Archive for the 'China' Category

Benny Bargains and the Great Wall of China…

Friday, July 28th, 2006
Another couple of crazy days in China. We went to the Silk market on thursday and let me tell you that this place is every girl’s dream. It was 7 floors of shopping at cheap ass China prices (your US products for ~80% less). There were 4 aisles of shoes and each aisles must have been 100 feet long. The catch of course is you have to bargain everyone down to a fair price. Regina and I tried to follow the 10% rule which is you want to pay 10% of their original asking price. Regina got some great deals on jewelry and I did well on some other select items (they might be gifts for some folks out there so I don’t want to spoil the surprise). I will say however I got 2 “I climbed the great wall” T-shirts for $2.50 USD.And I of course gave out Asian Invasion cards to anyone I bought something from and they were all very impressed and made a big deal out of them (see the pics when they are posted). One lady asked me if we would sell her stuff on our website but I told her she had to talk to the Johnny. I don’t know if anyone has noticed but at least 2 random people have picked up our cards and commented on this site, so if you lady’s are reading this now we’d love to hear that while I think I got a good deal, the stuff I bought was so cheap I really got screwed.

The Asian Invasion cards have come in handy in another way on our trip. Wherever the lovely Regina and I go people harass the shit out of us to buy things from them or to eat in their bar or to give us a ride in their carriage. Apparently saying NO to them 5 times isn’t enough to get them to stop harassing you so I decided to start handing them cards whenever they won’t go away. This has stopped every single one of our harassers because they either A) think I’m famous because I’m on a card (duh) or B) think I’ve just handed something very valuable from America (again duh). They also always think that Veronica is Regina which leads me to believe that all of us white folk look the same to them :)

And finally yes we did see the Great Wall of China and yes it was amazing (all that working out with Tex and Cry paid off because I think we went up a million steps today) BUT it was soo misty and foggy that we could barely see more than 10 yards in front of us so our pictures are unimpressive. We have not had one sunny day on our trip so far and it has rained everyday except for 2 cloudy days in Korea.

Since the invasion is going so well in China we decided to skip Hong Kong and spend more time in Thailand since it’s gonna take more time to clean that place up with the hooker problems they’ve got. I’ll clean that place up one hooker at a time if I have to. When we land tomorrow the lovely Regina and I will have gone halfway around the world and will be a few days short of the halfway point of our trip (tear). We might not have much Internet access in Thailand so if you don’t hear from us don’t fear, it doesn’t mean we couldn’t handle the street of Bangkok and their hookers.

BB

Posted in China | 21 Comments »

Take your picture with white people…

Wednesday, July 26th, 2006

Johnny gets what Johnny wants…

The invasion continues to exceed expectations, we’ve gotten first class treatment since we’ve landed in China. Someone picked us up from the airport and although they had a sign with Regina’s name on it, I’m pretty sure it had something to do with traveling with a member of the bigwheel bikergang. Our hostel obviously know they have a celebrity in house because they set us up with tickets to any event we want and provide a free ride to and from wherever we are going (shout out to my girl Apple). They also give us a free breakfast in the morning and help us in anyway you can imagine all for a grand total of 10 bucks a night. Money goes very far in Beijing and since my TDY was cancelled I’m thinking about moving here. The only drawback to our hostel (and all of Beijing for that matter) is that the bathrooms suck. You aren’t allowed to throw toilet paper in the toilet (what was I thinking) because it will clog up the pipes. In fact virtually no bathroom in Beijing comes with toilet paper so Brownie would be screwed if he came here. You also have to use water from a water bottle to brush your teeth and the shower is not separated from the rest of the bathroom so you shower between the sink and the toilet.

Right now Beijing is under MAJOR construction for the 2008 Olympics so it seems like every road and monument is under construction or renovation. Our hostel is located up a very shady alley that is all dirt road. Every morning there are like 50 people working on digging it up and I suppose eventually they will actually put a road there.

The lovely Regina and I have done a lot here so far, we’ve visited the temple of heaven, the lama temple, Confusus’ temple, the forbidden city and tiananmen square. The forbidden city was by far the coolest thing we’ve seen so far and I’ll post pictures soon. When we got to the hostel there were notices that con artists lurk out at places like tiananmen square and try to strike up conversations in english so you’ll befriend them so they can later suggest you go out for drinks and stiff you with the tab. This is pretty much true. Everywhere we went random people came up to us trying to talk to us about how they went to school in China or some other over-friendly story. I would hand them my bikergang card and walkaway, so if you guys are reading this now..nice try. I also handed out my card to alot of  those annoying people who try to hand you flyers when you’re walking around…they didn’t know what to do.

As you may have figured out by now we stick out quite a bit over here. There are tons of people who come up to us and ask if they can take pictures with us. No word on whether that’s because I’m a member of the bikergang or because Regina and I maybe the first white people they’ve ever seen…you be the judge.

Well that’s all for now…we got the Great Wall coming up in the next couple days, if I had my bigwheel I’d could find out exactly how many Great Wall steps a bigwheel could go down before it got detroyed.

BB

Posted in China | 6 Comments »