Somewhere in... Seoul (already!)

We haven't been in touch with you for a long time, but we didn't know it would be so difficult to find an internet cafe in Beijing! So you would need to be a bit patient to see the lovely photos of Mao or of the Chinese Great Wall which was really amazing. But again I am writing ahead of time...

From Taian we took the local train to Jinan, where we waited for a super fast connection to Beijing. In the local train we were once again the biggest attraction but I must say that everybody took great care of us and they made sure that we have a place to sit, considering we had standing tickets, this was impresive. Beijing was our last destination on our Chinese adventure and we left it today quite sadly, as we must say, after all we will miss China, its people and the culture. It took us couple of weeks:) to get used to the chaos, cultural differences and trying to be understood in English was sometimes very tiring, but the places we have seen and especially the people we have met can't be forgotten too quickly! At the end we have realised that there are still so many places to see, which seemed to be very remote in the beginning of our travel, but now after four weeks of our stay we would be ready to jump to the adventure and travel to more remote places. Or may be I am saying it because we are already in Seoul and China is left behind or because the time we spent in Beijing was unforgetable.

Beijing was amazing as well - the huge Mao portrait at the entrance and the grey rainy sky were giving the Forbidden city and the Tianamen square special, mystical atmosphere. The preparations for the next year Olympic games are giving Beijing special touch of rebuilding, rushing, replacing, so we couldn't wonder that some of "the" temples, or buildings were completely covered and you could just imagine the beauty behind the walls. But we could survive and still enjoyed the Summer Palace, Temple of Heaven, Lama Temple and other obligatory atractions for Beijing, which are staggeringly beautiful. Enjoying the best czech cuisine in these days we couldn't forget to taste the famous Beijing duck - which was just yummy! (it had to be for that price:) so with a lovely dinner in the traditional chinese restaurant we have celebrated our fifth month of travelling! Yes, it is incredible and it flies fast. It seems like ages ago when we landed in Bangkog and tried to get around:)

My great sis got us in touch with some czech people in the czech embassy and at the end it worked out that we could stayed in their appartement. So you could imagine that we felt pretty special showing the taxi driver address of the embassy as our hotel for the week:) Of course it wasn't just the place, but as well the hospitability of our hosts (the czech cooking, czech discussions, magazines, even the sockets in the walls were like in Czech). So once, only once on our journey with Pedro we were not surrounded by Portuguese history, stories and people, but by Czechs - the best nation in the whole world (please, let me have my five minutes fame and bear with us:)

Of course no tour of China would be complete without a trip to the Great wall! We have decided to do a bit different trip to the Wall and tried to get to the part, which was still original and a bit far from Beijing. We have no idea how, but we found a minibus, which took two hours to get us to a small town of Miyun and from there we shared a vehicle with a Chinese/German couple for an amazing ten km trek starting from Simatai and finishing in Jingshaling, along beautiful watch towers, steep crumbling steps always with continuous stretch of the Wall all the way before and behind us. Just check the photos! It was a fantastic day and trip but we arrived to Beijing completely tired. It was worth every step...

We said good-bye to China and took a plane to our next destination - Seoul, South Korea where we met up with two Americans Rachel & Nathan, who teach English in Seoul. With only one day to spend in Seoul, we got but a taste of this tidy, sofisticated city, which is the third biggest metropolis in the world.

We are off again, next to Japan, our last opportunity to use real asian chop sticks, where we'll patiently wait for Richard who will come from the UK for these coming two weeks of japanese exploration. Now we're off for some korean food and milky rice wine, only three months left and so much to see!

P.S. To see the photos, please go to both links now and start using the Where to look - photos I

Somewhere in...Shandong

We have arrived to Shandong, an overnight journey by train which would have been very comfortable - the beds and carriage certainly were -had it not been for the fact that we shared our 4-bed carriage with a guy who must certainly rank amongst the world's loudest snorers. As we tried (unsuccessfully) to sleep through the constant, never-ending rumble, we remembered all the people we met who annoyed us in their sleep through their snoring, and issued a silent apology - their snores were nothing compared to this earth-trembling experience.

But our adventures continue in the strange land of China, with so many stories to tell that when we find ourselves in front of the computer the choice is just overwhelming and many tales remain to be told over the next months, over drinks, recalling the whole otherworldness of this country. Just the other day I was reminded of the sight which at first did not seem so strange, of the Chinese markets where fish is killed at the moment of being ordered by the customer, with the severed head still breathing and apparently seeing its own body being prepared for packing (hope you have not just had lunch as you are reading this! ). Strange thing is, when we first saw it happen, it just seemed like another very weird Chinese thing to do, and so "shelled" we are now, the bizarre just seems normal!

The other side of this "bizareness" is that there are just so many wonderful, beautiful, ancient buildings that one just thinks, "oh just another 2000 years old beautiful temple, so what?" - the world heritage places we have been visiting would be a world famous attraction had they been in some other more exposed country, and in Shandong province where we are now, halfway through Shanghai to Beijing, we have visited two towns where these world heritage places are dazzling. Qufu is the hometown of Confucius, a sage from 2500 years ago, and a huge complex of temples has been created over all this time to create a huge area of extremely old, beautiful buildings, the Confucius Temples and Mansions. Qufu itself was a breath of fresh air, a tiny village of only 90,000 people!

We are now in Tai'an, a bigger town with a gorgeous Dai Temple from 1000AD, another world heritage site, the gateway to pilgrims going up the nearby sacred Tai Shan mountain, which we did not get to climb (the high admission price of 13e was a contributing factor, as was the fog and the luxurious hotel room we are staying in!) And tomorrow we move on to the capital and final stop for this vast country, whose size we just managed to grasp, whose people and habits we are only now starting to comprehend. And we have just read that quite a few more world heritage sites await us in Beijing's neighborhood! How bizarre!

Somewhere in ... Shanghai

So we are moving forward on our journey through this imense country. After our stay in Hangzhou, we took a bus (the tickets are bought in the china post office!) to Suzhou - town famous for its Unesco heritage gardens and beautiful women (as Pedro said, he could see the point about the women. For details please ask him:) We were welcomed into the house of Trevor, the English teacher, who is teaching at an international school and is getting ready for his next teaching mission in Quatar. He introduced us to the local teachers expat community and we had a fantastic evening cruising the canals of Suzhou and seeing the lights on the historical buildings (chinese folks like it, when everything is sparkling and full of lights). For three days we walked and walked and saw every single corner of each garden, which are really impressive with beautiful old chinese architecture. Of course we forgot that it was a weekend so the number of visitors at least tripled, but well, we are getting used to it and the crowds are almost nothing to us anymore (well, we might be really trying to persuade ourselves hard on this topic:)

But well, Suzhou itself was great and we really loved our time there, enjoying the delicious tea, chinese whiskey or great australian wine with Trevor.

The next task which was upon us was to buy train tickets for Shanghai. Even though the train departs almost every 20 minutes, the first available train was after 2 hours from our arrival to the train station. I guess, we don't have to repeat that there was at least one million people in the train station:) But well we have succeeded and got to Shanghai, the booming metropolis with almost 19 million people living here. Again we were welcomed to a lovely house of French expats couple Beatrice and Michel (yes, yes don't believe us, but we are practicing our French a bit and got to the decision - again - that there must have been something wrong with our stay in Strasbourg, as we find ourselves missing a word here and there in our french conversation). Shanghai is huge! Big skyscrapes, business and shopping centres, overcrowded underground and on the other side you see the old part, the poorer one with traditional architecture, small houses cramped beside each other, old chinese people practising their thaichi in a park and together with a french concession quarter it shows you completely different face of Shanghai. Again we were very lucky as Beatrice showed us around and almost as a local, speaking chinese in the markets getting better deals for us we saw the hidden corners and beautiful details which are not described in lonely planet. Michel introduced us to his German & Japanese colleagues and we have experienced the beauty of business dinners again. This is exactly what makes our journey so special. It is not just the visits of temples and seeing different landscapes, it is the people we meet, their views, philosophies and stories they share.

It will be difficult to leave Shanghai as we really enjoyed it here but it is time to take an overnight train (we will let you know how did it go) and make our way towards Beijing, stopping in a place called Qufu, hometown of Confucius.

Somewhere in ... the most beautiful city in China, Hangzhou

... Or this is at least what the adverts in the TV are saying. To be honest, this regular sized town (6 million people!!) is situated by a beautiful lake surrounded by gardens, small hills and old temples. We are staying in the university campus, in a "hotel" :) for foreign students. So from the expats point of view we are seeing China from the eyes of university students, in particular from Colombia.

China is definitely a new adventure for us and a completely different world. We are still not sure what picture should we draw about this part of our trip. Now we are in a internet cafe, where 95% of all people here are playing on line games. To order food we draw cows and pigs to make sure that we are understood and lonely planet, the language part, is helping us to get a bus tickets to our next destination, when we point to single words - ticket, bus, two, friday...:) So far we are OK, not lost and had duck for lunch today:)

We imagined that China will be a bit crowded, but we haven't seen soo many people in the streets before. Of course we have arrived as well during the Golden week, which is the Chinese national holidays, so that the whole country was travelling... We understand as well why it is not soo easy to hire a car in China. We were always saying that Italian drivers are bad, but we hadn't been to China yet. There is a huge chaos on the streets, nobody respects any rules, pavements, zebra crossings or traffic lights, everybody is honking. Imagine pedestrians, car drivers, bicycles in the centre of a big city ans multiply the number at least 10 times and you got the picture. Don't worry we are getting used to it and holding hands when crossing like it is on the traffic signs in Europe:)

Tonight we are going to continue in our adventure and going out with the international students. We saw the most amazing scene yesterday, when students from Columbia and Congo spoke together in chinese, as it is their mutual language:) this is something I call - international.

We are going to stay in Hangzhou for another two nights and on Friday we will take a bus to Suzhou another small town with 5.7 million chinese! So cross fingers for us... we will let you know!

Somewhere in . .. Xiamen, China

We are now in the real China, after having made a short stopover at Hong Kong. Hong Kong was very distinct to Macau, certainly a lot less older european architecture, as the British architectural legacy seems to have been less marked than that of the Portuguese in Macau, but such a huge hub of activity! We walked around the streets of Hong Kong for the two days, visiting strange markets of goldfish (a street filled with goldfish shops), and exotic pet birds, both of which are treasured in most Hong Kong homes, and went through the business district to look at the huge skyscrapers and to find among them remnants of the "old", more chinese Hong Kong. But what really marvelled us was the "Light Show" where the entire Hong Kong skyscraper skyline coordinates itself into a wonderful dance of synchronised colour schemes and music, just over the water!

On we flew (cheaply, flights in China are priced according to distances mostly and usually have pretty good prices) to Xiamen, our first destination in China proper. Xiamen is an old port city given concession to the European countries following the first Opium Wars, and retains some of the charm from that age, particularly in the island ahead of us of Gulang Yu in which no cars or motorbikes are allowed, a welcome respite from the polluted air and sound that is so pervasive elsewhere. But Xiamen has also presented us with a different China - a bustling, modern one, with clean wide pavements, greenery, well ordered and with very old charming budhist temples where many come to worship, next to immense, impressive skyscrapers (Xiamen is by Chinese standards a relatively smaller city, with only 1.2 million people).
Even if one feels the weight of a high density population, with so many people on the street and a chaotic traffic, Xiamen feels like a relaxed place to stroll around.


And furthermore we are lucky to be hosted by John, a danish expat who has very kindly welcomes us into his beautiful home, where we have the cosiness of a lovely place to stay in a great location, and more importantly a chance to meet (and seriously party with) a lot of people living here and who give us a wonderful insight into life in China - today we are going for lunch with the entire office workers (for of course some lovely Chinese food)!! All in all, a great start to our Chinese trip! We leave Xiamen for Hangzhou, near Shanghai, tomorrow morning, for our next stage... more news to follow then!

Somewhere in Macau

So our chinese adventure has now officially started! Back to the familiar smells of Asia, we are delighted to see again the deliciously looking food stalls, the incense-smelling budhist temples, the extremely useful low prices! But there is more to Macau than its oriental side, the one we had found in Thailand and Malaysia. There are two more sides to Macau in fact: Portugal and Gambling.

The Portuguese heritage of Macau, their administrative territory for 500 years, is clear everywhere: all signs and labels are in portuguese, still one of the official languages, the paved cobblestones adorn most streets in Macau in wonderful designs, buildings everywhere in the city would not look out of place in any portuguese city - and yet they seem odd in such a Chinese context! This is the part of Macau though which draws many of the tourists, most of them Chinese, having this south european feel to a chinese city, as exemplified by the ruins of St.Paul's Church, the symbol of Macau


But the other thing which draws the tourists, in throngs, is gambling. Macau is now rightfully dubbed the Las Vegas of the East, with casinos to rival its Nevada cousin and not lose out in comparison. So amazing to see them, a visual opolence to the eye, casinos adorned with neon colours, water games, british-looking guards, amazing collections of jade sculptures, and ever more casinos being built! And yet we cannot but admit that walking at night down the casino strip of Macau, there is an excitement, a visual circus, which is somewhat strangely appealing!

Now it is time to leave Macau, and the comfort and portuguese home-made meals of Pedro's uncles home (muito obrigado!!), to move on, chinese visa in hand (for one month, the time we will be spending here). Hong Kong and Xiamen loom ahead, and their stories will follow!