Off to the country

Hi all!

It's been lovely to hear from people on the comments, and through emails: we can't view the blog from here, but we can see your comments (they get emailed on to us). And although we have email trouble sometimes, we get through in the end most days that we try. Hopefully things will be smoother in Mumbai (?) and we'll be able to put up some more of our snaps and fix broken picture links, funny formatting and the like.

We're off to Yujin's family's home in the countryside for a week tonight - so no more posts or emails till around October 7th. Keep well till then!

- Mark

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival!

Last night was the September full moon, which makes it Mid-Autumn Festival, in which Chinese families get together and people give each other unpleasant-tasting (to us!) Moon-Cakes

We ate with Hongwei and Yujin, HW's mum and dad, YJ's two brothers and their wives, and two of YJs young cousins, in the restauranton the ground floor of our hotel. Our first social event with other Chinese people - and I think we did well. We had managed to find, agree on, buy and hand over appropriate gifts (also a first) and sustained various conversations - interpreted by YJ, HW and the cousins - about food, dogs, weather, etc. A friendly, relaxed, tasty (of course) and generally successful evening.

I like starting to figure out the giving thing. It just didn't properly click with us for a while, this whole business of fighting to spend significant amounts of money on other people: we're much more used to trying to avoid that kind of thing. The night before last, however, we managed to steal the bill at the restaurant and pay it before Hongwei could (the first time we've managed to pay for anything at all that we've done together with them here) and I really enjoyed it. We will have to be significantly more devious to get round Yujin (not with us that night, as he often works into the evenings), as he is tall, strong, sharp and very determined - but I'm anticipating the challenge with relish.

- Mark

Nearly a movie star ...

Sunday night, our hosts boundless kindness and concern caused me to miss a chance at movie immortality (sob!)

We were in the park after eating as usual, playing badminton, swirling pois around, being stared at and chatting with an older couple who spoke English, when a very trendy young man started talking to me. Seems he was a theatrical agent, and needed "a foreigner, about 38" for some filming on the Monday afternoon. The film is apparently being directed by some famous Chinese director, and Mr Agent was offering to drive me to the outskirts of Beijing for three hours extra-ing. Before he could get to any details, however, like what the film or the scene was about, and whether I was to be paid or not, Yujin and Hongwei leapt in to defend me, convinced he was a con-artist up to something. My new friend wasn't keen on being asked searching questions in a language he could speak well and left - saying I should call by midnight if still interested.

Was he a con-artist? His card led to a website of aspiring models and actresses - I couldn't figure out what kind of con he could be trying to pull, given that tourist-kidnapping isn't known as a Chinese sport. I think he probably was on the level and had been asked if he could find an extra or two. I would have loved to have seen the Chinese movie industry at work, and would have rung him - but by this time Rosa had become pretty worried about father-kidnapping, and really didn't want me to go.

So that was that. Ah, well, there's always Bollywood ...

- Mark

Huairou and Great Wall photos

Texting and recent posts

Hi. To clarify the note on the right hand top part of this page: if you want to be in touch with us quickly-ish, you can text Heather on her usual mobile phone-number for about 40p (Mark got his SIM nicked in Bangkok, unfortunately). I don't have it on all the time, and I might not always reply (lots of 40p's can add up!) - but they should mostly get through to us.

Why would you do such a thing?!

Here are just a few of the reasons we're doing this:

• To see friends and family and significant places that we won't otherwise see, much more cheaply than on lots of short holidays
• For all four of us to get a better picture of the world
• To get a break from the pressures of school, work, etc., and remember the joy of learning and experiencing new things and challenges that sometimes gets drained out of us by all that
• To get to spend lots of time together at a stage when many young people and parents seem to get pulled apart
• To learn about world religions, global politics, a wide range of natural habitats, and what shops, streetstalls and markets are like in different countries
• To spend time in places where racism plays out differently than it does in the UK, to see what that's like for us all
• To get the chance to really rest after working too hard for a while
• To see rainforest, swim with dolphins, make new friends, see how old human cultures are, see how fast-changing they can be ...
• To have time to regularly play guitar, juggle pois, talk about the way the world works, learn new things for the fun of them, be physically active, write this blog ...
• To spend money we've earned on something we really want: this has been a great motivator to save, to be in charge of and to earn money - all things we've wanted to get better at

A luxury hotel and more food ...

We've just been away for the weekend to a very posh hotel outside of Beijing. It is where the Prime Minister, other ministers and their minions go to relax at weekends. We went to visit the Great Wall (which really is a great wall!). We went up to it by cable car and came down a long slide/toboggan - really good fun.

We were then taken by our hosts to eat at a very delicious restaurant where they had amazing barbequed fish (Melissa's favourite food so far) then back to the hotel to swim, sauna and eat yet more food. We had foot massages, facials (me and Hong Wei), the men and kids played games, skittles, shooting, video games and others. I even had my hair dyed - it's now an interesting shade of dark greeny brown!!!

So much luxury - we really haven't had chance to miss any home comforts yet - except for a bath. The coffee's not great (except in Starbucks) but we can buy cadburys and galaxy ("dove") chocolate everywhere - and we do! Last time I came here there was none of that - I had a complete break from those particular addictions. The food is wonderful and awful at the same time - some delicious food - fresh, varied and lovely, there seems to be no end to the variety of ways that tofu can be served (some nice and some not) and lots of lovely veggies (thank goodness) and loads of different fish dishes. But there is so much else - we went up a little street today and saw kebabs of many things including snake, scorpian (live), beetle, hearts, squid etc - I felt sick and had to come away - Mark bravely bought a chicken kebab which was delicious apparently - even the little egg balls that I liked the look of had squid inside!

I find that I am very squeamish and a great dissapointment to our hosts who would like to show us all of the vast variety of foods that this country has to offer - Rosa is even worse and lives mostly on egg fried rice! Thank goodness we have Mark with us who will at least try most things (even cow stomach and sea cucumber) and Melissa is being very game about trying new things and has eaten a quantity of new vegetables.

Missing friends and family, especially when we see something that I know some of you would like or that I would like to share with you. Hope you are all missing us too - but not too much - just enough to make some of you want to come and join us somewhere on the route.

- Heather

A little news

Hi all! We're still in Beijing, still having email/web access trouble, still having a good time.

Yesterday was a good day for everyone, I think. We spent the day before rushing around this huge hot city in taxis, failing to find an open internet cafe that would offer better facilities than the grotty Internet Bar round the corner (over-18s only). I've been able to download our photos into HW & YJ's PC, and burn them on to a CD, so we don't need computers that our cameras will talk to, but we do need ones with CD drives if we're to load any photos. Mostly, we can't even get into gmail here, and I'm posting via email to the blog (you can try my old bigfoot address if you want to get in touch soon, or text Heather or me ...).

So yesterday we stayed close to home. The Yong He Tibetan Bhuddist Temple is local, colourful (photos to come!), calming, huge and smells strongly of the enormous amounts of sandalwood incense burned. We found shade and wrote postcards, then headed off to a pretty but not-delicious veggie restaurant nearby. This took us into hutongs for the first time (again, photos to come!) - people living very close to each other, hanging out with each other, adults and children on the street: a bit like George Street only more picturesque.

We spent the later afternoon in the paying entry bit (20p each) of the park over the road from the hotel. Parks in China are great. I want to live here when I'm old: people of all ages, but older ones particularly, hang around singing, playing instruments, flying kites, watching schools of carp, chatting and exercising. We've only seen one guy so far doing something we are sure was Tai Chi, but we've seen all sorts of other things, from swordplay to badminton, and from gentle stretches on the state-provided outdoor gym (looks pretty much like a kids playground in the UK, but with bigger equipment, and no grafitti) to sweaty sit-ups on the parallel bars. The one thing you can't do is walk on the grass - but the hard surfaces include ones designed for massaging your feet as you walk on them!

Then another huge, delicious meal with HW and YJ in another local restaurant, this one with NE China specialities (yam noodles, corn pancakes, etc) - Melissa ate aubergines, green and red peppers and big mild chillies with pleasure(!), though both girls liked the big chunky potato chips best (but didn't use the condensed milk dip provided ...). After, we went back to the streetside bit of the local park and played badminton and pois for an hour or two.

Tonight we're off to the outskirts of the metropolitan area, and what may be a luxury hotel by the sound of it - we're visiting the Wall and the place where H and Lani came to the UN conference until Sunday night. Next week we're going to Yujin's home town in rural Shang Dong province - travelling there on Thursday or Friday and staying a week - definitely no internet then! Then back in Beijing, or we may try and get out of the city (if only to find a way to stop HW & YJ paying for everything!) for a bit before we leave for India on Oct 13th.

love to all of you from all of us:

- Mark

Staying in Beijing

Here, as promised are photos of the Lama temple, and of a hutong shop:

Melissa is a fantastic hard bargainer - in this picture she's about to get the price she originally named (about a fifth of the asking price):

The park over the road is a great place for a stroll or some exercise in the day:

In the evenings we hang out in the street park, playing badminton or swinging pois:

Interruption in Normal Service

Hi all - sorry that we've not been updating very much recently: and I expect the posts that have got through may be looking a little wierd. We're being very well looked after indeed by Hongwei and Yujin in Beijing - but we are not near any good internet cafes, so everything is very slow, and our connections to gmail and blogger (who run our blog) are very patchy.

We are all well, and particularly well fed, and we'll get more up here as soon as we can.

- love HMRM

More Shanghai Photos

Shanghai introduced us to the range of Chinese transport systems:

It also gave us a chance to rest, start on-the-road blogging, look out the window at a new city, and just be tourists

The train to Beijing

The shiny new Z2 left Shanghai train station at 19:21 on it's 1450km, 12 hr journey to Beijing, with us happily settling in to our soft sleeper compartment:

We liked it: no longer in a shared dormitory; enough good food for two for about GBP1.50; all the hot water we could drink; and once the sun rose in the morning (it's getting light about 6am) great views of the flat, huge, Chinese countryside. We saw fields of corn, schoolchildren cycling in blue and white tracksuit uniforms, small flocks of sheep, a donkey, a quarry, lots and lots of sunflowers, and villages and towns all of whose houses faced the same way.

Beijing!

How lovely to be met by friendly faces at the station! Hongwei and Yujin brought us home to their neighbourhood near Yong He Temple. Our hotel occupies the bottom floors of a building shared by the Ministry of Labour and Social Security, for whom Yujin now works as director general (no less!) of their Centre for International Exchanges, is two minutes walk from our hosts' flat, and is right next door to the huge new building the Ministry will be moving into when it is completed next year.

Breakfast in a cafe round the corner: fried doughsticks (like savoury churros) with sweetened soya-milk, egg pancakes, pork chop and a bowl of soupy noodles. Then a quick visit to Yujin's office (he can't get at this website on the internet either) and off with Hongwei to our first real tourist must-sees of the whole trip - Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden Palace: finest collection of ancient buildings in all China. See the beautiful clay brick roofscape! Zoom in on the welcoming Starbucks!

Tried and failed to imagine the place when it was truly forbidden to non-members of the imperial court (for 500 years to 1911), the emperor's concubines spent their whole lives here, and latte was completely unavailable. The garden at the back was a relaxing place to end our visit and had more atmosphere, I thought:

Then home (chauffered by the Ministry!) to the hotel, off to McDonald's for a snack (sad but true), and then I escaped for a welcome snooze while Hongwei, Heather and the girls shopped for a couple of hours.

A good evening with friends

Yujin had to dine with the Minister, so we ate with Hongwei in a small room to ourselves at the restaurant underneath our bedrooms - so much delicious food! A Sichuan dish that was mostly chillies, from which chilles and peanuts were excavated to eat; asparagus with some bulb that Hongwei couldn't translate into English; a cold dish of wood-ear mushrooms with cucumber in a gorgeous garlic, ginger, sesame and chilli sauce; two kinds of fish, one very spicy; tofu; cold chicken; and two kinds of rice.

Later, Heather and I strolled and chatted with Yujin (dinner over) and Hongwei in the neighbouring park - the girls safely tucked up in their room. Groups of neighbours were playing music and dancing; couples cuddled; other people sat and watched goldfish in the pond; the occasional young policeman quietly available to stop any bad behaviour. A pleasantly cool evening, the wind making the weeping willows even more beautiful. The life of an ordinary Chinese director general seems very bearable on first inspection!

- Mark

leaving Shanghai

Leaving Shanghai today, quite relieved as although its been an easy transition from home the full on commercialism was something that we (adults) were trying to get away from. The tempatations to spend a lot of time and money on the 'western' luxuries (such as Starbucks) is very strong.

Finally adjusting to the time zone, woke up this morning and didn't feel like it was the middle of the night and was hungary for the first time for breakfast, and last night we walked a really long way and I felt energetic - hooray!

Met some friendly Koreans in the Youth Hostel and were able to give away one of our business cards and some little gifts, Mark is going to put a photo up of them in due course. We aren't able to see the weblog at all from here, so I don't know what it looks like now - hope it looks nice

- Heather

Last night in Shanghai ...

Shanghai's neon spectacular certainly rivals Times Square. We walked through the blare of colour and the crowds on a busy Saturday night to try to catch the acrobats - who were having the night off.

On the way we fell in with a South African 'hostess' for the British Jaguar F1 team, here to find English food and an Irish pub ready for the driver's arrival for next week's race - so we learned of the Jag's departure from Coventry from this unlikely source. Crossing our fingers that the knock-on effects won't cost any of our friends their jobs.

No acrobats, but an interesting stroll past all kinds of provision for wealthy people, followed by the week's most expensive meal (pizza). We strolled down this alley: - but the internet cafe we were looking for turned out to be a bar for over-18s, so we had to content ourselves with leafing through the latest DVD's available for 80p each - Princess Diaries 2, I Robot, Ocean's Twelve: and lots of art-house and world cinema - get your orders in now for our visit to Beijing's DVD markets ...!

- Mark

A few photographs

We haven't yet got really into taking and putting up photos a lot yet - too busy relaxing into this climate and culture and each other's company - but here are a few to look at:

- Mark

Shanah tovah!

Hag sameach and a year filled with sweetness to all of our dear Jews and all the rest of you. We're hoping our year will be - and last night was noticeably sweeter with the air-conditioning working (it was there, switched off, all along; we just hadn't realised that such a little box on the wall could make such a big difference ...). We have all had grumpy mouldy manky moments in the last while and I think we're each having scary culture shock feelings ("will there ever be any nice food??", "will it always be this hot, and will I ever get used to it?", "they're all laughing at me, aren't they?", etc.) and maybe its beginning to sink in that we have only each other as primary everyday companions and resource for much of the next ten months. That said, we are having fun also: a lovely cooling boat tour of the wide Huangpu River, past miles of towering skyscrapers, huge boats being refitted, coal barges, the tacky but amazing Oriental Pearl Tower; chats in the youth hostel with German sisters at the end of their China tour, and a wanderer from Wolverhampton; wandering ourselves through the old Chinese town bit of Shanghai where me and Melissa enjoyed an old-style Chinese garden and Heather and Rosa complained until they found a cool Starbucks to sit in. Enough - Heather will kill me if I don't leave this internet cafe and we're all hungry. More later - Mark

What jetlag looks like ...

we're in shanghai!

hey everyone, we're in shanghai as the title sugests! we're learning chinese but mostly its mark learnin to speak and me learnin to read and write it! im really enjoyin learnin that and mums bought me a book to learn some more, i was using the mandarin phrase book before but now i have 'fun with chinese characters the straits times collection1' hope to get through this 1 and get 2 and 3 soon! hope everyone is havin fun at home! dads broken his guitar already and is havin it fixed at this very moment! have found out that islam is the most practised religion in china (with a whole 2% of the population being muslim!). also have noticed that the @ and the " keys on the keyboard have swapped around in china! will keep you posted on this in different countrys! and am plannin to learn to read atleast some of; hindi(or whatever), thai and khmer, its really fun, uselot should really try it, although you really need to be the country of origin for the full afect! oh well mums gettin impatient waitin for me and dad to finish writin our blog entry's! hope you dont mind me finishin so soon! luv yall rosa xxx

Shanghai some more ...

Well Shanghai is certainly a good way to start off on our travels, it's very Chinese in some ways but has all of the decadent Western commercialism that we all hold so dear! I haven't yet had to face giving up my addictions (coffee and chocolate) and our youth hostel had bacon and egg for breakfast for Melissa. There are McDonalds, Pizza Hut and KFC on every street corner (yuk!) and Starbucks and Haagan Dass also (yummy!). We have also eaten some delicious Chinese food for a fraction of the price. There are Western style, clean toilets for the squeamish and squat, dirty toilets for the desperate (and after all my coffee that's me!). We have been to three internet cafes and a massive foreign language bookshop (bought book on Chinese characters for Rosa who's really getting into learning the characters), book called "Whatever happened to Lani Garver" for me, book about the life of Nelson Mandela for Melissa and a beautiful colouring book for us all to share with Chinese designs. All in all a good time is being had by all, although we are still suffering a little from jetlag - especially Mark and Rosa who aren't as good at sleeping as me and Melissa (not helped by a group of loudGermans partying outside our room at 3am this morning - earplugs lostin the bed by then!) - Heather

greetings from Shanghai

We are all well but very jet lagged, desperate to go to sleep but forcing ourselves to stay up until a reasonable time - we had a nap and now feel terrible so we thought we would come to the internet cafe to try to do something undemanding. We went and ate at a real Chinese cafe today, they couldn't understand us and we couldn't understand them but we managed to point, mime, point at things in the window and in our phrase book - we felt very brave but ended up with far too much food - it was lovely though and came to about 8 pounds. Shanghai is pretty amazing, very busy and surprisingly commercial, very western but very chinese too - how I imagine Hong Kong to be - its very clean and we haven't seen any birds, insects, dogs of any other creatures at all (I did see a squashed mossie on the wall of the youth hostel!) We are staying in a dorm with 6 other people, very adventurous, and it's costing us about 12 pounds a night for all of us, very cheap for Shanghai. Found a nice little market near us with lots of selling of pretend Guccis, CK, game boy games etc. The flight was ok but Rosa couldn't sleep much and kept me awake too leaning on me and fidgetting a lot, we saw a really funny chinese film on the flight about a stinky princess!! It has been hotter here than I thought but it poured with rain whilst we were taking our nap, quite overcast and close. I let the kids have coke to keep them awake and I even had a latte! (not that nice) Anyway hope you are all well and not missing us too much yet, - love Heather

Shanghai - what time is it???

We've arrived in Shanghai: this is definitely not Foleshill!

Best thing so far

• Melissa: Going to sleep, and the market round the corner before that: gameboy games for four pounds!
• Rosa: Sleeeeeping
• Heather: Being brave enough to go into a proper Chinese cafe where nobody spoke English, and managing to order things we could eat
• Mark: Showering, cleaning my teeth, playing my guitar a bit (but see below) ...

Worst thing so far

• Melissa: Smelly street near our youth hostel. Food's been a bit horrible.
• Rosa: Having to wake up again
• Heather: Jet lag - and not being able to sleep on the plane ...
• Mark: My guitar's broken already! :-( It must have got whacked and the soundboard is coming away from the wall over about 15 cm

Next on the list

• Melissa: Go round some more shops
• Rosa: Find an internet cafe that is faster than this one!
• Heather: I'm hungry now
• Mark: Find a website about fixing your own guitar with gaffer tape and superglue

More interesting posts as soon as we can find a place with faster internet access and our brains begin to work again - lots of love to all - M, R, H, M xx

We're off in the morning!

Let the record show that we are starting out carrying:

• Rosa: 10.2 kg backpack, 2.2 kg daypack
• Melissa: 10.6 kg backpack, 2.4 kg daypack
• Mark: 11.8 kg backpack, 3.2 kg daypack, 6.2 kg guitar
• Heather: 11.2 kg backpack, 1.6 kg daypack (with water still to be added)

This is, we should point out, less than 60kg total (that's only 50g of stuff each per day) - and the guitar adds less than 12% to the overall weight allowance. However, to all those who asked if they could fit in our luggage - we're sorry: no room.

Getting ready before we go ...

We have been saying goodbye to our cousins, Tilly, Stan, Seamus & Sean - & lots of other people. We went on a picnic to say goodbye at Amberly:

We've been tidying our room and getting rid of some of our stuff, giving it to our friends & families to make more space for Lani & Sati. We had a test pack to make sure that everything fits into our rucksacks: then we had to go to Birmingham to get our Thai and Indian visas and do some more shopping. We have also been getting ready for our open house on Saturday 11th September. I can't wait to go! I'm looking forward to seeing Hong Wei and Yu Jin, and to Jamaica - and everything! - Melissa

Culinary World Tour: Report #1

First in an occasional series: To start our culinary tour of the world, here's our farewell picnic in Jephson Gardens - Egon

Interesting Facts #93: Big Cities

Looks like we'll be visiting (as opposed to just changing planes at) at least five of the world's twenty largest cities, according to these official UN figures (thanks Jim!). As well as the 3rd (Mumbai), 8th (Mexico), 9th (Shanghai), 12th (Bangkok) and 13th (Beijing), we'll also take in numbers 31, 42 and 54. The same five also make it into the top twenty largest urban areas, although in a different order. We'll need a barely inhabited Thai island after that ... - Mark

We will not be with you for much longer

Well, it is getting very near now: starting to take my leave of loved ones I won't see for a long time, and chewing through a few more things on the long list of last-minute stuff to do every day. In a very minor way, this is great practice for dying. No pain, not too much terror, but lots of long and short goodbyes to say, and a set of affairs to leave in order. Some people are upset and not sure whether to burden me with it or not, some others have dropped out of touch a bit now we're nearly gone. I've caught up with old friends I've been out of touch with for no good reason, and also had a couple of important but awkward conversations that have been put off for a long time - now I will soon be on the other side (of the world) it seemed pointless to wait any longer. Of course, we have a guaranteed after-life following this departure, and we will be with you all again in the third quarter - though probably subtly changed in some way. In the meantime, this blog will carry news of our journey through the underworld ... - Mark