Tuesday June 8th

I composed this haiku on the drive to the Great Wall:

Chinese men loudly
expectorate in public.
It's grossing me out.

Our first day back in Beijing, we didn't do too much sightseeing. Our first full day, though, we did a day trip to Simitai, to the Great Wall. Here are some things I learned about the Great Wall: It wasn't really ONE wall -- it was a bunch of smaller walls that got joined together by that same emperor who made the terracotters. There's a close one to Beijing where the tour buses go, and other ones scattered around that fewer people go to. The one in Simitai only gets about 10 to 20 tourists a day. There are more postcard salespeople than tourists, so each group of tourists gets assigned their own vendor, who stays with you the whole time you're there.

The Taoist temple was also interesting -- same deal where you can't photograph. It had the best collection of statues. It was like a lifesize museum of the Taoist vision of the afterlife. There were dozens of afterworld bureaucracies -- departments which handle affairs of the spirit. Each one housed in a 15x15 foot square. The department of physical torment caused by feelings of temptation of the flesh, represented by a big scary demon holding court in front of 10 human-sized mannequins (but made of clay hundreds of years ago) depicting prostitutes and men with STDs. And the department of people who were equally good and equally bad in their lifetime, and so who have been reincarnated as mammals, which features this great assortment of tiger and buffalo-headed bipedal creatures. Nutty. The department of river gods, who are all half-fish and half human, and carry big spiked clubs to whack people who mistreat the rivers. The department of making babies happen safely and frequently, with it's giant collection of red wooden prayer notes, left by people who apparently weren't getting their babies quickly or safely enough. No one had left any red symbolic prayer parcels at the department of petty government officials, although I'm sure plenty of people have had their run-ns with the same. Maybe they're afraid that the real life department of petty officials is keeping tabs on the people who leave prayer notes at the temple and causes their cases to get thrown out of court or something.

The other night we watched the world's worst movie on HBO. I shouldn't say "watched." It was so bad, we turned it off after a half hour. Double Team, starring Van Damme, Mickey Rourke, and Dennis Rodman. Oh my god. It was so awful. It started out so bad that I hoped it was a spoof of action movies, and that any minute, the camera would pull back from a movie screen, showing that what you had been watching was just making fun of how bad Van Damme movies can be. But no -- it was all for real. And plenty of people made a living from putting it into being. Sad. 

We have seen some good movies, though. Today we saw Welcome to Collinwood. Tuesday night we saw Six Feet Under: Episode 30, where the opera lighting guy dies and they re-created Turandot for him. In it, the mom and girlfriend talk about visiting Beijing and climbing the great wall, which we had just done days earlier. Kind of weird coincidence. 

At the end of each train car is a little room where the provodnitsa sits. She's the caretaker of the car (the travel agent who dropped us off at the station called her "the conductor"). She keeps the water kettle full and hot, and hands out little treats. Terry-cloth disposable slippers in little shrink-wrapped bags, a stack of towels and sheets, 2 cups of weak black tea, 3 packets of sugar. A thermos full of more tea for when you need it, stoppered up with an ancient cylinder of cork.

Pulling out of Beijing, we went through some lush green rice paddies and farmland. We're still in farmland now, but not so green. I had imagined the Chinese countryside to be like Laos or Cambodia -- covered with green, rice paddies, water buffalo, and coconut palms. This is hard brown dirt. What grows out here grows not naturally, but through hard manual effort. There are irrigation ditches and farm machinery, and now and then groups of farmers wearing those woven straw cones my mom called "coolie hats" before that became a racial slur. 

Walter and Joelle are in the next berth. They didn't cancel -- Sean and Linda did, and the reception desk must have had them confused. We met up last night to share stories and meet our other fellow travelers. Ben, who's traveling alone while his wife takes a class this summer. Hanson, veteran of Shanghai American School after having taught there for something like 7 years. Scott and Ally, Canadians who work at the "other campus." Walter and Joelle met them in the lobby and shook hands -- worked together for a year and haven't met yet. It's a big school with 2 separate locations, spread out over a city that's bigger even than Beijing. There were 2 other couples on the bus to the station this morning. I don't know if we'll see much of any of them -- most of our time will be in our berth, and when we do get out into the cities we visit, we won't necessarily be on the same itinerary. Hanson's stopping in Ekaterinburg. We're spending one night in Irkutsk, while Joelle and Walter take a 3-day trip to Bolshoie Galadskoe. 

Oh, and Joelle has an interesting take on the bathroom tile. Or maybe it was Ally. They think the conversation went more like this:
"Hi, I'm the official government official in charge of building permits. I noticed you were putting up a rather large building. My brother owns a bathroom tile company, and would be interested in selling you a lot of tile for the outside of your building. Which has not yet been officially approved. How many boxes should I put you down for?"

On our way out of Beijing we passed the Great Wall again. And again. The first wall we passed had buses outside and tables of souvenir vendors. Then a few miles later was a section of wall that just ran for a bit up one side of a mountain. Later, another section on the other side of the train. A ruined watchtower on the top of one mountain that might actually have been a square jutting of rock, and not a watchtower at all. A bit of brown that was probably Great Wall, but might have just been an exposed ridgeline along an otherwise tree-covered mountain. Last night, over Belgian Beers (did I mention you can get Belgian Beers in Beijing? One more thing Delhi's missing) the Shanghai expats were pointing out the geographical errors in Tomb Raider -- you can't ride a motorcycle along the great wall from Shanghai to anywhere, since it doesn't go anywhere near Shanghai. They were quoting the movie and naming all the mistakes that could have been easily solved by a screenwriter with an atlas instead of just an active imagination.

We spend the next day and a half in this berth. Sunday afternoon, around 2pm, we'll arrive in Ulan Bator, the capitol of Mongolia. Tonight, at around 8pm, we'll hit the border. While at the border, they'll change the "bogies." The rail is a different gauge in Mongolia, and Chinese wheels won't fit. Rather than make us pack up and switch trains, they pop the undercarriage off and swap it out. The process, including the customs officiation and border crossing details, takes 8 hours. During which time, the bathrooms will be locked. We are going to have to pee two or three times at 7:30 to get it all out of our systems!

Malaysia - Beijing (pg 1) - Xian - Beijing (pg 2) - Train to Mongolia - In Mongolia - Irkutsk - Moscow - St. Petersburg