You want to tell a story in order, and you don’t want to skip ahead, but the longer you leave an earlier part of the stroy, the less you feel like writing it. That’s how Beijing is. I had such diffficulty accessing the internet while the stories were fresh in my head that now I’m just over the idea of writing it all up. There have also been plenty of interesting things happening in the interim, but I didn’t want to get all out of order, so I’ve just not been blogging at all. So now I tell you all – I shall start blogging afresh, and perhaps I’ll tell you the Beijing story, perhaps I won’t. I have some cool pics. Perhaps I should just give you the pics with a small commentary instead of writing an essay, which I fear at this point would be dull for all parties. One shouldn’t blog unless one feels the inspiration upon one.

So. The new term has started, and I find myself a full time primary school English teacher, and I couldn’t be happier with the situation. My two new classes, grades two and three, are at a much higher level (obviously), and they’re a joy to teach. I just taught my grade two class the Hokey Pokey, and my grade ones were enchanted by Alice the Camel (and not just because one of the popular girls is called Alice) and her multiple humps. Man, primary school is fun to teach.

Michael, the other English teacher, has left China and gone home to Australia via the UK (long story, I expect), but his apartment and position is now filled by his friend Pat the Aussie (not to be confused with Pat the Crazy Canadian) (I think he needs an adjective before Aussie, just for symmetry)(is this misuse of parentheses?). Pat’s a nice bloke, and although he’s a Xavier boy (Xavier is a v. expensive boys’ private school) and then a Newman boy (Newman is a relatively expensive “dorm” – we call them “Colleges” – at Melbourne Uni), I won’t hold that against him. He’s totally easy going, and as soon as I get my Firefly DVDs back (hint hint, Chris and Pat!), I’m going to attempt the impossible, and convert a non scifi fan to Firefly. Other things: he speaks and reads Mandarin better than almost any other Westerner I’ve met here (with the exception of Maggie the Harvard PhD student who I met on the train to Beijing – she was cool). He is studying Comm/Law at Melbourne Uni (Economics major, like me, only I think he gets it more that I ever did). For those who may not know, you have to be in about the top 1% of nation’s Yr 12 graduates to get into Commerce Law at Melbourne Uni. So, no cabbage is our Patrick. I reckon that he’s either Australia’s future Prime Minister, or a future volunteer aid worker in a third world refugee camp.

He’s a good bloke. Not a scifi fan, and therefore has an inherent flaw that will never make him a perfect person, but he’s a’ight.

In other news, the spring is starting to rear it’s slushy head. The roads have gone from thick with ice, to slushy, to puddly, and now they are almost dry. Snow falls almost every night, but melts and evaporates by the end of the day. I’ve been humming the Beatles song, “here comes the sun” to myself, and it makes me happy. Summer is nearly here! (Ever the optimist)

Now, friends, I’m back on the blog track, so you’ll be hearing from me more regularly…

Love to all, Charlotte

To begin with, my very deepest apologies for not having blogged sooner about my Beijing trip – a combination of severe laziness and non working internet. So, during these winter holidays, I went off to Beijing by train to meet up with one of my very best friends in the world, Jessie, and we had a fab, if slightly cold week, exploring wintery Beijing. Now we’re back in snowy Xin Jiang together, cutting a swathe through my dvd collection and just enjoying hanging out. Reckon we’ll head up to Kelamayi in a few days to pay a visit to the crazy Canadians and all the other crazy folk up there. But I will attempt to blog about our Beijing trip. Here follows a LOONG blog entry, and for the sake of all of our sanities, I’ll split the entries up into several entries, over several days.

Our first day in Beijing was spent shopping around in a big city – first priority: finding Jessie a warm coat that could withstand Xin Jiang weather, not to mention the slightly warmer, but MUCH windier Beijing conditions. That having been accomplished (you’ll see the pics of Jess in her GORGEOUS coat as the blog progresses), we embarked on a more involved mission – finding me a new palm pilot. For those of you who didn’t already know, I’m a geek. I’m a terrible geek. It’s quite sad, really. But to cut a terribly long story short, after an exciting cross-Beijing busride on the 808, where we got to see just how big a city it is – it just keeps going and going – I found myself to be the proud owner of a brand new Tungsten T3 Palm Pilot. Man, it’s beautiful. Colour screen, inbuilt mic and speakers, with a headphone socket. Now all I need it an SD card, and I’ll be SET! But I’ll stop gushing about my new baby… soon…

The next day was spent at the Forbidden City. Man, I thought the day before was cold… The thing about Beijing is, even though it’s not as cold as Xin Jiang, the wind chill makes it almost unbearable. But enough whinging – on with the blog:

The Forbidden City
Residence for the Ming Dynasty (second last before the Nationalists, then the Communists took over), the Imperial Palace is right at the heart of Beijing. It’s a huge sprawling complex, and just beautiful:

This is just one of the huge central squares that runs up the center of the place. See the Marble pathway running up the middle of the square? When the emperors were being carried in their litters, they’d be carried on the marble walkway, and all the other retainers and nobles and advisers walked to either side. The irony of this was not lost on Jess and I, that there we were, a couple of barbarians, strolling up this marble path without a care in the world, where before it was reserved strictly for the emperor.

Although all of the buildings look like they are made from stone, they are in fact mostly made from wood, which has been varnished with layer upon layer of red lacquer. The thing about this is that it makes the buildings totally flammable. Some parts of the Imperial Palace had been burnt down four or five times, and they had just gone and rebuilt them just as before. One interesting way they came up with to combat the threat of fire was this: at every building and gate, they had GINORMOUS bronze vats filled with water. And I mean, they were big. The size of a medium sized car. And during winter time, they could light little fires underneath them to keep the water from freezing. Kinda ironic, huh, to stop the firefighting water from freezing using fire?

We had heard about the audio tour of the Forbidden City, narrated by Roger Moore, and so we decided to buy one to share between the two of us. However, when we took our ticket with us to the place where they actually KEPT the audio tour thingies, they gave us two instead of just the one – brilliant! The Roger Moore toore – sorry, tour – was excellent, even if we did have to laugh at the way old James Bond said some things. If you ever go to Beijing, the Roger Moore tour is well worth it. Not only is it comforting to have Bond, James Bond giving you your own private tour in that smooth Bond, James Bond voice, but he actually has some interesting things to say. For example, I’d been wondering about the lions that you see so very often guarding doorways and gateways in China. Some times they have balls in their mouths, sometimes they have balls under their feet, but I’d never noticed that half the time, the balls under their feet are not balls, but lion cubs. You see, the lion on the right is the male, and has the ball under it’s foot, to represent the world, and the left hand lion is the female, with a cub under her foot. These two are to represent the yin and the yang of the world. Also, did you know that while the Dragon represents the power and might of the Emperor, the Phoenix represents the Empress. So places that are part of the domain of the Empress are decorated more with phoenixes, and those of the Emperor are, of course, decorated with dragons.

Here’s a pic of a lioness out the front of the Forbidden City, just infont of Tiananmen. See Jess pointing out a little pock mark on it? That’s a bullet hole from when the Anglo-French alliance ransacked Beijing in the beginning of last century.

On our way through the Forbidden City, we were stopped by an art student with surprisingly good English, asking us if we wanted to go visit an art show that was being put on by her college. Now, we’d read about “art students” who drag you off to some back alley place to try and sell you ridiculously overpriced works of “art” which are in fact, just copies, but we figured, what the hell, it’s the Forbidden City, they’d need to have some measure of credibility to be let in by the Palace Museum. So we went along, and saw some quite nice paintings. I am obsessed with scroll paintings. I just love them. So I bought a couple of the paintings there, the ones by that particular student, whose style I quite liked. Perhaps I was overcharged, but I have taken a supply-demand position on goods in China. I’ve decided that there is no such thing as getting “gibbed”. There is merely the price at which I’m willing to buy, and the price at which the seller is willing to sell. That’s capitalism, baby. So as long as I ask myself what price I’d be happy with before I start, and get some price at or below that once the bargaining is done, I walk away from the deal happy, and so does the vendor.

Anyway, we continued walking along, inside the Imperial Palace, just soaking in the beauty and majesty of the place, when I overheard some Australians talking about that same art show that we’d gone to. They said “man, we just got suckered into going to this ‘art show’ where they were just trying to sell their painting. What a con!” See, this is the sort of thing that just irritates me about Westerners in China. So many people just seem to thing that the world is out to get them, or to cheat them, or whatever. They have so many complaints about China that they fail to see the unbelievably rich culture around them. Of course and art show is about selling paintings. When was it not? Except when it’s an exhibition of Van Gogh or Monet or whatever, it’s all about selling the works.

At that point, I came to an understanding. All Westerners have complaints about China, be it the food, the language, the etiquette, whatever. My biggest complaint about China though, is hearing other Westerners complain about China. I hate it. It embarrasses me infernally. The amount of complaining and bitching and moaning that I overheard in Beijing from foreigners was just… it made me humiliated to be part of that cultural set.

Anyhoo. Enough bitching.

At the back end of the FC, there was a lovely little garden which, as Our Mate Roger explained, was used by the emperor for walking and contemplation after some long sessions of state. It was not made wonkily, as this photo might imply: it’s just the silly panorama feature on my camera…

We were getting silly by this stage, and were getting sick of the typical “chinese photo” shot – where you stand in front of the monument with a stick up your butt and say cheese in your head. So we began to take silly photos. Here’s Jessie showing her game face:

Here’s a pic of Jess doing her best Crocodile Hunter impersonation, from Tianan’men (literally, Gate of Heavenly Peace, which stands between Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City) looking towards the first gate leading into the Forbidden City.

I think that I’d better cut this particular entry short, and continue with the blogging tomorrow, or else you’ll all get square eyes. Look out in the following days for entries about the Great Wall, the Summer Palace, and the Temple of Heaven, amongst other things…