PART ONE - down and out in wudaokou, beijing

dr seuss was right when he described his horror as 'the waiting place'.

waiting around just saps your energy...you invest it all in what is to come and have nothing left for what still is.

that pretty much sums up my general state of mind in the last two weeks of beijing-bondy. well...a bit. it was definitely a down-time. what was i waiting for? well i was waiting to leave beijing...

the weekend i moved out with my 'friend' into the suburbs, sibastian arrived in beijing (rather unexpectedly but delightfully) and we moved into a hotel together. the poor thing had to put up with me day and night until we got different rooms in the second week. i cited exhaustion as my main reason for the move. though i'm precious at th best of times (and we all know it), with bastion breathing like a freight train in the next bed (technically it wasn't snoring...) i found that i slept lightly if at all, and i was zombie-like during the day. my weekend excesses and indescretions didn't help.

to add insult to injury, when i did wake up in the morning i did so with my eyes shut, and couldn't open them until after my second fried chicken burger, if not fourth (oh the horror...the horror...)

during the days we attended the korean focused mandarin school, but i found the classes to be so devastatingly slow and boring that i spent most of my time fantasising about rugby tackling my teacher and punching her head in, and would alternate between states of irrepressible giggling and frank paranoia. it was absurd. in the second week i dropped out.

we attended a beijing opera, which was fabulous. the highlight for me was an acrobatic act involving a girl riding a 1 and a half metre unicycle. she put one bowl on her head, three bowls along one foot that was stuck out in the air, and then gave a kick so that the three bowls flew up over her body, spun around and then stacked themselves neatly onto the head-bowl, all the while balancing on this fricken 1 and a half metre unicycle! it was crazy, but that's how they do the dishes here in china.

on my last day in beijing, bastion and i went out to the summer palace, a huge complex (75% covered by lakes) used by the royals to escape the blistering heat of the forbidden city in the warmer months. it was one of those places where you feel this really deep sense of calm coming over you as you stroll by the weeping willow-lined shores of the chinese garden lakes. i felt that it was no wonder that in the setting of agressive western military provocation at the turn of the century, dowager empress cixi misappropriated funds meant for building a navy and used them to spruce up a bit of the lake. at least someone had their head screwed on properly! as an aside, this cixi was one mean bitch, but you can google her if you're interested.

i'll make four general comments about beijing:

1) JOBS FOR CHINA. it seemed that in every store, restaurant or hotel we went into, the number of staff always outnumbered the clients. it was crazy. you'd walk into a restaurant and get served by three waitresses, or walk past a phone shop and there would be (at least in one where i counted in wudaokou) over 50 members of staff in an area the size of 4 standard high school classrooms. our hotel had so many live-in staff it was a wonder they had any room for patrons...

2) people. there are so many people in china, and i just love it. even in the suburbs of beijing where we were staying (and that is the last time i live more than 10 minutes walking distance from any city centre), the streets were just heaving with people at all hours - it's so alive, such a wonderful feeling.

3) it was really nice hanging around with bastion. even through my pall of fatigue and general irritability, a good friend is like a warm blanket that just wraps around you and keeps you snug. hmmm.

4) all the photos here are of the summer palace, except the last two pictures, which are of some of the things on sale over here. the first is a blanket-load of endangered species' bits and bobs that i found on a street corner (next to a box of dogs). you might notice the piece of wood with the nail in it (to hit the animal?) and the tool used to saw off its paws (presumably whilst it was still alive). the second are seahorses and scorpions - the latter impaled but still alive and wriggling - waiting at a street stall to be fried for general consumption. anyone else crawling up the wall?