Didn't manage to sleep but arrived Hong Kong 6am local time and blessed Matt's ingenuity at finding flights with free ticket amendments when we avoided the 10 hour wait we were due to have. We brought our Beijing connection forward and instead only waited until 9am. This gave us just enought time to rehydrate a little and send an email to our hostel before heading through security again.
The plane breakfast was unpleasent. We hedged our bets and got one of each of the two breakfast varieties on offer. One was a very white sausage with scrambled egg and onion chutney and the other was a plate of biege. It was first taste of Chinese food that I had dreaded. The dim sum seemed to contain some whipped meat and there was a square of stuff that I wouldn't touch. I asked Matt what it tasted like and he simply said, 'dirt'. Matt being the chivalrous soul he is, let me eat the scrambled egg. I don't know if it was the context but I wondered why I'd never tried it with onion chutney before.
We arrived Beijing around midday and took the cool monorail to collect the bags. We spent a while faffing around with buying a SIM but despite Matt's best efforts, it wasn't playing properly so we'll probably not use it much.
When we took the airport expressway to Dongcheng, we thought the station had got the air-con turned up too high. We felt pretty stupid when we arrived in the city to find that it was actually just freezing cold. We'd thought Nepal would be cold and it was lovely and warm and we'd thought China might be spring-like by now. Seems our lack of research is showing us up.
The walk to the hostel was very long and our hands were red-raw and cracking by the time we'd walked just a few of the huge Beijing blocks. We seemed to be trudging for so long that eventually we saw a McDonald's and cracked. Not even a few hours and we were running to the familiar comfort of a McD's cuppa. All credit to Matt, he was eyeing up the variety of gloop and slimy things on sticks that were on sale next door but decided to wait until we'd dropped off our bags before trying to eat anything so spiky.
The hostel, Beijing Downtown Backpackers, was quite nice and much more like European hostels but very expensive compared to to 2 or 3 quid a night we'd become used to paying. It was on a street that seemed a mix of classic Chinese architecture and cool modern city slick so we hit the shops to entertain ourselves and keep ourselves awake for a few hours.
I think the modernity quickly rubbed off on Matt because he went all hip and bought espadrilles! All credit to him though, his waterproof walking shoes have been "rotting" (eugh!) his feet and so needed a little comfort. I was dumbfounded by the fact that he had found shoes that he liked without months of trawling the shops and so encouraged him to buy them as soon as possible.
Back at the hostel we chatted to a nice Dutch couple, Jolene and Michael, who were in a similar situation and were doing a round the world trip too. They'd been more daring and and included Africa, as well as sensible enough not to include so much time in expensive countries like Australia. We also chatted to a couple of girls who were meeting up there. Mara was a German student and Nicole was American and was living in China teaching English. We drank a few beers and listened to how they met as Au Pairs in Australia. I was really interested because it was something that I considered doing a long time ago. Nicole was very entertaining and loved to spin a tale so we talked for a long time about all sorts of things to do with China and travel.
We were joined by another German guy, Jakob, who the girls had met earlier and after several beers and conversations about food, we were really hungry. Jakob wanted to get chicken sticks and go for a beer and since the time for sleep had long since passed, we agreed to join him. Unfortunately, the chicken-stick shop was closed so we headed to a restaurant. The stall selling scorpions on sticks and silk worm chrysalis was still open but we wanted to go to the night market to see the full range of stuff and hopefully buy it more freshly. I'm not sure whether this is the place for the freshest ming-on-sticks but surely if there's so much competetion then there's more customers.
By now I was not surprised to learn that the food is as insane as it was made out to be. Matt had bullfrog for dinner and spent quite a while picking the tiny little bones out of his mouth and putting them on the side of the plate. This was quite tame compared to lots of stuff on the menu though. There were all sorts of gross animal parts floating in blood with just the head on show or stripped down to the tendons. We weren't sure of the portions and so ordered far too much. After blowing a Nepali weeks worth of budget on one meal, we ended up with some fried mushrooms, aubergine (which they apparantly couldn't resist putting chucks of pork fat in) and some nasty fried rice to accompany those little frog limbs.
I had the hostel write down 'I am vegetarian' on a piece of paper and the symbols for 'Vegetable with rice' and 'vegetable noodle' for future reference. I can see a large food obsession coming on so brace yourselves for constant blogging about munching matters.
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