Nihao!

Hi! I'm in China! My blog website is all coming up in Chinese, so we'll see if I can manage to post this. So... hi! I'm in China! I know I said that already, but that's kind of been my thought process for the past day and a half. We'll be walking down a street and suddenly there will be this huge palace in front of us. Or a giant portait of Chairman Mao. Or scary-looking military guys in greenish-gray uniforms doing drills on the sidewalk. And it's like "woah! I'm in China!"

Anyway... we are in Beijing for a few days, went to the Forbidden City today which is very cool, took tons of pictures, which I will post when I have my computer again, which will be in a month. We are planning on a trip to the Great Wall tomorrow.

We started out in Kuala Lumpur, which was a good place to start off in Asia-- lots of English is spoken, and it is a very multicultural city-- a large Muslim population, and an especially large Indian population along with Asians. I did actually feel more out of place there because a lot of the women had their heads covered, and I feel like here, most people couldn't care less about the tourists looking at their city. I felt like a lot more people were looking at me in KL than here.

KL looks a little bit like Vegas-- the government part of town has beautiful Taj Mahal-esque domes on top of Corinthian columns, surrounded by what looked like a Venitian palace. Seriously. All in all, it was cool, we had one day so we walked around the city, mostly. We went to a really tall tower that overlooked the city. As we tried to get down from the tower, we wanted to go to a different side of the park, and ended up doing this rainforest walk. We got lost for like half an hour in the rainforest in the middle of Kuala Lumpur. It was legit- as we left there was a sign warning us about snakes and scorpions. Glad we're on our malaria medication.

Anyway, the other really noteworthy thing we did in KL was Cosmo's World. It's an amusement park inside a giant mall. It had some pretty cool rides, but all of them were kind of painful and liked to hold you upside down a little bit too long. The roller-coaster went upside down, but a little bit too slowly. Seriously, imagine if Big Thunder Mountain Railroad suddenly decided to do a corkscrew. It didn't feel dangerous, just... uncomfortable.

Our hotel was gorgeous, seriously we had to hold back laughter as we checked in under giant chandeliers, checked out the lovely pool, the beatuiful carpets... not to be tacky, but our room was $55 per night.

Our hotel in Beijing is also lovely (a bit pricier, but worth it.) It's down a little alley, so you really get the feel for actually living in Bejing. The alley is barely wide enough for one car, but cars drive both ways (not to mention the pedestrians and bicycles), so things get pretty interesting. The hotel is in a set of Qing Dynasty buildings surrounding a garden that was owned by some eunuch who was important to some Emporer's court (sorry, I forget). Anyway it's really lovely, the garden is beautiful and our room is full of furniture that I feel bad sitting on.

Beijing is big, the drivers are crazy. The crosswalks give you the little walky-man at the same time as the drivers get turn arrows, which makes crossing the street a real challenge. Mostly we try to get a human shield, because the locals are pretty good at it. I have still seen a lot of people almost get hit.

Jon and I are trying our best to navigate using the Lonely Planet Mandarin book, but it has been interesting. It's very strange what we can get across-- I can be asking for water, trying to say it while pointing to the characters in the book, and they have no idea what I want. But for some reason, Jon's pronounciation of the phrase for "check, please" must be perfect-- they get it every time. Weird. The food has been good and very cheap. Getting vegetarian food has been a slight challenge so far, but there is a lot of tofu and good vegetables.

Beijing is pretty chilly, especially compared to the other places we are going. Luckily I have been knitting up a storm and have a cute scarf to wear, as well as some socks that don't have toes, so I can wear them with my flip flops. They sound hideous, but with long pants, you can't see them at all, and they keep my feet warm. (Jon calls them my secret socks.) I mean, they are hideous. But invisible and awesome.

So I had taken notes on everything I wanted to write about... and they are in the room. So that's all you get for now, I wish I could send pictures! I will at some point. It feels weird to write without them. Okay, hopefully I can post this (have to guess which button to hit)!