Beijing Beijing

So I have spent the last 5 days here, crashing at a friend's place. I have really enjoyed meeting so many people and attempting to navigate this enormous city. I have been to the Summer's Palace, Great Wall, Temple of Heaven, Lama Temple, Ritan Park, and other random places around the city. I like the city a lot,. but the pollution and transportation is a bit hard to handle. Transportation is only hard, because everything is so far from each other, it is like if someone took a suburb and stretched it so it could hold over 10 million people. The streets are wide and busy, and people are packed into every crevice. I imagine that Shanghai will be worse, but I like being snug rather than spending 20 minutes walking 'one' block.

China feels a lot more safe than I expected and some people are nice. People are very happy if you speak a bit of Chinese. But once it passes the basic level of daily transactional-stuff, it is beyond me. They speak very fast and with a 'r' that Taiwanese do not have. I have forgotten a lot of Italian and replaced it with Chinese.

I managed to negiotiate a taxi for me and 4 Poles I met to go to the Great Wall and all in Chinese. I love it, but often people are not patient. The rest of China will definitely be a trip, and each place is full of diversity, so different from the last place. I met a couple other really nice people and have no trouble meeting fellow travelers to hang out with for the day.

I hope everyone is well at home, and I hope I will be able to post again soon. I'm not sure how thorough the 100,000 people censoring the internet are with their programming. Let's see if I can get this to work.

Much love,

Erica