China Stories

So we arrived then...

15th May 2008 20:00, Gerald

Arrived this morning at about 10 AM China time. That's 7 hours ahead of UK time. The flight took 8 (ish) hours and was pretty smooth. I managed to book my seat online the day before we flew so I grabbed an isle seat which meant two things.

1) More leg room for me (I'm a tallish 6 feet so it gave me a little more leg room - all important on a long flight).

2) In the event of an evacuation it would be myself who was responsible for opening the emergency exit. Gulp.

Luckily it didn't come to that.

After a couple of pretty poor films, an american sitcom or two (which were ok), two quite nice meals, 4 hours sleep and some nintendo, we landed.

Customs, it turned out, took very little time to pass through and so we quickly met up with George, our fixer, and the government official who will accompany us on our trip. As you can imagine we were pretty nervous but they both made us feel pretty relaxed. They seem easy going and helpful. We jumped into a really big government mini bus/4x4 thing and headed off to our hotel. It's right across the street from George's work so it means we won't have to waste valuable filming time every morning waiting for them to pick us up. And at the end of the day after dropping off equipment and writing diary entries we can just nip over the road to our hotel. Easy.

We arranged to meet tomorrow at 10 AM. We are going to meet a family and a doctor who will make up two of the stories we are going to film. We are also going to spend any other time we have filming GV's of Beijing, to include in the programmes.

So that meant we had a whole day to ourselves. Rather than going to bed we decided to stay up until the evening to get into the new time zone. So it was out for a bit of lunch and then off for a spot of sightseeing.

Gerald's next entry

The lost passport... and fish turned inside out!

15th May 2008 21:00, Maria

Gerald and I are vegetarians, well actually we're what's known as pescetarians - that's we don't eat poultry or meat, but eat fish.

This has caused great hilarity with people in Beijing as they had never heard of the term before. In general the Chinese find it a bit odd that foreigners wouldn't eat meat. Poor people don't eat meat because they can't afford it so they can't understand why wealthy foreigners who can afford it don't!

Before we left the UK lots of people said we'd have a nightmare trying to find stuff to eat, but here in Beijing we've had brilliant meals. At lunch we found a local restaurant that served a dish called hotpot. This is where they serve you raw vegetables and noodles and then you cook it yourself at your table in a boiling stock. The waitresses were very helpful showing us what to do and then laughing at us as we cooked everything in the wrong order.

We then went for a wander and found ourselves in an area that all they seemed to serve was kebabs, but these were not kebabs as we know it - not only was there meat on sticks, but loads of other 'interesting' ingredients such as scorpions, snakes and worst of all for we weak-stomached pescetarians, seahorses on a skewer.

Dinner was a much more successful outing. We met up with a friend who used to work at BBC Scotland and he took us to a really brilliant restaurant in "Ghost Street" so called because it's lined with thousands of red lanterns - not sure of that connection myself! Anyway, not only was the food delicious, but they laid on a floorshow. A man poured tea from a teapot with a really long spout, another man threw noodles about and then two men made horses and scorpions out of boiled sugar, what a night!

Our dishes were very entertaining too. We ate a feast which included a fish that was called inside-out fish - it was literally just that, a fish turned inside out with all the bones removed - green beans fried in garlic and perhaps best of all deep fried bananas coated in honey and sugar - yummy.

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