Mekana

China in 11,779 words

Food, Photos, Style & Shopping, Travel | September 8, 2009

They say pictures are worth a thousand words…

Trekking through the Beijing Zoo would not have been worth it if it hadn’t been for the pandas! I took several pictures and a four-second video of one of the pandas munching on a carrot. Can you say “d’aww”?!

I say “trekking” because it really was difficult shoving our way through hordes of people, all of whom smelled like B.O. because it was 90-some degrees and an unusual percentage of Chinese people are unhygienic. I witnessed several parents letting their children urinate all over the place and a few women with armpit hair growing halfway to their waist… I didn’t even know the hair there could grow that long! But anyway, if you think someplace like New York City is crowded or smelly, you should never go to China.

This gives you an idea of how packed the aquarium at the zoo was… we were standing in the very back because we couldn’t find any seats.

The Bird’s Nest is super cool, but only on the outside. My family and I did go inside, but we realized that paying to see a stadium that looks no more special than any of the thousands of stadiums you can find in the United States was just not worth it.

After doing plenty of shopping and eating my weight in dumplings (I ate so many that I really wouldn’t care to see one ever again), we took an overnight train to Changsha (capital of Hunan, a province in southern China). You might not have ever heard of it before, but it’s not a small city — it’s just as crowded as Beijing, and the number of buildings and skyscrapers there easily dwarfs all three of the biggest cities in my U.S. state put together. Or at least it seems that way. The population there is greater than 33 of the 50 U.S. states.

The train was not a pleasant experience… I awoke a few times to the smell of the bathroom wafting into our chamber. Chinese bathrooms smell worse than anything, I swear. You can smell some public bathrooms from half a block away… yeah, let’s not talk about it. The hammer thing in the picture is my cousin’s; he got that at a theme park in Beijing. He’s ten, and he wouldn’t stop lugging the thing around everywhere and hitting his parents (my aunt and uncle) over the head with it. It was cute. He’s funny.

You know how a lot of Asian people go back to China/Taiwan to get photos taken because it’s less expensive there and we’re cheap? I’m one of those people:

I do have a few more Asian-looking pictures (think bright colors, teddy bears, Hello Kitty, etc.), but as a whole, I asked them to tone it down. I also asked them to take all the English out of the portfolio thinger because it was all hilariously wrong, as was almost all of the other English I saw in China… I love Engrish.

Believe it or not, I’m not that big a fan of authentic Chinese food. I know, I know, I’m such a traitor, especially because I like the fake Chinese takeout you can get here in the States, but I really just cannot deal with the excess spiciness characteristic of Hunan cuisine. At least I didn’t get food poisoning — a lot of people I know who visit China seem to have to deal with that.

I remember two really good restaurants: Seafood Wanchai and this Korean restaurant in Beijing, but only Seafood Wanchai is pictured above. The food there was so good we went there twice.

Back in Beijing, we did some more shopping at places like Silk Street Market (Xiu Shui Jie) and Wangfujing. I purchased a fake Dolce&Gabbana bag whose “DOLGE&GABBANA” plaque gives away the obvious fakeness, but I liked the look of the bag enough to spend a mere ten or so dollars on it. Plus, I “fixed” the G by scraping it and coloring it in with permanent marker, so it’s all good. I also got a few fake Kate Spade totes and some jackets and jewelry.

A picture of Wangfujing:

In short, my trip to China was amazing; I took a bunch of pictures (this is barely a fraction of it), and I didn’t want to come back. I mean, I breathe much more easily here at home in the United States, and I think it’s a better place to live, but all of my family’s in China. I miss them.