China

There's a line in some particularly bad Leon Uris book that is something to the effect of:

"Kitty, you've become a woman of renown."
"No, Ari, more of a curiousity."

(Please don't ask why I can quote that off the top of my head...invariably the only answer is that no one will ever love me.)

One day while wandering through Tokyo, I declared myself a woman of curiosity. Here I am traveling the world, a woman without borders refusing to be contained by conventional stardards and expectations.

Sarah prompty mocked me. Something to the effect of "you're a woman with too much time on your hands you crackpot." (Point taken...)After this exchange, I revised my original statement to declare myself a woman of leisure. Here I am, no job, no one to tell me when to get up or what to do. I am, indeed, a definitive woman of leisure.

Except that I feel like women of leisure travel with money...they don't sleep on hostel floors using their towels as blankets.

Once aboard our lady the Yangjing, (China's definitive sea cruiser,) we declared ourselves sea women. We were, undoubtedly, meant for a life at sea, the cool wind flowing through our hair, the smell of salt and fresh air, out in search of uncharted waters. Carey Grant at our sides as we tearfully wave goodbye to land, though sure deep in our hearts that our fate was tied to the sea.

And then we encountered what life is actually like at sea. First off, Carey Grant is not there. They also like to snack on a little something called Chinese porridge: this is lentals soaked in water. A life at sea also involves screaming children, bizzare human interactions and late-night karaoke. After a particularly terrifying night time view, we decided that perhaps we were not woman of the sea. We were woman of land. Land women.

As time went on, we began to adopt the phrase for anything we took a particular fancy to. In the last 10 days, we've been women of...
-the hike (though the great wall proved otherwise)
-the walk (still in the bag)
-the mountain (I decided on this one after I used my Swiss Army knife to open a particular difficult bottle of mineral water. Sarah still claims that this does not count as a mountain-woman activity)
-the bike
-maps (ahh lonely planet...and yet how you mock us)
-public transport (we're actually amazing. We are the original women of p.t...)
-many tounges (although really only one tounge...kind of deflates the argument)
-meditation (well..one day perhaps...)
-positivity (err...well...one day perhaps...)
-regimented exercise (if food poisioning doesn't head our way again)
-concerns (we have a number of those...)

One day while struggling yet again with the crappy and incomplete information provided by our friendly neighborhood Lonely Planet, we decided to write them a strongly worded letter listing all of their shortcomings in great detail. As we continued to compose this letter and a number of other memos we felt the world desperately needed, it hit us.

Really, when it comes down to it, at are very core, the most distilled and central part of our souls...

We are woman of the strongly worded letter.

Take it away, Ms. Ivory...

It's hard to believe it's been more than a week already since our ship landed in Tianjin. One does not exactly take China by storm so much as China fully takes you. I have to admit, coming to Beijing was not at the top of my very long mental destination list before I set out on this trip -- but I am so very thankful to be here (all consuming food poisoning incedent and all). It seems impossible to sum up what we've seen so far into a bite sized first impression paragraph -- but I guess that's the jist of it right there - it's the sheer unconceivable enormity of it all.

In three adjectives, I would say that China feels incredibly raw, alive, and of a level of granduer for which there is no scale. As for the first two, they're more of feelings than describable sites or sounds or smells. China does not put on aires so to speak. There is no sensation that one is not seeing the country and its people for what they are. Somehow it simultaneously feels like a completely different world and yet very much like one I know well. Much more so than any other city I've visited abroad, Beijing has to feeling of the poorer sections of huge American cities like New York to me. It's the sensation that you are walking through it like a shadow unnoticed. There are no cars that will slow for your crossing, no people who will acknowledge your presence in que or your concept of personal space on a train, no bycicles that will share the sidewalk with you. Before coming many other travellers warned us that China would be incredibly rude and harsh to our senses. But there's something in it, maybe because I've been living in the south and missing the northeast for too long, that I find quite comforting.

On a whole though, my first impressions have been most shaped by the breathtaking magnitude of it all. It's not just the size of the country (Beijing alone is roughly the size of Belgium I've read) or the hugeness and diversity of its population that makes me say this. It's the whole picture - it is a country whose "modern history" chapter begins in the 1500s; it is a vast land with an all consuming concentration of power that reaches every pocket of the country and exists even to this day (isn't it difficult to imagine in a country of this size that there could still be someone out there monitoring what I write in this very blog and sheilding its populous from corrupting media outlets like the BBC?); it is a land covered with temples, palaces, and various public works projects of uncountered proportion and scale which have been standing for longer than many countries have even existed; it is the fact that there are 1500 dialects spoken by just one of China's ethnic groups (there are 54 additional ethnic minorities, each with their own myriad of dialects); it is the breadth and rapidity of the country's economic progress over the past two decades; it is all of this and so much more that weighs on the outsider with this feeling of hugeness. It's a country that has always had, and continues to have, a grand vision. And more importantly, the ability to make those visions come true. It is truely awe-inspiring.

Welcome to Beijing where the national sport is...spitting.

Spitting is actually a generous term...though I'm not sure I've ever used this phrase before, it would be more aptly described as "hauking a luge." (Unsure about the spelling there...) Though fines of up to 50 cents have been imposed on those caught spitting on the street, it still does not stop everyone and their mom from reaching deep down in their throat, summoning their phlegm forward and letting it rip. In fact, most people reach down 2 to 3 times before they actually release.

Some cities are alive with the sounds of birds chirping or cars honking.

Beijing? The retching sound of man summoning forth his bodily fluids.

And it's only just begun...