Just a quick update for those of you keeping tabs and worried about my travels into a military state.
Arrived Yangon this morning and haven't got into trouble yet. Haven't seen another westerner since I stepped out of the airport. All the natives stare at me, but in an endearing unthreatening manner. So to fill you in:
I go to see the most revered buddhist temple today. It's 100m high gold thing on a hill. But I'm not allowed on my own - I might damage it or take a picture of something nearby rather than solely pictures of the temple from designated picture points. So I have to have an escort. A lovely guy, but didn't catch his name. He helpfully tells me where to get the best photos from and then proceeds to take them for me!
It's a seriously poor country and after Bangkok is a bit of a shock. Everything here is more difficult that Thailand. There's malaria everywhere, mosquitos everywhere and not much electricity anywhere. They have one internet cafe (this is it) and a big old military firewall blocking things like blog sites, web based email and some news sites. But I planned for that and being the bestest digimon this side of china I laid down a few back doors and piggy back hook ups in Thailand. If I don't post again it means there is in fact a better digimon and he works for the myanmar government!
Saturday 26 May 2007
Friday 25 May 2007
Kathmandon't
The joys of an Indian summer. Baking in the morning, even more baking in the afternoon and a huge downpour in the evening.
My recovery is well underway. Kat is at 300m above sea level, so the red blood cells are much more comfortable.
As I had suspected Kat is actually pretty nice. Even with the weather it's pretty easy to relax here. My days are spent getting up late, drifting between the hotel garden, the hotel restaurant and my room to catch up on BBC News.
After two days of this Lizzie (a doctor who I bumped into travelling across Tibet) catches up with me. She spends a long time showing me all the great photo's of Everest she has taken and regaling me with stories of how simply life changing the whole experience of getting to base camp was. If I'd bothered to get her address she'd be off my christmas card list. I assume the positive, optimistic persona that suits me so well, smile and congratulate her for making it.
In an effort to avoid her vitriolic good nature I spend saturday at a temple watching hindu's sacrifice goats, chickens and buffalos to Kali. Kali is a wrathful god who happens to require a sacrifice every saturday. Coincidentally there is a nice park right by the temple perfect for a barbeque. They're pragmatic these hindus. I can't see what Kali gets out of it if they end up eating all the animals. I'm sure someone could explain it to me, but it smells bad, so I leave before anyone gets a chance.
Stop off in Patin on the way back to Kat. The only thing there worth mentioning is the pizza that gives me severe food poisoning. So the next day I put on my best "I'm really pleased for you" face and search out Lizzie (or more accurately her drugs). Being lonely she looks after me and takes me to a pharmacy to buy some antibiotics. A cocktail of Metronidazole and Cipro. No prescription needed here and the pills are a fraction of the price I would have paid in the UK. Obviously they are cut with Ajax and won't help at all, but at that price I'd be stupid NOT to take them.
A monkey temple and a monastery later and I'm ready for Thailand. It's a simple little 4 hour hop down to bangkok, but the weather is hotter, more humid and less rainy. There are plenty of westerners, but most of them are just out of school and don't seem to realise how dangerous the sun is - they all walk around with no protection on. I check into the only hotel with a SAGA sign.
Bangkok is just a layover to get stuff sorted for Burma. Sending winter stuff home, getting enough money together and figuring out where it's legal to visit in Burma. I'm back here in a few weeks sadly, so I don't feel the need to see it all. Call in on the Grand Palace though - the one thing you do have to see. Apparently shorts are innapropriate so some lovely thai chap lends me his heavy polyester trousers. I think he may have a fetish for western perspiration since he doesn't seem to mind when I give them back soaking wet.
Apart from the palace I see a few Wats. But substitute Wat for monastery / temple in my previous post and you'll get an impression of how enthusiastically I tour those. Also had a walk through Patpong. Supposedly the centre of the Bangkok go-go bar district, but I think all the ladies are tucked away inside the buildings. The only woman I saw was a 70 year old street cleaner (at least I think she was a street cleaner).
Burma tomorrow and I can't wait.
Photos of Kat:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/robinsouthgate/sets/72157600263950964/
Photos of Bangkok
http://www.flickr.com/photos/robinsouthgate/sets/72157600263758295/
My recovery is well underway. Kat is at 300m above sea level, so the red blood cells are much more comfortable.
As I had suspected Kat is actually pretty nice. Even with the weather it's pretty easy to relax here. My days are spent getting up late, drifting between the hotel garden, the hotel restaurant and my room to catch up on BBC News.
After two days of this Lizzie (a doctor who I bumped into travelling across Tibet) catches up with me. She spends a long time showing me all the great photo's of Everest she has taken and regaling me with stories of how simply life changing the whole experience of getting to base camp was. If I'd bothered to get her address she'd be off my christmas card list. I assume the positive, optimistic persona that suits me so well, smile and congratulate her for making it.
In an effort to avoid her vitriolic good nature I spend saturday at a temple watching hindu's sacrifice goats, chickens and buffalos to Kali. Kali is a wrathful god who happens to require a sacrifice every saturday. Coincidentally there is a nice park right by the temple perfect for a barbeque. They're pragmatic these hindus. I can't see what Kali gets out of it if they end up eating all the animals. I'm sure someone could explain it to me, but it smells bad, so I leave before anyone gets a chance.
Stop off in Patin on the way back to Kat. The only thing there worth mentioning is the pizza that gives me severe food poisoning. So the next day I put on my best "I'm really pleased for you" face and search out Lizzie (or more accurately her drugs). Being lonely she looks after me and takes me to a pharmacy to buy some antibiotics. A cocktail of Metronidazole and Cipro. No prescription needed here and the pills are a fraction of the price I would have paid in the UK. Obviously they are cut with Ajax and won't help at all, but at that price I'd be stupid NOT to take them.
A monkey temple and a monastery later and I'm ready for Thailand. It's a simple little 4 hour hop down to bangkok, but the weather is hotter, more humid and less rainy. There are plenty of westerners, but most of them are just out of school and don't seem to realise how dangerous the sun is - they all walk around with no protection on. I check into the only hotel with a SAGA sign.
Bangkok is just a layover to get stuff sorted for Burma. Sending winter stuff home, getting enough money together and figuring out where it's legal to visit in Burma. I'm back here in a few weeks sadly, so I don't feel the need to see it all. Call in on the Grand Palace though - the one thing you do have to see. Apparently shorts are innapropriate so some lovely thai chap lends me his heavy polyester trousers. I think he may have a fetish for western perspiration since he doesn't seem to mind when I give them back soaking wet.
Apart from the palace I see a few Wats. But substitute Wat for monastery / temple in my previous post and you'll get an impression of how enthusiastically I tour those. Also had a walk through Patpong. Supposedly the centre of the Bangkok go-go bar district, but I think all the ladies are tucked away inside the buildings. The only woman I saw was a 70 year old street cleaner (at least I think she was a street cleaner).
Burma tomorrow and I can't wait.
Photos of Kat:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/robinsouthgate/sets/72157600263950964/
Photos of Bangkok
http://www.flickr.com/photos/robinsouthgate/sets/72157600263758295/
Friday 18 May 2007
Kathmandu catch up
Apologies to all the loyal readers (you know who you are, mum) for not updating you all sooner. Left Lhasa last Sunday and since then finding an internet place has been tricky.
But here's the skinny on the last week or so: Lhasa is nice enough. You can see it in 2 days, but everyone stays longer because they are so scared they haven't acclimatised to the altitude. I give it five days, but I feel no symptoms of AMS and feel no acclimatisation either. They say everyone has a trigger altitude and I guess the 3500m of Lhasa isn't mine. It gives me time to see The Potala Palace and the Joakeng though. I could go on for ages describing those, but only if I'd bothered listening to the guides. Essentially, lots of chapels, with lots of Idols and lots of pilgrims giving lots of yak butter to lots of monks. Over the course of the next five days I see this a lot. Each time the guide describes how it is different to the previous one. But it isn't... ever.
So I get the hell out of Dodge on Sunday in a big Land Cruiser with Ghia trim but no spare tyre - It's not like we are going more than a mile from a starbucks at any point... oh wait...
First stop is Gyantse. Have to drive through a river to get there, so glad we shed the weight of the spare tyre, it could have easily pulled us down. Elevation is 4050m. There is a fort that was once defended from a British assault (or as the Chinese now put it an unprovoked Imperialist massacre - They are probably right - I wasn't there). Climb to the top and feel the altitude at each step. There isn't even a good view.
Accomodation is nice. For the first time I'm not in a dormitory as there are no dormitories out here. I even have a TV in my room and watch about five minutes of Cats in mandarin before I decide that I'd rather not have a TV in my room.
So Monday we head to Shigatse. It's got a big monastery (awesome) and an internet place (even more awesome). Shoot round monastery chapels in about an hour and spend two hours in the internet cafe. Some may consider that uncultured on my part, but in my defence - it's another f**kin monastery. Onward to Sakya, where apparently there is a really nice example of a monastery.
The monastery in Sakya unusually has a bit of gray paint on the outside where all the others have black. There is a reason for this, but by this stage I'm ipodded up and miss what I'm sure will come up in a pub quiz someday. These guys are big believers of karma and maybe I should pay more attention because after Sakya we decide to shoot to Shegar for the night rather than acclimatise in Shigatse (I think everyone had seen enough monasteries) and that's were it all goes wrong for me.
To get to Shegar we have to cross a high pass (5200m) into a valley. It's an hour and a half to get up and at the top there is about 40% of the Oxygen that there would be at sea level. I guess somewhere between 4000m and 5200m is my trigger point for acclimatisation. My heart goes into overdrive, I get pins and needles over every inch of my body and when I try to explain this to the others I can't make sense. Fortunately (very fortunately) I am travelling with people much more sensible than me who had bought along emergency oxygen which they administer to me. We aren't at the top of the pass at this point, but the driver decides it's quicker to go over and down than turn around and down. So two hours and a near death experience later we pull into Shegar. I can breathe on my own, but the tingling is still there and now I feel nauseous and my body temperature is all over the place. The place we are staying is at the low end of basic. There is no heating, no lighting when we arrive and they considerately built an out-house but in the house, so the smell isn't helping my nausea. First thing I do is dig out my insurance documents to figure out how quickly I can get medivacced out (in hind-sight I may have been over-reacting a tad).
A crisis meeting later and we figure out that I can't go any lower - we are at the bottom of a valley and the three passes to get out are all +5k. We also think that a chopper can't fly at this altitude so the medivac option is out. The only thing left is to sit it out and acclimatise to 4000m. We have a Gamow bag on standby if I start coughing blood and there is additional oxygen available.
The next morning and miraculously I survived the night. The plan today is to go to Everest base Camp, but in my condition it is decided that I should stay in Shegar for at least another day and night. So the English speaking contingent leave to Everest and I am left with 10 tibetans all staring at the strange white man sitting in their lounge in his underwear. I spend the entire day breathing (something I can normally do in conjunction with other things). At 7pm I get convinced that the people I am travelling with have gone on and I am left in Shegar to make a new life for myself. If you ever get to see Shegar you will know just how upsetting this possibility is.
But they come back and amazingly I feel better that evening and even manage to eat something. By the morning I feel up to travelling, but I'm in no mood to see another monastery so we all agree to shoot straight for the border in one day. The first test, an hour later is our first 5000m pass. I get the difficult breathing back, but don't need the O2, so when we reach the second pass (5124m) we actually stop to admire Everest - the closest I, sadly, will come to it. From then on the journey gets really interesting. We drop to 2100m in about an hour and a half on dirt tracks on the edge of ravines the likes of which I've never seen. At various points overloaded trucks are coming up from Nepal and we have to negotiate our way past them on this single dirt track, with no barrier protecting us from what at times is a sheer 2km vertical drop. Oh and by this stage it's monsoonal so the dirt track is more like a river. On a few occasions I actually jump out of the car while our driver tries to get round vans. To add to all the fun the chinese are dynamiting the overhangs above the track and every so often after what sounds like thunder our windscreen is pelted with small rocks. You can't buy an adrenaline rush like it (unless you buy a syringe and some adrenaline - but I think that is illegal).
The border is yet another bizarre chinese custom. Our driver, being Tibetan, can't leave the country, so we have to walk through. It's closing by the time we get there and still the rain is coming down in a big way. After showing the Chinese customs guy all the pictures on my camera I'm allowed out to discover that Nepal is 8km away and 800m below me. This is no-mans land. The Americans get through too and bizarrely for no-mans land there is a taxi there waiting. I spend the next few minutes trying to work out if I could kill the Americans with impunity since technically I am nowhere. But when we reach Nepal there is a bridge and apparently this no-mans land is still in China - so they live.
The Nepalese don't care who comes in - they've already got enough problems inside. So we cruise through and grab another taxi to Kathmandu. It's 140km, but 4 hours thanks to checkpoints and poor roads.
And that's where I am now. I checked into the kathmandu Guesthouse - an institution. I've had 2 days of proper R&R. The weather is hot and humid, just how I like it. The food actually tastes like a chef has been somewhere near it when it was cooking and the people smile and speak English. Compared to China it's heaven (you can't tell the Nepalese that though - they just end up here again in the next life).
Pictures from Lhasa: http://www.flickr.com/photos/robinsouthgate/sets/72157600203741342/
Pictures from the journey: http://www.flickr.com/photos/robinsouthgate/sets/72157600226919371/
But here's the skinny on the last week or so: Lhasa is nice enough. You can see it in 2 days, but everyone stays longer because they are so scared they haven't acclimatised to the altitude. I give it five days, but I feel no symptoms of AMS and feel no acclimatisation either. They say everyone has a trigger altitude and I guess the 3500m of Lhasa isn't mine. It gives me time to see The Potala Palace and the Joakeng though. I could go on for ages describing those, but only if I'd bothered listening to the guides. Essentially, lots of chapels, with lots of Idols and lots of pilgrims giving lots of yak butter to lots of monks. Over the course of the next five days I see this a lot. Each time the guide describes how it is different to the previous one. But it isn't... ever.
So I get the hell out of Dodge on Sunday in a big Land Cruiser with Ghia trim but no spare tyre - It's not like we are going more than a mile from a starbucks at any point... oh wait...
First stop is Gyantse. Have to drive through a river to get there, so glad we shed the weight of the spare tyre, it could have easily pulled us down. Elevation is 4050m. There is a fort that was once defended from a British assault (or as the Chinese now put it an unprovoked Imperialist massacre - They are probably right - I wasn't there). Climb to the top and feel the altitude at each step. There isn't even a good view.
Accomodation is nice. For the first time I'm not in a dormitory as there are no dormitories out here. I even have a TV in my room and watch about five minutes of Cats in mandarin before I decide that I'd rather not have a TV in my room.
So Monday we head to Shigatse. It's got a big monastery (awesome) and an internet place (even more awesome). Shoot round monastery chapels in about an hour and spend two hours in the internet cafe. Some may consider that uncultured on my part, but in my defence - it's another f**kin monastery. Onward to Sakya, where apparently there is a really nice example of a monastery.
The monastery in Sakya unusually has a bit of gray paint on the outside where all the others have black. There is a reason for this, but by this stage I'm ipodded up and miss what I'm sure will come up in a pub quiz someday. These guys are big believers of karma and maybe I should pay more attention because after Sakya we decide to shoot to Shegar for the night rather than acclimatise in Shigatse (I think everyone had seen enough monasteries) and that's were it all goes wrong for me.
To get to Shegar we have to cross a high pass (5200m) into a valley. It's an hour and a half to get up and at the top there is about 40% of the Oxygen that there would be at sea level. I guess somewhere between 4000m and 5200m is my trigger point for acclimatisation. My heart goes into overdrive, I get pins and needles over every inch of my body and when I try to explain this to the others I can't make sense. Fortunately (very fortunately) I am travelling with people much more sensible than me who had bought along emergency oxygen which they administer to me. We aren't at the top of the pass at this point, but the driver decides it's quicker to go over and down than turn around and down. So two hours and a near death experience later we pull into Shegar. I can breathe on my own, but the tingling is still there and now I feel nauseous and my body temperature is all over the place. The place we are staying is at the low end of basic. There is no heating, no lighting when we arrive and they considerately built an out-house but in the house, so the smell isn't helping my nausea. First thing I do is dig out my insurance documents to figure out how quickly I can get medivacced out (in hind-sight I may have been over-reacting a tad).
A crisis meeting later and we figure out that I can't go any lower - we are at the bottom of a valley and the three passes to get out are all +5k. We also think that a chopper can't fly at this altitude so the medivac option is out. The only thing left is to sit it out and acclimatise to 4000m. We have a Gamow bag on standby if I start coughing blood and there is additional oxygen available.
The next morning and miraculously I survived the night. The plan today is to go to Everest base Camp, but in my condition it is decided that I should stay in Shegar for at least another day and night. So the English speaking contingent leave to Everest and I am left with 10 tibetans all staring at the strange white man sitting in their lounge in his underwear. I spend the entire day breathing (something I can normally do in conjunction with other things). At 7pm I get convinced that the people I am travelling with have gone on and I am left in Shegar to make a new life for myself. If you ever get to see Shegar you will know just how upsetting this possibility is.
But they come back and amazingly I feel better that evening and even manage to eat something. By the morning I feel up to travelling, but I'm in no mood to see another monastery so we all agree to shoot straight for the border in one day. The first test, an hour later is our first 5000m pass. I get the difficult breathing back, but don't need the O2, so when we reach the second pass (5124m) we actually stop to admire Everest - the closest I, sadly, will come to it. From then on the journey gets really interesting. We drop to 2100m in about an hour and a half on dirt tracks on the edge of ravines the likes of which I've never seen. At various points overloaded trucks are coming up from Nepal and we have to negotiate our way past them on this single dirt track, with no barrier protecting us from what at times is a sheer 2km vertical drop. Oh and by this stage it's monsoonal so the dirt track is more like a river. On a few occasions I actually jump out of the car while our driver tries to get round vans. To add to all the fun the chinese are dynamiting the overhangs above the track and every so often after what sounds like thunder our windscreen is pelted with small rocks. You can't buy an adrenaline rush like it (unless you buy a syringe and some adrenaline - but I think that is illegal).
The border is yet another bizarre chinese custom. Our driver, being Tibetan, can't leave the country, so we have to walk through. It's closing by the time we get there and still the rain is coming down in a big way. After showing the Chinese customs guy all the pictures on my camera I'm allowed out to discover that Nepal is 8km away and 800m below me. This is no-mans land. The Americans get through too and bizarrely for no-mans land there is a taxi there waiting. I spend the next few minutes trying to work out if I could kill the Americans with impunity since technically I am nowhere. But when we reach Nepal there is a bridge and apparently this no-mans land is still in China - so they live.
The Nepalese don't care who comes in - they've already got enough problems inside. So we cruise through and grab another taxi to Kathmandu. It's 140km, but 4 hours thanks to checkpoints and poor roads.
And that's where I am now. I checked into the kathmandu Guesthouse - an institution. I've had 2 days of proper R&R. The weather is hot and humid, just how I like it. The food actually tastes like a chef has been somewhere near it when it was cooking and the people smile and speak English. Compared to China it's heaven (you can't tell the Nepalese that though - they just end up here again in the next life).
Pictures from Lhasa: http://www.flickr.com/photos/robinsouthgate/sets/72157600203741342/
Pictures from the journey: http://www.flickr.com/photos/robinsouthgate/sets/72157600226919371/
Tuesday 8 May 2007
Lhasa calling
Reached Tibet about two hours ago after 48 hours on the train from Beijing. Naturally the first thing I did was find a hostel with decent internet access so I can bang another blog entry out as I notice from all the comments on the previous post that everyone is eagerly waiting for the next update.
The last few days in Beijing are great. Meet up with a couple of ex-pat English guys, Julian and Oscar, who are the nicest (but rudest) people you could meet. Perfect company. They both have a particular English sense of humour that I don't think goes down well with everyone, but when the alternative is sitting on my own or talking to foreign types I just laugh along and put up with it. They also manage to take 200 yaun off me at a poker night. Bastards. I've posted a picture of them so you can all laugh at them like I do.
I have to leave Beijing on the train Sunday evening and get a cab from Julian's flat to the main station. It takes me about half an hour to work out my train goes from Beijing West. So I have 25 minutes to get a taxi across beijing and find it. Which I manage with about 5 seconds spare. When I get into my cabin, covered in sweat, panting and collapsing I think my cabin-mates are a little scared. I feel bad until they speak - it turns out they are American. I can't even make it up to my bunk and have to lie on the one below mine until my heart promises me it won't burst.
Recover sufficiently to sleep and then while away the next day eating yet more bad chinese food and sleeping. Then it gets interesting. Start climbing from sea-level to 5000m in the morning and they bring round nasal oxygen tubes to plug into an outlet by your bunk to counter the lack of atmosphere at 20000 feet.
So now I'm in Lhasa, the home of the dalai lhama (well actually Dharamsala/London is his home since the chinese kicked him out but spiritually it's here). Temperature is currently close to freezing and the hostel is a bit weird - no locks, open showers with no lights and swastikas all over the place. If I hadn't paid 30 yuan for the bed I'd feel like the fuhrer has something against me.
I've uploaded some photo's (apologies that most of them are shit - but I'm throwing yuan away like crazy at the moment and can't afford the editing time) - http://www.flickr.com/photos/robinsouthgate/sets/72157600191922686/
The last few days in Beijing are great. Meet up with a couple of ex-pat English guys, Julian and Oscar, who are the nicest (but rudest) people you could meet. Perfect company. They both have a particular English sense of humour that I don't think goes down well with everyone, but when the alternative is sitting on my own or talking to foreign types I just laugh along and put up with it. They also manage to take 200 yaun off me at a poker night. Bastards. I've posted a picture of them so you can all laugh at them like I do.
I have to leave Beijing on the train Sunday evening and get a cab from Julian's flat to the main station. It takes me about half an hour to work out my train goes from Beijing West. So I have 25 minutes to get a taxi across beijing and find it. Which I manage with about 5 seconds spare. When I get into my cabin, covered in sweat, panting and collapsing I think my cabin-mates are a little scared. I feel bad until they speak - it turns out they are American. I can't even make it up to my bunk and have to lie on the one below mine until my heart promises me it won't burst.
Recover sufficiently to sleep and then while away the next day eating yet more bad chinese food and sleeping. Then it gets interesting. Start climbing from sea-level to 5000m in the morning and they bring round nasal oxygen tubes to plug into an outlet by your bunk to counter the lack of atmosphere at 20000 feet.
So now I'm in Lhasa, the home of the dalai lhama (well actually Dharamsala/London is his home since the chinese kicked him out but spiritually it's here). Temperature is currently close to freezing and the hostel is a bit weird - no locks, open showers with no lights and swastikas all over the place. If I hadn't paid 30 yuan for the bed I'd feel like the fuhrer has something against me.
I've uploaded some photo's (apologies that most of them are shit - but I'm throwing yuan away like crazy at the moment and can't afford the editing time) - http://www.flickr.com/photos/robinsouthgate/sets/72157600191922686/
Thursday 3 May 2007
Two days in
It's been a day since I stepped off the plane. If you ever get the chance to fly Air China don't. And if you ever fly with Virgin make sure it's a Virgin plane and not an Air China on behalf of Virgin plane. For the record, there is absolutely nothing on behalf of Virgin and almost nothing on behalf of Air China either. No pre-take off announcement, no updates from the captain, no movies and no food until 3.30 am when we get the most unenjoyable brekafast I ever have to spit back in a box. But they love a bit of spitting over here so I doubt that offended anyone.
It is at least on time and without major incident (like engines falling off - that type of thing). Get through immigration easily enough - they have a customer satisfaction survey before you actually are a customer so, taking no risks, I say I am very satisfied and I think that got me a free ride through the whole ordeal. Hostel is nice and simple. I'm in a 4 bed dorm with a swedish guy, an american girl and an australian girl. The shower is on the other side of the building and so far I've not waited less than 10 minutes - both times the same israeli was in there singing away in ignorance of my needs. This is the sacrifice I make for meeting people...it's not worth it, they are all idiots.
I spend the day walking around Tianeman and the park behind the forbidden city. With it being the national holiday this week I am not alone. And they've shut all the factories for the holiday which means no smog, clear blue skies and 32 degree heat.
As for food...Rubbish. If I tried to feed some of this stuff to a dog the RSPCA would no doubt prosecute me. In fact a lot of it probably is dog so I'd get done twice. I haven't got ill yet, but sometimes I wish I was throwing up just to take the taste away. And they love oil - on everything. Losers!
It is at least on time and without major incident (like engines falling off - that type of thing). Get through immigration easily enough - they have a customer satisfaction survey before you actually are a customer so, taking no risks, I say I am very satisfied and I think that got me a free ride through the whole ordeal. Hostel is nice and simple. I'm in a 4 bed dorm with a swedish guy, an american girl and an australian girl. The shower is on the other side of the building and so far I've not waited less than 10 minutes - both times the same israeli was in there singing away in ignorance of my needs. This is the sacrifice I make for meeting people...it's not worth it, they are all idiots.
I spend the day walking around Tianeman and the park behind the forbidden city. With it being the national holiday this week I am not alone. And they've shut all the factories for the holiday which means no smog, clear blue skies and 32 degree heat.
As for food...Rubbish. If I tried to feed some of this stuff to a dog the RSPCA would no doubt prosecute me. In fact a lot of it probably is dog so I'd get done twice. I haven't got ill yet, but sometimes I wish I was throwing up just to take the taste away. And they love oil - on everything. Losers!
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