China

Firstly - apologies for the lateness of this entry. We couldn't access this site while we were in China, I guess because of the internet censorship over there, and for that reason it just completely slipped my mind. China - if you're reading this, I'm sorry!

We arrived in Beijing confused and under-rested. We'd had a hard night of partying in Tokyo the day before and weren't going to let early morning flights slow us down. There were two albino children on the plane who were absolutely fascinating, and lots of complicated forms to fill in before we got to customs. Even though we had official legal working visas for China, the border control guys seemed to not really speak English, so let us through without questioning our guitars and things. Olly said "we're in a band" and held up his cymbals and the man nodded politely and waved him through. The hired car that we had for the whole trip was quite entertaining, we listened to the driver's Fleetwood Mac best of literally every single journey.

On our first day we slept a lot, mostly whilst attempting to hold conversations and meet people, but at least we caught up on rest. We fell into the tourist trap of eating pizzas, which was mostly because of our tired irritability and dietry homesickness. This was probably the only meal that settled untoubled in Brendan's weary belly.

The following day - show day - we spent the morning in central Beijing, which was amazing. The Beijing accent is so noticeably different from the Taiwanese, despite them being the same language. I guess it's comparable to English and Irish, which is an especially appropriate analogy, considering the difficult political history considering the two sets of countries.

We saw Tienanmen Square and the Forbidden City, both of which were indescribably stunning. Lots of Chinese people took our photo, apparently Westerners are quite rare finds.

The show was quite a success, except for a broken string and out-of-tune guitar on my part, and some loud American girls at the front of the audience who kept asking my name during quiet parts of songs. I had to go back onstage to apologise at the end of the set because we'd run out of songs and the audience demanded an encore!


The next day we went to the Great Wall, which seemed to transcend all descriptions, images, stories about itself. I was quite dumbstruck at its architecture, "this is incredible!" was all I could say for the first half of the walk. We walked for about 6km up mountainside, along parts of the wall that hadn't been rebuilt since their first conception, which was amazing. There are some big millipedes on that wall.

Thanks:
Chang, Katharina, Sabina (again), Suesue, Lin, Xie and Wangwen, Fleetwood Mac taxi driver, Sainkho, Miss Ma, the photographer at the show who's name I've forgotten, David.