what a song.
to start off with - beijing is really good. the nightlife is busy, as are the streets and the food is excellent. myself and the boy matt have visited tiananmen square and the forbidden city. admittedly we were looking for tiananmen square when a tour guide told us we were in the forbidden city but that's irrelevant. i've bought a watch with mao waving which is the best purchase ive ever made. it stops every 30 minutes but that's beside the point. rumour has it that mao is pickled in a frozen cage in a building just off tiananmen square. they wheel him out every morning between 8 and 11, so we need to see this.
as expected, we've also made a few errors since arriving in this part of the world. the first being sleeping on the great wall of china. your not allowed to do it, the chinese knew we were doing it, we knew they knew we were doing it, but we denied it. on the way along the wall the last person we saw at around 5pm was a german character. when we told him our plans he said "well you won't die, but it will be cold." he wasn't wrong. we spend most of the night marching back and forward like border guards along a 20 metre stretch which we thought we couldn't fall off to try and keep warm. earlier on we tried our best to avoid drawing attention to ourselves in case we ended up in a gulag. from midnight onwards we attempted to start a fires in the hope of ending up in one of them. matt wouldn't let me burn the lonely planet, he reckons it's made of the wrong material. it's made of paper matt. idiot. the sun came up at 5.30 and i'd rather speak no more of it.........apart from the sunset was out of this world........and my camera broke so i don't have any pictures.
second mistake - going to mongolia during a national holiday. bus to chinese border town - 15 hours. sleep in odd hotel - 5 hours. time to cross the most messed up border in the world to Zamen Uud - 7 hours. Being told there are no trains to Ulaan Bator or back to beijing - priceless. By this time it was dark, one of the drunks in the car park claimed to be a taxi-driver. he took us around 3 hotels and none of them would have us. we ended up sleeping in the taxi drivers yurt eating sheep milk curds - my favourite. 4 hours across the border the next day followed by a 15 hour coach journey back to beijing. 3 WHOLE DAYS. i'm ruined. we did sleep in a yurt, i got punched of a mongolian and we were in a jeep in the desert so it pretty much ticked all of the boxes anyway.
our plans for the nest 2 days include: eat beijing duck, see acrobats, see pickled mao, stop taking the piss of mao so loudly - it's frowned upon.
all that's left to do is buy a joe kinear face mask and i'm sorted.
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3 comments:
That's my mum's favourite 90s song. (She marginally prefers it to The Power.)
Hope you got to see Mao, maybe add this to the trips theme's - you can visit Minh in Hanoi and... actually that's probably it. Unless there's a Steve Irwin one in Ozzy now.
Enjoying your posts, keep them coming.
Jim
p.s. season of consolidation for the Toads (in fact, need a final day result to avoid relegation). Promotion push next time.
keep up the work wlaton, you are getting me, joey and roberrino through our boring day. sounds like you kind of made the right choice.
Mao rocks. Herrroooo....
Gibbo x
Sweet jesus Andy you make me smile. I've been well busy here, unpacking hats and the like and generally loving life. Me and mark just took a couple of minutes time out time to slap eachother with velcro straps. We actually drew blood. Also, about ten minutes ago, i called mr ed over because i needed to ask him something. he had an important piece of paper in his hand and said 'can you help me with this?' (it was all numbers and boxes, the joker) and I said no but i did point out to him that if it had been you he'd posed the question to, you would simply have grabbed the piece of paper, scribbled furiously all over it in biro and then handed it back with a smile saying 'that'll sort you out'. Gotta' go. Hang ten and walk the dog you beat of a man. And stay classy.
Le Joe x
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