day 1: 北京市海淀区罗庄西里碧兴源3号楼2106室 (beijing bixingyuan) – 卢沟桥 (lugouqiao) = 26,7km

The original plan was to get up “as early as possible”, and start walking right away, but reality saw me going out to have hot pot with 小黑 at about 1 am the day before.

…so I get up and I try out the scale: 97 kg. I never made it to the 100. Damn.

Twenty minutes later I had my clothes on and was at 102 kg. With the cameras dangling around my neck: 109 kg.

And then I put on the backpack and looked at the scale… …123 kg.

I started breaking a sweat and decided to have breakfast before I would leave.

Well, how can I describe the amount of traffic I had to navigate through? When I noticed I was humming “one, two, three – one, two, three” I thought, are we that desperate already?? That’s when I put in my earphones and listened to music for the rest of the day, ignoring all the beautiful life out there that I had ventured out to discover.

Just getting out of Beijing, trying not to poke as many people with the walking sticks dangling from my backpack, can be a hard thing to do. I had noodles for lunch in an overcrowded place near 公主坟, where I wouldn’t even fit through the door with all my gear on. The noodles were okay though.

Now I’m in a hotel where some 张叔叔 served me beef and 馒头 for dinner, all the while screaming at the top of his lungs about how he had been to 28 countries, and that everybody should drink the hell up. Okay, I make this sound worse than it actually was – it was a nice dinner, but I couldn’t stop thinking about my hurting feet and decided to go to bed early.

I wonder if I have lost any weight yet.

Soundtrack: Indochine – “Tes Yeux Noirs (live)”

—total: 26,7km

Posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 08:08 ;Filed under Beijing, Walk.

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