Written in Beijing, China 

Hey, hope you are all having an amazing day. I know I emailed last week, but I decided to do a mail on Beijing before I headed out into the great wide unknown of the rest of China. Mainly because I don't think I will be able to get access to the internet for quite a while. And thanks for all the mail. Please forgive me if I don't respond that timorously - just know I will reply when I can and I really love you for mailing.

What can I tell you? The past few days here in Beijing have been totally surreal. In fact, I keep walking round thinking like no, there is no way this is even the same city I was in five years ago. It seems admission to the World Trade Organisation and the 2008 Olympics have made a huge impact. Pretty much overturned the city.

So, the changes? Firstly, and the best bit of all, it is clean. And I am not just talking about putting-litter-in-a-rubbish-bin clean. This is CLEAN. New buildings (with new clean carpets), new four-lane-wide streets, new two-metre-wide pavements, separate bicycle lanes. It is just amazing. So amazing that I have been wearing sandals for days and not worrying I might step in something that, if I were wearing closed shoes, would be so much better to step in. It is just awesome.

There are new buses (with aircon and TV), MacDonald's and KFC stores, the sky is blue and the city has been remodeled to include parks with TREES and FLOWERS. Like I said, I have been walking around for days thinking it is just too surreal to actually describe. And road signs in Roman lettering. And loads of foreigners on bikes.

Oh, and Beijing even has a subway system, with three lines and more planned. I did a trip to see what it was like. Clean. And new. That was the initial impression. Although the streets are teaming with people above, there are fewer passengers on the trains than you might expect for a capital subway system. And for those of you who have ever been on the London Underground, a trip on the Beijing subway costs three Yuan - about R2.50. Surreal just doesn't even cover that one.

The subway though, also shows things haven't really changed that much, that China is still China. In the government's guaranteed employment scheme, getting a ticket on the subway runs like this: Step one, stand in a Chinese queue, which basically means just push until you get to the front and get the ticketing guy's attention. Step two, get the ticket from the ticketing guy. There are no automatic ticket machines. Step three, hand your ticket to the lady at the entrance of the subway, where she will check your ticket and tear it to show it has been used (again, there are no ticket checking machines you just put your ticket through and it registers you are using the ticket). Step four - depending on the size of the subway station - there will be another lady further on, checking your ticket has been torn. Lastly, get on the train (with some advertising inside the carriages, like most underground trains - a little unusual for China, although all the advertising is for foreign companies). Remember to give your ticket to yet another ticket lady at the end of your ride - keeping to yourself the thoughts that it would all just be so much easier and quicker with a turnstile machine taking your ticket and letting your through.

But anyway, there are so many other changes to describe. There is a street called Wangfujing Dajie ("dajie" is street or road) that could easily pass for Oxford Circus or some other really up market touristy street you find anywhere in the world. There are souvenir stalls and department stores, although the concept seems to be a bit different here.

A department store in China is a group of shops, most in separate rooms - just like the ones everywhere, except there are no real names to the stores. The stores display a brand name mostly, like "Tommy" or "Gucci" or something. There are few individual businesses (I figure the party cadres are making a small fortune from the new trendy masses).

Then there is invariably a floor with small stores at counters, all open-plan, selling cosmetics and electronics and stuff, although the same principal seems to apply. An individual store will sell "Avon", or "Elizabeth Arden" perfume, without an overhead name.

And I managed to get milk (unheard of five years ago) in a SUPERMARKET (and if I stress these words it is because the concept of a supermarket five years ago was non-existent, food markets with snakes in tanks was more the thing).

I have also noticed that women seem to be more "out" in terms of leaving the home or the traditional "women jobs" of waitressing and cooking. They seem to be more represented, like the number of people walking the street or sitting in a restaurant. Although there are still young girls, most patiently waiting to get married, filling the traditional jobs of sales assistants and waitresses. But I have seen a police woman (actually, even a policeman five years ago would have been weird, and a policewoman I think even now is pretty much unheard of) and a few women bus drivers. I cannot tell you what is going on in the law courts about women or, in fact, what is going on in the rest of the world, never mind news in China. The Chinese newspapers are not what newspapers are in the rest of the world. I cannot even access the major news websites here -CNN, BBC, all just blank. Even logging onto Mweb and trying to get their news, the news bar you would normally click on is just not there. Now that is surreal.

Ok, so what has stayed the same in Beijing? It took me four days to book my ticket to Xining (pronounced "shunyung", for those interested to know how the Romanisation of Chinese differs in the pronunciation of it), even though there may have been trains that had space sooner. It is just because you can only book a ticket for a train four days in advance. Not five, not three, but four, and that is the way it is done and you can do it no other way.

Same as booking to see the Chinese Opera tonight (I have hooked up with an American guy travelling on his own, and an Irish girl, also travelling on her own, and we decided to see the opera tonight as it would be something totally different). Anyway, you can only book for the Beijing Opera half a day in advance. That is it. So you have to make sure you are at the counter at lunch time to book it for the evening. Even then it is half full and you wonder how the others did it.

There are still hutongs around the inner city - those little old alleyways that are really crowded and really dirty and that the government is making every effort to renovate by 2008. Hence all the construction work. The guys outside our room window are at it 24 hours a day. They work under spotlights, renovating the alleyway of the hostel (probably a former foreigner only hotel - it even has the desk at the end of each floor, where someone was employed to sit through the night to see that the foreigners didn't sneak out and contaminate the locals).

And there are the touts, always the touts. "Hey lady, come and buy my t-shirts, one dollar", "hey lady, postcards", "hey lady, you American, buy my binoculars", "you see nice, lady, you need taxi". That about sums it up. Don't even stand still for two minutes because someone will come up to you and start trying to sell you things you don't want, courtesy of a tourism boom not been very well controlled by a communist government. Although there are still the friendship stores - China's answer to government controlled tourist spending. I was actually surprised they were still around. They are still the same too. They sell souvenirs and English books and CDs and anything else a tourist would vaguely want to buy.

Friendship stores are government run and formally, a tourist would have to shop there. No choice. Now there is a choice, although the stand-back-and-offer-assistance-when-the-tourist-asks attitude of the sales assistants (which then fill out your purchase in triplicate and make you sign for it) is sometimes better than the "you buy?" attitude of the unofficial souvenir stalls. But the prices in the Friendship Stores are government controlled and through the roof.

And yeah, you get ripped off. Big time. Bargain, and bargain hard, and even then pay attention because someone is going to slip you the wrong amount or not put all what you have just bought into the packet. Or someone is just going to blatantly tell you you are a foreigner and therefore have more money so why should they give you your change? All of these things you learn and accept and carry on regardless. This includes the basics like buying food from vendors, or water from a street stall. Just go with it and hope you are seeing everything you should be (which with me you could rip me off blind-sided and I wouldn't realise).

And the spitting - that awful grinding-of-the-back-of-the-throat to move the phlegm to the mouth so you can take aim and spit on any available form of open space - seems to have lessoned. I only see it on the floor every now and again, and the sound is rare. Although people have warned me this is only in Beijing.

I should tell you all about the Dong Hwa Men night market, a couple of streets away from the hostel. Everything you could ever imagine put onto a thin wooden stick and grilled, ready to eat. This everything includes dog, snake, starfish, still squiggling baby octopus, silkworms, crickets, pretty much anything.

Chinese food is still pretty much divine. Anything you can eat and more besides. And the variety of veggie food is great compared to South Korea and Japan.

There seems to be so much to tell you but so little time to say it all in. I am feeling pretty brain dead typing away at this computer for so long. The traffic here is still from the Wild West, and crossing the street (regardless of what the traffic light says) makes for an interesting experience. And if the drivers hoot, they are not going to stop for you, and they mean it.

The new roads are in one direction only. There are four lanes going one way, and a break in the road with flowers or a park or something, and another four lanes going the other way. It seems to have sorted out the driving habits of just driving anywhere, although once you leave the city and hit the one lane roads, the drivers straddle lanes to get the best view of how to overtake the truck in front of them continuously, regardless of how big the vehicle coming the other way is.

For all those into tacky tourism, I did the really tacky tourism thing of taking a tour bus to the Great Wall yesterday. The tour was great, after being touted to a jade factory in order to buy, and a Friendship Store, in order to buy (and they get quite pissed off when you don't fall for it) and the Ming Tombs (ok, but not that impressive). It was really tacky and just what I wanted. We all had to get taken up to the Wall (it is built on mountains) in this funfair ride thing, like a slow rollercoaster. Then you get to walk along the Wall for a while, with peddlers walking besides you touting their stuff, and then you have to go back down because after all the touting around it is time to go. Loads of souvenir stalls and tacky memorabilia and stuff. And the wall itself was ok the second time round. Still immense and impressive.

Oh, and for those of you who remember the old South African phone booths, the bright orange ones that were really huge and elongated round and stood out from a mile away? Well, the ones in Beijing (public phone booths are newly installed for the Olympics) are almost exactly the same - only difference is that they are a little shorter.

I went to the China Art Gallery today to have a look around and just veg before the opera tonight (after the all-night construction for the last few nights my sleep is becoming seriously deprived), and it really made me realise I was in China and this is a very different thought. Firstly, the dearth of women artists, perhaps two of three out of five floors of works on display. Secondly, the political and historical nature of the work on display. Paintings commissioned by the military for the "20th annual celebration of the Cultural Revolution" or the People's Uprising. Or an artist working for the government department of communication, or art, or education, or even (once mentioned) propaganda, painting his experiences as a soldier against the Japanese, or as an intellectual receiving his re-education as a peasant in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. There were very few pieces of art that were just art, art for arts sake, not about some historical or political experience - and those pieces were invariably by a Chinese artist now living overseas.

Now I have said too much and have been writing too long and I am off. I hope that was all of interest and what you were looking for - most of you have asked me to describe where I am and what I am experiencing. I hope you are having an awesome day and send love.