This is the first incoherent installment. Keep in mind that I was traveling with three other people, Brennan, Max, and Bryan and that I will probably mention these people and use the term 'we' a lot, assuming that you have some idea of who I'm talking about.

My first day waking up in Beijing was devoted to the two biggies of the city. The Forbidden City, which should now be known as the Really Full of Tourists City, which really was stuffed to the gills with tourists, mainly Chinese.




The other big sight was Tiananmen Square, which is famous in China for mostly things other than the 1989 protests on behalf of Democracy. Max suggested that we do a reenactment of the famous photograph of a single protester standing in front of a tank, but since you can't really make a tank out of one person, and a protester out of the other person and still have somebody to take the picture we abandoned that notion.

There is a big mausoleum smack dab in the middle of the square, guarded by men in uniform that stand under big green umbrellas all day. Mao's remains are displayed from 8am to noon every day, and our timing was never right, so we didn't get to see the Chairman. Also on the square itself is a giant statue to "The People." Max kept wondering why giving them the definite article is necessary, but I think that referring to "the people" and just "people" gets two very different ideas going. We had been warned that the square would be full of hawkers and people trying to scam tourists into buying overpriced art, but for our explorations that day we didn't get bothered at all. The flapping of the red flags and the nearby honking (because anywhere in China there is a road there is honking) were far louder than anyone trying to sell cold water or souviners.



The funniest thing about the first day to penetrate my befuddled, jet-lagged, scared-country-mouse-in-a-huge-city-of-13-million-other-mice brain, was when two Chinese guys came up to Brennan in The Forbidden City and wanted to take their picture with him. He was't even wearing the kilt or the individually toed shoes that day, so was just kind of a scruffy, fluffy white guy. Noteworthy enough to have your picture taken with, though.



I felt extremely popular when I ended up in the position of having my picture taken by strangers as the token foreigner. It happened three times in the Guanzhou airport alone. Though one guy did it all stealthy like, the other two ladies came up and posed with me, holding their hands in peace pr v-for-victory style. I have no idea why that pose is so ubiquitous when you are standing with an American, but it happened over and over again.

In the afternoon we had to leave our hostel to catch a train (my first Chinese train!) to Hengshui, to go to the wedding of one of Bryan's cousins. And that's where the real adventure began. (In eating, anyway.)

Thanks, Twitter.

This is what I call need to know information.


onelark Wonder if there is anything specific I should or should not bring to China now that I have my visa and I can officially go.

rupsyfrimbles @onelark toilet paper.

Let me describe the rigmarole of getting my Chinese Visa, because it is worth complaining about.

To get a Chinese visa you have to either hire a special visa courier to drop off your paperwork, or you have to go in person to one of the six Chinese embassy/consulates. These are located in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Houston, Los Angelos and Washington, D.C. The official webpage of the D.C. embassy is difficult to navigate and provides few clues as to what is needed in the visa application. I found the visa application on a courier's webpage, actually, and found the declaration form there, too. (I think the declaration form is because of the recent N1H1 pandemic, since all it requires is for me to state where I have been in the past two weeks. Easy: Bowling Green.)

The listed phone number -- (202)3386688 -- leads one into a maze of options. I was finally able to find hours of operation (which were out of date) visa fees (which were right, but incomplete since they made no mention of the $5 mail-back fee) expected turn-around time (which was out of date, they said three days, turned out it was six days.) I tried in vain for several hours at several different times of day on different days of the week to reach a real live human being, so that I could make sure they do offer mail-back service since Mom was going to be in D.C. to drop my application off. I failed to speak to a human being, so just crossed my fingers and hoped I had everything I needed in a pile. I filled out the application, the declaration, purchased a money order for the visa and a money order for the mail-back fee that I had read about on the section of the official website dealing with marriage certificate notarization. I put the whole thing into an envelope with a priority stamp on it so that my passport would be sent back to me.

My mom dropped all of my info off on the morning on a Tuesday morning and I got my Chinese visa in the mail exactly six working days later. It is a huge relief to have my passport back in my hands and out of the wily grip of inefficient bureaucracy.

Getting revved up for China

I've got three weeks before the reality of travel to China will really hit me. In the meantime, I'm pouring concrete in the daydream by buying batteries for my creaky old camera and making lists and doing some research.

I now know how to write the pictograms for numbers 1-10, though I haven't figured out whether those numbers are the ones that get used in a store, or if the Chinese rely on Arabic numerals for that.

I also did some research on Chinese bathrooms. I gleaned useful advice: bring your own toilet paper. Most public toilets are squat toilets. That will take some getting used to.

1 Chinese yuan is worth about 15 cents. According to my coworker who was in China just last year before the Olympics, Beijing buses cost about a yuan for a ride.

Tomorrow I'm going to the library to pick up some travel guides and a book about Chinese calligraphy--as though I didn't need to feel even worse about my bad handwriting.

Still haven't purchased a plane ticket. And of course I won't know the status of my Chinese visa for a week and a half, and that makes me feel paranoid. I never like forking over important documents. (On a similar note, the woman at the financial aid office checked to make sure I had actually signed my documents, today. What, did I look like a newb?)

Last post of the trip, my friends and family, last post.

I didnèt sleep tonight, and strange accent marks are from a French keyboard, not my typing skills, I assure you.

We stood on Charles Bridge, built by Holy Roman Emperor Charles when Prague was the seat of his castle, in the 1300s. There was wine, and swans, and light on the water and we watched the moon rise and set, and the swans fall asleep, and we met a woman from Wales and a man from Alabama, and then we walked to a gyro stand and talked to a guy from Chicago for a while, he recommended the Chicago gyros.

I am richer than I was before.

I am delighted to be writing you all from the big old clunker computer set up at the hostel Mellonu in Prague. We got in last night and had enough time to grab dinner and see the sun set over the city after our forays to St. Barbara's cathedral in the silver mining town of Kunta Hora and a visit to Karlstejn castle, where the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV lived, not to mention the strange little church completely festooned with human bones (easily 40,000 bodies some of them plague victims, some of them bodies dug up when the cemetary shrankin size.)

Prague is bustling. Our hostel is right next tothe bright pink house of Antonin Dvorzak. I'l go home and listen to some of his music and brag about living nearby, however briefly.

Today I get to see the Charles Bridge, which is spectacular by reputation.

I'm going to have another fabulous falafel, probably, and then wait around until everyone buys multiple hotdogs, so that I can offer to eat all of the hotdog butt ends (which are really the best part) which iswhat happened last night.

We hung out in an underground bar and I had the best White Russian of my life, though everything I wore smells pungently of smoke, even after I hung it up in the window so that the night air could freshen it up a little.

I am terribly excited to be coming home.

After Bitoc castle and the Znojmo underground we went to a little winery in a very old monastery. (Very old, old and new all have slightly different meanings to me now than when I first arrived.) Wine is aged in a Gothic cellar with a series of hash marks carved into the wall where a trio of monks were once punished for drinking wine off of the monastery ground. At the wine tasting I gave my wine away to our teacher (not to be a suck-up or anything) and to Marek, our Czech interpretor and sometimes tour guide and general organizer of amazingness. They were both very appreciative of the wine that I shared. I did drink the first taste of white wine, it was a good sweet one, and when I taste it again I think it will remind me of my favorite moment on this trip which came shortly after the winery.

After our tour and tastings we all trouped outside into the sun and sat picnic style under a grape arbor, eating bread and cheese and briney olives and everyone else drank wine from the little winery shop. We lingered for so long that they shut the front gate on us. THe bus was parked a mere twenty feet from the front gate. We slipped out a side gate and started searching for another way to get to the fenced-in bus parking area. We found a tall wooden fence and a metal door that was open, four feet up. Marek climbed through the opening and rather drunkenly suggested that we all do the same. In the end he just went and informed the bus driver where we were, and brought the bus to us. When we finally got on the bus he handed out the phonetic version (and rather bad English translation) of a Czech drinking song. He had the song on an SD card, and my MP3 player was the only one that would play it, so I went and sat up front and showed him how to work it. We jerry-rigged it so that he held the headphone to the bus microphone and it actually played the song quite clearly. We listened once, and then sang along stumblingly a dozen times until we were home, back to Olomouc. I have been singing this song ever since.

Veenechko beele
si od may meehey.
boudou vas peet
tso boudou jeet.
Veenechko beele.

One of the things that made the singing so sweet was when Marek explained to me a little later, sharing his wine, that he was very shy to sing in front of people, but he loves to sing. It was a small moment, but full of kindred spirit because I feel the same way.

I will be home on Monday, and I am very excited about this fact. I probably won't sleep in Prague, and I might not sleep on the plane, so I may be some hiccuping zombie by the time I fly in.