<p dir=ltr>I'm heading to China! Its going to be a great trip. Living up to my reputation I only finished booking my flights, busses, trains and accommodation literally a few hours before I got on the plane. Fortunately everything is organized (or organised to be organised). My plan is china - England - Netherlands - Germany - France - England. It should be great fun.</p>
<p dir=ltr>I guess every good story starts off with a feeling of regret. The suitcase I packed is needlessly large. Not just by my standards but by Ryan air standards. I guess my dream of being able to frolic peacefully between hostels with a camping bag full of clothes and essentials is dead. I know its not the biggest deal, but it does say a lot about my decision making abilities when I'm short on time.
<p dir=ltr>But it doesn't have to be this way. I try to turn every international adventure into a way to improve myself, and this trip is going to be no different. Starting from this Chinese airlines flight and extending all the way to my final days in England I'm going to make this trip about independence and exploration.</p>
<p dir=ltr>Alright, dinner was just served on the Chinese airline and I could not be more disappointed. Before I got to exercise my new found independence by asking the waitress to give me the meal of my choice (out of a menu of two options), she informed me that the 'western meal' was all out. I now had to chose between the Chinese meal or the Chinese meal. After bravely choosing the Chinese meal I figured to myself that at least I might be able to explore some fine cuisine. Nope. The Chinese meal was beef and rice. Either the meal was surprisingly western or I've been living on an unsurprisingly Asian diet all my life.</p>
<p dir=ltr>OK so we've landed in china and its nothing short of a sensory overload. We left the airport with our baggage heading for the taxi area when both tom and I were approached by an overly enthusiastic Chinese 'taxi driver'. We got about halfway up the airport walkway when I decides to stop being distracted by the NBA small talk and ask him whether the taxi had a meter on it. He said it didn't and told us that the 'taxi' was a fixed price of ¥580 to drop us off at the city center. After saying "fuck no" in the politest way possible, he immediately dropped his price to ¥300. Tom and I decided to ditch him anyway and go for another taxi. After arriving at out destination for ¥100, tom and I decided to check into our hotel. Not good. We arrived at 8:30am and check in was at 2:00pm - a 5.5 hour wait. </p>
<p dir=ltr>1st hour: <br>
We toured the immediate area by walking around. Its so polluted!! Its nothing like what I was expecting. I expected souring skyscrapers and giant blade runner type advertisements promoting coca-cola. Instead the city area is very spread out and poverty is everywhere. It reminds me a lot of Jakarta bit with fewer (FEWER) people.<br>
Food. We found a dumpling place bear the hostel and decided to walk in. Its much harder to communicate than I expected - no one knows English, not even a little. We tried to pay for the 4 dumplings we had by using hand gestures.  The shop keeper was so confused that he offered to give us ¥40 for eating there. I just dropped ¥20 into his hands and left.<br>
We then went back to the hostel to rest in the public lounge area. Tom collapsed in a corner by a fish tank and I started writing this blog.</p>
<p dir=ltr>2nd 3rd 4th and 5th hour:<br>
We couldn't just wait around the hostel air we decided to find a way to the city. An earlier attempt to go to the city centre resulted in tom asking the first white person he saw "do you know where the city center is"?. Unfortunately not every white person speaks fluent English apparently. After a very awkward 30 second conversation of pigeon English with a German family we pretended to understand what they were saying and left. I did learn something though - the hand gesture for "city center" looks amazingly similar to the hand feature for sex.</p>
<p dir=ltr>Anywho, we eventually made it to a place called tian'anmen east via the subway. Wow, just wow. When we arrived at the famous landmark we saw giant TV screens showing communist propaganda - space missions and army marches everywhere. Shortly afterwards we found ourselves bumping into beautiful landmarks - almost literally because the pollution makes the visibility so bad. We almost walked into this beautiful hemispherical shaped theatre when we met two locals; tom and jack (yeah I'm pretty sure they chose those names for our benefit). They were aged about 30 and 40 and both spoke (to our relief) great English. We sussed them out pretty quickly and realized that they were both homeopathy doctors with very deep pockets. We got talking about all the must-do's in Beijing and apparently some once in a year festival was occurring this week only. It was a tea festival at a place called tea city (or was it T.C.T? I can't tell). They invited us to a tea house where we tried a range of amazing teas while talking about China and our German heritage (toms idea). They taught us the way you're meant to hold tea, drink tea and... wait for it... pray with tea. Apparently the first serving of tea should always be wasted in honour of the gods. I didn't let the fact that 1) certain types of teas had supposedly job promoting powers or that 2) the fact that tom and jack had chosen professions that are the cause of a lot of 21ar century outrage bother me. Instead I tried to learn more about the Chinese culture, superstitions and hospitality.
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