lost in translation

beijing. we haven't been here long, but already we've begun to see just how far removed from life as we know it it is. russia is run from an essentially european cosmopolitan city and the influence echoes across the country; though muted, even to the distant reaches of siberia. ulan baatar and the mongolians pride themselves on their westernism and in the countryside they were so open and welcoming you immediately felt part of the life... but now there's beijing.

not least is the language gap. elsewhere you can see and hear similarities to english even if you aren't close to fluent, but chinese? no way josé. to a westerner such as myself a conversation between two chinese people sounds largely like a series of high-pitched yelps interspersed with an exploration of the vowel sounds. and i'm sure you've seen the mystifying collection of chinese boxes and swirls which make up the written language. even a well educated beijinger will only know about 12% of the 56,000 recorded chinese symbols, so i have a duck's chance in peking of getting it.

with the help of a chinese girl who conversed on our behalf with the taxi driver we made it to the hostel, a lovely little courtyard abode in a hutong on the north-west of the inner city. hutongs are the remaining areas of old beijing, pokey collections of tight alleyways, unchanged in years and holding their own amongst the boom invasion of modern life.

we took a walk. about 40 minutes to the entrance of the famous forbidden city and climbed to the top of a nearby park, a pagoda that overlooks the city. there were tourists here. lots of them. we've managed to avoid such bursts of the blighters so far. euch.

the walk back was where it really hit home how different the chinese culture is and how lost we could get. signposts are illegible, overheard speech is a labyrinth. sometimes you could tell what a shop was by peering inside, but not always. road rules here remain as ambiguous as the other countries we've seen, no less than a game of frogger every time we crossed a street. it's hard to really put a finger on it, but it's just different. very very different.

and as for the food. in the places we went to... absolutely no way of knowing what anything is. even visually it's impossible to identify a lot of it, like nothing we've ever seen before. we've experimented a lot today, and so far it's been a bit 'hit & miss.' when you miss, it's bad. really bad. but when you hit, it shows signs that actual proper chinese food is some of the best damn food in the world.

i trimmed my beard as a reaction to the heat here. it took ages as the amount of hair kept clogging up the plastic guard on my trimmer. i think i took about half an inch off. it feels wonderful.