my god this washing machine!

i wasn't sure if they changed the sheets when they come into our room and cleaned- or just made the bed.

so I've tried to wash the sheets... and accidently done it 3 times now, with out drying them.

my record is washing my cloths 4 times and half drying them twice. I only know 40 characters in chinese!!

to my dad has been doing some yoga courses here in Beijing (he did 6 days of language school and then took a sabbatical. through that he met an Italian man Fabio who runs a cafe just around the corner of his, it turns out that his gf is a Chinese real estate agent in Beijing who's niece is finishing her masters this February in Melbourne.

So we went, well where taken out to dinner with them tonight to yet another TOTALLY amazing (im sorry, the pictures will have to describe the restaurant) restaurant! we met them at his cafe and then she drove us there (personally, i think using a driving licensee would be like dating cerberus), it had a private parking lot, the entrance was marked by a simple sign "lotus" and then door was a thick velvet drape.

we walked inside and people came giving us 'lucky water' to wash out hands with, and took us t our table- the menues well... ill just let the pictures talk.

well in still exchausted, and i still need to study my hanze!!

(if i could actually get them on here, but my bandwith is chocked by the VPN im using to get past the great firewall)

way to exchausted atm to do a propper blog post, but i went to Xi'an on the weekend- think terracotta warriors.

oh and we bought some ming dynasty art works, 100% authentic and good price the street side vendor said! what a find!

so where we live is accross the road from a large (think 6 storey several hundred meters long) shopping mall, and there i a KFC there... i finally tried some.

ironically, it was proubably the least oily food ive eaton all week.

today

well my day wasn't to eventful- late to class, caught the metro to H and M, spent 40 minutes looking for detergent...

oh, and i had a bath and somehow locked myself out of my bedroom.

i had to go down to reception...

yea...

think jossi in finland.

olen etala-afrikkalainen, puhutko englantia?? (she was naked, locked out of her locked from taking a sauna at a public bath)

"anteksi, en puhu."

how to describe china??

'eEEP!',

yes, the non descriptive yet highly illuminating word 'eEEP!'. on one hand, its expresses immense adrenaline rush that traveling through a foreign country can provide, while on the other hand it provides a subtle insight into the hidden mystic of china- the great land behind the firewall.

a firewall, that through my immense skill, ingenuity and ability to Google 'accessing Facebook in china' and then 'free VPN' have breached.

This weekend i am very probably off to Xi'an to see the terracotta warriors, I'm already studying up on sedimentary rocks, there uses and looking for a whip and leather cow-boy hat. if you hear of any ancient artifact that have mysteriously disappeared, or perhaps a tall blonde white girl that is going to be in the area that i could bicker and argue with, and then stumble through a here to unknown secret passage in the tomb, then I'm sure it would result in the scientific community being very thankful.

last night, it was my new Brazilian friend Marina's birthday, but as her arm had somehow sustained an infection due to the Kungfu lesson she took last week... so after spending some time in the hospital with her sister and teaching her what she had missed in class (Numbers, so we counted to 100 and the nursing staff kept helping us- apparently i still can't pronounce 10.. or 9... or 7 or 6 or 4 or 5... and I'm not too good with 2) we took the subway home and had a conversation in Chinese on the train.

though the beijingers might be used to foreigners because of the Olympics, the whole train went silent as they all eves dropped on our conversation :). the conversation went something like this.

(I'm going to write in English, but we actually spoke in very very fluent Chinese*

*white people awkwardly staring at each other*

"hello"

"hello"

"hello, how are you"

"very good, and you"

"err, also very good"

"and you?"

"good"

*pause, giggle*

"i am finnish"

"good. i am brazilian, and you?

"i am also brazillian"

"i speak finnish, i dont speak english, do you speak finnish"

"no i speak portugese, and italian"

"i speak italian!"

as you can see, we chocked-but later on we had a slightly more sophisticated conversation:

"i am hungry, i want bread"

"mm, i am also hungry, i want noodles"

"i am hungry to! i want... umm.... dead cat"

we've since made plans to start counting to 100 together the next time we're on the train.

last night u had hot pot with the two Brazilian girls, and Anna, the fast speaking Chinese girl that works in the basement mini store and somehow has learnt very very fluent english in just 4 months... basically they put a broth with a few odds and ends- it looked like we had a pigs knee bone, and a few assorted (un-label able to me) vegetables and then you use your Chinese friend to read and pick items from the menu- this is quite a useful technique, i highly recommend it.

you then end up wit ha mountain of food on the table, and on a little trolley beside the table. you then pretty much just throw it in addhoc, let it froth-away for a while and then eat it with out asking what it is.

now i don't want to sound squeamish, but in the same restaurant i saw swimming turtles in a tank, several types of fish (all swimming) sea snails, large frogs- maybe toads, and also some sort of long pink worm (tape worm comes to mind?), and then 2 other types of grub/worm things that where all wriggling around. usually i would say that i am up for anything... but turtle?

your right, I'm being silly, i really need to taste it, ill make Anna the (Chinese girl) take us to somewhere to try it. (BTW, i would just like to mention that Anna is such an amazingly nice and helpful person! the Chinese are so generous!!).

last weekend me and Baba visited shanghai. ok, it might just be me, but i feel like the Chinese do some things just so that they can say they did it, and not for an actual process- and seeming as the media is government controlled, unless your have 'wired wetwear'- then no-one really critisises it. for example, the maglev train from shanghai pudong trainstation to the international airport, it probably would have been faster and cheaper for us to just catch a cab the whole way, seeming as the trainstation is no-where near the centre of the city.

but it was quite cool to ride a floating train going at 301km/hr and see the cars fall behind :).

well that hack was a small illistration of some of the views im forming here, oh one more thing, the restaurant we went to it was about au$60 for the 4 of us, quite good seeming as we couldnt eat all the food! but i asked anna how much the waitresses there got paid, 1500 yuan/ month, working 28 days a month and 10 hour shifts. they get on average then AU$0.8/hr. when me and mariana (one of the brazillian girls) figured this out, we were kinda shell shocked for the whole night...

ill try to write something every now and then from now on, and write something up about shanghi, but i really must be off to go study some chinese- test this friday!!

I'm going to acquire an acquous suspension of methylated xanthenes in a complex polymer vessel.

im a hong kongien

For any of you how have actually spoken to me before, you will have noticed i have the structure of communicating very much representing a grass hopper flying madly from a combine harvester.

in this blog, you will see that format distilled into its purer essence

I've been told that people don't like Hong Kong often on their first visit, but i already feel like i AM a Hong Kongien... there's something about the cities heart beat that resonates within me. and all the cheap food around.

Well, Hong Kongien? that might be a slight exaggeration you may think seeming as i can only read one of the languages here, have survival skills mounting to 'there are cops everywhere, I'll be fine" and "ohh! HK$10 a dish! delicious!", but somehow I've managed to last the 4 days.

Wednesday we woke up (at around 5 am...) and discovered the first reason i would catch the Asia bug. They have a sauna in this building. after I had truly had my fill of warmth and the most delicious scrambled eggs for breakfast, we decided to head over to kaloon and see the Hong Kong history museum so that we would have a little context on this 'country'/province of china.

turns out i was correct and knew nothing about Hong Kong.

oh, and it has very very interesting rocks, but I won't bored you here with them, ill corner each and everyone of you and show you a power point presentation about them... the rock part was only a small intro into the 8 gallery museum, but I managed to spend about 45 minutes in it. but seriously, the geological history is very interesting.

so before modern times, Hong Kong was settled by 3 ethnic groups: hakka, punti and the holko/tanka.

The Punti (translation: origional locality) where the first settlers in Hong Kong, and performed such industries and salt farming and incense farming. I won't write to much more exept to say that to defend them selves from pirates they build walled villages to defend them selves in, and I'll be doing a walk tomorrow through the new territories with dad that passes through several of these villages.

the Holko/Tanka people i believe are the most interesting. they are called 'boat people' not because they used boats a lot, or did a lot of fishing. but because they literally lived there entire lives on boats, only every coming ashore to build new boats/repair boats. and so they have developed a rather interesting marriage ritual where the pride and groom meet on there wedding night by being rowed towards each other on 'dragon boats' rowed solely by the brides female relatives. currently, the Holko/Tanka people instead perform a dragon dance through the streets in brightly coloured.

yesterday me and dad went out to the new territories of Hong Kong- and saw some of the old walled villages that the ethnic inhabitants of Hong Kong used to live in, and people still do. It was quite a contrast to the intense activity of down town Hong Kong (see the pictures) yet ironically in some of the falling apart brick garages we past, i saw some really really nice cars... I'm not quite sure what to make of that seeming as its Kong Kong and driving a car must be hell. after wandering through the edges of the new territories we caught a half hour train back to the kawloon and were back in Hong Kong.

well, we leave in half an hour for Beijing, soooo you'll all have to live with my limited blogging. hopefully ill be more dedicated in Beijing!

oh, and the food!! I've eaten to much here its ridiculous! we where at the equivalent of DJ's yesterday at a sushi train place, and between me and dad we probably had around 16 dishes and 3 servings of miso soup (we had dinner with a friend of dad's) and the whole thing was only AU$25 a head! by far the most expensive meal we had dad (the cheapest being HK$31 for me and dad together). and it goes without saying, its all delicious!

eep!! My the first day in china.

I feel like such a Chinese tourist in australia, exept that im an Australian tourist in china. on the train ride in from the airport i took about 15 photos of every sky-scrapper i saw.

so my first impressions of china?

people arn't starring at me! i was so expecting to be stared at here! (like in finland when i first went to school, or walked down the street practicing my "r's" out loud to my self), but everyone just seems to power ahead ignoring everyone around them. so far the only person who I've noticed looking at me was the some white guy trying to cruise me in the lobby when i got home tonight. stupido gringos!! vittun americalaiset! (can somone tell me the mandarin/cantonese??)

oh, and in Hong Kong the pedestrians own the streets; we walk blindly into the road expecting that a car just won't be there; and for the most part they arn't. The streets are actually quite empty, and as a pedestrian one can quite easily walk constantly as there always seems to be green lights at intersections.

Also, everything is really small. the esculators, the rooms, the windows the showers and the people!! i think my dad is enjoying feeling normal sized for once though.

and its kinda cheep if you know where to go i think. me and dad got coffee for the both of us for AU$9 and sat and talked for several hours, but then got dinner for the both of us for AU$4.

hope your all managing to somehow live with out me,

zaijian Lucas

hey everyone, just got to the hotel in hong kong.

wow. the buildings are so freaking big!

now im off to go find something to eat and be awed.

zaijian!