*blink*

For god's sake..it's 5:30 in the morning and I'm wide awake. Is this jet lag?!? Couldn't be...I could have slept though a hurricane yesterday. Bah!!

More tidbits about my life for 2 weeks in China:

• Guilin is the most beautiful and perfect place in China. Mother Earth pulled a few strings when it made Guilin...I miss it already.
• Shanghai is people, people, people....and buildings. And the pollution is outrageously horrible. Me and my parents could not stop coughing and hacking away.
• If you think we are bad, we're not the only ones. Many men in Shanghai also cough away and spit out phelgm on the ground. It's sick and gross, and makes you wonder if they ever learned about cleanliness from SARS. Whenever me and my sister hear the "wind-up", we run.
• A friendly taxi driver chatting with my mom told her that working in a restaurant in China will earn about $600 Yen a month. Remember, $1 Can = $7 Yen. You can do the math. Makes me apprechiate my life in Canada a lot more.
• The stairs at the Great Wall are horrible. They are not evenly made...some steps are super short, while other steps will reach as high as your knee, so you pretty much have to climb up. Going down is a lot more dangerous, and scary. But I climbed until I can do no more and my legs were shaking when we got to ground level.
• Milk tea in China is officially DISGUSTING. Don't drink it!!!!!!
• And yes, I did see grasshoppers, beetles, and centipedes on a stick, waiting to be sold and eaten at those street vendors. And yes, it looks exactly like those pictures if you google it.
• And yes, I did see snake wine as well. But hey, it's friggin expensive man...!! It's like a national treasure or something.
• Tiananmen Square is still an extremely sensitive place, where everything is hush hush. The day that I was there, I was standing next to a military guard taking pictures when he all the sudden screamed "HEY!!!" (or least a chinese version of it). It scared me so bad, I thought I was caught for something. But it turns out, some old lady was running up a bridge the military blocked off shouting something. The miltary guards picked her up, dragged her, and threw her into a police van. We didn't know what it was, but I'm sure the old women must have had political reasonings for doing that. It was my bad luck that I happened to be right in the middle of it (next to a friggin guard, my god), but I was honestly, really, really, scared.
• The Forbidden City had so many palaces to it, that after awhile, they all start to look the same. Very beautiful though, with wide open spaces. The tour lady told us about this one palace, that had a couple of lion statues facing the entrance to the city. In between the statues and the entrance gate, there was a little river and bridges. Many years ago, an earthquake went though the Forbidden City, and cracked one of the lion statues a bit. The government wanted to fix it, so they decided to move it back to the warehouse to patch it up. Once they started to move the lion statue, the river in front started to boil (true story). Government dudes freaked out, and sought advice from a famous fung shui guy, who said that the statues cannot ever be moved; they were there to guard the evil from this palace, and would bring immense bad luck if moved. So yeap, it's still there...freaky story though.
• The Terra Cotta soliders are seriously, to be seen. No wonder it's called the eighth wonder of the world. I still cannot believe a king would go through so much just for his burial. The excavation, sadly, I think is halted; the soliders were once colored once excavated, but soon after the paint vanished, and there is no way to perserve it so far. But what they have uncovered so far, is so wickedly awesome and unbelievable.
• In the Temple of Gods, there is one temple which was surrounded by a perfect circular concrete wall. It was called the Echo Wall, since if one person stands at the left and right of the door and speak into the wall, you can hear each other. The sound waves vibrate through the wall apparently. And it does work. Me and my sister tried it, and it almost sounds like she's standing right behind me. Freeeeaaakkkyyyy...
• The way China elders do tai chi in the morning is amazing. It's not about moving hands and all. But they take a paddle with a ball balanced on it, and move gracefully with it, without ever dropping the ball. That's what so hard...it trains them physically and mentally.
• Panhandlers in China are the worst I've seen. I had a small child with no feet try to crawl to me for money. I couldn't give him any, because then all the panhandlers would come to me, and I would have to feed the entire block or two. But it totally broke my heart, and even now, I regret just not taking that plunge and giving him money.
• We actually lost a day in Guilin because of such heavy rainfall. The plane couldn't land so we detoured to Cheang Sha airport for about 8-9 hours. And then after, when we could board the plane again, it's not like in Canada: "Rows 1-20, please board now..". It was more like "Anyone heading to Guilin on China Eastern, go NOOOWWW". So, you have this mad rush of about 200, tired, hungry, pissed off, Chinese people, who want to get on that plane. Trust me. I was NOT happy.
• I have gotten really used to sleeping anytime and anywhere: various hotel rooms, tour buses, airports, airplanes, etc, etc.
• The only english channel that's on TV is CNN, and if you're lucky, HBO. The only sport they talk about is badminton and soccer. So I had no contact with the playoffs this whole 2 weeks, but hey, Barcelona won over Arsenal for the European Cup!!! Isn't that great??
• And lastly, everywhere I go in China, this song seems to be SOOO popular. I'm convinced that the Back Dormitory Boys had something to do with boosting its ratings.
  
  

Anyways, I think I should try to get some sleep now. Toodles! I'll update later when I can think of more!

Karen