We've finally made it to Beijing. After 16 days on the road we've survived the noddles, rice and strange delicacies, weird but nice tea and a few beers along the way. We still don't know if our blog is updating OK so I'll leave the travel details to later and generalise on China. It's a nice place overall. The chinese have two very bad habits, Smoking and spitting. Seeing a granny hack up half a cigarette from her lungs and happily gob it in the middle of the street is not pleasant.
They also have a weird method of potty training. Little children, those that can just about walk wear tousers slit around the crotch. Bum and bits to the wind if they have the need they can just squat and go, literally. Some parents are conservative and have taught their kids to aim for gutter, others don't seem to mind as much. Sometime these kids aren't older than a few months, so I pity the parents when they're carrying the child!!!
Speaking of children, an easy way here to avoid the bed head/craddle cap most babies get is to keep the heads shaved. OK for a baby they don't sleep on the top of their head so a little mohican can be nice.
We've been on a few trains. Undeground, over ground and super fast 431KPH fast (about 260MPH). The idea of letting people get off the train before boarding doesn't qite exist. It makes for a bit of fun when you have 15 people with bags blocking your way out. You really have to learn to use your elbows !
Lastly the language. I've said it before (56 Nationalities in China, multiple languages per nationality - we where reminded today.) the language is the biggest barrier cause you just don't know what anything is. Even today walking down a street, you can't even guess what the doorway leads to unless they have some sort of English phrase somewhere. It is nice that so many Chinese have learnt English, not all of them are great certainly not up to red lorry, yellow lorry standard, but it's far better than our Chinese and they like showing us they can say hello etc. We've tried to learn some of the basics and I think I know the trick. Keep you teeth clenched, your tongue in the roof of you mouth and be careful with the inflections! We made a guy laugh last night with our failed attempt of pronuncing one of the place names. He was evesdropping, but couldn't help but laugh! If worst comes to worst, we point and do inpressions!!! That always works.
We head to Japan on Saturday for 4 days before North America. It's going to be nice being back on our own again after another group experience. We'll try and get the blog updated from there with pictures of everything.
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