Another (Mostly) Facebook Roundup

It's Chinese National Week here, which means I'm now off for seven days. Unfortunately as I was told quite specifically two weeks ago that my school was only off for two days (Saturday and Sunday - how does that count as holiday?) I didn't make any arrangements to go anywhere. I was told it would be seven days by a student on the morning of the day before it started leaving no time to actually arrange anything. Oh well, you've heard "c'est la vie" and "c'est la guerre" - now you can add "c'est la Chine".

It does mean that I have time to do my occasional re-blogging exercise and add a few of the things that have gone onto Facebook since... oh wow... is it really almost four months since I posted anything here?

Anyway, this time, rather than just cut and paste, I'll paraphrase - mainly because I'm bored but also to give anyone who reads both this and the FB page, a marginally different experience.

*

Back in June the end of the school year was rapidly approaching and lessons were being shuffled around and end of year activities shoe-horned into the schedule. I was invited to be a judge on two occasions. The senior one students, who are now my senior twos this year, invited me to judge performances of sketches they had written. This event was to take place out in the school yard but thanks to the weather was on, then off, then on, then off, then... well you get the picture. In the end it was on - on the only night in the whole month that I couldn't actually make it. So I never did get to see them. On the other hand I did get to judge the speaking competition where twenty two of the students from my (then) senior two classes made near identical speeches on the subject of "Yangshuo". As I had helped them prepare, I was happy that there were no clashes to prevent my attendance. The evening came and as judges we were seated seated in a row at the front and I was in the middle. The two Senior 2 Class 1 students who were comperes started out by introducing the judges. They introduced judge number one who stood up and was applauded. The judge two, then judge three. Skipping right over me they went on to judges five six and seven. Then, after a slight pause they added, "and finally the most handsome, interesting and funny teacher in the school... Bob" and the whole auditorium was filled with cheers, shrieks and foot stamping. They even asked me to make a welcome speech before the competition started.

I noticed the school headmaster nodding with approval, a fact that made me quite happy as, at that stage, I had no idea if they would be renewing my contract or not.

*

Of course it was also the time when my school, for no very good reason and against the practice of practically every other school in China, wanted me to do exams. You may recall that I tried to explain last year that it's impossible to do oral exams for sixty students in thirty five minutes and expect anything meaningful to come out of it but there they were, insisting again. So, having, after a lot of effort arranged for the school to let me do my oral exams over two weeks, which was still inadequate but, at least, possible, I then had to reschedule Monday's exam for Saturday as Monday was the Gao Kao* exam day. I was told categorically that I had to finish by Friday that week so the results could be handed in to the office. Then I got to school on Tuesday and another teacher - my administrator being absent - informed me that I couldn't do senior exams then or Wednesday as they were sitting other exams. Another "discussion" ensued in which I tried to explain that I couldn't hand in results for exams that hadn't been done and they insisted that I must. Eventually it was agreed that I could now work the following week on Tuesday and Wednesday and hand in the results on Wednesday afternoon. China is one long stream of right-hand/left-hand communications interface failures. 

(*The Gaokao is the Chinese University entrance exam.)

*

In July I went up to Baiyin to visit Theresa and see some old friends. While I was there I witnessed (from the outside only) the setting up of a Chinese circus. I was taking a walk  to the coffee shop to meet a student when I came across it. Just across the street from the coffee shop is an open space where a circus was setting up. I walked past a crowd of people looking at two tigers, a lion and a black bear in cages. It was one of the saddest spectacles I had ever seen. All the animals were lethargic and looked horribly malnourished. The lion's cage was barely two inches longer and six inches wider than the animal. The tigers (in separate cages) fared little better. Worst was the bear which was chained inside a cage smaller than my bedside table and which looked to be on its last legs. I know that animal welfare isn't something most people on China are concerned about but it was pitiful to see.

While I was there in Baiyin I had my first problem with mushrooms in ages. Usually I have been quite adept at avoiding them but sometimes the restaurants just don't get it. I think I might have been reasonably safe from the dreaded mushroom at one dinner as I was eating with five Chinese friends all of whom are aware of the problem including two doctors and a nurse. When the pumpkin soup turned out to have mushrooms in the resulting chorus crying to get it replaced could be heard streets away. It was rather embarrassing really-I could just have ignored that one dish but they wouldn't hear of it. It was on another occasion, when it was just me and Theresa, when things went wrong, I don't understand why they find it so difficult. My food intolerance to all kinds of mushroom and fungusis quite severe so I make very sure that restaurants know this. So, when we went for hot pot, Teresa explained for a full five minutes that I can't eat mushrooms or food containing or cooked with mushrooms. The soup came and we checked again and were assured that it was ok. I put some vegetables in and started fishing them out and eating I'd eaten quite a lot when I fished out something that was very clearly a mushroom. The staff said in Chinese that it wasn't a mushroom it was a wild fungus. We told them that this is just another kind of mushroom. They brought a new bowl of soup which I think was just the same thing with obvious bits strained out. Too late, the damage was done. I had a night of hot and cold sweats and stomach pains and a morning of  hasty dashes to the toilet. It's not the first time. No matter how carefully it's explained they just don't get it. Why?

*

While I was there I did a few English lessons - some for Candy, my old private student who still managed to brighten my day with her ten-year-old enthusiasm and some for the young son of one of Theresa's colleagues. He was a little shy but did inform me that his favourite TV program is The Walking Dead. He's eleven. Later that same day Candy had brought our old books over and we were looking at a chapter about countries which included Puerto Rico which she insisted, quite deliberately, on pronouncing as "potato rico". When, the following day, we came across the word Toronto, she told me clearly that it had to be pronounced "Tomato" so that someone could move from Potato Rico to Tomato, which is actually quite a good language joke from a second language student aged ten.

*

Waiting at the airport for my flight back to Yangshuo I looked around. I was sitting in a crowded airport lounge waiting for the plane and realised that over eighty percent of the people I could see were using their phones either as phones or to play games, watch movies or send messages. The woman sitting next to me was simultaneously using three - one to send text messages, one she was talking on and one to watch a movie. Isn't modern life wonderful?

*

*

Of course I still occasionally comment on things that are not China related. For example

Sometimes I wonder about the people who release software. On my edition of Word most of the settings are still at the defaults. This means if I type. '"Good morning." said the boy.' It changes the "s" to an "S" (because it thinks it's the start of a new sentence AND THEN underlines it in green to tell me it's wrong and then I change it back to lower case and the green line disappears to tell me it's right. So it "corrects" my correct sentence , identifies it's own "correction" as wrong then lets me change it back and identifies my original as right. Ridiculous.

and

A comment on a post elsewhere read simply. "ooooooooooh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Facebook offered the option to "see a translation" so I did.

The translation read "Ooooooooooh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

That capital "O" makes all the difference.

and

So Vin Diesal has signed on for Guardians of the Galaxy 2. I imagine the conversation went like this

Agent: Sorry Vin, Groot isn't in the movie.

Vin: Come on give me a chance, we haven't started to explore my range yet.

Agent: Look, Groot just isn't in the movie.

Vin: Listen, "I am Groot.", "I AM Groot.", "I am GROOT". There's just so much more I could do with the character. We haven't scratched the surface.

Agent: Leave it with me. I'll see what I can do.

*

A nice little story cropped up when I was teaching my "What do you know about the UK" lesson. One of the questions I ask is "Who is the UK Prime Minister." As part of the instructions I always tell the students that if they don't know an answer they should guess. Walking around and looking at answers I discovered that one of the students had written "Bob Dylan." When I asked him why, he shrugged and said "I don't know the answer, but I like Bob Dylan." He was pretty knowledgeable about his music too.

*

Finally, I've had a poem accepted for the forthcoming Offa's press anthology of poetry about Staffordshire. Here, exclusively on the blog, is a sneak preview.

Staffordshire Not

The emblem on my school badge was the Staffordshire Knot.

It's visible in all the fading photographs.

I could write my own address before I even started school

And the last line that I wrote was “Bilston, Staffs”.

But then came '74

And we were Staffordshire no more.

They had changed us at the dropping of a hat.

Our badges stayed the same,

But our home had a new name.

“West Midlands.” Where's the character in that?

Some objected; they considered that they were of sterner stuff.

Continued to use “Staffs.” in weak defiance.

Wrote letters to the papers, to their MPs to the PM

But it could only end in their compliance.

The fait had been accompli

And thoroughly and promptly

The boundaries of Staffordshire receded.

The ears they turned were deaf.

No use appealing to the ref.

Any opposition to it went unheeded

But some of us, like history, will take a longer view

Not everyone thinks bigger must be best

And identity's a tricky thing to try to take away

Not something that can just be dispossessed.

Here's my old school tie.

I look at it and sigh.

To see the emblem of the knot repeated there.

Nostalgia? Well, perhaps.

But though the years elapse

Some bonds exist that are too strong to tear.

Chinese labour relations

I recently came across an unexpected difference between China and England.

A Chinese friend wants to change her job. The reasons are unimportant.

In England, America and most of the restof the world the is is simple. 

You apply for new jobs and go to the interviews.

When you get one you tell your old employer.

You work your period of notice, if you have one.

You leave the old job and start the new one.

Here you have to get actual permission to leave the old job. You fill in forms requesting that you be allowed to leave and submit them to the proper authorities within your organisation and wait. They have absolute control over whether you can leave or not.

In her case it was "not".

So even though she has a new job to go to and wants to leave she has been told she must continue to work for the company she is currently at doing the job she currently does.

Sometimes, as a foreigner with rather more leeway than the average Chinese worker, it's easy to forget just how authoritarian the society here can be. We aren't really exposed to it very much so we don't notice it as much as we should.

In case anyone wonders, the job isn't anything high powered or official, it's in an ordinary and unexceptional office post.

It can be worse though. I have heard of teachers who for some trivial imagined failing have been demoted from teaching to toilet cleaning. I was also chatting with another friend recently, a Chinese English teacher. His English is excellent - virtually native speaker level - but they still sent him on a week long total immersion program with other teachers. In this they are closeted away together (in what didn't sound like fun conditions to me) and required to speak English at all times. If they are overheard speaking Chinese they receive demerits. There are a range of punsihments available including exclusion from social activities, confinement to rooms and the ever popular cleaning duties.

This sounds suspiciously like what they used to call "re-education".

I'm not sure how serious he was one he uttered those immortal words beloved of authoritarian regimes everywhere, "It's for our own good.".

I am sure that if they tried it with foreign workers it would be no time at all before they didn't have any.

Getting Closer

Today I have received my Chinese working visa which means that everything is now in place for my new job. Everything except selling the house, that is. On that particular front there is still no progress but I'm of a Mr Micawber turn of mind. Something will turn up. I'm sure of it.

So, now that it's all in place how do I feel about it? Well about from that nagging worry about the house it feels rather as it did when everything was in place for my world tour but I still had to work out my notice and then spend a few weeks at home waiting. In short, we have now entered the period when everything feels rather flat. I want to be gone, to be on my way to my exciting new venture, to be anywhere that isn't here. I have been growing increasingly bored with my naval-gazing, thumb-twiddling life of idleness anyway and now that there is nothing actually preventing my departure the waiting game becomes even more tedious.

Still, it's only a few weeks until my Harrow contract, then six more weeks after that to my brief visit to my brother and then three more days until I'm sitting on a plane on my way to China. It's a tedium I can cope with knowing that what follows will be so different, so new.

It just keeps on getting closer all the time.

Getting Closer

Yesterday I bought my airline ticket to China. This afternoon I have some paperwork to complete and send.
Things are moving on.

Making the right decision

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.
   
    Anatole France

I ran across this quote today and it seemed to be remarkably apposite. Since I finished work at the end of February, taking the redundancy money and walking out of the college for ever, I have been gradually dismantling the whole apparatus of my life.
I have given away most of the contents of my home, barring a few things that I couldn't bear to part with that have gone into storage. Only today I have put my house on the market. Sometime this afternoon a charity shop is coming to take most of my furniture.
And of course the changes are about to become even more profound. I have my regular summer job in Harrow to look forward to but, unlike every other year , this time I won't be returning. Barely a week later I shall be on an aeroplane on my way to China where I have accepted a teaching post. It's a strange feeling.

Of course I have travelled in the past - travelled for long periods, when each new day was in a new place and  home was a tent or a hotel room. This is different though because all of those travels had left behind me somewhere that had been home and would, sooner or later, be home again. This time that won't be true. When I return from China I will have no home to return to, no comfortable, familiar surroundings, no base. Instead I shall have to change everything again, have to retrieve the tiny portion of my life from storage and create a whole new life around it.

Before that I have create a new life as a teacher in a country where I will be in  a position similar to many of the students I have taught in the last ten years. Living in a country where I don't understand the customs, where I am effectively both illiterate and innumerate, where the most mundane aspects of daily life take on a new difficulty. It's an exciting and a rather frightening prospect.

At the moment I have a lot of time on my hands and perhaps that is adding to the almost overwhelming melancholy I feel. I was six years old when we moved into this house, almost half a century ago. Over the years its been decorated and redecorated; we have had half a dozen changes of furniture. The windows and doors have been replaced. The layout of the garden has changed as often as my father's whims about how it should look. None of that matters. The house - the home - has been part of, more or less, my whole life. Even when I was at University for three years this was still here, an ever-present refuge looming in the background.

And soon it won't be.

When I trained to teach, my original plan was to teach in China but plans change and somehow I never made it out of England. Well what can change, can change back and my plans have changed back. As the quote above implies though it does feel a bit like dieing. The whole life that has led me to where I am now will be gone and something new will have taken its place. I feel less as if I am leaving part of me behind and more as if I am surgically removing it and discarding it in a container marked "Incinerate: Human Waste".

A week or so ago, a friend asked me if I though he had made the right decision about something - who and what don't matter. My reply was that there are no wrong decisions; that whatever decision you make is always the right one. The important things are to make some kind of decision and to accept that everything you do has consequences. You can never know what the consequences of the decision you didn't take might have been and it doesn't matter.

So now my decision is to discard one life and start another. And that's the right decision, melancholy feelings or no.

Well that's done it!

Five minutes ago I sent back the contract accepting the job in China.

Great Travel Experiences: Doing Nothing in Yangshou

So, I have a job offer in China, not just in China though but in my favourite area of China. It seems that now might be an appropriate time to mention the joys of doing nothing.

* * *

We had been on the road for a long time when we reached Yangshou. Days of tedious driving interspersed with unremarkable stopovers had left us a little tired and dispirited.

We reached Yangshou at four thirty and checked in at the hotel. I had been intending to take just one night and then seek cheaper accommodation but two things changed my mind. The first was the weight of my rucksack. As we were changing trucks in a couple of days everything needed to be in it and I could barely lift it. The thought of carrying it around while I searched for a new hotel was horrible. The second was the ‘dorm’. I had thought that for dormitory rooms the price of forty yuan was a little high and so it would have been. However the "dormitory" turned out not to be exactly what I was expecting. Instead I found myself in a Spartan but adequate, large, high-ceilinged room, approximately a cube with a twenty foot side. with its own shower and toilet and, moreover, the sole occupant of it. In fact, as a little exploration verified,I was the sole occupant of the whole building. It was great.

Next morning I rose early and took my breakfast in one of the cafes. A quick count gave the impression that if I stayed a month I could eat three meals a day without twice visiting the same establishment. Yangshou, was as I said, a backpacker town, one of those places that seems to have no existence independent of the travellers on its streets. It’s a small place with two main streets joined by a series of parallel alleys and the buildings are a fifty-fifty mix of tourist shops and bars. They all have either jokey names - Minnie Mao’s, The No-Name Cafe or mock classical ones - The Golden Lotus, The Shining Mountain. One famous one was the Mei You Cafe - Mei You is a phrase you hear a lot in China - it means ‘we don’t have it’. You could buy T-shirts with the slogan ‘Hold the Mei-You’ , a pun that must surely have been incomprehensible to the people selling them.

The stalls, except for a few at the far end of the main street sold statues and paintings, T-shirts and carvings, lanterns and jewellery and of course CDs. Every fifth one seemed to be selling the now familiar stock of pirated CDs.

Those few shops at the far end were more interesting though. They were the Chinese equivalent of junk shops. They sold everything - old coins, broken toys, ‘antique’ jewellery, clocks, Chairman Mao watches, ivory carvings, old books, statues of everything under the sun. Whatever you wanted was probably in there somewhere. Finding it though... that could be another matter.

The restaurants and cafes all spilled out onto the street and everyone would stop to chat with no effort to persuade you to buy or to come in. It was superbly relaxed and friendly. I walked around for a couple of hour, stopping now and then for a lemonade - the day was very hot - and a chat. Most people had limited English but what they lacked in vocabulary they made up for in enthusiasm.  

On the whole it was one of those wonderful, relaxing but essentially event-less days. The more I saw of the place the more I liked it.

The following morning was pretty much a retread, substitute different bars, restaurants and company but otherwise similar. The afternoon was different though.  I had decided to join a group taking a boat trip along the river. It’s a remarkable place, every bit as lovely as I remembered it. With the sun high in the sky the water is calm enough to be a mirror reflecting back the slightly wavering images of the conical mountains that rise from the plain like giant molehills. Here and there, there were groups of children playing in the water and the sometimes a long low boat with a fisherman. We sailed downstream, watching the birds wheeling overhead and the water buffalo cooling off in the shallows. When the sun started dip towards the mountain tops we turned around and sailed back, the new light changing the appearance of everything, filling the sky with flaming hues. I sat at the front of the boat doing nothing but just watching it all. I could have spent hours more there.

It was clear that any day spent in Yangshou was likely to be uneventful and relaxing  and so it proved once again on our last day there. It was nevertheless an enjoyable one. Yesterday I had bought a Tang Dynasty T-shirt (so much I had grown to like the band) and it proved a nice conversation piece with the locals.  First, as I sat finishing off my second cup of coffee after breakfast in yet another of the restaurants the very bored looking waitress remarked

            “Ah, Tang Zhou - famous Chinese Rock band !”

A pleasant if inconsequential fifteen minutes of chat about western rock music ensued until the arrival of some customers ended the conversation by dragging her back to work.

Later, in similar circumstances as I was having a beer after my chilli dog and chips lunch at the 7th Heaven Cafe another local girl approached, drawn by the T-shirt and introduced herself as Angela. We sat talking for well over an hour. Angela - that’s her English name of course, she had a real Chinese one as well - was visiting friends. She was from  Zhaoqing in the Guangdong Province. It’s supposed to be a nice place in itself but she said she preferred Yangshou. She was on holiday but her friends were at work. She was at a loose end and wanted to practice her English. She was also perfectly charming. Our chat was wide ranging if shallow covering the topics of English and Chinese language difficulties, my impressions of China, her desire to travel and the difficulties that presents. We also covered BSE and CJD (which had actually made the Chinese news broadcasts !), British, Chinese and European agriculture and the House of Frasier (she worked for one of their suppliers) .

Scarcely had that encounter ended than I wandered into another bar (just for a lemonade this time) and found myself in another long conversation with the waitress and then again as I ate my evening meal at eight O’clock and again shortly afterwards as I became involved in a conversation with an English woman and a large effusive Israeli in a T-shirt almost as loud as his stentorian voice.

When I finally went off to the hotel at about eleven thirty I reflected that it had been an excellent day and an excellent stay in Yangshou. Today had been the most sustained conversation I had had for months with anyone outside the group. Tomorrow though we would be leaving and heading for the South Coast ready for Hong Kong and the end of this leg. A few days of essentially doing nothing had been a very pleasant interlude.

* * *

And that's the area where the school that I have been offered work at is located. Until I went over my notes from the period to write this entry, I had forgotten how much I like it. 

Moving On

The title of this blog, "The Hitting The Road Again Blues" seems to have extra significance lately. As followers will know I took the decision in December to leave my job, accept voluntary redundancy, and seek work overseas. Accordingly, I actually finished work at the end of January and since then have been, mostly, sitting on my backside at home.

Well that's not completely true.

I have done some bits of work around the house.

I have cleared loads of stuff - books, music, clothes, bric-a-brac... even furniture, by giving it all away to charity.

I have got rid of at least 70% of my extensive comics collection by giving it all to a fellow collector. In exchange he gives me beer.

I have had the house valued and even, though it isn't on the market yet, had interest from one potential buyer.

Most significantly though, I now have a job offer. My original intention, back in December, was to seek a job in China. I even had an agency in mind to help me organise it all. The water was muddied slightly by the suggestion that I might prefer Singapore, a route I pursued for a while and may still resurrect next year or later. However I can't rely on possible future work so I went back to the Chinese plan.

I had told people that it would take me about a fortnight to get a job in China. I have a realistic idea of just how experienced and qualified I am. In the event I was wrong. It took four days. I now have an offer, a contract and a date. Moreover the date fits very nicely indeed with my previous summer contract commitment. In principle, if I chose to, I could take a cab from my summer contract to the airport and fly to my job in China. In practice I actually have about a week's grace to wrap up my British affairs before I need to.

Now I haven't actually signed the contract yet but I can't see a reason not to. The job has, at least on paper, everything I was looking for. It provides a decent package of accommodation and facilities, a good orientation package, assistance in all the necessary paperwork to work in China and an adequate salary. The money was never the point. The point was to go abroad and teach, as I had intended when I trained, ten years ago, before real life took over and held me in the UK. It's the experience that I'm interested in.

The icing on the cake, for me, is that the job is in one of the nicest bits of China, one of my favourite bits. The specific school isn't determined until later but all of them are in the Guilin and Yangshou areas, both of which are towns that I have visited before and really enjoyed.

As I say I haven't signed the contract yet but I expect that I will. Once I do the potential futures will all become crystallised into one. Things are moving on.

Ongoing 10

The next picture in the book shows two doctors dissecting an alien. I got the poem idea immediately but struggled with it. Then it occurred to me that it was ideally suited to a Haiku.

The Chinese Village

I was alien,
a pale specimen skewered;
silent winter eyes.

Anybody who has ever visited rural China will understand this verse perfectly.

Back in China

Back at our hotel in Beijing I spent a few minutes checking on my emails and then met up with a few of the others to head over to the Temple of Heaven. Once there we split up with some choosing to do their own thing while Alisdair, Darren and I – who had plans for the afternoon – strolling around together. I have been to the Temple of Heaven before. I know I have. I have the photographs. I wanted to go again because I have no memory of it at all. The reason for that is that when I visited last, on my first trip all those years ago, we were taken there straight from the airport on our arrival. We were all so tired and jet-lagged that it’s a wonder we were still able to operate cameras.

It was worth another, more wide-awake, visit. The pictures really say it all.

When we had had enough of the rather marvellous site, we wandered out of the gate opposite to the one we had entered by and went into a nearby cafe for lunch and to discuss our plans for the afternoon. Last night I had had no plans but then I overheard Alisdair asking Neil about a place he had read of – 798. 798 is an art village, a series of converted warehouses and other buildings in which the very best of the Beijing art scene can be found. I always love to visit galleries, especially when I’m travelling and can see things I might not get the chance to see at home. I had never heard of 798. I had, truth be told, never realised that China now has a vibrant and exciting art community. When I heard it being discussed I asked if he minded if I tagged along and a little later Darren also decided to join us.

Outside the cafe we soon found a cab and, after some confusion with our written directions, we were on the way. It proved to be rather a long way out towards the airport. Eventually we got there and went in. It was everything I could have hoped for and more. It was huge, bigger than my home town, with hundreds of galleries and bookshops and restaurants and bars. If I ever return to Beijing again I shall take at least a whole day there. I could easily spend a week there. Every kind of art was on display. Paintings both representational and abstract. Sculpture in every possible style. Satirical works and highly stylised works. Photography, graffiti, embroidery.
It was completely marvellous.







Among the exhibitions that I saw and especially enjoyed were

· an exhibition of black and white photographs of Chinese life

· a series of paintings of women’s faces hidden in clouds
· some photomontages showing thousands of people in a mixture of landscapes
· a statue called “The Ideal and the Reality” which morphed from the classic Marilyn Monroe pose into a female Chinese soldier without indicating which was the ideal and which the reality
· a series of large photographs by a former prostitute showing herself nude in various unlikely places such as business offices, in each of which she was shown as having the position of power by virtue of holding the shutter release with the cable running out of frame to the camera

· various outdoor statues that were in the streets and squares.

However the one that impressed the most by far was also the strangest. We were wandering more or less at random in and out of galleries on the principle that there was far too much to see for us to employ any kind of logical approach. In one there was a Chinese woman at a desk in a large white room with a single work at one end. The work in question looked at first glance like a green laser hologram of a larger than life figure. Closer inspection revealed it to be no such thing. It was in fact a sculpture made of fine mesh net and cunningly lit with green light so that the sculpture, the lighting and the resulting shadows created the hologram illusion.
The woman from the desk indicated a curtain covered doorway that I hadn’t previously noticed. We went through and found ourselves in a large darkened hall filled with sculptures in the same style. Red and green lighting on elaborate mesh sculptures created a startling illusion of holograms that floated around the gallery space like disembodied phantoms. I was like being trapped in Superman’s Phantom Zone and it was really quite remarkable.



The artist, according to the leaflet I picked up on the way out, was a Korean called Park Sung Tae and I can do no better than quote from that leaflet. “Park’s installations have gained a reputation for the uniqueness of their materials and for their... communication with the installation space. [They]... have been constantly spotlighted by leading art fairs around the world and have been collected by major art museums of Korea, including the National Museum of Contemporary Art and Seoul Museum of Art.”



When we came out we went for a couple of beers in one of the rooftop bars which had a slightly disconcerting glass floor that allowed us to look down onto the heads of the people in the gallery below.

I vowed as I sat there that the next time I come to Beijing, and I am certain there will be a next time, I shall spend at least a whole day at 798. I only wish that there was something comparable here in the UK, but I’ve looked at art galleries all over the world and seen nothing quite like it.

In the evening we had dinner at John’s and then a night time walk around the Hutongs which was much more impressive than our daytime bicycle tour had been, but it was a last evening kind of activity – interesting but full of the knowledge that it was all over now and tomorrow we would be on our way home.

As ever I had thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing, especially as it had proven to be such an unusual trip.

DPRK: Prelude in Beijing (The Forbidden City)

Back outside, in that smoggy atmosphere, we headed north towards the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the southern entrance to the Forbidden City. As we queued to go in we were entertained by the bizarre callisthenics of the Chinese Army guard. These exercises seemed to consist of some weird oriental mix of running, marching, wrestling and barn dancing. They were an odd but momentary distraction, all but forgotten as we entered the Forbidden City itself.

For those who haven’t been there then I can do no better than recommend that you hire a DVD of the Last Emperor, which was filmed there. It is far more than just a palace being, as the name indicates, a city within a city. It was the residence of the Emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties from 1420 to 1912 and contains almost a thousand buildings with over eight thousand rooms. Now it’s a World Heritage site with many thousands of visitors, both Chinese and foreign, every day.
I wandered around taking pictures and looking at a couple of the museums that are contained inside – the museum containing the various jade sculptures was particularly fine.
I noticed, as I had done the last time, a rather odd phenomenon. To describe it you need to picture the layout of the City. It is more or less symmetrical about a North-South line. The main palaces within are set at the ends of a series of courtyards in such a way that you can proceed from one to the next through the courtyards by following a central line. They have names like the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the Hall of Complete Harmony, the Hall of Preserving Harmony and the Palace of Earthly Peace.

Off to the sides things become slightly more labyrinthine, though no less interesting, with smaller buildings on smaller courtyards and paths. Some of these buildings have been pressed in to service as the museums. The odd phenomenon is that almost all, certainly over ninety per cent, of the visitors choose to follow the central route so that if you do the same things are crowded and at the entrances to the various palaces there are people six or seven deep taking pictures over each other’s heads. If on the other hand you wander off to the sides there is almost no one. You see a few visitors once you enter the museums but otherwise things are calm, peaceful, beautiful and devoid of crowds.
So, after seeing a couple of palaces, that’s what I did, following the eastern side of the complex through the museums until eventually I came to the end and turned left again to lead me to the Northern Gate, the Gate of Divine Prowess, where we were to meet up again with our guides before going our own separate ways for the afternoon.

It is, as my pictures show, a remarkably photogenic place.

DPRK: Prelude in Beijing (The Great Hall of the People)

As soon as we left the bus, a little way outside Tiananmen Square, it became obvious that China has changed a great deal since I first visited the city. For one thing nobody was wearing uniforms or red armbands. For another the ubiquitous coughing and spitting has, while not exactly disappeared completely, has been greatly reduced. It was the atmosphere that was most noticeable though. There is an openness, a lack of tension that wasn't there back then.


The people now in and around the square are clearly tourists, back then they seemed more like pilgrims. China may still be communist but it's a very capitalist style of communism now.


This new freedom seemed rather at odds with the frequent, and apparently pointless, X-ray checks that our bags were put through. I asked Bobby, our local guide, about it. He seemed rather amused.
"They bought a lot of X-ray machines before the Olympics," he explained, "So they feel they have to use them."


Our first vist was to something that hadn't been open to the public last time I was there - the Great Hall of the People. This is an impressive building that runs along the western side of the square and acts as a ceremonial building and the Chinese Parliament. Inside - among other things - are meeting halls for the various regions, a vast auditorium and various banqueting halls.


It's a magnificent building - outside and in. We were guided round for about an hour listening to descriptions of the building and the Chinese government, but, if truth be told, nobody was really listening as the look of the place was too distracting.
Eventually we returned to the reception hall. Through the glass doors we could see just how smoggy and dirty the air outside was, a fact that hadn't been immediately obvious to us when we were out there.

DPRK: Prelude in Beijing (Arrival)

The main trip was of course to DPRK, but at either end we had time in Beijing. Flying into North Korea is only possible from a few places. The UK isn't one of them. China is.
When I first visited Beijing, about twenty years ago, my initial impression was of greyness. Grey roads ran between grey buildings and grey dust covered the grey clothes of the grey people. Times have changed. Now the first impression is one that has been carefully designed and constructed specifically to leave visitors to the city gaping open-mouthed - the airport. Specifically Terminal three.

Of course we've all seen it on TV in the build up to the Chinese Olympics and during its construction. This one terminal is famously bigger than all five of London Heathrow's terminals together. It was, until Dubai overtook it, the largest passenger terminal building in the world. It looked impressive on television but that was nothing compared to the real thing. This place is designed to impress and it delivers. Vast cathedral-like spaces are filled with an impossible amount of light from walls of glass. Beamed domes with triangular skylights arch high above the gargantuan rooms. Uniformed staff look like toy soldiers in an aircraft hanger. The scale is immense and, as we arrived, it was, apart from the few disembarking passengers almost totally empty.


There was a bus ride from the plane to the terminal followed by a ten minute walk to passport control and then another walk to a railway station. A train journey of several minutes took us to baggage reclaim with another lengthy walk to conveyor belt 36. The buildings we pass by and through would not have been out of place in the glossiest of science fiction movies and the interiors were so pristine and gleaming they might have been polished only seconds before our arrival.
It was very, very impressive indeed.

Chess in Lijiang

An encounter from one of my previous trips.

Most of Lijiang is an ordinary, modern, even unlovely city but the old town is perfectly wonderful. It is a maze of streets, some more touristy than others but all delightful. In the tourist sections no two shops seem to sell exactly the same thing: all of them are individual and unique as fingerprints. The buildings too are fascinating. The ground floors may have been converted into shops or bars or restaurants or hostels but a glance upwards shows that they are indeed old buildings remodelled rather than new imitations. In places the buildings follow the lines of the old canals, separated from the water by narrow footpaths from which you can step directly into any one of the bars for your lunch. The roofs lean towards each other like whispering conspirators leaving only a narrow strip of sky visible.
A few minutes ago that strip had turned from blue to grey as a prelude to rain and now, as I sat inside a pleasantly rustic cafe the rain started to penetrate the gap and spread throughout the spaces between the buildings. It muddied the reflections in the canal but wasn’t strong enough to create any ripples.

The wooden shutters of the cafe were opened all the way back, pressed against the walls, leaving a large opening through which the world could be watched. I ordered some corn soup and bread and a beer and sat doing just that. I had finished eating and moved on to a second beer when a Chinese teenager entered. He wore dark trousers and the ubiquitous high-collared blue jacket but had made a concession to individuality in the form of a perfectly hideous pendant of an old man’s face worn on a leather lace about his neck.
He sat down in the far corner and I didn’t give him another thought until I glanced back from th window and found him standing opposite me. My Chinese was limited to “hello”, which I duly used, but lacking any further vocabulary found to be an ineffective gambit. He pointed to the shelf behind me and, turning to look, I found a chess set. He clearly wanted to play. While I can play chess I’m not actually very good but I thought I’d give it a go. He sat down and we set the board up.

As we played he tried out a few phrases of English. They were quite elementary but considerably better than my Chinese. We took our time, spending more effort on trying to converse than on playing. Suddenly I realised that I was two moves from a mate that he obviously hadn’t seen. I played the moves and won. He seemed happy enough with the result and started to set up again. Half an hour later I had won again and he still seemed happy. He did, however have to go. He suggested, or rather I thought he was suggested, that we should meet again to play tomorrow. Unfortunately tomorrow I would be heading out of the city straight after breakfast. He gave a small nod of departure and left me sitting there. I packed up the set, ordered another beer and went back to watching the world go by.
Later, I thought, I shall go for a walk, or perhaps return to the pleasant walled courtyard of my old city dormitory.
Or perhaps, I added to myself, I shall just stay here and watch the rain.

Guilin: The Prequel

My earlier post about visiting Guilin in China was all based on my second visit there. It had changed quite a bit since my first visit in 1992. That had been interesting in a whole different way.

Our plane, a small narrow bodied jet on which the faint but unmistakable logo of Aeroflot could still be seen through the inadequate ‘Air China’ repainting, approached the airport. In the bright sunlight the area looked a gorgeous place. The strange conical mountains rose from an impossibly green plain like the Molehills of the Gods. When we landed it was at an airport that seemed to be military rather than civil. We had acquired a new "guide" at Xi-An airport, Robert and now, as we trooped down the steps onto the runway, we were met by our local man, Hector. He was tall and thin and slightly shabbily dressed, with a broad goofy grin that never left his face for the whole of our time in his city. Parked near the chain link fence was a bus which could easily have been mistaken for a derelict. Hector led us to it, proudly proclaiming it to be the best in the city. We climbed aboard, leaving our luggage behind, and drove on to yet another lunch in yet another local restaurant. This one was magnificent. It would have shamed the standards of Chinese restaurants in any capital city in Europe. The interior was cool and air conditioned. The furnishings and decor were all of elaborately carved wood. We grouped around the highly polished tables and were served by immaculately uniformed and deferential waiters.

We were also the only people in the whole enormous dining room. The impression was that it had opened solely for our visit.

At the hotel our luggage hadn’t turned up. By now we should have learned the lesson but still no-one had thought to pack anything as sensible and practical as a spare T-shirt into their hand luggage. As it was 90 degrees and we had exploded into soaking perspiring sponges the moment we had left the plane, we were in need of a change of clothes. Robert checked us in while Hector went back to the airport to find out where our changes of clothes had all gone. There was just time for a quick shower to get rid of some of the sweat and cool down before climbing back into the dirty clothes and heading out to the Reed Flute Caves.

Guilin is in the heart of the China that people imagine, the China of rice paddies, toiling peasants in broad hats, buffalo drawn carts on dirt tracks with mountains in the background and thin wispy clouds in a perfect blue sky. The town itself was nothing very special. It was rather seedy and shabby. The hordes of visitors, both Chinese and foreign, had resulted in a thriving but rather tacky tourist boom.

The drive out to the Reed Flute Caves though was so perfect that we insisted on half a dozen stops to take pictures of the mountains reflected in the water of the paddies. None of the workers in the fields showed the slightest interest as twenty people lined up on the road to take their photograph. I supposed that it was such a common occurrence that they scarcely even noticed it any more.

The caves, when we reached them, were extremely busy. Crowds of people were waiting to be admitted. We queued with joined them for over an hour in the small, shadeless concrete waiting area. The sun was even hotter now that it was at its afternoon zenith and we were all on the verge of heat-stroke when we finally stepped into the cool dark interior.

Those strange conical mountains are limestone and they are pitted with caverns that have the usual weird limestone stalagmite and stalactite formations. We went down the steep path and entered an enchanted fairyland. Coloured spotlights in dozens of hues and shades had been cunningly hidden among the rocks to illuminate the various features and formations, casting gargantuan multicoloured shadows around them. For more than an hour we followed the path. At the very lowest point of the cave system was a vast natural hall with a perfectly still underground lake that reflected the gorgeously lit roof as if it were a polished mirror. I had never seen anything like it and even now, years later, when I have been in cave systems in many parts of the world, even in the mighty Carlsbad caverns, it still remains the most wonderful of them all. Purists will disagree, saying that what I found so entertaining was the light show, that the caverns themselves were much less spectacular than others, that to appreciate the natural beauty would have been better than the art and artifice of the Reed Flute Caves. I don’t care. Even if it was the lighting that made the place wonderful it was, nevertheless, wonderful.

Back at the Hotel there was still no luggage. There was however an extremely harassed Hector. Our bags, he said, were safe. Unfortunately the reason that they were safe was that the authorities at the airport had impounded them. He was negotiating for their release. It wasn’t an uncommon problem. All that was needed was a sufficiently large bribe and we would get everything back. Meanwhile we should eat dinner, have a few drinks and a sound nights sleep and wait until morning.

We took the advice and sure enough, when we woke up, our suitcases were outside our doors. OK, the locks were open and broken, clearly having been forced. Inside everything was messed up but seemed to be complete. I didn’t know whether to be pleased or insulted that none of my things had been worth stealing.

I selected some clean clothes from the jumbled together mess and got ready to attempt breakfast. The anti-malarial tablet that I had taken was making me severely nauseous but I went down anyway. By the time I reached the dining room I felt dreadful. The sight and smell of breakfast unleashed a fresh assault from my quivering stomach. I forced down a glass of juice and retreated to my room. It looked as if I might have to miss today's trip on the river Li and spend the time in a darkened room. I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes.

An insistent knocking at the door woke me. I looked at the clock. I had had about two hours extra sleep. The knocking proved to be Robert, checking up on whether I wanted to take the boat trip or not. I was still feeling ill but the immediacy of the problem had eased so I decided to go after all.

Down at the docks there wasn’t one boat there were dozens, a flotilla that looked like a re-enactment of Dunkirk. The boats were all of the same design, square and blocky with an interior lower deck with tables and seats and a flat canopied upper deck where we could stand and watch the riverbank go by. For the more dedicated shoppers there were even a couple of small trinket stalls on the deck selling items of jewellery.

The convoy moved out and the combination of the fresh air and the lovely day started to blow away my sickness. I was glad I had come.

Out on the river the cormorant fishermen were at their business. They fish with trained cormorants, slipping a noose around their necks to stop them swallowing their catch. I watched one release his bird into the air. It hovered for a few moments then swooped down to skim the surface rising again a moment later with a large fish in its talons. It circled back to the boat it had come from to deliver its catch.

We drifted lazily down the river through a magnificent landscape. It was tranquil and serene and a perfect change of pace from the frantic sightseeing that had filled the days until now. At the back of the boat was a kitchen where cooks were busy preparing our lunch. We ate inside the boat and considering the cramped conditions in which it had been prepared the meal was excellent.

After lunch, all nausea gone I wandered back outside to simply watch the world drifting by.

It seemed that there were many things that were common in our wanderings wherever we went in China - the local restaurants, the people striking up conversations and, of course, the cultural shows. In Guilin there was another of them. Of the two I’d seen already I’d hated one and loved the other. What would the Guilin version be like? It turned out to be colourful enough but was one of the weirdest cultural shows I have ever witnessed. It consisted mostly of dancing but there was no perceptible Chinese element to it. The opening dance was, as far as I could tell, a Cossack dance. This was followed by what appeared to be a Red Indian rain dance and the show stopping finale was a perfectly choreographed replica of the Chimney Sweeps dance from Mary Poppins.

In the interval I had another unlikely encounter that left me chuckling for the rest of the evening. I had found out in conversation with Robert that many of the jobs in China are state controlled. The employer is he government and as a consequence the job you end up with can be determined by the whims of the particular government officials with whom you have dealt. At the break in the show I went to the toilet and was standing in the urinal happily going about my business when I felt something at my feet. I looked down expecting to see a cat or a dog. What I saw was a wizened old main kneeling at my feet polishing my shoes and taking the chance that my aim might not be perfect. I was astonished. What should I do, I wondered. What I did was pretend he wasn’t there, carried on until I had finished, zipped myself back up and turned to leave. He stood up and opened the door for me. I reached into my pocket automatically to tip him, forgetting that tipping is illegal in China, and he backed away waving his hand in a gesture of refusal. On my way back to my table I wondered if he had been allocated that job, polishing shoes in a men's urinal, and d who exactly in the local government offices he had annoyed enough to be given it.

Another Point of View

It's often nice to get a different viewpoint on something, to see something familiar through other eyes. Paul Merton's TV series on China could scarcely be more familiar. Although he's getting to meet lots of people arranged specifically for him, and staying in decent hotels rather than the tents and downmarket dives that I managed, he's visiting all the same places that I went to last time I visited China and that's giving me the chance to compare my observations with his. Of course there are some differences – I paid for my trip whereas he's was paid for his – then again he's a famous (and very funny) comedian and I'm a bloke from Bilston who has a blog. So how do things stack up?

A few general observations first. He was absolutely spot on target when he talked about the ever-present noise that forms a soundtrack to the Chinese experience – the sound of someone hacking up a mouthful of phlegm and gobbing it into the gutter. On my first trip – way back in 1992 – I wrote down my first impressions and they included this

"the other thing you can't help noticing (is) the amount of coughing and spitting that goes on among the Chinese. To a westerner it is very disconcerting to see everyone from teenage girls to little old men coughing up a mouthful of phlegm and expectorating with gusto into the gutter."

He seems (though I missed an episode, so I could be wrong) to have missed another particular favourite in which someone will lean forward at an improbable angle, place a finger firmly against the nose to close one nostril and empty the other onto the ground by blowing very hard.

Something else that I have to agree with him about is Chinese Opera. After I saw it in Beijing, my local guide commented sadly that it was killing Chinese culture in the eyes of foreign tourists because once they had seen that nothing he could do would persuade them to see anything else "cultural". A group of us who had been to see it struggled for appropriate descriptions and eventually came up with

"It sounds like someone strangling cats in an alley full of dustbins and looks like Max Wall performing Aladdin."

When we saw it, it was enlivened by a faulty computer generated translation of the words which seemed to be omitting all the nouns and thus providing such eccentric possibilities as "I will overcome my and build a mound of their."

Another point of almost complete concord between his experience and mine was his boat trip down the River Li from Guilin. He went on one of the small boats which seem to always be full of backpacking Australians. The scenery is magnificent, far more so than you can possibly appreciate from a television program. It was such a highlight of my trip in '92 that when I returned nine years later I made a point of ensuring it was in my itinerary again.

Although both Guilin and Yangshou had changed greatly in the intervening time, the river had not. It was every bit as lovely as I remembered it. The sun was high in the sky, the water was calm enough to be a mirror reflecting back those remarkable conical mountains that rise from the plain like giant molehills. Here and there, there were groups of children playing at the water's edge and sometimes a long low boat with a fisherman. We floated downstream, watching the birds wheeling overhead and the buffalo cooling off in the shallows. It was idyllic… and just as with Paul Merton's trip every now and then the peaceful tranquillity was completely shattered by the noise from a flotilla of huge boats steaming up-river full of Chinese tourists all sitting inside, eating dinner and ignoring the wonders around them.

I have to differ with him on some things though – specifically on his opinions of Yangshou and Guangshou. In both cases it would be harder to find a more complete disagreement. Oh, the facts of the cities are indisputable but it's the interpretation that you put on them. Paul Merton wasn't to put it mildly, very keen on Yangshou which he thought was too touristy and too commercial and too much like every other touristy and commercial place in the world. I, on the other hand, loved it. I checked myself into a very odd hotel that reminded me of a condemned flat I once occupied in Nottingham. Not only did I have the room to myself, I had the whole building… an annex to the main hotel. Why should somewhere quite so deadbeat have appealed to me? It's hard to say. I wrote several versions of a description while I was there. The best of them was this.

There was something very Chinese about the room: not the Chinese of pagodas and palaces, or rice fields and straw hats but the Chinese of the cultural revolution. As I looked at the streaked and stained whitewash on the walls and the bare floorboards with just the faintest remaining traces of ancient varnish; as I looked at the beds with their thin mattresses and single sheets, I could picture myself as one of the proletarian masses living my life in what was only technically a two roomed apartment. I paced out the larger area – almost eighteen feet square and about the same height. The other "room" connected via a hole in the wall without a door. It contained a tiny cold shower, a cracked and plugless sink and a squat toilet. It was about four feet by three.
I lay down on one of the beds and stared up at the green metal fan, which, even on its highest setting, moved barely fast enough to disturb the humid air. It didn't matter. I hadn't put it on for the comfort but to help dry my washing – underwear, towels, T-shirts – which were strung out across the room on a wire fastened there by some previous occupant. It was a losing battle. The day was so humid they would never dry adequately.
I mentally inventoried the furnishings. It didn't take long. Two beds with mosquito nets. Two armchairs far too dilapidated to be called threadbare. One table with a wobbly leg. A broken television set. An apparently homemade cupboard.
As I lay there trying to relax, I could smell the mustiness of the place. The whole building reeked of it. The room was a perfect match to the building, which was a seedy run-down thing away from the main block of the Xiling Hotel where those on higher budgets were staying. I didn't mind. I actually felt comfortable there. It was – after a fashion – en suite and I did have a room, indeed a whole building, to myself.
Forty yuan per night? For a whole building?
A bargain.

Anyway, back to why I like Yangshou. After months of travelling we were stationary for a few days and I couldn't think of anywhere I had been that I'd rather be stationary in. It's a backpacker town and anyone who has ever been backpacking around the world will need no further description. It's a place that seems to have no reason to its existence beyond the travellers on its streets. It has two main streets joined by various alleys and they are crowded with a fifty-fifty mix of tourist shops and bars. They all have either jokey or mock-classical names : Minnie Mao's, The No-Name café; The Golden Lotus; The Shining Mountain. The shops sell nothing but souvenirs (T-shirts, carvings, lanterns, jewellery) or pirated copies of rock CDs.

I found it all very relaxing and friendly and for three of the four days there I did absolutely nothing except hang around in bars chatting to random strangers – Chinese and otherwise – and generally relaxing more than I had done in the previous five months of travel. It was great. I was very tempted to answer one of the many advertisements around the place for English teachers and stay there.

Guangshou, by comparison, Paul Merton liked, seeing it as the authentic face of modern China. And he's not wrong there. Unfortunately the authentic face of modern China looked to me very much like a grim and dull industrial city with little to recommend it other than the facts that a) my stay was very brief and b) it was a convenient place to get the ferry to Hong Kong. It's the kind of place that is vastly improved by leaving it. The restaurants and hotels were too expensive for someone on a tight budget and all in all, especially coming a mere day after Yangshou, I'd have to say that I found the place thoroughly depressing. This wasn't helped by the fact that I could find absolutely nowhere to eat that wasn't well beyond the money I had to spare and ended up sitting in a hotel room (I'd persuaded a couple of Danish backpackers that what they needed was to rent me six foot of floor space in their room, without mentioning it to the hotel management), drinking a couple of bottles of beer, eating a packet of biscuits and watching a documentary – in Chinese – about tuna fish. It was a new low.

Next week Paul Merton is in Shanghai. I shall make a point of watching to see if we agree or disagree. Either way, it's good to get a second perspective.