Hello from China... I mean, from Mongolia!

Censorship in China is no joke. I was only able to get on Blogger once in Beijing, and I sent myself the e-mail of what I'd written in case it didn't post properly. I'm glad I did, because about a week later I get to Mongolia to find that the post I'd posted did not, in fact, post! So here is what I wrote from Beijing a week ago:

Hi Brigadiers!
I'm coming to you from Beijing, China, and what a place it is! It's a massive city, with some amazing buildings and the largest public square in the world, which you may have heard of. It's also go some crazy skies, mainly in that the sky fluctuates from dust storm of the post-apocolypse to clear blue of a beautiful dream.



But it's mostly like this.

Just when the sky was starting to clear up in a big way happened to be the day that we took off for the tiny village of Cuandixia, which is about 3 hours out of Beijing where all of the buildings are way old and you can stay in a little house and hike in the surrounding mountain areas. 

The funniest story from the short trip came when we first arrived and had sent Jake up into the neighborhoods to look for a place to stay. I had the guitar out and a group of young Chinese folks came up to us, staring. One of them, apparently the english-speaker of the group, asked us what we were doing. She seemed quite concerned when she learned that we had neither a tour guide nor a place to stay yet. We assured her we'd be okay as the crowd grew larger. We made chit chat for awhile and found out they were a group of art students from Beijing doing paintings of the town throughout the week. We would end up seeing them over the next two days from sunup until sundown working on their projects. We then learned that the speaker could play guitar, she took the instrument from me and relearned Twinkle Twinkle Little Star before our eyes, it was funny and everyone clapped. They then asked that I play a song, which I happily did, singing "Hey Ya" by Outkast to an apparently unfamaliar crowd. But the applause was resounding, and the crowd grew. Another english speaker arrived and this is where I have to go on a tangent. Ever since our arrival in Vietnam we have noticed that the people we meet have absolutely no problem singing with or without accompaniment at the slightest request. We have been sung to on a dozen occassions at this point, with Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" far outnumbering any song we've been sung. It's been amazing. So, the new english speaker offers to sing us a song, and we are suddenly given a rendition of Avril Levine's "Happy Ending." I actually just found out that this was by Avril Levine, as I'd not heard it, but it was awesome, we all clapped, and shortly they dispersed and we found our guest house as the sun fell behind the mountains.

The Great Wall does live up to its name. It's amazing, and huge, and there are some epic stairs to climb up that are so steep that at points I was using my hands to maintain my balance. Jake and Andre found this humorous, but I maintained my Smeagle style and made it up and down safely. It's high! Anyways, it's way cool because you can take a ski-lift up to a high point in the wall, which is worth the price of admission itself it's such an amazing view. Unfortunately, though, the slide down was not in operation due to weather conditions or something, but I was so stoked to learn that they'd installed a slide down from the Great Wall! That's a beautiful thing.

We've got our train tickets to Ulan Bataar and we leave on Tuesday. It's exciting to know that the train part of the trip is finally coming up, but it feels like everything is going so fast. Beijing has so much going on, we've seen the Forbidden City, walked through Tianamen Square, didn't buy kites at the birds nest, checked out some of the great views from temples on tops of hills, we've explored the small hutongs and eaten feasts, we've learned "liars dice" (not the Chinese Name, obviously) and gone to a Beijing night club (very similar to other night clubs I've been to, a shame). So far we've had nothing but positive experiences with the locals, minus a few tiffs with cabbies, which is to be expected, and our tummies have responded well to all that we've eaten, which is impressive considering the amount of street food we've consumed over four countries. Hopefully our luck keeps up! Famous last words.

Outskirts of Ulaan Baatar

- Now, back in Ulaan Baatar, we are getting ready to hop on the train again for Urkustk, Russia. This is a much quicker turnaround than anticipated, but our timeline is squeezing us again, so riding horses in the Gobi desert is being sacrificed for to save enough time to go to St. Petersburg. Bummer. And awesome!

Is this the best photo I have of the train? Sadly, yes.

Our first leg of the trip on the train was great. The amount of smog from Beijing all through northern China is incredible. It's just a grey, dreary, smoggy mess for hours and hours. Scary stuff. But then the sky clears a bit and the Gobi Desert starts to show itself and soon there are horses and camels and tiny villages with bright green and orange rooftops.

Ulaan Baatar is really small but the people are incredibly nice. We found ourselves in a karaoke (spelled kapaoke here) party last night and sang "La Bamba" before realizing it was a private party and taking our leave. They were happy to have us for a song and take pictures of us/with us, and then were very polite about asking us to get out. We're learning new things all the time!