Bungee Jumping

The hostel that I'm staying at here has a tour that goes to some really big gorge in Beijing. I could attempt to impress people by actually remembering the name of the gorge, and then rattling off some historical information about it, but since I don't know either(and wikipedia is blocked), I'm not going to.

What's more important, was that I got to bungee jump for the first time. Bungee jumping for the first time in China seemed a little sketchy to me, the Chinese aren't known for their exacting safety standards, but it seemed really risky to me, which I think is a good enough reason to decide to do something.

After being weighed, I climbed up the tower in the picture above. Emptied all of the shit in my pockets into my backpack, then sat down to have the harness attached to my feet. The harness kind of reminded me of the those fuzzy sextoy handcuffs that attached to peoples beds, except for bigger, and tightend to the point that I couldn't feel my feet. After that I edged to the end of the platform, and realized that I didn't know what I was doing, this being my first jump and all. Nothing that couldn't be fixed by a short conversation with the bungee jump station staff I figured. The conversation went something like this -

Me: (gesturing and pointing down below on the edge of the platform, with a puzzled look on my face)

Chinese guy: You go!

After that, he pushed me off the platform, which was just as well, since I think I had reached the extent of his english language skills anyway. I heard laughter behind me for the first second or two, apparently because I was pushed off, and was ungracefully falling feet first, whereas most bungee jumpers dive. A half second later, the realization that I was falling really fucking fast hit me, my unconcious reaction to this was to wiggle my legs, my body searching for it's former companion, the ground.

After this, I got whiplashed like a mother fucker at the end, due to having to make the head over feet to feet over head transition at the end of the rope, which jostled me enough to forget any fear I had prior to this point. I got a nice round of applause from a boat full of korean tourists that was passing by underneath me in the river.

The next part of the jump was less exciting, but more painful, as I hung by my feet, with blood rushing into my head, over the river.

For this, I paid 10 US dollars, not bad.

Blah, sick

Caught some cold, at first I just thought was the air in Beijing, since every Chinese person here seems to have a recurrent cough, but it knocked me on my ass today. I spent the day on my bunk in the hostel, only coming out to eat.

I'll have to take a little better care of my immune system. You can get a 22 ounce tsingtao beer at the hostel for 60 cents, so drinking until the morning the first few nights I was here, didn't do much to strenghten my immune system.

The last couple of days have been pretty exiciting, but I'm going to wait until I don't feel like dog shit to write about them.

In Beijing

So I made it to Beijing in one piece. Its pretty fucking different here. The first thing that struck out at me about Beijing is how BIG everything is. The animated billboards that I saw while riding out of the airport reminded me of something out of Blade Runner.

Speaking of the airport, I was expecting that I was going to have troubles at customs. Whenever I've gone through customs in the United States, it seemed like every agent was a wannabe Jack Bauer. The worst time was when I was coming back from Canada. They tore my car apart, and played the "try to catch him in a lie" game.

"What did you say your name was again'?
"Brian"
"DIDN'T YOU SAY IT WAS BRAD BEFORE?"
"No, you've must have misheard"
"So... Brian...IF THAT'S YOUR REAL NAME!!!...."

Pretty hardcore for a Canadian border crossing. Coming into China was much easier. My bags didn't even get searched. My interview consisted of me sitting outside a police officers booth, while he briefly looked at my passport. Outside the booth was a box, which displayed his Badge number in red led lights, along with a row of buttons with two green and two red emoticons on them. The buttons are used to show your level of satisfaction with the officers service. Press the green emoticon with the gigantic smiley if you are "greatly satisfied', or the red frowning one if "service was too slow". I think that every police officer should have to hand you a smiley face box whenever you have to deal with them.

3 days and a wakeup

So, I'm running around, getting stuff ready for my trip, and decide that I should check my travel itinerary, to see what time I'm leaving on the 30th. I look at the itinerary sheet, and notice that my flight is leaving on the 23rd. Oh fuck. My heart skips a beat, as I briefly ponder what would have happened if I had waited until after the 23rd to check my travel plans. The notion that I was leaving on the 30th entered my mind while I was up late one night, when I spent a half hour haggling with different fare websites to get a decent price for the 30th. After spotting a cheaper seat for the 23rd, I quickly changed my plans, and then went to bed and forgot about it.

Now, instead of getting ready at a leisurely pace, I have to get ready pretty fucking quick, and hope I don't forget anything.

Getting a blog started was on my "todo" list, so now that's done. Now I just have to be good about keeping it updated. I'm also hoping that it isn't filtered out by China's firewall, which would obviously make updating it a bitch.

After having done some testing, blogspot is filtered out by China's firewall, so back to the drawing board....