mongolia

we are here. after many many hours of sitting on a non-moving train around the china/mongolian border, lots of driving through moonscape, too many nasty toilets/holes to talk about and an introduction to new alphabets, we have made it into another country. so far we've holed up with foreigners and protected ourselves against the cold.
Alex almost lost her mind while riding the train and I did what I could to keep her from plotsing, kvelling, or getting agata. But I didn't do very much except for having enough power on my ipod to watch one episode of 30 Rock. As we sat on a ledge outside the train station (we were locked out of our train for a couple hours) the screen kept getting covered over with sand and I had to brush it off. Apparently Mongolia is a desert. But a cold, windy desert. Another suprising fact was that the town we were stalled in (Earlian (sp? - we are entering the portion of the trip where I can't spell the places I am visiting.)) is a shopping destination for people from Ulan-Bator. This is surprising since for us at least it was an 18 hour train ride to get there.

Getting kicked off the computer now....ttyl.

chengdu and bac

we've seen pandas, pimped some rickshaws with foreigners, climbed mount emei and seen pictures of the faux chinese dalai lama at the top, slept in a monastery, seen a very large carved buddha from a filthy beach, missed seeing jane goodall in two cities, eaten thanksgiving dinner and gone to "the bus bar" in beijing- a camoflaged trailer in a parking lot with a land rover bar- oh yeah, and we're off to mongolia at 6am. see you post-detox.

i climbed the great wall!

i thought that the great wall was just going to be a long walk, wrong. jane and i chose to go today which happened to be too foggy to see anything outside of the wall (which is actually good, if i could have seen what i was about to climb i may have just sat down and cried). by the end, after being lifted down from one of the towers by jane and some polish dude (each with a leg in hand) and climbing down another one with a number of onlookers coaching me on the footholds i was happy to reach the end, where it was snowing. besides the fact that it may have been a more challenging climb then i was ready for, it was fabulous to occasionally find myself alone on the wall, sans tourists and hawkers. scarily enough, as the bus got back onto beijing roads, jane and i could both feel the pollution. i am ready for chengdu and environs!

ni hao!

shanghai felt alternately like chinatown, brooklyn, and an amalgamation of american cities with tall buildings. now we're in beijing, after one of the nicest train rides ever, although i could have done without the chinese ballad muzak. we now know the words for rice, the numbers 6-10 and vegetable bun in chinese. we also do a mean reenactment of the announcer on the shanghai metro.