The great loop of China - April 2018 - Page 1

It's a good old fashioned montage!

On my last trip I suggested I would need to move apartments as another skyscraper was being built behind me, spoiling my view. So move I did, here is the new view of the city of Melbourne from my balcony. Just next to me they are building Australia's new tallest building, which will be 99 levels. A very strange decision to not add on just one more.

And here is a bit more of the view. At night, every hour, the casino shoots giant fireballs into the sky, I always know what time it is. Also cattle trucks constantly drive by on the street below, so I always get to see cows on their way to become dinner.

Rather than take the normal skybus photo, here is the back of the seat in front of me. Do you like artistic bokeh shots of metallic textures? If you do you might like this photo.

And here I am, looking even older than on my last trip 6 months ago. Still no grey hairs. Each time I wash my hair in the shower entire handfuls of hair come out, and yet I still have lots left. I am collecting it in a giant ball which I am going to offer for sale to charity. You can gofundme my hairball charity if you wish, together we can make giant hairball charity sales a reality!

The dreaded Airbus A350 - I recommend avoiding at all costs. I still say the Airbus A330 is the most comfortable plane, its only 8 abreast seating instead of 9, and yet I think the tube profile is the same diameter or maybe even wider!

Totally redundant photo of Singapore airport. Each time I pass through here I marvel at the miles and miles of carpet. Whichever company supplied it need never make any other style of carpet ever again.

Pictorial evidence I was in Singapore, and charging about trying to avoid Airbus A350 induced deep vein thrombosis!

And this is where I have stopped to type this vomit story and other boring crap to kill time before I head into the city and drop my bags off at the hotel and wander around like a zombie. The coffee is really very good!
No children with split pants have been held over bins, I have not been spat on, and so far the milk is not poison (I am pre-empting comments).

I came up out of the train station at Dongzhimen and this is the site that greeted me. Modern, blue, clean, leafy and pollen-y Beijing.

Nearly all the cars are electric these days, the traffic is very quiet.

Here is my hotel room. The internet works great, the bathroom is huge and has a separate full bath and shower, theres not too much crazy stuff littered around the place, although they have provided a full size windows xp pc.

If you live in Australia you are familiar with obikes and their competitors, if you live in the rest of the world you have seen the news stories about seas of dockless bikes abandoned across China. Here are the yellow companies bikes, heaps of them, but they are all lined up nicely and everyone seems to actually use them. More on this soon....

This is Wangujing pedestrian street. It is wide and has been rebuilt since I was last here. The trees are great, but have not got all their leaves yet.

To celebrate the upcoming Beijing winter Olympics in 2022, there is a display of water buffalo statues. Yes, when I think skiing and luge, I think of water buffalos.

This is where I had a sneezing fit along with everyone else. I have never really noticed actual pollen in the air before.

Electric cars are the norm. Beijing even hosts a round of the formula-e all electric racing series. I think this is an actual car, not a mock up, in side a car dealer inside a food court inside a mall inside a subway station.

The view from the other end of Wangfujing street. Actually its not the very start, there are big shed like structures at the very start where I think another new subway line is being constructed. Only this time they have not just dug a huge hole that consumes everything during construction, they have put up nice covering sheds to shield everyone from noise and dust.

These guys are getting pretty close to the wires while they glue a few bricks half back together. Actually there really was not too much dodgy work going on at all that I noticed. Do not worry, I will be heading out of tier one cities to places where sink holes consume entire towns soon.

Pineapple rice.

Here is the competing orange brand of dockless bicycles. Now there definitely seems to be some form of organisation going on, they seem to have turf assigned to them. But of course people that rent them can just leave them anywhere, and do... yet its not total chaos, read on.

I walked back to my hotel through this linear park. There are actually lots of them, all very well maintained, all full of people taking photos of blossoms while sneezing.

There are public toilets everywhere, and they all have attendants and are all clean. Seriously every couple of hundred metres. I visited 3 and they were all immaculate. This information is also here to pre-empt comments.

My hotel is quite near the national art gallery, which I have never visited. I doubt I will get time on this trip, so here is a shot of the outside.
I am already overusing the words seem and quite, but I am so far succeeding in not saying whilst, which isnt even really a word!

And here is a guy employed by yellow bike company organising the bikes. There are heaps of these guys, anytime someone leaves a bike they are there minutes later to move it back into position. Is this sustainable? In Australia this would be a $30 an hour job at least.

And finally, here is my hotel, from the outside. It is large and being re-skinned to attain increased modernness (according to a letter in my room).

How many people do I know would actually fit in one of these?

I am going to have to retract what I said earlier about the dockless bike organisation problem being solved. All they have managed to do in China is take it up to the next level. In addition to blocking the footpath with millions of bikes, now they are blocking it with thousands of bike moving tricycle ute things!

A trackless tram! They have had these in China forever, and I think the concept has been around for more than 50 years.
I have seen them operating without being connected to the wires, which suggests they use the wires to recharge a battery, read on to find out how that works.

I wandered into the Yang Rou Hutong, literally - Lamb Meat Neighborhood. Their leisure centre has a pagoda. Actually all around it was some recently restored old shops and houses kind of on display, I wasnt sure if they were on display or if I was trespassing. Another tiny white dog attacked me.

There is however a free library. I read some Sun Tzu.

Here is the main bit of Xidan, shiny.

And here is one of about 20 food courts. This is a crap photo but I took it to demonstrate something I have been seeing a lot.
In places where they prepare your food out the back, they have cameras streaming to tv's where customers can see whats going on and check out how clean the kitchen is.

This is my sort of food court, well suited to the solo Nigel no friends diner. The floor below had a theme street full of little street food stalls, but all that meant was you cant sit down and you eat everything with toothpicks.

Biang Biang noodles. The production line of this place was a joy to see, at least 20 people working. All the noodles are made fresh by hand, mine are thick and long, I think it means long belt or similar. The Biang character is also the most complex Chinese character with 20 strokes, hence they put 20 random toppings on my hand cut noodles. Can you name them all? I cant but they were delicious. At least 3 mystery random meats and at least one of those was bits of sausage which probably contained a deeper level of combinations of mystery meat!

It's the famous TFBoys, what are they selling? Face whitening cream. Everybody wants to be white.

I am back at Wangfujing now, taking steady hand held night shots and boosting some shadows.

Here is the massive apple store, the place to go if you really enjoy notches and $1600 phones.

Every European tourist was having their photo taken in front of this church. By European I might mean Russian, hard to tell cause it was dark.

And of course, mass grandma dancing has broken out, the song of choice, little apple. There were probably 5 competing troupes along this part of the street. Just wait until I get to Chongqing where there were groups of a thousand! The competition between rival groups is so fierce in Chongqing that there have been suspected murders of group leaders!

And now as promised, squint at this, this is where the electric trolley buses re connect themselves to the wire after they have been operating on battery for a while. The metal plates help guide the poles back onto the wires.
BED TIME!

At the long distant bus station you can buy pollution masks from a vending machine. Someone smart thought of this.

This is the bus stop at a random street on the outskirts of Huairou. The actual city looked quite nice, lots of plum blossom trees, new mall, nice river. The bus stop to the great wall is on a highway in an industrial area.

This is the entrance to the great wall pedestrian shopping street. It is also where you buy tickets. They try and force you to buy tickets to the cable car and luge. I refused. I went inside to the information desk and they told me to tell them I wanted the 45 Yuan entry ticket and 15 Yuan return shuttle bus ticket, and hold out 60 Yuan only, otherwise they wont listen because every westerner takes the cable car. Why take that when there is a perfectly good path up to the wall?

Here is the pedestrian souvenir street. I over paid for water here, and chocolate, they didnt have any real food. I have regrets I didnt buy food earlier! I did however haggle in Chinese and get the water price down to half the original price shown to me on the calculator. She still made enormous profit, charging nearly $3 Australian for water that should be about 50 cents.

I walked up from down there somewhere, pollution becoming apparent.

There is the wall!

The path up to the wall was very pleasant. Spring hasnt fully sprung here yet, not many leaves on the trees, but there was a snow storm of pollen and lots of flowers along the path, I skipped along and sang to myself.

The far side of the wall has some great looking mountains. Info on hiking routes is very hard to come by, frustrating. Lots of places are closed off from the public, they normally claim to be military bases. Some people go anyway, and vanish.

Mountains through window.

And after a lot of other photos, heres a photo everyone has seen before, the great wall of China.

I walked all the way to one end of the places you can get to and then turned back, re traced my steps and walked all the way past the other end into the wild parts of the wall.
I walked right to the top of the mountain in the distance in this photo.

Here is the luge track. Lots of people take the chair lift up, walk a hundred metres, take the luge track down.

Some more wall. Colors look weird today due to pollution. I passed a lot of American teenagers saying like a lot, its like, like, you know, like.

Here is a dog. There are a few resident dogs around here, they seem to be very well liked. This is a very old dog though, he just watches everyone.

A bit more of those mountains!

Still got to go all the way up there. This photo came out better than most.

A particularly steep section to come. I had lost most of the vocal fry suffering wealthy USA church group / high school by now. They had been replaced at one point by a very loud woman going 'BUCKET LIST ITEM......dramatic pause...TICK!

Still more big stairs to go. One of the highlights for me was seeing people, grown adults, having a full on sit on the ground tantrum declaring they couldnt go on. Generally husbands reasoning with wives trying to explain that he hauled her all the way here from wherever to see this, and now she just want to go home.

This photo is taken from the last of the official watchtowers. I had been all along the watchtowers. Now onto the 'wild' section of the wall.

Just before we climb over the barrier, I was actually impressed so many people had climbed to the top. Here is a reason why.
Many work places come here for team building day. I saw lots of groups with a similar sign or banner. If you tried this in Australia you would get sued by all the obese office workers for discrimination. Meanwhile, its not discrimination against non drinkers to make EVERY...SINGLE....OFFICE.....SOCIAL....EVENT an alcohol fueled competition to be the biggest wanker.
Rant over.

Here is a wild section of the wall. Notice the floor area is made of something different. I still think its been restored, numerous times, just not lately.

And now I am nearing the top, prayer flags have appeared.

I knew I was at the top, thanks to this very well placed sign.

A guy lives here selling drinks and snacks. Actually he lives in the crumbling watch tower with a dog. He spoke really good English for a quasi homeless Chinese man, we actually chatted for a couple of minutes. He never even tried to sell me anything.

Me. I was sweating. It was hot and the stairs are steep and I did it without stopping to rest at all. Wheres my medal?

Now to re trace my steps back down to the series of buses and subway lines.

Do you watch if you are the one? It is a Chinese version of perfect match, except the contestants will tell each other they are too poor / fat / old / stupid, then the judges will lecture the contestants on how they have failed their entire life. Anyway, here is where the film that inspired the series filmed its proposal scene.

Free entertainment was provided while waiting for the shuttle bus courtesy of the singing rickshaw man. His rickshaw is fitted out with huge blaring speakers.

And entertainment was also provided while waiting for the super full local bus, in the form of a bridge that exists for no reason and might fall down at any minute. It has intricate carvings on its concrete pillars.

China also has Family Mart. It is very similar to Japan, many of the same products. These seem to sell out every day, I have been in this one multiple times to buy water / pepsi, it is fully stocked in the morning and empty in the evening.

You can still also find fruit sellers with their carts. It all looks amazing, but I can only eat fruit if its been cut up for me and put in plastic, like they do at Family Mart.

This place is very huge, and made more so because a lot of the shops are a labyrinth of tiny corridors. I could not find dinner in here.

Nearby I did find this thing. You may have seen the swimming pool with the never ending wave where you surf while staying still? This is the skiing version of it, a moving floor ski slope. Unfortunately its not working on a Monday night so I dont get to see anyone break their neck trying to use it.

This place is even bigger than the other place. Too upmarket for me though, I did not find my dinner here.

The police are everywhere here. These guys are getting yelled at by their boss before they start their shift. Note they wear flashing red and blue lights on their shoulders. Surely that is annoying to have that flashing in your peripheral vision all night? The yelling is all for show I presume, he is probably yelling messages the government wants yelled out in crowded areas so the population can think it is important.

Here is my dinner, the above mentioned not cold noodles and some dumplings that were filled with scrambled egg and pickled vegetables. Very nice but I did not get the pile of cold vegetables I wanted, despite my best repeated efforts. I saw other people getting the thing I tried to order, the ONLY reason I was not allowed to have it is because my eyes are too round.

Tonights dancing grandmas are performing an erotic fan dance. A grandpa may have snuck in there too.