more photos

a fairly random selection of photos uploaded in thise two places: 27-hey-benc1 and 26-japan-china-cd

interesting(!) hostel

this hostel is much more interesting than the olympic parktel one -- much smaller, and there's ongoing illwill between two of the five people here which includes frequent shouting and the leaving of threatening notes... funny to watch from my perspective...

seoul more

moving to a different hostel (HEY guest house, your cozy friend in Seoul of Korea) today as I have become annoyed by the lameness of the one I'm staying in... don't really know where it is though - had better find out.

also booked a trip to Tokyo (airmiles from excessive business travel still paying off!) for this weekend to visit some people I know there.

yesterday evening went for a walk in a nice park (can't remember name, Y...something) where I had a sausage-on-a-stick for dinner then meandered through the "korean forest area", the "lawn area" and the "ecology area" before heading down to some other nice park adjacent to it (can't remember name, A...something) where lots of people were sitting in the twilight picnicking.

seoul

left shanghai to go out to Pu Dong airport aboard maglev that peaked (according to onboard display) at 431 km.h^-1 in the company of american (pacific northwestern) chick from hostel who had a flight at about the same time as me. the maglev didn't start running until 0830 so our early departure from hostel was wasted as we had to sit at the station drinking yogurt (mmmm) for 40 minutes, swatting away taxi drivers.

Possession of same-day airline ticket gives one-off 10 or 20% discount (can't remember) on maglev ticket - my stack of 15 boarding cards (all my remaining flights from here to LHR) confused the ticket seller a little, as he tried to work out where he could put the stamp to show I'd used my discount...

when I got to airport, despite the maglev delay, I found I was still too early to check in, so sat in "CoffeePort" drinking western-priced coffee for an hour. Eventually moved airside to the Star Alliance gold lounge, where (in true backpacker form) I stuffed myself on free sandwiches, beer and coffee.

Arriving in Seoul, I had even less idea than previous places about how to get to hostel. Fortunately their was a computerised bus information machine into which I typed the name of the hostel/hotel and was given a selection of buses to take. Turns out it even gave me the right information!

The hostel is actually a few converted hotel rooms in the big nice Olympic Parktel; converted means "had some bunk beds put in", with the satellite TV, telephone, ensuite shower&lavatory all left in place as well as free postcards, daily linen change and other such hotel-like properties. Unfortunately its got a hotel rather than hostel atmosphere -- no common area with people reading LP and getting drunk on the cheapest alcohol they could find -- so I've spent much more time wandering round the city looking at stuff, getting food from FamilyMart and wondering why its so hard to find an internet cafe (found one now... seems to be about 1300 Won per hour)

Also found details of an Irish pub, O'Kims, which I will investigate this eve if not too exhausted by the heat.

localedit!

internet connection is not so crap (censored and flakey) as in China - seems I can actually get at the proper blogger post page instead of having to edit over ssh! hurrah...

strike

according to reputable chinese newspaper, there is strike at Asiana who are meant to be flying me to the land of dogeating tomorrow morning

Shanghai

I've really on seen the area around the Bund in my time here, but it has been good fun and pretty interesting.
There's a branch of Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf near to the People's Square. Also some advertising for UCLA (I think they sell their clothes on the Nanjing Road).
As I think I said before, this place reminds me more of Japan than China, for the most part.
Yestreaday walked up to People's Square and looked around the shanghai museum which is a pretty good collection of art, furniture, calligraphy, statues, jade, seals.
Then walked down the Nanjing Road (which is big pedestrianised shopping street, capitalism at its finest, and absolutely crazy at night - daytime you get offered a constant stream of fake rolexes; nighttime instead ladybars and hashish...)
At Lawson, my second favourite chain of Japanese convenience stores (after FamilyMart) got some deodorant (I've been going without for about a week since my last tin ran out of vapour) and funny three layer sandwich (two layers of egg, one of ham) for lunch. Back at hostel, went for a second lunch at cheap (15 kwai for a big plate) restaurant - dumplings (fried), sweet&sour pork, rice, steamed vegetables, then put som elaundry in and sat down for a quick beer with the intention of heading out after laundry was done.
Got drinking with a man from luxemburg called Bob who has lived in china for 5yrs. Ended up drinking with him all afternoon, and with various other people who joined in - some people who'd been intending to teach english for 6 weeks but had been flooded out, a couple of dutchmen.
At around 19h went back to same chinese restaurant for dinner (and had almost the same dishes). Spoke drunken french at Bob. Then we went to the bund and sat by the river drinking until 2am, playing with the street urchin kids who seem delighted for people to pay them some attention rather than just shoo them away, lits sparklers that some dude was handing out for free, lamented th fgact that such a developed money-rich city still has street urchins.
After that one last beer in the hostel which we hardly drunk any of and then sleepy bye bye... sat this morning for four hours then went back to bed and lay in discomfort for the rest of the day. American chick from last night appeared to be in similar state (only her and me and a scottish lass made it all the way to the end of the session).
Quote of day is from Maarten, a dutch developmental psychologist "Ben, sometimes I think you are deliberately fucking with me." Some people work me out so quickly.
Tomorrow morning to Seoul.

another all day hangover

up till 3am drinking on the riverbank then spent all of today recovering.
tomorrow korea. shame i didn't get to see more of shanghai. oh well, maybe next time round.

shanghai

here I am in shanghai, ahving turned up at shanghai railway station with no hostel booking, and just a drunk sketch map copied off someone's lonely planet to get me to what Ihoped was a reasonable hostel that would take me.fortunately they did, so here I am!
I've walked along the bund a bit, which is half a block away from the hostel. a chinese boy wanted to get his family to take a picture of him standing next to me - very excited by foreigners they are here.
this place is more like Japan then Beijing - they use coins, it doesn't stink of shit apart from down alleyways, they sell the dsame drinks from the same chain convenience stores as in Japan, there are flatscreens everywhere showing all sorts of adverts and bits of information. it is however still chinese - man on the subway station platform with a whistle and loudhailer to shout at people who bundle through the train doors even after they have tried to close them, and peddlars in the street selling postcards and touristy crap at negotiable prices.
internet here is 5 yuan for 15 minutes, almost 10 times what I was paying in Xi'an at the local internet club. grr.
if you have read empire of the sun, or perhaps seen the film, this is where he lives at the very beginning, in the international settlement. perhaps my presence near jg ballards childhood home will turn me into some kind of cynical pervert?
yesterday purchased some trousers; today purchased some flip flops. also some toilet paper and some lots of japanese soft drinks (pocari sweat-u!)

some .cn pics

are at http://photo.hawaga.org.uk/orig/2005/07/10/

train

At 1730 after returning to the hostel from an hour or so online and after drinking my third 1.5l bottle of water of the day, got a taxi from outside the hostel. Not being able to say in Chinese where I wanted to go, I instead waved my train ticket at the driver; this revealed to him that i) I had a lot of time 'till my train and ii) I had a very expensive seat, so I became fearful that he would drive me all round the houses instead of a direct route. As it happened, he took me straight there, heading north and east through the city grid, but never backtracking south or west. The ride cost CNY9 (actually 8.60, but everyone rounds up for tourists instead of using shitty useless coins and notes).
In the taxi, the driver babbled at me in foreign for a bit, then spelled out the letters "U... S... A..." (both out loud and with his finger). I said "no, England" and after five minutes thought he spelled out "e.. n.. g... l... i... s... h"
Outside the station, its like a refugee camp. I head inside, through the laughable security checkpoint and find signs for the "Z20 soft sleeper lounge" (Z20 is the top end express to Beijing that I am to take).
I don't know at the time if I am to be in softsleep or hardsleep but I head in there anyway as it looks nice. No one tries to stop me at the ticket checking counter, perhaps because of my white skin.
Inside, airconditioning blows pleasantly on the back of my neck. I'm the only whitey there to begin with.
A chinese lady sits next to me with a baby, which I wave at. She makes the baby wave back to me and say hello in Chinese, then strikes up a short conversation "What are you writing?" (A journal) "For remembering?" (yes) "How about Xi'an?" (its very nice but too hot) "Yes, too hot but Beijing is too hot too" Then baby cries and she wanders off.
At one end of this luxurious waiting area, a flatscreen TV shows CCTV1 (?news, not closed circuit television); at the other end, another device shows a drama of wizards fighting each other in ancient peasant village (lots of that on TV here).
Suddenly crowds of whiteys appear, mostly older and in caps, looking like theiy are on a tour group which confuses me as I do not initially see the ubiquitous tour-guide-with-flag-on-a-stick; eventually I locate such, a purple triangle on a metal telescopic rod. Very high rolling luggage quotient.
I've checked out peoples tickets here - they seem to have paid more (417 CNY vs 400) but not much more. I puzzle over the price difference (later to discover its the difference between top bunk (cheap but I prefer) and bottom bunk (more expensive but people want to sit and puke and piss on it, in my experience).
At 1840, a surge and people start queuing to board... the outside platform smells of piss and shit like the rest of the chinese outdoors.
There are three people in the four berth cabin (the very last in the train). t Then me. Then three more arrive. This puzzles me, but eventually it turns out that some are only saying goodbye and leave after half an hour or so.
The layout of the carriage is much as russian kupe carriages are laid out; a little net by each bunk to put your stuff in, storage space over the corridors just big enough to fit my rucksack. But being the Z20, it has superiour fittings too -- each bunk has a 6 channel flatscreen TV, with padded headphones far superiour to those supplied on airlines. Muzak is piped over the speakers at the start of the journey - Carpenters etc. Not as cool as in Russia where the invariably started each trip with Global Deejays / What a feeling....
Also in contrast to Russian kupe class, there are no drunked soldiers to give me free food and alcohol; and people actually use the little ladders at the end of each bunk to get to the top, rather than dragging themselves up with their arms. At 1923, we leave, bang on time.
The provodnik comes along to unlock the lavatory. A little girl from my cabin uses it straight away; i decide I should use it too, while it is still clean... the state of train toilets is legendary around here.

java globe

Looks like i hadn't updated this since about 2003:

http://www.hawaga.org.uk/travel/

I've put some markers on for the places I've been in the past few months.

I Like Vegemite

Whilst waving my tin of vegemite around to disgust a man from colorado, I came across the idea of mixing it with my cheap bowl of rice to add flavour. mmmmm, even better than tabasco.

still xian

here i am still in xi'an. yesterday did not leave the hostel, was just lazy. around 3pm I went upstairs to get my towel to have a shower and instead found the air conditioning in my dorm room vastly superior to the found elsewhere in the hostel (both the chinese and japanese have a habit of keeping doors and windows open to help the air conditioning....) so stayed up there reading until about 6pm when I descended to dine and drink until midnight.
i suspect today will be much the same, although i have made it outside at least to the internet cafe. i seem to have misplaced my USB extension lead, which I was hoping to plug into back of computers here for another attempt at photo upload..
many many people with scientific background/interest doing english teaching here - so far, a mathematician, a fluid dynamicist(?) and a physicist have indulged themselves in the delights of my company.
tonight is hopefully last night here, assuming something terrible doesn't happen to the train.

stuff

machines here have usb ports but appear to not work... grr.... they al have webcams,though, sohere's a pic of me



finally have a train ticket out of here but notuntil wednesday...

escape from Xian

It seems all trains out of here are booked for the immediate future. I wonder how to get to Shanghai.

umm no?

one curious side effect of london winning olympics day before bombs in London, when combined with the slow percolation of news through the hosteller community is conversations along the lines of:

A: have you heard about London?
B: Yes! Isn't it great?
A: ummm no

moloko

options on the breakfast menu here include "black coffee" and "black coffee with milk"

xi'an

here I am in Xi'an. I've only just discovereed where in China that is, after being here for almost 24h.
annoyingly the Great Firewall of China is not letting me get at the blogger post pages from local browser so I'm writing this in Lynx on a clifford.ac host... mmmm... All i've done so far is sleep and eat - the hostel has a pretty good cafe/dining room, one of the best that I've seen anywhere in the many many hostels that I have been to. I'm about to run out of moleskines, the pretentious notebook of hemmingway and others -- if anyone wants to send me any, please do!
somewhere round here are terracotta warriors but I'm not in the mood to go looking for them - perfahps I will take a wash in the skanky showers here (although I'm informed by person at next terminal along that there are possibly nicer ones upstairs).
On the train here (where I thought I was going to get a sleeper bunk, i tbeing a night train and me having been told I was getting a sleeper bunk), I ended up with just a chair in a sitting carriage, crowded in with many oither chinese people. at least I had a reserved seat. In the middle of the night, I woke to find a small girl pissing accidentally all over my bag. She missed my legs, thankfully, and in the heat it soon dried up. methinks i will have to burn this rucksack at some point in the next few months.

more beijing

after taking rest of day before yesterday easy (bed at noon, woke at 1800 got some cheap food then back to sleep), yesterday went back to tianenmen(?sp) square to walk round some more with Viv from hostel (who has been teaching english for that great supplier of imperial culture to the global unwashed the British Council for a year to chinese people, but who also knows about quaternions) and Jeff who I have been exploring Beijing with for the past week or so. A couple of beers in the evening mushroomed into being out 'till 0400, with a dutchman we were also with managing to piss off a few Chinese people by talking Japanese at them (they understand, but are not friendly to the Japanese at the moment; I accidentally used Russian at one of them the other day and no enragement occurred...). This morning everyone has been saying hello to me in the corridors (even ones that I do not recall having seen before) and I'm told by one of the people who started drinking but scuttled off around midnight to sleep that I look like I was out until 0400. The main instigator of the 27h day that was last weekend (Alicia from Sydney) has left for pastures new and Indian, although I thought she'd left earlier in the week too, but in fact she'd just had a 3 day hangover and had been hiding in her room (sound familiar?). This evening, night train to Xi'an to see teracotta(?sp again) warriors - probably stay there three nights or so and then try to find somewhere else in China to look at. Here's the blog of some Glaswegians that I met in the hostel here (don't believe the lies about them being in New Zealand).

tired

walked to tianamen square by circuitous route, then subway back. after that, watched some beijing football team playing at the Workers Stadium (we won 4-0, hurrah!) and then on to bars which lasted until post-dawn; back at hostel we continued drinking from the beer fridge until breakfast was served, having picked up drunked australian who does not belong here, as well as a Motorway Mathematician (she grew up in Preston); plan now if anyone survives the next half hour (to 0830h) is off to visit Mao rise from the ground in a cloud of dry ice and then perhaps a rest.

frenchman

in this hostel, I have met a frenchman who was sleeping on a couch in the lobby of the hostel in Moscow when I was there two months ago. He seems to have made his way overland with almost no money from there to here and now tries to find a boat to take him to the Americas.

moloko

whilst quietly supping upon our beers one evening, through the glass roof of the kitchen descended a 2l plastic bottle filled with milk, source unknown.

wall

been on the great wall... some parts in remarkably good condition, whilst only metres away other parts were all broken. the walk was about 10km long -- our driver dumped us in some village and said "walk that way until you reach the wall, then turn right and walk 10km along the wall until you reach a suspension bridge, then turn right again and I'll meet you at the restaurant." simple instructions for something that took us 5h. on the way plenty of people to follow us telling us how they were pooor farmers from mongolia and then suddenly produce bags filled with books, tshirts, ice cold water (it seems to start the day as a block of ice and turn into water as the day progresses), beer, coke, postcards, allsorts. I avoided paying anything; one of the others in the group took the oppoiste approach and hired two of them to carry his bags the whole way (very colonial).