Peking out

Wow I finally found a Chinese computer that will let me post something to my blog! Now where to start? With completely out of order random trains of thought of course!

So when we got to Bejing it was bleedin baltic. Numbingly, bitingly, critically icy - there was a siberian wind that just blew right through every layer of clothing and tissue on your body. I guess the fact that I only packed enough for an Asian beach holiday didn't help either! Anyway it was not a fun place to tourist around but we perservered and hit the sights as best we could for a couple of days, before scuttling into the tourist info office and booking train tickets the hell outta there! Of course the next day dawned a sunny, warm and windless 23 degrees...

Thursday night Sarah really wanted to try the famous Peking duck (or the more politically correct Beijing duck as they refer to it now). Even though I'm not keen on the poor little fellas being force-fed and then slaughtered, the duck is a 2-person meal and a world-famous cuisine so I felt that the little guy would be lying there dead anyway, I might as well eat the other half... cultural exception and all that. So we went to the most famous duck restuarant in Beijing, the place which boasts photos of none other than George Bush Snr and Yanni among their celebrity ducky diners, and ordered an extraordinarily overpriced quacker. Well the atmosphere was really something, we sat on high quality plastic chairs while our table was laid with the finest paper plates and disposable chopsticks and we were lovingly tossed a couple of plastic sachets of Hoi Sin sauce and shallots in a styrofoam container. And the duck was disgustingly oily.

So much for all my cultural exception justifications, my body wasn't having a bar of it and decided to reject all that ducky goodness, so after about 2 hours it made an unwelcome reappearance.

That's it for me, I'm going to try to buck the trend in the land where animal torturing is a national sport and there's no such thing as a meal without meat. From now on it's nothing but vegies and faux-flesh all the way! And now for a foaming schooner of bear-bile before bed...