so far - will be updating from here

Sorry, Big Brother sees fit for me to update my site but not view the final product or to view any comments from my readers. In fact, because the interface is all in Chinese, I cannot even tell if there are comments. Do comment though, I will reply when I get to an off-label machine or home, whichever comes first.

Style will vary based on queue for computer and connection quality.

Friday the 7th/Saturday the 8th: uneventful travel via Chicago and Tokyo. JAL seats tiny but luckily we had an empty seat next us - the only one on the flight from Chicago to Tokyo, I think. That 5 hour layover in Tokyo was deadly. Sooooo tired.

Sunday the 9th: forbidden city
Tiananmen (the gate, not the square) is awe-inspiring. The forbidden city is fascinating too.

Monday the 10th: climbed the wall at Simatai. incredible though visibility was not always good. In fact, there was a down-pour just as we started back down the mountain. Yolande has never been 5 hours away from dry clothes before.

Oddly enough, I think Yolande has experienced a lot more culture shock than I have. She finds the city quite dirty and our neighbourhood rather rundown. I haven't seen any parts as dirty as Chinatown or Kensington. I also think that she's a little put out by the traffic chaos and the complete lack of "the customer is always right" attitude in the city.

Tuesday the 11th: summer palace. perfect day to do it - hot and muggy. still big crowds even though it's a weekday. irritatingly, the long corridor closed for renovation.

We used public transit to get there. I was very impressed with the subway system. Extremely easy to navigate, all the information you could want clearly and frequently displayed. Unfortunately, we chose a simpler but longer surface route for most of the route. Not so enjoyable except that: there were TVs in the bus (got to watch some of the world cup highlights) and we went by some of the most important University campuses in Beijing.

We still haven't figured out how to get the TV in our room to work.

Wednesday the 12th: Ming tombs and great wall at Badaling. pretty nice tour guide but some required stops at Jade, silk, and tea "factories", i.e., guided shopping. very fun day. stayed up much too late chatting with Yolande.

Thursday the 13th: Tiananmen square but skipping Mao's tomb. WAY too many people.All afternoon in the Temple of Heaven. A very nice park/historica attraction. Some souvenier shopping in the evening and chatting with the hostel staff.

Friday the 14th: pretty much a day off. transfer to another (really nice) Beijing hotel to start the JBC tour. did some walking around. watched some older people doing some traditional dancing in a bank parking lot.

Saturday the 15th: fly to Urumqi (Wulumuqi), Xinjiang province. population 2 million, lovely climate, beautiful valley setting. city farther from the ocean than any other in the world. 5 star hotel. too weird. spend evening walking through the local market. kinda like the shabby parts of kensington but much larger.

strange tour system. It seems we're the only ones who signed up. So far it's just me, Yolande, our guide, and our "driver" in a big-ass Honda. Our driver is obviously some bigshot friend of the tour operator and he is treated like royalty in every restaurant we go. and we're going to nice restaurants.

Sunday the 16th: morning at heavenly lake and heavenly mountain. Just gorgeous. hope my photos turn out. afternoon in nice new museum. mummies made Yolande uncomfortable.

Monday the 17th: drive to Turpan (with same guide and driver), 3 hours away but near one of the lowest land depressions with some of the hottest temperatures ever recorded. waiting until 5pm to start touring when heat should subside. famous for grapes. hotel on the shabby side but email access under one Cdn dollar per hour.

Monday afternoon: Jiaohe ruins. An ancient city on the silk road. Fascinating and beautiful. Whereas I was a puddle of sweat and sunscreen in Beijing because of the constant 30+ temperatures and 90%+ humidity, Yolande really suffered in the 40+ heat and 0% humidity of Turpan. Poor woman doesn't sweat.

Tuesday the 18th: Gaochang ruins, Astana tombs, a vinyard, and a high-wire act [watching, not performing :P ].

Food in Xinjiang province (Urumqi and Turpan) has been delicious.

Tuesday the 18th/Wednesday the 19th: overnight train to Dunhuang in Gansu province. shared a cabin with two Hong Kong business men. slept great. new guide and driver in Dunhuang. still just the two of us in a Honda, but just a Civic maybe, not an enormous one.

Wednesday the 19th: Silk Road Museum in Dunhuang - small but effective. Several hours touring the MoGao grottoes (caves) with a bizarre but fascinating guide and two Americans. The MoGao grottoes is as LonelyPlanet says, "one of the greatest repositories of Buddhist art in the world". dinner first bad meal in China but our guide got us an apology, at least.

FABULOUS hotel in a gorgeous sand dune setting a little outside of town.

Thursday the 20th: drive out to the Jade gate (WuMenGuan) and the Western-most (I think) section of the great wall, both build during the Han dynasty. updating blog while waiting for the heat to break so that we can go climbing sand dunes. It's not even so hot, really.

Thursday evening: climbed sand dunes at Crescent Lake. I took a camel ride, Yolande took a slide on a toboggan.

Friday the 21st: pretty much just killing time. went to the white horse pagoda, which is a monument to a monk's horse, not the important white horse pagoda. helped our taxi driver change a tire on the way. just waiting for our flight to Xi'an.

Friday evening: arrive in Xi'an, Shanxi (aka Shaanxi) province, start of the silk road and capital of numerous Chinese dynasties, notably Han and Tang. quick dinner at the airport then about a one hour drive into Xi'an. Our guide, Yang, is terrific. terrific English, outgoing, intelligent, great conversationalist. laughs at all the right times. He is also a rabbit. It's a good thing he's one of our last guides. Anyone else who follows will/would disappoint.

Saturday the 22nd: Qin Terracotta Army Museum. amazing. Thousands of life-sized terracotta soldiers placed in battle formation as part of the tomb of the second last Qin emperor, Qin Shi Huang. roughly 2200 years old, rediscovered by farmers in 1974. I hope my photos turned out - no flash photography was allowed. Of course, I had my photo taken with a general. Please refer to my previous entry titled: If the shoe fits.... Also, Huaqing Hot Springs then the Shaanxi Provincial Museum, which has great artifacts and exhibits from Neolithic to Tang times. The post-Tang exhibits pale in comparison to those in Beijing.

Saturday evening: Xi'an dumpling banquet with song/dance performance of supposed Tang style. kinda entertaining.

Sunday the 23th: buddhist temple in Xi'an, fly to Chongqing. City has roughly 8 million, municipality has roughly 31 million. Ever heard of it? was completely rebuilt since being utterly destroyed in WWII. dinner, tea "ceremony", i.e., sales pitch, and quick tour of a park before boarding the MS Sunshine after dark for a 3 night, 2.5 day cruise to Yichang along the Yangzi, properly called the Chongjiang.

We learn that there will be Chinese, German, French, Spanish, and Canadian citizens on board. Seems odd. No Americans? In China, only some hotels are allowed to take foreigners, so maybe boats are only allowed to accept specific varieties of foreigners? We tried to guess the reason. I had two ideas. 1. They don't want Chinese people mixing with Americans for the same reason they don't want Chinese people reading blogger.com. seemed weak. perhaps 2. Americans attract attention and thus require more security to quell any lobbyist or protest activity that follows them. We were later told that it was simply a matter of marketing. Our boat targets European and domestic travellers. I'm still not sure what the deal really is.

Final count 120 passengers (2 French, 2 Canadian, 18ish Spanish, 30ish German, remainder Chinese) capacity 160, 110 crew.

Monday the 24th: meet our table mates: a middle-aged French passengers, three middle-aged Germans who were travelling together, a 28-yo German woman, and us. 5 speak French well. 5 speak German well. 6 speak English well. 2 speak Spanish well, 2 poorly. based on talkativeness and assertiveness of the personalities, most group conversation was in French or German. Side conversations were had in English and Spanish. We came to like each other very much.

excursion to Ghost temple. kinda boring actually. after 3 meals, we conclude that the food is going to be mediocre for the whole cruise. "Fashion show" by a dozen or so of the cruise. good sports. takes a lot of humility. A drunk HK business man made an ass of himself by joining in several times.

Tuesday the 25th: findout that Herr Professor Ralf has sprained his ankle. cannot join us on the excursion to Badong, where most locals are from the Tojiao (sp?) minority. I overheard our local guide complain that she had so many foreigners but luckily she was able to switch and we got John, an adorable Tojiao guide with good English. At one temple, he tried to convince me to pray to a goddess who is supposed to grant sons but I refused.

On the way back to the boat, four of us split on a kitsch cane for Ralf. Also, I had made a tiny bit of small chat with some Spaniards earlier and then when one Spanish lady asked me to translate what the English guide was saying, my brain hung. Insufficient memory error. The cache was full. Although I'm not sure whether to say my head was full or empty. But I was paralysed.

Early in the day we entered the Three Gorges. Right when we entered, my camera went kaputt. ah well. No more photos from here on out.

talent show by the crew and passengers. Passenger portions we three karaoke songs and the limbo, which a german group taught to the crowd, who had never seen it before but ate it up.

Wednesday the 26th: excursion to see the locks and dam just upstream from Yichang. pretty impressive. no amount of reading or listening can do justice to a structure that can produce 84 GW of electricity. yes GIGAWATTS, 84 of them.

Before we left, Ralf gave me a small present. A Chinese painting that the onboard artist had made. Carolina, the younger German got one too. I think he was very touched by the cane and wanted to reciprocate.

find out that the French couple received their very first communication in French from the boat. There was no French guide. There were Spanish and German guides and the Chinese guide doubled as an English guide as necessary. The handouts were available in German, English and Chinese only. What is the first communication they get? A handout explaining how and how much to tip. We were horrified. They even asked us to label our tip envelopes with name and room number!

disembark at noon at Yichang. lunch - where we happened to meet up with Carolina. embroidery "factory", where we again meet up with Carolina. but that's it. She's off to Wuhan, we fly to Shanghai. Like Dunhuang, Yichang has only one gate at its airport.

flight late arriving in Shanghai. traffic is insane. Like Beijing only lanes are narrower and streets are more irregularly shaped. Nothing close to a grid, lots of intersections. just enough time to make it to dinner and then an acrobatic show, which was very, very entertaining.

Thursday the 27th: silk "factory". souvenir shopping. Yu Yuan garden. lunch. walk along the Band (river side boardwark). Yolande had a small rest in the afternoon at the hotel and I walked around the hotel. very cute area. A short pedestrian street called duo lun lu. The restaurant at our hotel is called duo lun duo or Toronto.

5 minutes after we arrived at a vast but empty restaurant for dinner, who appears but the three middle-aged Germans? too strange. Our guides don't even know each other or work for the same company.

After dinner we had free time to stroll along (one of?) Shanghai's most famous shopping street(s), Nanjing. We killed tons of time and spend the last of our RMB at Shanghai's biggest bookstore. This place was huge. You can take the teacher out of the school but... Anyway, I left with 13 books (including three Chinese language textbooks) but spent under 50 dollars.

Now, I'm just killing time updating the blog. There's plenty of time for sleeping on the flights home.