1,321,851,888 people, One country

CHINA

Beijing

Beijing is a city geared up for one thing only - The Olympics. Everything is focusing on making the place bright and shiny and non-confrontational place for the games. They are cleaning the air, and doing a very good job of it, cleaning the streets, stopping the spitting(well..) and generally removing everything that doesn't say 'shiny shiny Olympics, great city, fantastic!'....
They are also trying very hard to make things too old to demolish look shiny and new; the great wall, terracotta warriors and even the remnants of their city wall. But, if you dig deep enough you can find the good old spitty, dog-on-a-stick real China. This might mean following snacking school-children to holes in the wall for mystery food or braving the almost museum-piece decrepit Hutongs but when you do it is all good.

Xi'an

Xi'an is a lovely city, with the 14km of original city walls intact, making for a very interesting walk or bike-ride if you are up to it. The place is full of history(having been the capital for yonks) and has loads to do in- and outside the city including a big unexcavated tomb full of mercury which all the locals said was a pile of poo(my words, not theirs) but it beat the warriors for us because it hadn't had the 'Beijing treatment' and was still full of mystery told a much better story than the warriors. We did get to see the man who found the terracotta warriors though!yey!

We stayed with Rong, Xizhong and YingYing in their beautiful apartment on the campus of Xidian university. We were treated to all the realness of living as a Chinese family, be that with a little more meat and probably a lot more eating out. The food was amazing, lots and lots of mystery meat that became not so mystery meat mid-munch thanks to YingYings good vocab! (pointing at stomach and smiling does not always mean yummy)

We did get to try some Xi'an dishes that even the most accomplished culinary geniuses could never figure out (well, we couldn't)

Enter restaurant, request food
Empty bowl and bread given
....
break bread into tiny little pieces and return bowl full of breadcrumbs to waitress
....
Bowl will return full of noodles, soup, meat and hiding at the bottom your broken up bread bits - delish! (Just make sure your hands are clean for that one)

Other culinary delights included various meats, veggies, maybe some fish, floating in a bubbling bath of the hottest Sichuan chilies and peppers. Oh and lots and lots of tasty meat on sticks!

We also had Paddy's day in Xian which was, well, interesting as there are no Irish people in Xian and definitely no Irish pubs and it was just wrong to go to and English pub so it was live Chinese music and back to the apartment at a half reasonable hour. (we made up for that one in the first Irish pub we found after Xian)


Chengdu

We managed to see all of 'none' of Chengdu thanks to a far too comfortable (if noisy) and cheap hostel with the all important pool table, cheap beer, good company, comfy couches and of a bit of Tibet controversy thanks to an Associated Press journalist. The Loft hostel definitely gets the thumbs up from us.

We managed a few hotpots without the guide of Rong et al. The first one was comical, the pictures should explain.

We ended up with eggs and stomach lining from an unknown animal.

The second was the trusty 'pick your own stuff on a stick' from what can only be described as a 'food on a stick' library?!? We got a few very odd looks but at least we knew what we were doing, kinda!

When we did manage to tear ourselves away from the hostel's immediate surroundings we headed straight for the Irish bar, although the Guinness was about 7Euro, the Jameson was great and we ended up playing in a pool tournament (kinda) with two Irish guys, a girl from the Basque country(who loved Fiona's little bit of Basque) an Aussie whose cousin lives next door to one of the Irish guys in Dundalk, a 1/4 Irish, 1/4 Chinese and half Scottish guy from London and his friend and George, the resident Chinese pool shark (who beat us all at pool, except for Fiona)(yey!)

Later on (around 5am), we drifted to the 'stage' to play piano, drums, some darts and before leaving we had a go of the security guards tazer! Oh the fun.

We managed to leave Chengdu when the morning awakenings by the building site next door got too much hangover cleared, we headed off to Chongqing in the hope of hopping on a boat up the three gorges the next day!


Chongqing

Well, after a week of being woken at nine by a the lovely builders next door, all of ten metres from our head we decided that a quite spot, out of the city centre might be nice. So, we arrived at our hostel to find it was not just beside a building site but it was a building site!

mmmmm, we took a room anyway as we were knackered and waaaay out of the city in a very strange but interesting reconstructed old town on the banks of the soon to be flooded Yangtze. We left first thing the next morning before you could say..."what's that smell". It seems building sites do not make for good plumbing sites (how many years of training and we didn't cop that one!)

So, we went to find a slightly less stinky, more comfortable, more central setting of the "mid range" Chongqing guesthouse, which had received very nice reviews although it was a tad over budget. Well, it seems our guesthouse had been razed so our taxi driver conveniently dropped us off at the Marriott, nice!
That being a touch too expensive we were directed to a less expensive hotel whereupon requesting directions to an even cheaper hotel we were given a hefty discount (still thrice our budget) so three nights later, twenty baths, laundry service, brekkie in bed.... we find a 3Euro, all you can drink, fine wine 'special' in the uber fancy bar... bliss :)


Chongqing is a very odd place, I'm not sure if we researched wrong or there is a mis-print in our book but this supposedly four million person city seems to hold four billion and they all live in forty storey high skyscrapers that descended from the sky crushing everything below, thousands of them towering over higgledy piggledy old buildings perched on the side of the river. The whole area is analysed and documented and extensively modeled in the massive 'Chongqing Planning Exhibition' which was fascinating if completely bizarre. The spotless exhibition shows all the towns and villages of the area as well as those the Yangtze will flood, all beautifully modeled with flashing lights showing where the water will come up to, with all the buildings in perfect detail that will be, in not too long, totally submersed and viewable through glass bottomed boats! The exhibition also had 'planning games', like sim-city but you got marked for your efforts, prototype 'future houses', web-cams of the city, the history of the area, touch screen info and loads more. All this while outside is a bizarre mish-mash of soon to be flooded over development, well, not exactly flooded but ya never know!