Monday 13 August 2007

China Post 3: The Tourists


Hello Everybody, I'm here once again with another exciting update from our wondering Kung Fu enabled westerners. today they are telling tails of stone boats, tea parties and some particularly large wall they stumbled across.... so without further ado read on...



“The Story so far... Our intrepid heroes have actually had 3 days sight seeing! This, we foolishly thought, would be a well deserved break from training 12 hours a day, we were wrong! Out of interest everything in China seems to take ”about an hour“ to get to, whether it is dinner, the Summer palace or the shopping market, distance is irrelevant. Certain Exalted types will find this entertaining :)


The Summer Palace

Saturday 11th August 2007
On Saturday we went to see the Summer Palace, which was truly splendid and HOT and SUNNY. There are massive 1000 year old trees, a HUGE man made lake with boats for messing abut on and a bloody great big marble boat described so eloquently by one of our American cousins as ”Retarded“ (Yes that is you American Dave). The boat is actually quite beautiful and BIG (this is also a theme in China) and nearly bankrupt the country during the Opium wars. The Palace itself has long corridors and winding paths and is very pretty without being imposing. There are a LOT of stpes (also a Chinese feature) and everything is VERY high up which of course Dave loves! We made it up to the top to see the thousand armed budha and then made our own version where several of us crowded behind Dieter (who Xu Laoshi reckons looks like Budha) and contributed more arms to his celestial enlightenment. We had a bit of an adventure to get back to the bus with Dave ”I'm a Scout “Thompson actually getting us back in record time! We then went to the Laotze Tea House for dinner and Chinese opera and entertainment.

The Tea House

The food was OK but not as good as the restaurant that mister Zhang had taken us to on the Friday night. We then all piled into the theatre room for tea and weird small things to eat. All of the food was very beautiful, there was a dish of air freshener, some annoying seeds, a soft version of sesame cracknel biscuits and something which looked like it should have been sweet but turned out to be savoury. There was a small dose of Chinese Opera, which is a Lot like pantomime with incredibly expensive costumes. There was a magic silk scarf act, some alleged kungfu whihc wsas pretty much dance and acrobatics whilst shouting and a Wicked face changing performance, where with slight of hand or maybe head the performer changed masks without seeming to move! The tea house had some expensive rooms downstairs with indoor grass (more successful than the stuff at the last one of our mob who had it) and some raised contained living rooms with splendid wooden design. The feeling was of a courtyard of small rooms, very cool! The following are teasers as we've been on this for over an hour and need to get a life :) Look on the face book links below for the latest pictures, you can look even if you are not on Facebook, which Dave is and I am not! Apologies for appalling spelling
(Robbie: I've corrected most of it) but we've just had a 10 minute fight with the machine to get it back into English characters, this is of course the fault and not my appalling typos and random hot key shots when I am excited :) :) ”

Day 2 :
Tinamen Square, Forbidden City, Tea House, Alter of Heaven, Peal Market and the Olympic Village.

Day 3:
The Great Wall

Photo's are here

I'm going to have to interrupt you there.. imagine if you will an angry Chinese teenager trying to logon to Warcraft standing beside K8 and Dave... I'm sure they will send as more in the goodness of time.

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