China

Despite the people, China is a lovely place, naturally one of the most stunning places I've been. The China you've seen in pictures, huge mountains, lush greens, big water, really is the China that you find there. Some of the mountains have such odd formations you wonder how they don`t fall into the sea. And the smog, as well, is quite like you've heard or seen. Except it's worse. In Beijing you literally couldn't see the other end of Tiananmen Square from one end. Even the ever imposing painting of Mao hanging above the Forbidden City gets a little blurry. It was crazy, and quite bothersome as you had to wait until morning to judge how smoggy it was going to be before planning on what to do. Super smoggy, go visit the preserved corpse of Mao Zedong housed indoors, not as smoggy, temples and gardens outside.
And not only the big cities, all cities. Cities I had truly never heard of that house millions of people that you couldn't`t see from across the street.
Chinese people have this great habit of spitting, reaching deep within their guts first to summon every last glorious drop, then letting it fly in the loudest possible manner towards the nearest possible section of ground, be it inside or outside. This might sound awful but I came down with a cold a few days into China that stayed with me the entire time I was there, so the ability to cough up some seriously nasty shit that really wanted out of my body in public was actually a strange comfort. Urte did not see it that way.
In Xi`an we took the bus an hour out of town to see the famous Terra Cotta Warriors, a massive underground tomb filled with over 7,000 life-size terra cotta figures in full battle armor, each with distinctive faces built hundreds of years ago during the Qin dynasty and then buried with terra cotta horses, birds, weapons and the unlucky few real humans who set the final figures in place before the entrance was sealed behind them, burying them alive. I had seen pictures of the figures for years and thought that I would be a bit unimpressed, but once you get out there and see the magnitude of the undertaking and realize the balls of emperor Qin Shi Huang in hoping he could carry all this might into the afterlife, it is quite stunning. There are three different buildings in which the warriors are housed, and the largest of them is as big as two aircraft hangars. And after seeing all the excavated warriors you find out that the excavation is still ongoing, and that they expect to find many more, and also that 2 km away lies Qin's own tomb, a massive underground pyramid that is the biggest known tomb in the world. Mad, mad people have existed before us.
In Luoyang we walked two sides of a river where hundreds of years ago a hundred different people spent years carving likenesses into the rock face.
In Tai`an we walked up and down over 20,000 steps to reach and descend Mt. Tai`shan with thousands of other people.
In Shanghai we walked into the future, or the past, depending on your architectural affinities, and saw one of the world`s greatest skylines.
I spent my entire allowed stay of 30 days in China (for which I paid $198 for my visa in Nepal), breaking off with Josh and Urte a few weeks ago in Shanghai as they flew off to Japan and I traveled further south to Hong Kong. On the way down I stopped in Suzhou, a slightly quiet city referred to (at least by some Chinese people) as the Venice of China due to the canals streaming throughout, then Hongzhou with it`s massive lake Xi Hu, to which every single person in the in Zhejiang province had decided to come the weekend I arrived (apparently the second biggest holiday in China) and then to Guangzhou (ugly, hot) for a couple hours before catching the train to Shenzen (clean, hot) and walking myself across the border to Hong Kong, mere hours before my visa expired. There, I spent a few days walking the streets I walked almost exactly a year prior, watching A Symphony Of Lights at Victoria Harbour every night at 8pm, haggling for a room at the Chung King Mansions, eating red bean curd peanuts (the absolute best peanut in the world), even going back to Hotel New China to ask if they ever found the journal I left hiding under my mattress when I stayed there a year ago. They thought I was trying to use this story to haggle for a better room price. This is why I love Hong Kong. For someone who rarely returns it was nice returning.