rakish richard's rants...

Cardiologists Beware

Greetings again loyal readers!

I'm pleased to say that I'm here and having the time of my life in Beijing; a city that never sleeps, let alone serves vegetables.

But, we had to get here first, and that was an experience unto itself. Indulge me please...

In practise for the mighty Trans Siberian (more on that later) we caught the direct train from Nanning in the south, up to Beijing on Monday morning, rolling out of Nanning station at 9:50am.

We took what's classed as a 'hard sleeper', costing us about US$60 all the way to Beijing. It's apparently one of the fastest trains in China, but dawdles along at 160km/h compared to Japan's mighty Shinkansen (ooooo, still by far my favourite train in the whole world,universe, and everything - no returns.)

A journey that long is a good way to get a handle on the world's most populous nation, I'd have to say. Unlike Japan - where you can steam along at 300km/h between Tokyo and Osaka without seeing a break in the buildings - China has vast tracts of countryside, with almost all that I could see given over to developed farming. Also unlike Japan, the countryside is very beautiful, with concrete and power lines surprisingly discreet.

It's a big mother indeed, and most of the scenery of the first day continued on in the same vein; rice paddies, vegetable plots, and comrades carrying shovels and hoes as far as the eye could see. In the rural transport sector, forget being seen in anything less than a three ton three wheeled truck. Four wheels are for squares in this part of the world, stupid extra wheel...

The farmland is broken up with little villages (buy shares in bricks, pronto) which are all of similar design; small gabled brick huts with tiled roofs. In the smaller settlement these are detached dwellings, but in the larger communities they started to have small design features which were common to all the buildings, and were tangled together with a web of low walls forming private courtyards and streets. This is the best description I can give while rocketing past at 160km/h.

I wasn't going too fast however to see my first sheep in a really longtime, and have to admit that a tear or two of longing was shed, as I came face to face with that mighty animal - Behold the Mutton, in all its glory.

There were plenty of pigs and goats as well, but seeing them off the spit was too much of a shock to me, and I remain unimpressed. These were accomodated in much the same manner as the locals, with little brick roofed pens. Why is it that goats like to stand on top of things?

So, most of the first day was spent glued to the window, trying to imagine what it would be like doing it for 6 days solid. A good night's sleep was had, after dinner of instant noodles (chicken's feet seemed to be the favourite of the locals) and a couple of complimentary beers kindly offered by our neighbours.

One of the best things about China so far has been the almost total absence of you damned foreigners. We've met more locals here than in almost any other country, and we've only just got here. Our hair must still be on fire as we are still attracting stares just as well as we were before. The new trick is for people to just rock on up and start fondling Jules' dreadlocks. The percentage of people who ask if it's ok to do this is about the same as that of goats that weren't standing on top of something.

I, and I presume the rest of the carriage, was woken around 7am when the military recruitment advertisments started playing on the train TVs. Wonderfully inspiring, (unfortunately, I wasn't allowed to join) these showed a guy belting out a stirring dialogue in song, as all the divisions of the armed forces lined up behind him. The ads finished with the might of the Chinese Air Force unleashing a hail of missiles onto some unsuspecting target. It would have been really great, if it wasn't also really scary.

Shortly after the army recruitment drive came the obligatory calisthetics, and as I sat sipping my coffee (Jules was up there with them) the whole car got up and wholeheartedly stretched their way into the new day. Just to make sure that I'd let my last grip on reality slip away, the conductors then passed through the carriage demonstrating the unbeatable strength of the socks they were selling -by stretching them between two people and scratching them with pencilsand wire brushes. I did a quick check of how many times I've ruined socks by catching them on a stray pencil or wire brush and decided to pass up this otherwise excellent offer.

By now we were approaching Beijing, where mining seems to have becomethe major rural pastime - mile after mile (leave me alone, you metric freaks...) of power line hangs from posts sitting on little pedestals of land, the surroundings having been lowered by two metres or morefrom constant digging. Vast amounts of acreage have been lowered intothe ground, and in the vertical walls of these depressions you couldsee the occasional door covering an underground room. According tothe Lonely Planet, over 100 million Chinese live in buildings with one or more wall buried in the earth, terrible for shelving, tough colour to match to...

Along the way we met up with Bessie, who is training at the Beijing University of Acupunture and Moxibustion. She was returning from one year's maternity leave down in Nanning, to resume her studies, and insisted on helping us once we arrived in Beijing. Thanks to her we managed to actually exit the massive train station in Beijing, board a bus, and get over to her university. As if things weren't too much like a Coen Brothers movie by this stage, we were led into her professor's office (no english, not a lick) where we took green tea and proceeded to mime out our adventures. The poor lady was more than a little bit frazzled at all this, so wordlessly disappeared from the room, only to return with three students who proudly pronounced, "We are students of this University!" and kindly offered to 'introduce us to' each and every one of the sights of Beijing that we happened to show interest in.

After tactfully allowing these offers to evaporate into the social wastelands, Bessie took us onward to begin the mission of finding us a hotel. It's a lot more expensive here, but the amount you're prepared to pay increases inversely in proportion to the temperature, and after four hours in the biting cold, we decided to go it alone, taking our map in hand and hitting the taxis.

We're now settled in the south of Beijing, about 1km south of the famous Sky Temple, after looking at 6 different hotels before making it here. We promptly celebrated our check in with a meal round the corner, where we discovered that our Russian Roulette style 'lets-just-point-at-something-on-the-menu' strategy had inevitably hit a full chamber. Now, I know, loyal readers, that I'm a fan of a little bit of warming fat; it's good for the complexion (especially when rubbed on), and keeps out the winter cold. You could even say(and some have), that I'm a bit of a 'fatty', but this was unprecedented - we ended up with two of the fattiest meals I have ever seen in all my days of guzzling fatty meals. My beef noodles contained half a dozen lumps of stewed fat, and our plate of beef stew had SO much fat that if any of the broth dripped on the table, it set hard within 30 seconds.

Eeeeewwww....

Still, it was delicious to the last drop.

Our time since then has been slowed, as the fat is starting to congeal in my joints, where I hope it will be stalled and prevented from reaching my heart.

It's BITTERLY cold here, and clothes shopping is high on the agenda. Having come from more than 6 months of summer weather, I'm pretty poorly prepared, but have my eye on a big old furry hat and matching jacket, which is sooooo next season you're just going to wet your pants.

We took in the opera last night, a snap decision which proved to be pretty fun. Perhaps aimed a little more at the tourists than the locals, it's full of a lot of jumping and leaping, which is great for fans of Mary Lou Retton. It's also full of a lot of extremely high pitched, drawn out singing: One minute of singing (over some of the most discordant music I've ever heard, even during the recording of the Cosmic Wheel's Difficult Second Album) produced merely the caption, "I find us congenial." They did all the classics, including'The Innkeeper', and 'The Goddess of Heaven Scatters Flowers', but it was 'Donating a Pearl At Rainbow Bridge' that really took the cake. This ended with the female lead - let's call her Pearl - standing in a circle of men, spinning around kicking the 8 or so staffs that were being continuously thrown at her; some of the best foot juggling I've seen since 1986.

I took the final leap in preparation for the last stage of the journey, and laid down my deposit for the Trans Siberian. On December 4th at 10:50pm I will leave Beijing, travelling non-stop to Moscow, where I will arrive on the 10th of December at 6pm, 9004km later. Recent changes to Russian visa application procedure from China have meant that the only way I can do it is to book an accomodation package- despite having someone I can stay with in Moscow. It's an expensive option, but Rakish Richard just can't back out now, and I'm now booked on the train journey that 'makes every other train seem like once round the block on Thomas the Tank Engine', according to one book. Along with my booking, I also got a free CD of 'train themed' songs, which eased the pain of forking out nearly 900 euros for my ticket and accomodation.

I don't profess to have done this with any of the finesse of forward planning, and the whole journey can be done a lot cheaper if you can eliminate the need to book accomodation in Russia. MonkeyShrine are the folks I went through, and they can put together ticket-only packages if you have visas sorted out. They're at www.monkeyshrine.com. (Don't all of you budding businesses expect free advertising here either, it ain't gonna happen...)

So loyal readers, with my passport now on its way to Hong Kong for express processing, I have 9 more days to pass here. Think I'll goand see a preserved communist leader, hear the state's version on theTiananmen Square Massacre (where students massacred innocent soldiers, apparently), and there's some big wall around here too that I might check out.

Beijing really is a vast city. It's taken me hours to get around, the scale of it is pretty staggering. It's pretty obvious too that the city is already in the grip of pre-Olympic preparations, and I've counted at least 20 super-size construction projects on the go - any of which would be a huge building in Tokyo or London. I have no idea where the massive sums of money for this are coming from, but no small amount is certainly being taxed from my wallet, as accomodation and admission fees are several times more than anywhere else we've been. The next week or so will be costly, but I have a good feeling about Beijing, despite the cold. Once I'm kitted out in my army surplus hat and jacket, I'll be ready for anything.

Well, I've almost digested my first ever Peking Duck, (clocking in pretty high on the 'fatty' scale) and it's about time for beddie-byes for this lad.

Till next time, and thanks again to Berin 'Amazing Grace' McKenzie, my chief media distributor, muse, lord and master, idol, (and copy editor) extraordinaire.

Your man on the winter diet,

Arch :)

PS: Just kidding, I didn't really eat all the beef stew. I have standards, for Pete's sake...

posted by Arch @ 6:43 AM