National Week

So this week is the National Holiday (marks the founding of the PRC in 1949) so everybody gets the week off. Naturally, wanting a break from studying, I'm going to attempt to travel a bit, but face two obstacles: 1) don't have a passport; it's been taken from me by the "Public Secuirty Bureau" to obtain my permanent residence permit. This makes it difficult to even travel domestically. But we're going to attempt. 2) every single person in the country tries to travel this week. So imagine Christmas, everybody going home for the holidays, planes and trains packed, flights delayed, everything disorganized, etc. Then, add ONE BILLION to that. US pop=300 million China pop=1.3 billion, right? Also consider the fact that their is virtually no air travel, and no personal cars, so everybody in the country is packed into the rail system. So I expect it will be quite an annoying and difficult week to travel.

We're going to Datong, a city in Shanxi province. Shanxi is a province to the southwest of Beijing, just south of Inner Mongolia and in the Yellow River Basin, and at the beginning of the desert. Apparently it's one of the poorer provinces in the country, and Datong is a major coal processing center, with the third largest coal strip mines in the world. It's also supposed to be a very polluted city. So why, you ask, would I ever want to go there? Nearby are the following: ancient Buddhist caves with rock carvings (a UNESCO world heritage site), a hanging monastery that's supposed to be cool, and one of the five sacred Buddhist mountains in China. So hopefully we'll be able to escape the pollution and the crowds at these sites.

But I think I've gotten pampered here in Beijing; where I live I don't attract nearly the amount of attention that I did in China the first time around. Not really looking forward to that part of traveling to China's less developed regions.
Shouts of HELLO!!!!! get tiresome. Listen, man, don't talk to me. You don't know me. You don't want me to reply, you just want to yell at me. HELLO! HELLO! Sometimes I want to turn around and just scream HELLO!!!! right back at them, in their faces. mostly i ignore it if possible.
I also really like, Look at her yellow hair! It is so....yellow!!! And, wow, our foreign friend knows how to use chopsticks!!!!! Yeah, what a fucking miracle, man, if I didn't know how to use chopsticks I would frigging starve to death in this country.

Anyways, pictures when I get back.