Vignettes from my Chinese travelling notebook
At the Old Summer Palace park, the gift shop specialises in facsimiles of ancient Chinese weapons, with a sideline in tourists hats that are all too small for me.
The first lake, with the black swans, is also populated by strange black dragonflies, blue darters and a couple of faintly embarrassed-looking ducks. The lotus flowers are in full bloom.
The park is gorgeous, as it must have been before they rebuilt and cleared away most of the ruins, and especially before most of its palace buildings were destroyed in the Second Opium War.
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We visited 'Book Cafe Heaven', a Korean Christian bookshop cafe library where almost all the books for sale are about Jesus, but they also have lots of other, largely pirated books to read in English and Korean.
In the toilets there are posters firmly instructing us to place toilet paper in the bin, rather than flushing it, which I gather is quite common in Beijing. By the sink there is a cup full of washing powder near to an empty soap dish.
I wonder if this is normal in Korea.
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Tube Station Pizza has two vegetarian pizza options, both with white sauces instead of tomato. The closest they get to plain Margherita is a pizza base with garlic & cheese and a tub of pizza sauce on the side. They won't add toppings. Their 'iced' coffee is tepid. The nozzle shoots off the ketchup in the middle of adding it to my chips.
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On our first day in Shanghai we wandered through neighbourhoods full of oddly specific shops, each just a small room open to the street: plumbing pipe shops, a shop selling fans and fan accessories, one selling a wide range of fruit and veg, but only ones which are green, white or both.
In the evening we met Sonya's friend Oli at a vegan restaurant before going to KTV, where I experienced a karaoke booth for the first time. They're a huge thing here, rivalling bars for popularity. I sang two or three songs; most of the songs were in Chinese, half of our party being native speakers. I enjoyed seeing the characters while they were sung.
On our second day we went to the Insect Museum. It has some wonderful insects with rather scant information accompanying them, mostly about their popularity as pets. Downstairs they have turtles in too-small boxes, sad snakes and a workshop where kids get to stick insect specimens on cards, with fake flowers, and put them in frames.
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As we drink our beers and eat our boiled peanuts in the lively neighbourhood we've just discovered near the flat in Beijing, a truck laden with bins rolls up, and a woman starts scooping food waste into them using a giant spoon made of a hard hat attached to a pole.