So I’m in holiday mode. Not going-around-the-world holiday mode, not crazy-busy-study-chinese-in-shanghai holiday mode, not bead-show-in-perth holiday mode, just plain HOLIDAY MODE! As such, I have very little of interest to write about. Every day has been a lazy crazy china kind of day…

Much of last week for me was spent in bed – turns out my body went into shut down at the thought of either a) dodgy chinese water/food or b) dodgy chinese hot weather and packed busses. Either way, I had a nice case of food sickness/heat stroke and spent most of my waking hours attempting to keep down the various Western Foods (combination of McD’s and Subway) down. Not nice. Feeling much better now – the question is, did I learn my lesson? Probably not, the dodgy chinese street food is soooo yummy, and it’s hard to stay cool on a crowded bus in Beijing’s summer.

We have spent most of the last week attempting to get to the various visa offices in Beijing. First stop was the Chinese Embassy to get an extension on Matt’s visa – it expires about a week before we’re due to leave China. Day one consisted of us getting up at about 4pm and realising that, even with superpowers, we’d never make the visa office in time. Day two we got up at about 3pm and realised the same thing. Day three saw us up at about 12pm – we were on the streets and down to our local metro station by 3pm, to find out that it is closed. For the next two weeks. Nice. Bus to the right area got us there by 5pm. Day four – we gave up. We’ll get the visa later. Similar story to us getting our visa for Mongolia (we’ve decided to head there for a week sometime soon) – except the visa office is only open 9am to 11.30am, not really convenient given our current predicament at leaving the apartment before dark.

We’ve spent our afternoons wandering town once the sun goes down, and we’ve seen some interesting sights. The other night, on our perpetual search for the perfect supermarket, we stumbled across a large group of mainly older chinese women dancing in unison. Maybe dancing is the wrong word – they were moving there arms and shaking their hips to popular western and chinese songs, with the vigour of an aerobics lesson. We joined the men on the grass as these women continued their exercise class for over an hour… Who would have thought that watching chinese women do the nutbush would be so entertaining.

Today/tonight we finally ventured out of our apartment at 8pm, in search of food. Our search led us to Wangfujin, where we wandered and finally settled on Japanese, mmmmm. Unfortunately, our walk home was not so nice, when is started pouring rain. Not so bad, considering we both had umbrellas. And then the lightning started. There’s nothing quite like walking through a lightning storm with an umbrella to get the heart racing.

Hope the weather is being kind to you all… Catch me on msn 🙂

bobs