Benny Bigggs: Asian Invasion ‘06

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

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 26th, 2006 at 4:51 pm and is filed under China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.