Blocked Blog #1 Skiing the Back Bowls of Vail

So I am indeed blocked from accessing my blog, facebook, youtube, and
hundreds of other sites on the web, so my blog will now be carried out
via email until I leave china or am in some region that perhaps allows
it. Thank heavens ESPN.com is not blocked however.

I have noticed that my trip the last couple of weeks has seemed like
a day in the back bowls of vail: being in places like the China Bowl,
Inner Mongolia Bowl, Outer Mongolia Bowl, Siberian Bowl, Orient
Express lift Ghengis Khaan run, etc.

8-22 Left Ulaan Baatar early in the morning on the chinese train that
was coming from moscow and heading to Beijing. I share my cabin with
Qu (the korean I went to Terelj NP with) and two mongolian students
(who were making out on the top bunk most the time) who go to school
in Beijing. Also in my same car were the 4 swiss university guys that
I had met in Listvyanka and Irkutsk a couple of weeks ago. I spent
most of my time in their cabin bc a. they are fun and b. the love fest
going on in my cabin. Being the partying swiss guys that they are, we
ended up playing quite a lot of drinking games with mongolian beer and
of course vodka. They are also big into doing these bets where if you
lose you have to eat a whole lemon or an orange peel or a scorpion or
snake (in china). When I was with them before Didye had had to eat a
whole lemon. So we played that game again. They think all americans
are quite poor at geography (rightly so since a lot of americans seem
to mix these swiss up with swedes), so they tried to get me at
geography. But I avoided eating lemons by correctly naming 12 of the
14 countries that border China, getting 80% of the european capital
cities (the ones I couldn't get are those eastern european countries
like maldova, bosnia and herzegovenia, lithuania, bulgaria, etc. I
also avoided a scorpion and another lemon by naming 6 cantons
(provinces) in switzerland (little did they know I had travelled
through switzerland a couple of times and I remembered that most of
their cantons are just named after big cities) and by guessing 5
cantons i Sweden (I am reading a swedish novel right now and visited a
couple of them with Kim and Clare, so they were fresh in my memory).
I do, however, have to eat a lemon for not being able to name 10 plays
in the british premier league (soccer). They, however, have to each
eat a lemon and a scorpion b/c they could not between all 4 of them,
name 10 capitals of our 50 states. They managed 7 and couldn't for
the life of them believe me that san francisco and new york city are
not capitals.
Sometime around 9pm we arrived at the border. It was funny bc the
chinese were playing some loud patriotic sounding border. The border
crossing took 4 or 5 hours (don't know bc i fell asleep) bc the tracks
are different widths in mongolia/russia than china so they have to
lift each car up and change the wheels. The scenery up to that point
had been the typical deserted mongolian steppe changing into empty
desert.

8/23 I woke up and I was in China. The route from the border to
Beijing was probably the most scenic of the entire st. petersburg to
beijing trip. Through some gorgeous canyons, along rivers, with views
of the great wall snaking along the mountains. Of course as soon as
we were in china there were huge cities and life everywhere. I also
noticed that china seemed to have construction going on everywhere and
tons of coal mining and dams, but also a fair amount of windmills.
One portion of the gorge we went through was quite an engineering feat
with lots of tunnels, bridges, etc. Sort of similar to the glenwood
canyon, but a bit wider and longer. And they had highways criss
crossing the top of the gorge via bridges all the time.

Arrived in Beijing around 2pm, got some money, said goodbye to the
swiss and Qu and took the subway to where Lukas (the other czech guy I
met in indonesia that was traveling with Martin, who I stayed with in
prague). Lukas is working here for a year with an internship. Lukas
is great bc China is quite difficult to travel in bc of the language
and just other barriers, so he helped me book some train tickets (he
speaks chinese) and is going to help me with the tibet permit. He
hasn't travelled much in china except to tibet, but he is annoyed by
chinese travel and doesn't think it is very good for independent
travel (and he should know as he has spent the last 5 years basically
travelling through Asia, s. america, africa, australia...his dad had
given him a bunch of money hopeing he would spend it on education, but
he chose to educate himself by traveling) bc it is just travel on a
grid and very difficult and often expensive bc budget hotels for
instance aren't allowed to have foreigners stay unless they are above
3 star. So if you are away from hostels or dorms you could be in
trouble. From just reading the lonely planet I have gathered that it
is difficult (also being such a huge country makes travel more
difficult), but I have picked a few main sites to see and should have
a good time seeing them.

He said something funny that he did here was to go skiing. Everyone
in China is so bad at skiing that although Lukas is only so so, they
would all sit and clap for him at the bottom bc he was that much
better. Lukas says he is excited to get back to the Czech republic as
his internship ends in September. He’s a bit tired of Beijing though
he says he will miss the Beijing girls because he definitely has the
“yellow fever” He says the girls here are so much more gentle,
curious, and shy than the European girls, and he really likes that.

Although he said that china will be difficult to travel in, he is
excited for me to go to India. He says that India is just magical for
travel. The best he’s done. He had 3.5 months in India and wished he
could have had way more.


Finding Lukas’ place was a bit tough. He had given me the subway stop
and that he was in building 15 of the giant red buildings at out of
the station. I found the giant red buildings and a 15, so I called
his room, 1907. Someone that only spoke Chinese answered and couldn’t
understand me when I was saying Lukas. So I went back outside and
noticed that several buildings were 15. I was looking all confused,
so a Chinese gal that spoke English asked me if I needed help. I told
her I was looking for 15. Well, apparently 14 and 16 are unlucky
numbers so instead of writing them, they write 15 minus one or 15 plus
one, so she pointed me in the correct direction for plain 15.

We went out for a coke float before he had to go to chinese class, and
then tonight we will go out to eat. One of the awesome things about
having a friend who lives in beijing and speaks chinese is that he can
not only help me out with travel a lot but take me to the best places
to eat (beijing is one of those culinary hot beds) and such. When I
got off the subway near his house and walked through a market and
smelled the food, I immediately had a big smile on my face. It felt
great to be back in Asia. Mongolia is obviously asia, but not on the
culinary level like SE asia or japan and china.

Lukas lives in a big building complex on the 20th floor in an area
with lots of expats and international students. So lots of westerners
walking around compared with most of beijing. I met a couple of his
roomates, a chinese gal and a western guy, garrett.

It's quite a shock going from the least densely populated country in
the world to the most populous in the world. Beijing itself is the
size of Belgium (according to my guidebook), but packed with tall
buildings. You can imagine, then how many people are here as belgium,
back when I was working for sapidyne there, took me quite some time to
drive from oostende to the southern border with luxembourg. Beligium
is small, but not THAT small. But I had a very good impression of
beijing so far. Very clean and nice and the subway was the easiest
and best I have been on for a country that doesn't speak english.
Everything was written in english and english characters and they even
had english reminders over the loudspeakers. Qu said that they
cleaned up the city quite a bit and made it more foreigner friendly
for the olympics. I am quite thankful for that. So much easier to
get around than in russian with the cyrillic. However, I figure that
once out of beijing it will only be chinese characters and mandarin.
The air quality also appeared nice today, but Lukas said that during
most of the summer it has just been hot, humid, and polluted. He said
he only saw the sun 3 times during june and july bc of all the black
smoke. But with the arrival of fallish weather the skies clear and
the temperature and humidity drops, so I am happy for that! Lukas
said that the pollution is so bad here in the summer (and then again
in the winter) that most people develop coughs and colds. He had a
cough for 2 months straight in june and july.

Tomorrow I am going to go explore a bit and also try to get my visa
extended, just so I don't run into any trouble with overstaying my
visa. I have a feeling that Chinese prisons aren't a place you want
to go to, and China isn't so easy to leave at a drop of the hat like
other countries are bc of how fully booked transport can be. Trains
tickets open up 10 days in advance and lukas was there 1 hour after it