An overnight train will get you from Xi’an to Pingyao and another overnighter will take you back to Beijing. However, someone I met on the train told me I could have saved time taking a faster train from Taiyuan to Beijing, I didn’t mind it anyway since I have the superpower of sleeping in the noisiest, most uncomfortable places. When I told people I was going to visit Xi’an and Pingyao over China’s Golden Week, some said “Oh, you’re going to Shanxi” or “You’re going to Shaanxi?” It was only later that I found out Xi’an is in Shaanxi while Pingyao is in Shanxi and they are two completely different provinces.  I probably arrived at about 7am before it got very, very busy.

After filling my tummy with some local noodles that I’d assumed had fish in it but didn’t, I went on to collect my return train ticket from a hostel which refused to store my backpack for the day and later decided to charge me 50RMB (or some other ridiculous amount) after much persistence on my end. Fuck that, I thought, and continued knocking on the doors of several other hostels but they either refused or wanted me to pay. It was unexpectedly disappointing when even the international youth hostel in town turned me down. Downheartedly, I walked over to Yamen Hostel and gave it one last shot. The lady boss agreed immediately. “How much?” I responded skeptically. It was free! I got a bit bolder and asked if there was a bathroom. After making a quick observation, she replied matter-of-factly that there was and that I must be tired and needed a wash-up. I’d only wanted to use the toilet but she offered me the shower and dismissed my offer to give her some money for it. She even helped me rent a bicycle without the usual deposit although I wasn’t staying at her hostel seeing I didn’t have much cash on me. I had lunch of some baked pasta and a hot chocolate at her hostel instead of trying out more Pingyao snacks as my way of saying thanks. By late afternoon, I was exhausted and went back for another cup of hot chocolate, barely able to keep my eyes open. I won’t even use the washroom at McDonald’s without buying anything and I definitely couldn’t hog a table and simply pass out after all the kindness she’d showed me, so I asked if she knew if there was anywhere I could get some shut-eye given all the cheap hostels were fully booked, and she let me sleep on the sofa in the entertainment room explaining no one really used it at that time of the day. I slept soundly for about an hour feeling re-energised and more hopeful about China when I woke up. Thank you, to the lady boss of Yamen Hostel.

Xi'an to Pingyao

I met a giant who wanted to learn English so I started by teaching him the alphabet but no matter what I did he could only say the letter A in a deep low voice and pronounced no other consonant or vowel other other than the letter A. Tired, I begged him to let me go to sleep in his palms only to wake up and realise I was still on the train with a heavyweight snorer on the hard upper sleeper right next to me.

30th September 2011
Beijing to Xi’an

Last month, I joined my first ever alleycat since I got my fixie from Natooke some time last summer and got DFL (dead fuckin’ last), well not really because I came back after the cut-off time. 4 hours and 40 minutes of getting lost all over Beijing starting from 798 to Chaoyang Park, Drum and Bell Tower, Bird’s Nest and back, riding alongside Chinese cyclists and shouting “Shifu! Do you know how to get to …?!” Tired and dirty with my confidence growing little by little as I fought the crazy traffic of cars, bicycles and people. I am proud that I went to all the checkpoints and completed the race, coming in 6th place. Videos of the race here and here.

Beijing’s gotten a lot warmer and I’m bracing myself for the impending heat wave armed with The Tipping Point and The Party. Meanwhile, I’ve given up on recovering zakka-zakka.com and the old craft blog has moved to woolgather.me.

Yuyuan Garden

Meeting my mate, Mark (who’s doing a massive holiday around the world with his missus, lucky bastard), definitely put the icing on my vacation. It was Spring Festival and Shanghai was about as quiet as Beijing, minus smoking in public areas. The skyscrapers in Shanghai were incredible and led me to this article on The Mainichi Daily News making an interesting connection with the Tower of Babel. We stayed at Le Tour Traveller’s Rest Youth Hostel and had RMB30 breakfasts every morning: sausages, eggs, toast, juice and tea, quite a luxury! Other than doing typical touristy stuff, we rode around Shanghai on rented bikes from the hostel and tried to go clubbing but failed to find anything decent. There’s a Singapore Day coming up in Pudong in April and hopefully I’ll make it there provided the flights are cheap then; miss Singapore food!

Home Sweet Home

And here’s a picture of my 31.5m² of goodness that was my studio apartment in Chongwenmen. My bathroom was behind the kitchen and came with a shower head with strength of a leaking hose but made it up with a toilet capable of flushing down toilet paper. What you’re seeing now is the result of more than a year of personalisation (thank you, IKEA), which I’ve learnt makes living abroad a lot easier and better. You have to make it home, and it becomes home. Moving out of Chongwenmen means leaving urban comforts such as fast food joints (MacDonalds, KFC, Burger King, Subway and Yoshinoya) and my staple brands H&M, Muji and Uniqlo behind. I will miss the DVD guy and remember the night-time BBQ guy outside my apartment, both of whom never failed to show up throughout the seasons.

Disclaimer: Apartment had been cleaned and uncluttered before photo-taking because my landlord wanted pictures to advertise for new tenants.

Bloody fresh!

My CELTA mate, Greg, kindly put me up at his place at Yonsei University – a gorgeous campus and my first college-life experience. Seoul proved a little too cosmopolitan to excite me but still, it was refreshing to get my WIFI-and-coffee fix after spending a year in Beijing. I also found the most amazing Korean winter dessert – hoddeok, freshly baked hotcakes with cinnamon filling. The best one I found made by this man with a stall somewhere around EWHA University. I hit Busan by bus from after a short-lived catch-up session in Gimhae with Aaron, also from the CELTA course, and found myself strolling along a near vacant Haeundae Beach, which was supposedly too cold for the Koreans in October. Had a lonely buffet lunch after strolling about Jagalchi Fish Market before I crawled a hundred little shops behind PIFF Street. I found it a lot easier to shop in Busan than in Seoul, like I prefer Suan-lum night bazaar to Chatuchak weekend market in Bangkok.

Cinnamon hotcakes

Finish up!

Yo

Golgusa Templestay

Buses make the cities very accessible and I took one to Gyeongju from Gimhae. Rented a bike and rode around the city before I headed to Golgusa, thanks to Pico who recommended and arranged the templestay. She reckons learning Sunmudo (traditional Buddhist martial arts) is more interesting than making paper lanterns and I agree with her. There are various templestays in Korea that you could register for but Golgosa’s the only one which offers Sunmudo. You don’t have to be athletic or religious but please bring a bit of discipline and respect. We woke up before the sun did to do meditations and had vegetarian meals three times a day. The rule is to finish everything in your bowl or be prepared to stay until you do! It was actually a very comfortable stay in a spotless room with a Korean mattress akin to Japanese futon, and an en-suite bathroom with a Western toilet and shower.

Picnic ground

Jeju Island

I took an overnight ferry from Busan. If you’re on a budget or wish to rough it out, the cheapest ticket is bed-less. There’s an open space of a room where you find your own picnic spot to snooze for the night. I stayed at Yeha Guesthouse which was less than five minutes from the Bus Terminal where buses leave for all over Jeju. The Korean staff spoke good English at the hostel and what I loved most was you make your own eggs and toast, sunny-side or scrambled it entirely up to your liking, and they had a VoIP phone for you to make free international calls back home!

It is a horrible thing to try to catch up on blogging, I’ve left out so many details because I don’t have the same enthusiasm as I did then, or some of which I’ve forgotten. I just recalled the 1330 Korean Tourist Helpline, an extremely helpful service I think every country should have. It operates 24 hours in different languages and you can ask them about almost anything. I’ve tried them in different parts of South Korea to get bus schedules, directions, hostel information and whatnot and it’s more efficient than trying to navigate around Korean websites. Oh, and if there’s one thing I’d highly suggest you do is to try the grapes in Korea. No, I’m not being the usual random self but I’m being serious! Have you ever tried gummy candies? The Japanese ones that come in different fruit flavours? I’ve always thought those flavours were artificially concocted and intensified until I ate the grapes in Korea and went Whoa! because the texture and flavour was so close to being artificial. You don’t even eat the skins because give it a little pinch and the jacket slips right off, remember to try it.

My trip to Jilin earlier this year saw a North Korean menagerie from across the river. A chat with a middle-aged Chinese selling strawberries by the road revealed that desperate North Koreans occasionally swim over to steal her crops because of poor harvest.

One mountain per city has proven ample for me and the two sides of the Changbai Mountain provided very different scenery worth a visit. However, the real highlight would be a peek of North Korean communism in contrast to China on a river cruise if you spoke with the right people and be granted this privileged experience, and discovering the kimchi strewn town of Jian.

From a Finnish sauna to a Roman steam bath, that’s how I felt in the ridiculous summer heat from Beijing to Qingdao. Don’t get me wrong, I love the humidity because I’m from Singapore but anything above 35°C is just crazy. Clouds. I miss seeing clouds after ten months of cloudless days (and starless nights) in Beijing. German influences (I was told seeing my lack of geographical, architectural knowledge) is strewn all over the hilly landscape in Qingdao which reminds me of Florence. The town is old and pretty much intact though you see footprints where tourism sneakily left and continues to take over the world.

It was a nice walk from the train station to Kaiyue International Hostel: small grubby restaurants with styrofoam boxes of seafood laid outside, watermelon sellers, retired shirt-less men playing chess. There was a small, Japanese-inspired shop selling little potted plants where I wanted to get something but the boss told me it’d be cheaper in Beijing, minus the hassle of bringing it back. He lived in Beijing for a while but settled down in this little outfit that his missus wanted.

The beer festival was a letdown, almost as disappointing as the one I attended back in Singapore a couple of years ago. Bad music, expensive beer and there’s something about space-to-people ratio that I take into consideration when gauging the success of an event; no excuses that it was a weekday evening. Some stupid mascot wanted to charge us 10RMB after we’d taken photos with it! I wasn’t going to pay and we all walked away thinking fuck that. Please understand that this may be a completely biased opinion because I’m not a beer person as Mark had noted but I did still enjoy Qingdao thoroughly. Who needs beer fests when you could get smashed at the hostel bar or buy a 2RMB Tsingtao beer-in-a-bag off the street?

I haven’t been to the Great Wall since I’ve came to Beijing and usually not one who does touristy stuff but the Tsingtao museum was really interesting. Jess got a bottle of Tsingtao with her own label (you can put your face on in) and I just couldn’t get enough of the beer peanuts. Factory visits are always brilliant!

I’d visit the safaris in Africa and scuba dive in the Great Barrier Reef if I were a jet setter but I am just a poor ESL teacher so I still visit the menageries even though the aquariums and zoos in Asia have been rather depressing so far. The Qingdao aquarium was no exception with what looked like a dead turtle segregated from three others in a miserably small enclosure to penguins with clipped wings that made felt like I was in a taxidermy museum.

Wore my swimmers under my clothes and we headed to No. 2 beach at the end of the day which was supposedly less crowded than No.1 beach. It was relatively clean to my standards because Singapore’s aren’t any better. And Mark taught me what rock pooling was, a shame it wasn’t part of my urban childhood because it’s one of the simple pleasures in life where it doesn’t cost anything to have fun. By the way, the public showers cost quite a bit at the beach and there are no toilets. Yes, I had to do it in the sea.

We only managed to get standing tickets for the train back to Beijing because they were sold out. We all agreed that we wouldn’t have minded six hours without a seat if it were much cheaper but they were the same price! In the end, we each found a cosy spot for ourselves that is the luggage compartment and some empty space behind the back seats as I made myself comfortable by ripping off pages from the in-train magazine to sit on. Tip from a Chinese man who kindly offered hungry Gloria some buns and bananas: tickets from Qingdao to Beijing may be fully booked but you might be able to get tickets from Qingdao to other stations then top-up or upgrade to a standing ticket for the rest of your journey. Good to know!

Next stop, South Korea!

Don’t have the chance to see it in Japan so I had to settle for the ones in Beijing. Yuyuantan (玉渊潭) Park is located between subway stations Gongzhufen (公主坟) and Muxidi (木樨地). It’s quite a walk from the subway so if you’re unable to ask for directions, it’d be better that you take a cab. It might be unfair for me to say that the cherry blossoms in Beijing are unimpressive given that I haven’t seen them anywhere else. Maybe it’s because the grounds had more earth than grass with the exception of random spots like in the photo above.

Midi Music Festival and Strawberry Festival this weekend! I’m going for Midi (flea market, yay!) and probably White Rabbit, post-party. It’s a shame that I’ve never been to Zoukout or The White Rabbit in Singapore; gonna make the effort to if I go home…