China: How Moa brown cow!

Ok so here begins the blog officially! Sorry we know some of you have been waiting with baited breath, but alas China has no blogging allowed so we had to wait to leave before we could start updating our tales of travel....

I will start at the very end of Korea or the very beginning of our trip. The 29th of March was an emotional last day at work saying goodbye to some very wonderful students and great co-workers. The day was long and stressful as we had to pack up our two years worth of living in Korea and somehow get it to fit into two backpacks that we could feasibly carry for 8 months, no mean feat I tell you!

 Once most of this was done we went for the most amazing 10 course duck meal with our friends Jeff Eudikis and Juwon Choi, what an amazing meal! What was also fantastic was that Juwon opted to stay at our house overnight and drive us to the bus terminal the next morning at the crack of dawn so we wouldn't miss our bus... What a nice guy!

Fastforward>>> We arrive in Beijing!

Upon reaching China we were supposed to meet up with a friend we met while SCUBA diving in the Phillipines, Keith Luu. Alas we had no phone and the internet wouldn't allow us to log on without a Chinese phone number, panic stations! So we wondered off to a McDonalds and sat contemplating our next move, luckily a foreigner wondered in and we asked if we could use his phone, which he was kind enough to let us do. A couple of hours later Keith found us and took us to his awesome home. We had a couple of cool beers (R3 for a large one!)... but they believe it is unhealthy to drink cold stuff so they store beer at room temperature bleh.. Then we went out for dinner.

DINNER!!! Holy moly what a pleasant surprise! I'm not one for Chinese food usually as I associate it with fatty bits of meat swimming in sauce. This certainly wasn't the case here! We went to a Muslim side of Beijing (I didn't even know they had Muslims) and went to the most rocking resturant ever! The flavours were intoxicating! We had 3 dishes. Lamb on skewers with the most amazing herbs and spices smothered all over them, fantastic! Our personal favourite was lightly fried beans with crisp bits of pork spiced with cumin, pepper and chilli to give it a punch, along with what was a sort of chicken curry Chinese style, absolutely amazing! After dinner we went out and had some beers in a 'Bus Bar' with the Couchsurfing group in Beijing, some really nice folks, all in all a great start to China!

Some yummy kebabs!

The most delicious beans!

The next morning we woke up relatively early for a day at Tiananmen square! One of the couch surfers from the night before opted to join us (his name was Max). Wow - the scale of this place is simply breathtaking! Those commies couldn't run a country but man oh man did they have an eye for architecture on a grand scale!  The statues and architecture were very stereotypically Communist but very impressive indeed!

This is a monument to fallen comrades, the biggest in the world!

A very typical looking communist statue.

After wondering around this massive square for about an hour or two we decided to go inside and have a look at Chairman Mao in his mausoleum -  it was quite an eerie experience. You are marched in single file and are forbidden to take photos, take cameras or anything with you into the mausoleum. As you enter there is a giant statue of Mao sitting with thousands of flowers before him and a picture of the sky behind him. There are tons of security guards that ensure that you walk in absolute silence. Once you are quickly marched past here you walk through a corridor and see a large room with a glass box in the middle surrounded by four armed guards and it has a (I assume bullet proof) glass box engulfing the whole room, you are obviously on the outside of this barrier. As you approach it looks like there is  a wax mask with a light underneath shining through it, but as you get closer you actually see it is Mao himself lying there (apparently the waxy look is a side effect of the embalming process). He lay there, with a bright red blanket with the hammer and sickle - symbol of Communism - wrapped over his chest. A powerful statement. No time to stare - you are hustled through and come out the other side. What amazed me was how in awe some of the Chinese people were, and how brainwashed they still are. They basically worship Mao despite the fact that he ruined their country and killed millions of people in his revolution. It's quite strange that he still has pictures everywhere and is still loved by so many people.

After this we were going to go to the forbidden city, but felt tired so with Max in tow we went for lunch and headed back to the house. That evening we had a delicious meal (lasagna) at a couch surfers house who lived close to Keith and had a nice early night.

Okay this post is getting a little long for me so I will continue the rest of china either later today or tomorrow as we have stuff to do now.

Take care everyone and thanks for reading!