to do your business. I'll never take another Portoloo for granted.

Our second observation was that there seems to be a wonderful sense of community within these areas, ranging from groups of ladies gossiping and laughing in Doris' doorway, to the gambling society taking Roger's last Yuan in a game of cards, backgammon, or checkers (Chinese of course). It was evident that these people do not have a huge amount of money, but what they lack in financial security they make up for in seemingly strong relationships and neighbourly love. It was certainly eye opening and I think something the western world can definetely learn from. Can I borrow some flour for my cookies Natasha?

When we arrived at the Bell Tower we were 1 minute past the final entrance time, pretty typical given our last couple of days, so we observed from the outside. We decided it was time to go check out the Olympic Park so made our way through the neighbourhood to the nearest tube station. We walked passed a couple of delicious looking restaurants and decided we would make our way back to the area after for a spot of tea.

The Olympic Park was heaving with Chinese tour groups who took turns taking photos in front of the birds nest coming up with the most elaborate poses they could possible think of. We walked around and waited for twilight to turn to darkness to see the park in all its LED splendour. The water cube (the national swimming pool) was pretty spectacular (see photo below) but the birds nest was a bit disappointing with its light show dedicated to Chinese advertising.

After obtaining the obligatory photos, we made our way back to our predetermined dinner choice and enjoyed a delicious Mojito (rating 4/5) and some fried red bean dish that was out of this world. China might have annoyed us with not being able to do barely anything without difficulty, but I'll give it this, the food has been sensational. I am however becoming increasingly concerned that my fat pants are not going to fit when I get back to NZ.Read more