It's me, reporting to you finally from inside the Great Firewall of China!
Just kidding. I'm outside of China now...nobody breaks the wall.
This is going to be a quick one because I'm once again zipping off somewhere else again but I have to tell you that bar all the, er, obvious oppression, I absolutely fell in love with Beijing. It's what all the travellers I met coming the other way on the Trans-Siberian called 'a city of contradictions' (in a very guidebook-written-by-Louis-Theroux kind of way) and you can see why: Starbucks coffee stores are crammed inside traditional Chinese buildings with elevated lanterns outside; there are 52 McDonalds in central Beijing alone and the mascot is an anime character rather than Ronald the clown.
Arriving in China from Mongolia was an interesting experience. First of all, the Mongolian border town is a sad place, unusual for the Mongolian countryside in that it has brick housing rather than the normal ger tents. The reason for this? It used to be a massive Soviet base, and at the collapse of Soviet control over Mongolia, it was left at the edge of the Gobi Desert with a bunch of abandoned residents. When you get poked off the train during border control by the provodnitsyas, little kids try to sell you common desert stones out of biscuit tins by the sides of the rails. The crumbling brick houses around them are an obvious sign of the slow trickle of depopulation occurrent daily there; the lack of local animals suggest that these residents still rely on extremely infrequent deliveries from Ulaanbaatar. Nobody wants to buy a pebble for a dollar.
After three hours' border control on the Mongolian side, you get shunted off to China and undergo six hours of wheel changing: substantially less painful than on the Russian side because Chinese trains have AC and padded beds.
Pulling into China, I actually derived genuine joy from the presence of fluorescent lights, because I knew they meant that the toilets here would no longer be holes in the ground. Sorry, I am an uncultured swine.
Beijing is a place where Mao's Mausoleum stands overlooking Tiananmen Square, where Facebook and Blogspot are banned, where I came at the brunt end of all the bad points of celebrity. Warned by the guidebook that if you are 'blonde, blue-eyed, or fair skinned' (check, check, check) Chinese people may request photographs with you, I wasn't surprised when the first teenage girl approached and asked in broken English if she could be photographed alongside me. I was more surprised when, at the Forbidden City, hundreds of people converged upon me requesting my face for their mantelpiece. I was even more surprised by the ones making the requests, who were almost invariably families and often fathers wanting each one of their daughters in separate pictures. Interesting.
It had to be stopped when I was approached while I was eating breakfast - in a backpacker's hostel that a family actually entered when seeing me from a distance. That didn't stop school groups openly pointing at me when I took my later walks around the central city...luckily it's usually good-natured, if racially insensitive (you know how often Aryans like me have to deal with racial insensitivity.)
On my third day in Beijing, I signed up to a tour to the Great Wall along with six other confused westerners. As we gathered round a table with the Chinese guide to discuss which part we should visit, we were given a number of options that included:
1. The touristy one
2. The fake one
3. The really real one
4. The one with the slide
No contest. I took a toboggan slide down the Great Wall of China.
[[[There will be more on China soon but I'm incommunicado for another week]]
