Hey all...I have a lot to say, so bear with me :) It's just general commentary to get out of the way before I tell you about Tibet!

The drivers - they are a little better than India, but not much :) We have been in some taxis and on a few buses now and it is, at times, a scary experience. They drive in the middle of the road, in the passing lane when there is no other traffic, they take a right turn on red as if it's a green for them :) In the UK there is no right (or more appropriately left) turn on red and in the US it's a right turn on red AFTER STOP...that last bit obviously hasn't made it through the translation here :) It's the thing we have to watch for most when crossing the street on foot or on the bicycles. They also like to drive and talk on their mobile, or if they think that is a bit dangerous, they just pull into the cycle lane and drive really slowly while talking on the phone. They drive in the bike lanes which are often separate from the main road by a median strip, sometimes even the wrong way down the bike lane! Ah, it keeps us on our toes :)

Let's talk toilets (obviously my favorite subject:) They are everywhere!!!! They are not always pleasant, but there is no shortage of them. We occasionally see the men using a wall, but it's rare compared to India. In Louyang they have signs on the streets about every 100 meters telling you there is a toilet up ahead, just on your right or behind you, so pull a u-turn. We used toilets in petrol stations or rest stops while we were on the bus (the driver would pull over every couple of hours) but we could also see tons of roadside toilets where drivers could pull in and relieve themselves - always a boys and girls room, but most were very basic, roofless latrines, often with a weird fake rock motif as if the loo was carved out of a big boulder :) You have to bring your own paper, too. And you have to put the used paper in a bin provided for this purpose, or risk blocking the pipes (when the toilet has pipes, which is only in the nicer places). A is quite talented at clogging the toilet up - she forgets to put the paper in the bin as it's not our habit...but we no longer have a problem communicating what assistance we need to the hotel staff :)

Tree planting. Wow, someone has put a bee in their bonnet here!!! On the ride down the length of Shanxi we saw that, literally, millions of new trees have been planted in the last year, many of them within a month of our passing by. They are planted quite close together, only feet apart in many cases, and many rows deep lining the edges of the roads. The rows of trees encroached on planted fields in many cases as well. We also saw many hillsides planted with trees. Many of the trees were what looked like poplars - their tops were cut off and they looked like staffs had been planted, but we could see some of the older ones had new branches coming out of the tops. As we got further south they were planting evergreens - small pine trees. As as we got further south it got a lot greener! Everything wasn't so brown and things were really growing. Xi'an amazed us with it's greenness and beautiful flowers everywhere - it was definitely Spring!

Hot water! This is the drinking kind and the bathing kind. Everyone in China - local and visitor alike - knows that they have to boil the water to drink it. This is excellent, as it means that we are not the only ones concerned about the health of our insides and we don't have to worry so much in restaurants. In India the locals would drink anything (and wash dishes in anything) so we were always vigilant. We still buy bottled water in China but we also have water in the hotel rooms. Sometimes it's a kettle and I boil water to put in our water bottles. Sometimes it's a flask of hot water that they provide and we have to ask for it to be refilled. The last method is a like a mini water machine - similar to what you get in a lot of offices - a water bottle upside down into the machine and water taps out. The machine boils the water and it comes out a hot water tap. We use this only for making coffee in the morning as it's very small - it would take forever to fill a water bottle, it can barely do 2 cups of coffee at a time! :) We don't know what water has gone into it - if the cold is safe to drink - so we don't drink it. As for the hot water....we don't have to do a hot bucket wash, we always have a shower, but the quality of the shower hardware varies greatly! That said we have had some great showers and the water is usually hot. Just as in India, though, the consistency as to whether hot is to the right or the left is trial and error :) Many places have had 24 hour hot water and some places only have night time hot water. We are keeping clean :)

As a continuation of the water concept...there is a serious drain smell problem here, as in India. I think a bit of bleach would go a long way to solving this problem :) As in India, it's the bathroom floor drain but also the open drains in the streets. It's an easily recognizable smell, but I don't remember ever smelling it in the US or the UK. A says she has smelled it in Spain once, but not in the UK. It's pretty foul, and one of our hotel rooms had a pretty vicious case of it and we had to keep the bathroom door shut the entire time. Yikes!

Living where you work. We saw this a lot in India, but we have seen it quite a bit in China, too. In the hotels there are floor women (they were all women, we didn't see any men...more on that thread in a minute :) and they had a room to live in so they were available to the guests all the time. As did the person that watched over the back of the hotel and the bike barn - we could see a little room at the back. We also could see that people were living in their shops - in Beijing, in Wutai Shan, in Louyang.

On to the roles of women :) In India we thought that women, for the most part, were hidden from the public view - this was not just the Muslim women but *all* women, except, of course, the westernized/urban women. I know I found this a bit depressing, and I think A did, too. Women in China are more visible, which we think is great :) but for some reason I was surprised to see women as part of the Chinese ruling class on the news on TV last night...hmmm for some reason I have picked up that weird idea (if was great to see that India had a lot of women in power....am I contradicting myself????). Chinese politics has always seemed to me to be very much and "old boys club", a bit stuffy and conservative. Anyway! The roles of women. Like on co-ed softball teams where women play certain positions and men play certain positions and it's rare to see it differently, women hold certain jobs and they don't hold other jobs. For example, all waitstaff are women. We have yet to see a male waiter. All the floor staff in a hotel are women. There are crossover jobs - we have see bus boys and bus girls and both male and female bus drivers. In India we saw many women working construction and doing road building and we have seen the same here although the women here seem to be treated equally unlike India where there were obvious inequalities amongst the workforce.

The last bit of commentary I want to share is about the vehicles. We have done our share of riding behind vehicles and breathing the fumes :) and sometimes we are pleasantly surprised....mmmm, that smells like wood :) They have solid fuel combustion engines! We have smelt wood and coal exhaust in addition to the standard diesel, petrol and 2 stroke exhaust smells. Many of the vehicles are not so much air polluting as they are noise polluting - the engine noise of some of the three wheeler pickup trucks and tractors is enough to knock me off my bike! They are incredibly loud...as are the horns of some of the trucks as they honk at us while passing, causing me to shout back at them "UNNECESSARY!!!!!" but I am sure they don't care :)

Later!