Beijing -- getting ready for the olympics

On our way out of Datong, we whipped round to see the nine dragon screen. It is supposed to be the China's largest and oldest ceramic wall. It was made 600 years ago and I am sure the glaze chipped off and they painted it. If you look, there is a lot of turquoise background colour running down several dragons. In one instance there is a tile which has no business even having that colour on it that has huge streaks. There is no way any artisan that could produce such a beautiful work would make such huge errors in glazing and actually use the tiles in the finished project. My guess is that the glaze was looking worn and someone (a sloppy painter) decided to "fix" it. Too bad, I hope someone can restore it sometime.

We took a pretty decadent trip to the screen. We walked out of the hotel and into a taxi (who ripped us off by driving the long way round) and gave us a $1.50 ride. On the way home we took another taxi and only paid $1. I think it is ridiculous how little the taxis are being paid. Granted gas seems to be the equivalent of 50cents/litre, but I don't know how they can make anything with depreciation costs factored in. I would never think of jumping in a taxi at home to visit Parliament Hill for 15 minutes. It would cost 10 times as much at least anyway.

We took the train to Beijing during the day because the overnight train arrived at 5 in the morning again and we were pretty sure the kids couldn't handle that twice on the trot. Speaking of trot, Jacob is sick. He has stuff coming and going at once if you catch the euphemism. I am glad we are (a) in a big city (Beijing) and (b) almost ready to come home. This is only the second time one of them has been sick (thank goodness). It has been months since Heather got sick in India along with my sister Nicky and her sons, Sam and Jay. Perversely it didn't seem that bad to me then because (a) Surya speaks the lingo and (b) there was some wierd sort of "safety in numbers" thing going on in my head which is, I know, completely illogical, but there you go. We have postponed our trip to the Great Wall until the day after tomorrow and hopefully he will be recovered enough to visit the Forbidden City tomorrow. We got to the gates today but he didn't feel well. He actually started throwing up on the way home.

We have been in Beijing for 2 days and have not managed to accomplish much sightseeing. Yesterday we only managed to buy more junk than I think we will be able to carry (again) and find out that the proposed trips to first Japan and then Mongolia were not possible because in both cases the transport only goes once or twice a week and they are full up anyway. We were trying for a boat to Japan and a train to Ulanbator. We checked about flights to Japan and the price was just too exhorbitant for a week stay. We have decided to jump in and out of Hong Kong to fulfil our visa requirements and visit another few places in the south of China before we head home on the 14th of June. For those of you that don't already know, we have cut the last two months off the trip. There were two reasons: financial and burnout. Now that the end is in sight though, we are all thinking we will miss the travelling and seeing all the new and interesting stuff. All the time.

I went to a place today called the Lama Temple. It has another entry in the worlds biggest Buddha sweepstakes. This one is 18m high and carved from a single sandalwood tree. Now THAT was a huge tree. This Buddha apparently made it into the Guinness book of world records in 1990. It is at least our 6th worlds biggest Buddha so far on our trip...

We are staying in a fabulous 300 year old hotel. Apparently it was a family compound and converted to a hotel 50 years ago. It is two stories high and mostly beautiful wood construction. It has a central courtyard inside and two rings of rooms round it. There is a huge skylight covering the whole courtyard. It was taken over by the hostel Heather had picked from their posters (they say "c u in Beijing" with a cutesy happy face with a chinese hat...aimed at the younger set and hitting squarely on her mark). We were really lucky to have been put in the overflow hostel. It is much nicer than the real one.

Beijing is under HEAVY renovation (as are a lot of places we have been in China) to put on a good show for the Olympics. They are apparently evicting all the stores we went to yesterday so they can be demolished and rebuilt in time for next summer. There is a huge picture of what the area will look like on the billboards which are being used to close the streets off. All the ends of the streets leading into the area are being bricked up and they seem to just build the brick walls one block further out each time and knock the buildings down.

China will be impressive for the olympics but they will have to do something about the pollution. I think the main thing people will notice is the air quality. They have 16 of the worlds 20 most polluted cities right now and the countryside is almost worse. On the way to the Hanging Monastery the other day I counted 29 smokestacks at one time in front of the bus. Scary. After spending a few weeks in China it makes me wonder if there is any hope of Kyoto succeeding even if it is ratified. I think China will pick up any slack and carry on the warming for us.