Paying our Respects

I had heard it mentioned, but I had never fully understood what happened at the ‘Rape of Nanking’ until I started reading up on China in advance of my visit. Bloody hell. It’s without doubt one of the most shocking atrocities committed in modern warfare, and a black mark on Japanese history for the rest of time. If you’re also unfamiliar with what took place in 1937, I’d suggest you look it up.



With only one day in Nanjing, a visit to The Memorial Hall of the Nanjing Massacre was top priority. This exhibition alone made the city worth a visit. It truly was dumbfounding. With no grisly detail spared, at times it was difficult to take in the events and the personal stories from those infamous six weeks. But that’s one of the reasons that it left such an impression on me. It was incredible that these events took place in this beautiful, historical, thriving modern city only 72 years previous.



And that’s the thing, Nanjing really is a beautiful city in parts, especially when compared to other Chinese cities. In a restaurant recommended by a hostel staff member, we enjoyed one of the best meals we had in China (John in particular enjoyed eating duck embryo). With an abundance of history (it was China’s capital on two occasions, most recently during the time of the massacre), and excellent food, it has a lot going for it.



Towards the end of the massacre memorial exhibition you can hear what sounds like a slowly dripping tap. Each drop lights up a picture of a victim on the wall of a dark hall at the end. Brilliantly effective, I can still hear the drops in my head even now. Unforgettable - as it should be.

Exile on Beer Street

I’ll be honest - the biggest factor our decision of where to go next was: beer. Qingdao, located south-east of Beijing on the Yellow Sea coast, was occupied by Germany from 1898 until an Anglo-Japanese force wrestled it from them in 1914.



In those 16 years, the Germans certainly made their mark, with the old part of the city looking far more German than Chinese in parts. Their other main legacy besides the architecture was beer - the Tsingtao brewery they set up in 1903 was still going strong. Though now under Chinese control, Tsingtao is by far the most popular beer in China today.



Many Chinese holiday here to make use of the beaches. The weather was far too cold for that during our visit - in fact thanks to the ocean breeze it was even colder here than in Beijing - and rainier too - exasperating the cold I had picked up in the capital.



The day we arrived we saw most of the relatively few (compared to Beijing) sights the city had to offer - including a mildly interesting (very interesting for John - going by the number of photographs he took) naval museum. Just wandering about the old town witnessing the unique mix of old German architecture in modern China was fun in itself.



The following day I hardly left the hostel, due to a combination of a hangover, a cold, and the cold outside. Taking it relatively easy that night, we had big plans for the brewery the following day. But that day it rained, and rained, then rained some more. Stuck indoors, unable to do anything, it felt like home. So we drank, and drank, then drank some more. This time we didn’t even make it out the hostel door.

Having bought our train ticket a couple of days previously (you have to in China or else they sell out), we had an early evening train to catch, and a brewery still to visit, and a major hangover to nurse, all on one final day in Qingdao.



Having heard of a mythical ‘beer street’ (where, legend has it, you can buy beer by the bag), and failing to find it on our first night here, we were disgusted to finally locate it with only a couple of hours until our train. "Beer Street" was it's actual official name (pijiuchang) - and as well as the brewery it was home to a plethora of decent watering holes - something we had great difficulty locating previously (we were looking in the wrong place). The whole street was beer themed, right down to the cheery images populating the footpath.



With our train departure imminent, we had to rush through the brewery museum/exhibition, which was a shame as what we saw was excellent. In the end however, the miserable weather conditions meant I was glad to leave Qingdao, though not as glad as my liver was.

Have You Really Been to Cork?

During a wander about to find a bar after exploring the Forbidden City, a chauvinistic English speaking Chinese man accompanied by two young (and very cute) Chinese girls struck up a conversation with us on the footpath. Our trust level lowered by the experience of a couple of days before, we were instantly suspicious. This time the pretext was slightly different - he was the head of an English language school, and the girls were his students, and he wanted to use this opportunity for them to get some practice.

“Which country are you from?”
“Ireland”.
“Ah! Ireland! I’ve been there!”
“Really?”
“Yes, I like Drogheda a lot”.
(Surprised laughter). “We’re from Cork, do you know it?”
“Yes, I have been there”. (Changes subject)
….(brief chat about something else)…
(Returning to subject) “So did you like Cork? What did you see there?”
(Changes subject without answering question)

The bullshitting above ended any thoughts that this guy was genuine. After more small talk, he asked did we all want to come to a bar for a drink and more conversation. It’s not often we turn down a drink.

Enjoy the Cold While it Lasts

One of the problems with Beijing for visiting travellers is that it has too many things to see, especially for a casual Chinese history enthusiast like myself. There were still a few items on our must see list, and fear of guilt over not visiting them while we were in Beijing (when would we be here again?) initially overcame sightseeing fatigue. My own personal excitement over our next ‘sight’ also helped - the Forbidden City.



If you want a real taste of the power and might that China’s rulers wielded in the past, look no further than here. The entire complex conveys a grandeur and opulence unmatched by anything else I saw in China. Having recently been given a good scrub before the Olympics arrived, we were able to marvel at the halls and palaces in a pristine state, how they would have been kept when only the emperor, his eunuchs and concubines inhabited the area inside the complex walls.

Later that evening we stumbled upon a large night food market whilst looking to satisfy the hunger built up from exploring the forbidden city - one that had plenty of the more unusual Chinese delicacies. Fried centipede anyone? How about fried scorpion? Silkworms on a stick? Who would eat such things?




John ate them all.



Rising the next morning it was a case of another day, another unmissible sight to see - the Temple of Heaven. We were all getting tired of sightseeing at this stage, but it was nice to explore the park surrounding it’s main monuments, a refreshing break from the uniform drudgery of big city China. To be fair the Temple of Heaven complex itself is impressive, and perhaps we should have taken a break from sightseeing before this point, but we had already been in Beijing for almost a week and there was so much more of China to see!

In the two months since we left a chilly winter Ireland, my body seemed to have forgotten how to cope with cold weather (it was below ten degrees most days in Beijing). Perhaps all the rushing around to see things contributed too, but whatever it was, I had caught a cold. I spent the final day in Beijing feeling sorry for myself in the hostel. As our train departed from Beijing's station that night, I was able to comfort myself with the fact that this would be the coldest weather I’d see for at least a year and a half (or so I thought).

Blogging From Memory

Before I left home, I had a Nintendo DS with Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training, which I used occasionally. One of the things it's meant to improve is your memory. Well now I (and you) will get to see if it actually works - I lost my blognotes and now have to blog from memory.

I say "lost" when in fact my bag containing said notes was stolen - but stolen from a bar in the wee small hours of the night. It was partially (some would say wholly) my fault for bringing the bag out with me in the first place. As I learned later my bag wasn't the only one stolen that night. Other people that fell asleep in hammocks (in the same outdoor bar) awoke the next morning to find their pockets emptied.

So now I have to soldier on with the blog, sans the notes for the rest of China and the whole of Vietnam. I'll have to write from memory, with some help from the photographs I took. As someone who has delegated the task of my memory to computers and mobile phone reminders, this is not an ideal situation. I can't remember the last time I had to use my memory like this.

Hitting the Wall

Well we were in Beijing, and it was only a day trip from here, and it’s one of the biggest tourist attractions in the world. It’s not the only man-made object visible from space, nor the moon, which many generations of Chinese were once taught. It is visible after a bus journey north from Beijing though, so we said we’d see what all the fuss was about.



I’m not an expert on walls, nor am I an expert on defending your empire from invading northern barbarians (the reason it was built, but it didn‘t perform that task very well, more due to sentries being susceptible to bribery than with any functional fault). But seeing the wall today, roughly two thousand years after it was originally built, left me in awe of the capabilities of the Qin and subsequent Chinese dynasties that oversaw it‘s construction.



It’s not just the height and girth that are impressive, it’s the terrain that the wall runs through - it’s far from being flat. Parts of the wall we walked on were even quite tough physically, due to the steep inclines in parts. The manpower and engineering skill and logistics would make the wall a challenge to build today - 2000 years ago it was something that only a hugely powerful empire with available slave labour could even dream of building.

We were able to hike up and down the wall for a couple of hours. As I mentioned above, walking on the wall can be physically tough, which inevitably meant that John soon took off on his own blistering pace to see as much as possible, whilst Gearoid and I took a more leisurely pace. Watchtowers punctuated our walk - these were once used to look out for invading barbarian hordes, but are now used by male Chinese tourists to piss under (unfortunately this isn’t the first case of the Chinese pissing on their own cultural heritage).

And so back to Beijing we returned, glad to have gotten the must-see off the list. At times sightseeing can seem like work, but the wall is an amazing sight, so this time it certainly didn’t feel like that.

The Beijing Tea Party

Beijing’s metro is excellent. Spotlessly clean, almost foolproof navigation (even for English speakers) and very regular trains made navigating to other parts of the city a breeze. Our first destination on it was also the most famous - Tianamen Square.



There’s plenty to see around the square itself, which is why we went there, but this was the day we learned that Monday in China is the day museums and other attractions are closed. Wandering about the square wondering what to do, two Chinese students, who weren’t much younger than us, started up a conversation, with the pretext of practicing their English.

Offering to show us to a temple that was open (and free), and with nothing better to do, we decided to take them up on their kind offer. The temple was quite good, something we would never had found ourselves, and I genuinely learned a lot about Beijing from the lad I was talking to. Then we suggested getting a drink somewhere, and they suggested some tea. We agreed, and followed them to a nearby teahouse.

Showing us into a small room with no windows, they suggested that we go for a pot as it works out much cheaper. All of us felt a slight sense of unease at this stage. It was Gearoid who noticed, on the barely legible price board on the wall, that a pot of tea was 300 yuan - about 30 euro! On Gearoid’s words of “Lads, this is exactly what I read about”, we all promptly leapt out of our seats, grabbed our bags, and scrammed. They even had the cheek to yell “well won’t you buy us lunch at least” as we paced down the street. This incident was a shame as all it did was destroy our trust in Chinese approaching us on the street - I’m sure some of them genuinely just want to talk.

We had read about this particular scam in Lonely Planet - we would have to foot the bill for all the expensive tea. The tea-house was in cahoots with the scammers, who I assume would have got a cut.



Still reeling after almost being duped out of a lot of cash, we calmed down with some cheap noodle soup and wandered about for a while - stumbling entirely by accident across Qianmen Dajie. A historical market street about a kilometre long, the entire street had been knocked and was being entirely rebuilt - keeping the traditional architectural style of the original. It reminded me of Main St. USA in Disneyland - everything so clean and perfect that it doesn’t look real. This surreal sight of brand new old buildings epitomizes modern China for me, something I don’t think I could have witnessed anywhere else on the planet.

Taking the Capital

Beijing is a city that’s been invaded numerous times in it’s history, and now it was the turn of three inquisitive Irishmen. Emerging from the train station, our first impressions were that it looked very similar to Xian and Chengdu. I had heard that after a while big Chinese cities begin to look the same - we had encountered this on our third stop in China. Still, the long taxi journey showed up the difference in size - Beijing is enormous.

The hostel proved more difficult to find than size 10 shoes in Nepal (we had more trouble finding it than any other hostel in China in fact). Hidden deep within a clutch of hutong (traditional residential Chinese streets), we eventually located it with the help of a hastily drawn map from a local.



The first day was spent visiting sights in close proximity to the hostel - the Lama Temple, the Confucius temple and the old imperial college. All three were excellent, the outstanding highlight being the 18m tall Buddha statue in the Lama temple.



Thankfully only a ten minute walk from the hostel (which served awful food) was a street packed with restaurants. With such a huge selection, we had some of our best meals in China here, and really started to perfect our chopstick skills.

Yes, I Am Still Alive

It’s been nigh on three months since my last blog post. Three months! I’ve been getting a few inquiries/threats as to when I’d recommence the account of my travels. That time is now. But first, let me explain the resaons for the yawning time chasm between this post and my last (I already feel like I’m explaining to my teacher why my homework wasn’t in on time).

The primary reason is simple: I’ve been enjoying travelling so much and having so much fun that I’ve found it hard to get time to sit down and write. I’m sure some of you have been following the photographs, but they only show little snapshots of my adventures in Asia.

There’s also another, more idiotic reason - basically, alcohol and netbooks don’t mix. So I was without my blogging tool for a significant portion of the latter part of my time in China. But I realized that this blog has really become a pet project of mine, and I decided that it was worth the damage to the budget that a new netbook would inflict (even one in Chinese).

So right now, I’m in Vientiane, the sleepy capital of Laos, and it’s raining outside. Perfect blogging weather. Since my last blog post three months ago (I still can’t believe it’s been that long) I’ve had some amazing experiences. I’ve made some new best friends in Shanghai, I’ve gazed in wonder at the Hong Kong skyline, I’ve changed travel partners, I’ve sat in the clouds near the Vietnam border, I’ve traveled by myself, I’ve explored Vietcong tunnels, I’ve even floated down a river lined with bars on a tractor-tyre tube. In short, I’ve given myself a lot to write about, with plenty more new experiences to come (I‘m thinking of extending my stay in Asia beyond the originally planned six months). In time I hope to share them all. I just hope you’re still interested.