Things I Miss About England #3: Beer (Well, duh!)

Let's do the most obvious one.

If I lived in Shanghai or Beijing, or even Yangshuo, there would be no need for this post. But I don't. I live in Baiyin. We have quite a selection of beers available here. There's Tsingtao, Hyung, Snow, Yellow River, Harbin and a few others. 

And they all taste exactly the same.

The most discerning palate in the world would be unable to distinguish any of them in a blind taste test except maybe Harbin which sometimes (though not always) seems to have a slightly appley flavour.

They are all pale yellow lager-style beers with virtually nothing to recommend them beyond the fact that there is nothing else available.

And they're cheap. The prices range from about 30p a bottle to about £1.20 a bottle depending on just how down market your bar is.

They are also insanely gassy. Mike and I once devised a bar game. When you are both about halfway down the bottle you pick it up and swirl the beer as gently as you can. The froth will rise quickly to flow out of the bottle neck. The objective is to build the highest tower of froth on top of the bottle as you can without it running down the sides. The record was about an inch and a half.

You can continue playing even when there is less than an inch of beer in the bottle.

Now I have omitted the fact that there are two bars here that do dark beers. These are, I think from the labels, Chinese attempts at European style dark beers. By and large failed attempts. They do have some flavour and I do drink them occasionally but they are far too sweet for my palate. They are also between five and ten times as expensive as the fizzy yellow stuff.

So, I often find myself fantasising about the way that in England I could walk into pretty much any pub and get a decent pint and in a good pub get a choice of a dozen decent pints. I could select from all kinds of style of beer at all kind of strengths - that's another thing here: the strong brews are 3.5%, the weak ones 2.5% - and have a great time drinking it all.

In summer I could sit out in the Black Eagle beer garden with a few pints of one of their guest ales and pass a perfectly pleasant Sunday afternoon.

I could go to Wolverhampton Beer Festival and spend the night drinking myself silly on halves without having to duplicate anything.

I do miss beer.

Thankfully, I have signed up to teach summer school in Yangshou and while I can get the Chinese stuff there too, I also know a few splendid bars that have imported bottled beers. It's pricey but it's worth it. And I'll be there in about six weeks from now.

I'm counting the hours.

My Life In China - Video #1 : The Apartment

Don't want to offend, but

Anyone who knows me knows this about me - I don't believe in stuff that has no evidence. I don't believe even more strongly in stuff where there is actual evidence of the opposite.

So I don't believe in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Controlled studies all say that it doesn't work. That's good enough for me. The jury isn't out. The jury has been out, come back, returned a guilty verdict, heard the sentence and watched the execution.

It. Doesn't. Work.

I know you can't convince a true believer. I know there will be people who say it's been around for thousands of years. I know there will be people who say one and a half billion people can't be wrong.

All I'll say is neither popular opinion nor antiquity make something true.

I'm not trying to convince you — just saying what I believe.

Anyway, the point is this. One and a half billion people do believe. And I live right in the middle of them. This means that whenever there is something wrong with me — be it a cold or a sprained ankle — there are always dozens of people telling me that they know a super-duper, whizz-bang TCM practitioner who can not only cure it but bring colour to my cheeks, restore my thinning hair and pep up my love life.

Right now I have one of my occasional attacks of gout. It's bloody painful. I'll take pain-killers. I'll go back to an alcohol-free and vegetarian lifestyle for a while. It will last as long as it lasts, then fade away and disappear completely — until next time.

I've had it for years. I know the pattern. I know it's intermittent. I know that when you have it it never goes away completely. I know that, in the UK, I could easily get drugs to treat it. 

I also know that here getting someone to take me to see a western doctor who will prescribe those drugs instead of magic potions is going to be next to impossible. Sure those doctors are here, but they work side by side with the ones who will give me a bag of twigs and tell me to boil it up for a couple hours and then drink it.

And those are the ones that all my friends will want me to see.

They did it when I had a mild chest infection. I went because I didn't realise that's where they were taking me. I wanted a doctor of western medicine. Instead I got someone who looked like a doctor but gave me stuff to drink that, and I'm not kidding, after one sip, had me vomitting all over the kitchen floor.

I didn't take a second sip.

But they do go on trying, and right there is the problem. How do I tell them that I don't believe in any of that stuff and if they must find me medicine find me something that has been tested and evidenced to western standards.

How do I tell them that I think TCM is all just so much voodoo?

How do I do any of that without offending people who are only trying to help?

Things I Miss About England #2:Galleries

If you live in one of the major cities in China - say Beijing or Shanghai - there are art galleries and museums galore for you to visit. Sadly I don't. I live in a small industrial city in the middle of a desert and art galleries are more or less non-existent. There are artists - I have twice visited artist studios - but no public galleries.

Back in England I was a frequent visitor to exhibitions in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and had a couple of visits a year to the major London galleries. I would pop into Wolverhampton art gallery whenever time permitted and finding myself in an unfamiliar town or city would always seek out the galleries.

Here in Baiyin the only artworks that I get to see are the large, and mostly awful, public statues. There are plenty in the park. The largest being three slightly stylised people in uniform representing the glorious workers who built the city. Most schools have a piece of art in the schoolyard and most of them have a grim similarity. They usually consist of pillars and posts with globes and doves and often a Chinese flag. 

The Experimental School out in the west, perhaps in keeping with its description, has something different (and actually quite appealing), a twenty foot high polished boulder. It's really rather striking.

But the kind of gallery I used to visit? The Tate, the Saatchi? No, there's nothing like that.

And I miss having the chance to walk around just looking at things, trying to see them with the artists eye, making my cynical but (hopefully ) affectioante comments about the art.