The cheaper, the better

Half way between Kunming and the border town of Hekou, laid flat on the sleeper bus at five in the morning I asked myself: "Why?". For about a hundred years Man has been able to fly but here am I on the most pot-holed highway in the world on a 40 centimetre wide bunkbed, legs cocked to fit, bouncing - literally bouncing - through the night on holiday. I did the calculation again: a flight from Chengdu to Bangkok and then on to Hanoi would have cost twice as much as the train, three times as much when you add the taxes which they always forget to mention until the last moment. No, there was no way around this being a holiday on a budget, what - if I was in advertising - what I'd call a "holiday experience".

Sleeper buses are regular coaches with the seats stripped out and three aisles of bunk beds bolted in their place. That gives you an idea of how wide they are; length-wise they're just short enough to be bloody uncomfortable. But they're undeniably cheap even if there's a price to be paid for saving money.

A few miles short of the border PLA soldiers boarded the bus and took everyone's passport; they were scrupulously polite to the couple of foreigners aboard and returned twenty minutes later to give them back. The border itself was quite dramatic: an iron bridge straight out of a spy movie spanning the Red River and then, a few more forms filled-in, you're in Vietnam.

The price for saving money was then exacted. The train from Lao Cai (on the Vietnamese side of the border) to Hanoi was to take 12 hours. It'd have been quicker to walk. And the 'soft seat' I'd paid for really was not at all soft. In fact I couldn't imagine what a 'hard seat' must have been like. Ouch.

I didn't like Hanoi. I tried; its narrow streets and tree-lined avenues owe something to the French and look very charming but the avenues, boulevards and rues are filled from gutter to gutter with the buzzing of a million 50cc motorbikes, the riders with their fingers permanently pressed on the horn which is made even louder because the narrow streets act as a kind of architectural amplifier. Blimey, I thought China was loud. But if China were a Heavy Metal band, then Hanoi would be a Speed Thrash Death Metal one.

Three hours from Hanoi on the coast is Halong Bay, right at the top of the list of things to see in Vietnam. Towering shards of limestone poke above the green waters in the bay, a kind of watery Guilin, which was made famous as the baddies' hideout in The Man with the Golden Gun. Undeniably impressive, the shine was taken off a little by being part of a sanpan procession around and through the rocks. Some tours last three days but I was happy with the single day trip, feeling like a carton of milk on the conveyor at a Tesco's checkout .

Onward and southward. The reason for choosing Vietnam/Cambodia for a holiday was that, after two miserable Chengdu Januarys, I didn't want to spend another cold, damp, shops-shut month and Chinese New Year in China. Above all, I wanted to be warm; even here Hanoi let me down so I was glad to get back on the train to head ever closer to the sun, first stop being Ninh Binh.

Ninh Binh is the base for visiting a land-based version of Halong Bay: Tam Coc, a nature reserve with ribbons of rivers twisting among skyscraping rocks and a similar procession of bored looking tourists desperately imagineering that idyllic holiday experience despite being Number 21 in a queue of a hundred boats paddled by local women whose only word of English is "Tip?".

Some aspects of Vietnam and Cambodia were a bit disillusioning. Very often the smiles of welcome disappeared as soon as you'd paid your money; and it was impossible to get reliable travel information because everyone had their own package to sell or their own deal with one operator or another. The hotel owner in Ninh Binh out-and-out lied to me about the cost and availability of train tickets to Saigon because he wanted to flog me a bus ticket from which he'd get a cut. The moral of the story: if you're on a tight budget always buy your tickets direct from the station!

So I was glad to get to Hue, about half way down Vietnam, the ancient capital of this ancient country. Hue may have a long history but it's also the jumping off point for visiting sights (or sites) from Vietnam's more recent past: the American War (as the Vietnamese call the Vietnam War, funnily enough). So it was another bus, another day, thrown together with a bunch of other tourists as I spent a long day dodging between key spots from the war.

It made me want to re-watch all those Vietnam War movies I've seen too many times already. We saw The Rockpile - a lonely peak overlooking the surrounding countryside, used by the Americans to keep an eye on things but ultimately given up as undefendable. Khe San was a vast U.S. base, again at the top of a mountain, which was besieged by the VC as a diversionary tactic before the famous Tet offensive of January 1968. Defended tooth and nail by the Americans, they ultimately withdrew when they realised it had little or no real strategic importance - a microcosm of the whole American adventure really.

And then at the coast we saw the tunnels at Vinh Minh where villagers dug in to survive bombardment from the sea and land. But more about tunnels a little later...

Still cloudy and chilly, I chose to skip the beaches of Nha Trang and take a giant leap all the way down to Ho Chi Minh City on another long distance train, a journey of about twenty hours. Since 'soft sleeper' tickets are only marginally more expensive than 'hard sleeper' ones in Vietnam I opted for a little bit of luxury - a compartment with just four rather than six bunks. This is where travelling by train beats air travel hands down. You not only get to see the countryside all the way north to south but you get to meet people like Hua, a student who was returning home from college. Her English wasn't great but, naturally, it was a damn sight better than my Vietnamese and she told me about her life, her family and her hopes for the future. She showed me photos of her mates and a rather disarming one of her wielding an AK47 rifle taken during her military training. Wherever you go in Vietnam war is never far away.

Next day I woke to blazing sunshine as the train hauled itself into Saigon station. (Yes, they still say 'Saigon' to denote the centre of Ho Chi Minh City; the railway station is 'Saigon station', the airport 'Saigon airport'.) It's a vast city (when taking the bus to Cambodia a few days later it would take an hour and a half simply to reach the outskirts) but I liked it so much more than Hanoi. It seemed more cosmopolitan, more modern and far better equipped to deal with the millions of people that populate it than Hanoi had done.

Highlight - although that's probably the wrong word - was a visit to the War Remnants Museum, once called The Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes. As at so many sites in Vietnam there was a collection of American armour, machinery and ordnance that never made it home outside: tanks, jets, helicopters, huge 'seismic bombs' stood on end. I'd never realised just how vulnerable a helicopter pilot must have felt with just a sheet of glass between him and the enemy below. But the museum, of course, is about the Vietnamese victims and it was interesting to read and feel the sense of indignation that Vietnam still feels at the American intrusion into their country. More than that, there was plenty of evidence of why the museum had initially had its original name. Grotesque pictures of inhumanity - soldiers posing with the decapitated heads of Vietnamese soldiers - brought to mind more recent images of American soldiers in the jails of Baghdad.

Two hours' drive from the centre of the city there's an even more chilling reminder of the war. Centred on the village of Cu Chi the Vietnamese dug hundreds of kilometers of interconnected tunnels on up to three levels. It was from these tunnels that they conducted their guerrilla war with the Americans, even managing to burrow right under one of their largest bases to attack the enemy from within. They're grim though. Bent double in blackness, the clay walls damp, the floor slicked with dirty water, it was enough for me to struggle about 30 metres before escaping through one of the modern day exits, a twinge of panic fluttering inside. To think that fighters would spend weeks down there; and to think that the Americans sent soldiers down those stinking holes to flush the fighters out. Staggering.

And so on to Cambodia, one of the few countries whose recent history could rival Vietnam's for grimness.

Throughout Vietnam you can pick up what's called an 'Open Bus'. These are coaches which tramp up and down the country which you can jump on and off as you choose. They're also incredibly cheap. From Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh is just $10.

So that is what I did.

Cambodia struck me as being abut twenty years behind Vietnam in terms of development. Not bad considering it started at Year Zero not so long ago. More Indian than oriental, the capital - and the people - have a laid-back, almost Caribbean vibe; it's much less frenetic that the big cities of its neighbour.

For the penniless backpacker there's a great strip of cheap hostels next to the (mosquito infested) lake in the north of the city. $3 buys you a single room with a fan (and when you think of it, what more do you need?). During the trip I paid much more in places which delivered much worse value. It infuriates me sometimes how hotels just don't seem to give a damn, how they ignore the most basic things that'd take pennies to fix but which make a big difference to the experience of staying there: a remote control that doesn't work, TV channels that aren't tuned in, bathrooms awash with water that doesn't drain away or with rails and soap dishes hanging from the walls. Oh don't get me started.

Time was running out so there was a limit to how much I could see of Cambodia. Top of the list, of course, were the temples of Angkhor so it was back on the bus (there are no passenger trains in Cambodia) and up to the town of Siem Reap.

Plenty has been written about the temples, especially Angkhor Wat which is said to be the largest religious structure in the world. My biggest worry was having too great expectations. But it was sublime. How can something so vast, so colossal be so graceful, so elegant? Around every corner there was a new aspect to its immense harmony.

Even the restoration work is exemplary. They have only rebuilt structures if more than half of the original stonework is available; otherwise they leave the tumbledown stones to tell their own silent tale. I'd seen the same approach at the old citadel in the centre of Hue where the most evocative parts of the emperor's palace were those left as ruins in a sea of fresh cut grass which invite your imagination to fill in the gaps.

At Ta Prohm temple the balance of nature and the ruins is of a different order. It's as though the jungle is slowly swallowing the structure, reclaiming it, as giant tree roots crawl along and around the mighty stones like some great devouring dragon. This, incidentally, was the temple featured in Tomb Raider.

Then at Bayon temple there's the eery sight of the hyper realistic face of the king carved into the stones of the temple no less than 216 times. Outside, a majestic avenue straddling a moat is lined with more immense busts . Again, the scale of it all is mind blowing (I loved the Elephant Gate - a door to one of the temples about two or three metres above the ground opening apparently to nothingness but this was where the king would have alighted his elephant to enter the place); how could they even have imagined it let alone built it? They reckon it took a million men working every day for thirty years to complete Angkhor Wat.

One day is not enough to see Angkhor but it was all I had; this was just a recce for a future visit.

There was time though for one final indulgence: a day on the beach at Sihanoukville on the south coast. Given Cambodia's history I wanted to experience something of its future - a simply beautiful holiday destination.

So that's how this year's adventure ended. Who needs flights and fancy hotels? Just give me a cheap bottle of beer in the shade of the tropical sun and a lot of wonderful memories. Definitely one of my better holidays.

See more pics at http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=216463&l=9f87a&id=589175623

Insult and injury

I got a call the other day from some company trying to sell me something. After letting me humiliate myself in worse-than-pidgin Mandarin the woman at the other end stopped me to say: “Your Chinese is terrible”.

It’s really come to something when people cold-call you to say how bad your Chinese is. But such is my life.

I think my poor teacher is completely fed up of me. I seem to forget words quicker than I learn them. Of course, I should practise more but every time I try even the simplest conversations I’m struck completely dumb – in every sense – by the person’s incomprehensible reply. “Ting bu dong” I say – I don’t understand.

Then, to make matters worse, more often than not they don’t even understand what I’m trying to say when I say I don’t understand.

The sooner I teach China to speak English the better.

Let me be misunderstood

I went to watch the Olympic torch relay on its way through Chengdu the other day.

But I couldn't find it.

Where else in the world could that possibly happen? For the previous few days I had hounded my Chinese friends for information about the route and timings and, in a very Chinese way, got many helpful suggestions, rumours, apologies even, but no facts whatsoever. It wasn't much use talking to the ex-pats here either: they just had their own rumours about how only Party members were being invited, that the whole city would be cordoned off and that crowds lining the route were to attend a rehearsal the day before...

Even on the day itself there was no word about what was going on. No website with a schedule. No AA signs on lamp posts pointing you in the right direction.

As I cycled rather forlornly around the city centre I saw lots of indications that something was happening. Public buildings had armed police and even a few troops with plastic riot shields outside. There were lots of otherwise ordinary people wearing red armbands who seemed to be waiting for something along most of the major roads. I finally caught up with a group of about one hundred white tee-shirted students as it processed through the city centre behind large Chinese national flags. I asked them if they were following the torch. But no, they hadn't any idea where the torch was. They seemed a little wary of my interest to be honest but eventually concluded I wasn't very subversive. Then, rather furtively, one girl asked me "Do you love China?". Well, there's a long answer to this question and a short one. I gave her the short one and she stuck a China sticker on my chest and presented me with a little Chinese flag and a little Olympic flag to wave. Which I did.

I rode on. Still not a sign of an Olympic entourage. So eventually I gave up and called into a bar for a beer, like you do. The TV was on and I caught the last few minutes of the torch's procession somewhere way outside the centre of town in a new exhibition complex a mile or two beyond the city's third ring road.

What struck me about all this wasn't the authorities' reticence (or secrecy?). Nor its rigid control. Nor the fact that the final ceremony was before a carefully chosen audience who had indeed been drilled in how and when to cheer. What got me is the fact that people in Chengdu let this happen. Nobody I spoke to thought it at all strange that, even though the procession was going past their home, they had been told to "stay indoors and watch it on TV". Can you imagine Boris Johnson telling Londoners that in four years' time? The person whose house it had gone past told me the government had done this "for security reasons". Another person told me that the arrangements had been made because there would just be too many people to organise (Chengdu is just a tad smaller than London). But all the Chinese I spoke to about it thought it was quite normal. None felt aggrieved that they were being ostracised from their own Olympics or denied their chance to show their passion for their games.

As I said in another blog recently I will never understand this place.

The final ceremony was pretty wooden and charmless. Officials spoke. People cheered on cue. And the Olympic flame was marched off by the same officious looking figures who had caused so much offence in London. (What was it Seb Coe called them?)

Behind the dignitaries on the stage, the backdrop carried the city of Chengdu's latest marketing slogan - in English, so it must be intended to appeal to the western visitor - which reads: "All because of you, Chengdu will be better". Is this really what they meant to say? Or is it - as with most bits of Chinglish you see around the city - a sign that the Chinese really don't give a damn whether they're understood or not.

On top of the world

Plan as much as you like but sometimes holidays just don’t quite meet your expectations. My winter break in Xinjiang was like that. I’d gone at the wrong time of year and the whole holiday was spent desperately chasing entertainment but just missing out on it while getting tired and frustrated in the process.

And sometimes, by accident, everything just works out.

All I wanted from Yunnan last month was some peace and quiet and fresh air. Oh, and maybe a chance to escape the intense humidity that builds up under Chengdu’s hazy grey skies.

The photo says it all really.

It was taken from my room at Tashi’s Lodge near Deqin right on the Yunnan-Tibet border. I’d not planned to go there at all but turned up having missed my bus back to Zhongdian and then stayed for four days either sat on this terrace reading a book in the sun or walking around Meili Snow Mountain.

The mountain is one of Rough Guide’s ‘Must see’ sights while in China – although you have to be extremely lucky to see it at its best during a cloudless sunrise. Still, even through the clouds that hung around it while I was there, you can see why it made the Rough Guide list.

(By the way, it’s also home to the world’s most southerly glacier. I spent three hours climbing up the mountain alongside this rather sad piece of dirty ice which is disappearing fast because of the changing climate. My Tibetan guide wistfully pointed to the spot way down the valley where he remembered the glacier reaching when he was a kid. Ten more years and it’ll be virtually gone.)

Many of the most memorable bits of the holiday were kind of accidental. Just looking out of the window of the bus on the way to a new place often made you gasp. The towering mountains! The plunging valleys! Rocky roads scratched into sheer rock faces at nose-bleeding heights. And blue blue skies that lift your spirit like no drug or booze ever can.

Artificial reality

I've written about places like Huanglongxi and Lijiang before. They're both sites of very old settlements but populated with buildings barely five or ten years old, recreated in an approximation of the original style. The only difference, of course, is that they've been rebuilt to accommodate modern day supermarkets, banks and public conveniences so their authenticity is dubious to say the least. Some students took me to another "ancient village" near Chengdu called Longquan recently and one of them proudly told me that her brother had actually designed the main street.

Chinese people I speak to don't find anything odd in this. They seem to have a different perspective on history. If a building is in Tang Dynasty style then it's a Tang Dynasty building. When I've pressed students on things like this, asking for instance, when exactly the Tang Dynasty was they haven't a clue. And if any building is from more than about thirty years ago then it's "very old". I don't know if it's something to do with the skewing of history during the Cultural Revolution but "the past" just seems to be a single block of time - sometimes known as "culture" - rather than a long timeline of discrete events.

Still, I rather like Lijiang (as long as it's not choked with tourists). You don't so much "suspend your disbelief" as ignore it altogether and just enjoy getting lost in its tangle of narrow, cobbled streets criss-crossing streams of fast flowing mountain water.

Six hours' bus ride north west brings you to another "ancient village": Zhongdian. This one is actually still being built. To add to the surreality of it all, the authorities audaciously renamed the town "Shangri-La" claiming it was the inspiration for James Hilton's novel Lost Horizon. (Most foreigners - and locals - seem to find this an absurdity too far and refer to it as Zhongdian still.) Its friendly jumble of Tibetan style buildings houses hostels, 7-11s and more 'outdoors' shops than you can shake a walking pole at, all stuffed to the rafters with fake North Face branded waterproofs, fleeces and jackets.

But come seven o'clock in the evening Zhongdian comes into its own. I'd seen traditional folk dancing in the town square in Lijiang and in a kind of open air theatre in Luoshui on the banks of Lugu Lake but you couldn't escape from the fact that both of these shows were put on purely for the (mostly Chinese) tourists with the suited and booted dancers going through the motions a bit. In Zhongdian it feels different. The square becomes packed with concentric rings of dancers old and young. One or two are in traditional dress, most come as they are but all know the moves for each tune being played through the loudspeakers. Old ladies lead grandchildren by the hand; middle aged shopkeepers join-in to unwind after a long day of selling all that dodgy gear; and teenage lads seem genuinely proud to be part of the tradition, dancing the intricate (often almost effeminate) steps with a kind of hip hop style and a rapper's glare.

The dancing in Luoshui had not been free (although I'd not paid having been invited by a couple who knew the guy on the door). Even here though, where I knew the dancers were getting paid, it was kind of amazing to see the pride of young men and girls in their traditions. And it wasn't all fake by a long chalk. Spending three days walking round the lake, I was surprised to find villagers wearing traditional dress or - among the young ones - combining the old skirts and shiny leather boots with the new jeans and trainers.

The villagers were people from the Mosu and Naxi minorities who are coming to terms with the Twenty First century, combining their old pastoral lives with the new and potentially lucrative opportunities offered by tourism. Each village has a handful of guesthouses all decked out with Tibetan prayer flags, the city slickers' shiny 4x4s parked in the courtyard. And, of course, they have some of the most magnificent scenery in the whole of China.

Straddling the border between Sichuan and Yunnan, Lugu Hu is a vast lake set among the mountains at 2690 metres above sea level and covering an area of around 50 square kilometres. Ten hours from Xichang, about nine from Lijiang, it's not easy to get to but, boy, is it worth the effort (even in a truly ancient minibus along roads and tracks blocked every so often by the most recent landslide having tumbled down a virtually sheer mountainside).

This was everything that Chengdu isn't. There were no car horns blaring mindlessly, no squealing brakes and no smog. There were blue skies, there was fresh air. Huge purple butterflies wobbled through the air as though leading the way along the lake shore. You heard bird song. Hell, you even heard the flutter of birds' wings. Every corner brought a new perspective on the lake, a new way of looking at it: now from high above on the unmetalled road, now within earshot of the water slip-slapping the side of trough-like boats hollowed out from tree trunks. I sat alone on a jetty listening to singing as one of these boats crossed the lake. There were four Mosu women, all blue skirts, white sashes and black bonnets, rowing from the other shore and bringing huge bundles of firewood, singing as they paddled, giggling as they brought it all ashore.

It felt good. It felt real.

P.S. See more photos at

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=138981&l=3572a&id=589175623

Simply The Fourth Best!

I know. I tend to write mostly of disaster and depression. This is basically because it's easier to write interestingly about bad stuff than about happy stuff. But last term ended rather well: all my students passed their exams this time (a remarkable improvement!) and one or two said some very nice things which made me think that maybe I'm not doing such a bad job after all.

Nonetheless, I still got messages from others who told me they were 'depressed' by their exam score. Well, not so much by the score as by the fact that they weren't top of the class. That's the nature of the system here: it's so damn competitive that even when they score around 20% better than last time they're still not happy. I felt like telling them to grow up and get a life.

(Others who had kindly given me end of term gifts like tea or Sichuan spices seemed baffled that they too had not scored top spot in the class.)

Sometimes I think I'll never get the hang of China. Exam fortnight fell on the two weeks immediately after my year's contract officially ended. I'd pointed this out at the beginning of the year and had been told not to worry, it'd sort itself out. But sure enough when I went to pick up the two weeks' wages I was told that I shouldn't have worked those days! Then the college said I should talk to the Foreign Affairs Office; the FAO said it was a college matter. It all got very messy and fractious.

Really, it's another case of Yes. Probably. Maybe. - the state of uncertainty that people like to live in here. It's the same story with my visa for next year. It runs out a month before the end of term. Pointing this out, I was told "It'll sort itself out". Hmmm, we'll see.

Many foreign teachers - especially those in private schools - have had terrible problems renewing their visas and quite a few have had to leave China altogether. The authorities have clamped right down on issuing them in the run-up to the Olympics which has caused a bit of an exodus. It doesn't make you feel very wanted or valued! What's more, there are very few new expats coming into Chengdu because of worries about earthquakes. Those of us left should really be at a premium - but it doesn't feel that way at all.

But that's just the way of things. Apart from the wrangle about payment at the end of term, there was no word from my boss to say thanks for the year's work or any kind of review of how things went. Nothing. Not a word. Another teacher, however, came up to me and, beaming, shook my hands saying he had some good news. It turns out that the students are required to assess their teachers at the end of each year and, in his words, I was "the fourth best teacher out of one hundred".

It's great news of course. But I can't help seeing the negative side too: why on earth did my bosses (in either the college or the Foreign Affairs Office) never even mention it to me?

A student came up to me at the end of class. She wanted to apologise for missing last week’s lesson. That’s okay, not the end of the world, I probably said. She went on to explain. She had been back to her hometown, Qingchuan, in the mountains north west of Chengdu. Her home had been destroyed by the earthquake. Her mother and father had been killed. Her only other relative is her sister who's seriously injured and in hospital. This student has exams in two weeks which she’s determined to pass because it’s what her father wanted.

Interesting times

It’s just over a week since the first quake. Since then there have been hundreds of aftershocks, some virtually imperceptible and some strong enough to shift the furniture around your room. People are weary from being woken in the middle of the night or from simply not sleeping at all. And then last night it was broadcast that another severe shock in the range of 6 or 7 on the Richter Scale may hit in the next two or three days.

You can imagine the panic this caused. It was 10.30 at night and it seemed everyone in Chengdu fled out into the streets in a cold sweat. Some jumped in cars and headed east away from the mountains causing huge gridlock outside my apartment. It’s a wide two-way street but the whole of it was taken up with cars with only one direction in mind and no intention of obeying silly things like traffic lights. Then there are those without cars. They set off for the nearest bit of open ground and set up makeshift tents made from stripey and tartan plastic tarpaulin material – the kind of stuff shopping bags are made of. Wherever you go in the city you see tent cities like these full of people too scared to stay in their own homes.

Stubborn or stupid, I’ve stayed in my seventh floor apartment figuring that it withstood the first earthquake so why shouldn’t it do the same for a second, lesser shock? Apart from that, I’m not aware that any scientist is actually capable of predicting the next earthquake anyway. Stable doors and bolting horses spring to mind. So here I’m staying despite the continuing shudders which still send a chill of fear through your body every single time as you wonder: maybe this one is going to be the big one…? The sensation is the same as feeling seasick. The trouble with sea-sickness is that even once you get back on firm ground your legs are still a bit jelly-like and you imagine the earth moving even when it isn’t.

At 2.28pm on Monday 12 May I was teaching. It had been a pretty tedious lesson to be honest. We all felt the first tremor, looked at each other and expected it to just pass. But it went on and on and on becoming stronger and stronger. Ceiling tiles began to fall from the ceiling and cracks to appear in the walls as the ground beneath our feet shook more and more. I think most of the students were already heading for the door when I shouted “Get out, Get out” and we all headed for the stairs in a walking don’t panic kind of a run.

At 2.28pm on Monday 19 May we were all in the same classroom, standing for three minutes' silence while outside sirens and car horns wailed a sad lament. I felt a little out of place. China is hurting and I think the students would have preferred consolation in Chinese not English. They certainly weren’t in the mood for a lesson on ‘The language of complaining’. Me neither.

Four girls at the front wore white tee-shirts with “I ♥ China” which pretty much sums up the national mood. But funnily enough, these tee-shirts which everyone seems to be wearing weren’t manufactured post-earthquake. They became popular a few weeks ago when Tibet kicked off. And the understandable – almost sentimental – message of solidarity on the front is often matched by the rather more sinister words in 300 point on the back: LISTEN TO CHINA’S VOICE.

The Chinese were also incensed at the treatment of the Olympic torch as it travelled the world. They took it as a personal insult that anyone could possibly protest as it spread its message of peace and harmony. They think everyone hates them. They are just not used to criticism. The French in particular have been vilified because of their vociferous protests (and President Sarkozy’s support for them) which has led to the Carrefour and Auchan megastores here being boycotted by shoppers for the last few weeks. Clearly we’re not meant to listen to France’s voice.

Defensive, beleaguered and tired: this isn’t how China expected to feel in the run up to the Olympics.

Making an impression

After a whole term of teaching ‘British Culture’ to my students, it seems I’ve still got my work cut out to dislodge some pretty deep seated ideas among the Chinese about us Brits. Here, for example, are some extracts from essays the students wrote entitled ‘My Impression of the UK’:

“Britain is a tea drinking nation. They drink tea in the afternoon every day. People drink tea with a piece of sugar and some milk. Their tea is sweet and when they drink tea they will eat some delicious cake – especially sandwiches.”

“In Europe there are many coffee houses in the open. But in England, because of the weather, they have bars.”

“In England the ladies are very beautiful and guarded. The men are so gentle who inherit ‘lady first’ and respect ladies most.”

“The English think that food is for nutrition and Chinese think it is for tasting.”

“The fog in London is famous but I don’t know exactly how it comes; maybe the reason is the air pollution.”

“The fog in London is much better now. It’s a splendid city.”

“The Chinese seldom talk to strangers when they are waiting for a bus… but the English may start a conversation about the changeable weather.”

“The English do not like discussing man’s ages and woman’s age or even the value of his family’s furniture. The English does not like bargaining back and forth…”

“I feel that education is more concerned about the United Kingdom’s actual ability as well as creativity…”

“People told me that Scottish people are better than English people. However, when my sister experienced Scotland she discovered it is a strange country.”

“My first impression of Scotland is death… it is full of memory to dead people. My sister said she only felt death in the air of Edinburgh. Although the Scottish people always do smile with strangers I do not think they will be your friends.”

“England has the world’s most perfect football league system…”

“Prince Edward isn’t really famous for anything…”

“The London Underground extends in all directions. People always get on it sitting comfortably on the soft chair, taking out a newspaper or reading a book during a long time.”

“English men have good manners, they are so modest and elegant but the most important is that they have a warm smiling expression.”

“Driving is to the English what flying is to birds.”

“Most British students don’t like to borrow their class notes to classmates. But in China it is very natural that classmates share the class notes together.”

“Everyone [in Britain] between 16 and 25 is fond of smoking.”


Well, at least they were right about Scotland!

Testing time

According to one of my students in her end of term assignment, "Traditional British-style wedding, the bride, symbol of good luck will be the Calla, if new comers living in the suburbs and the ceremony will have guests step by the church, and sprinkled Changeup way".

As their end of term test I'd asked them to write a short essay about any aspect of British culture but ended up with an amazing insight into Chinese culture instead.

Many students, like the one I've quoted, took various shortcuts to get their submissions done. I assume the gobblydegook is the result of feeding some Chinese text into an electronic translator. This would also explain another one of my students telling me that "the males are all agnatic kin" (his English is okay but even I had to look up "agnatic"). Or, in an essay about London, I was baffled by the words "Telefajia" and "Ximinsi"? Turns out they're literal, syllable by syllable transliterations of Trafalgar (Square) and Westminster (Abbey).

Of course, there's absolutely nothing wrong in using electronic dictionaries (I'm getting a Chinese one for myself soon). But what got me was the complete failure to check what they'd done. Reading what seemed to be a quite well written piece about marriage, one essay then went like this: "Your wedding dress: the complete guide" before giving me the dates and venue details of the "Chinese International Wedding Attire Exhibition" copied and pasted pell mell along with the rest of the article.

Essays were littered with dead hyperlinks or phrases like "click here for more". Worst of all there was the passage, painstakingly handwritten:

Request further info. Enjoy England will be pleased to send you a selection of our brochures; simply complete the form and tick the brochures you would like to order. Scroll down to view our current brochures. Why not register with Enjoy England and save...

What gets me is that there's no effort to disguise the fact that they've just copied stuff word for word; there's no sense of them trying to pull the wool over my eyes here. They think that just copying blindly is what's expected.

(Well, there was one instance of wool pulling. One student sent me her 300 word essay as an email which began "Remember Al Martino?" and went on to discuss some pretty obscure UK Christmas Number Ones with amazing familiarity. A quick Google search found a page from the BBC 'Learn English' site copied word for word except for introducing - inexplicably - countless spelling errors. She then had the temerity to write at the bottom "I really like music. That's why I write about it.")

When I gave out some pretty low marks there was consternation. I was emailed and texted with tearful messages asking why they'd 'failed' the exam. "Failed"? Nobody had bothered telling me there was a pass/fail threshold. Having said that, I had used my common sense in doing the marks and hadn't been too draconian anyway, giving marks in the range of about 40-85. But it appears that in China sub-60 scores are 'fails'. Worse than that, the 'fail' mark goes onto the Student Record - a document that stays with them for ever influencing not only their future education but their employment prospects too.

Were these kids' entire futures being blighted by this single mark from a patently incompetent English teacher? I called my boss to try and get the marks reviewed but he was inflexible: "I have sent the final score to the adminstration office and they have filed it". Great, thanks for your help.

So now I'm getting ready for the new term and classes full of sulking (if not suicidal) and resentful students. On the advice of another Chinese teacher - who had a word on my behalf to the President no less - I'm hoping to organise some kind of notional re-test to put things right and bump the scores up to the minimum 60. It seems that even teachers have to cheat sometimes.

Sightseeing and believing

As soon as you step off the train you know there's something different. And, indeed, many Chinese people had warned me not to go to Xinjiang at all so alien was this region to them. They said that it’d be too cold– down to about minus twenty in mid January. They also explained that the people there were different – “barbarians”, no less – and I’d probably be attacked and robbed.

You don’t take advice like this lightly. But I’ve learnt that most Chinese people have barely travelled beyond the boundaries of their own province let alone to the further reaches of their vast country so their knowledge of faraway places is based on little more than hearsay and rumour. Strange too: I heard the “barbarian” description from several different people as though it’s something they’ve actually been taught.

Well they were right about the cold: it virtually froze your face off. But I didn’t get robbed, attacked or even threatened. In fact I had quite a nice time really.

Xinjiang is an ‘Autonomous Region’ similar to its southern neighbour, Tibet. China’s largest, driest and coldest province, it’s about the size of western Europe and shares borders with Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, India and Afghanistan. Its people are ‘Uighurs’, racially and culturally more Turkish than Chinese.

Since 1949, ‘Han Chinese’ – the majority ethnic grouping in China – have migrated to the region to balance the Uighurs. But, despite the official language being Mandarin, every sign is written in both Chinese and Arabic script; all traders speak both languages but seemed pretty reluctant to use Mandarin whenever I tried to strike up a conversation.

Language is one thing that sets Xinjiang apart from “mainland China” (as a tour guide described it to me). The other thing is religion. Uighurs are all Muslim to a man and wherever you go you’re never far from a mosque of some description. The Kashgar Idgah Mosque can hold 20,000 and throughout the old town you stumble across many many more tiny mud coloured ones tucked round every corner.

Strange though it is to see religion so overtly practised in China, don’t get the idea that this is some enclave of total religious freedom. A travellers’ café set up by some Americans a couple of years ago was shut down very suddenly when it emerged that the owners were Christian evangelists. Talking to a local, it was explained to me that tolerating Islam is one thing but that doesn’t mean a carte blanche for other religions. Tolerating one religion is do-able but having the potential for competition between different ones is not something the authorities want to get into.

The evangelists are everywhere though. In fact, many of the English teachers I know here are Christians who make little secret of their faith. And, to be fair, many Chinese students are desperate to find out more about Christianity. This, of course, seems odd to me. Personally, I think freedom means questioning religion and rejecting mystical mumbo jumbo; but new-found freedom for the Chinese means enthusiastically embracing it as something completely new.

Funnily enough I was on the receiving end of evangelism in the Pakistan Café next to my hotel. I have to admit that bespectacled, bearded and baggy trousered Aljammet initially made me feel uneasy (talk about stereotypes...) but we ended up having a good chat about the meaning of life and Islam over a chapatti and fried egg washed down with delicious sweet milky tea. I was converted to chapattis for breakfast but not much more.

Food was probably the highlight of my trip to Xinjiang. Unfortunately because of the ice and snow many of the places I wanted to visit – like the lakes of Tian Chi and Karakul – were inaccessible so I only got to see the three cities of Urumqi, Kashgar and Yarkand. Well, “see” is actually an exaggeration. The capital – Wulumuqi or ‘beautiful pastures’ in Chinese – was submerged in a smoggy soup so that you couldn’t see a bloody thing.



Talking of 'pastures', it’s said that those around Kashgar are unusually dry and salty which means that the sheep and goats which graze there effectively season themselves before they’re slaughtered. So, while there isn’t a great variety to the food available, the unique taste of Kashgar meat jammed onto huge metal skewers more than makes up for it. It even made me feel sorry for vegetarians. Silly arses.

It took 24 hours to get to Kashgar from Urumqi (that following a 48 hour train journey from Chengdu to the capital – and you thought everything was big in Texas). Historically a key point on the old Silk Road, Kashgar is still a heady mixture of nationalities long after the camel trains stopped passing through. But mid winter is probably not the best time to do the sights here.

Described in the guide books as a “riot of colour” and the “must-see attraction in the whole of Xinjiang”, the Kashgar Sunday Bazaar was a bit of a let down in the snow and the smoke and the slush of a chilly January day. Dogs and cats shivered miserably as they were haggled over, tails resolutely between their legs; donkeys stood stoic as icicles formed from the drool of their mouths; and people huddled together more for warmth than to jostle for position in front of the open stalls selling huge hunks of meat or semi-frozen sweet potatoes.

In Yarkand – a four hour drive along a treacherously icy highway littered with upturned minibuses and SUVs that had taken one risk too many – I swapped snow for desert (though the cold was just as bitter) to get a tiny feel of what the Silk Road trek must have been like all those years ago. But to be honest I just felt like a complete plonker. This poor camel had to be dragged kicking from its stall as it screamed in Camelese "But it's off-season!" before being mounted (is that the term?) by a rather self conscious English tourist and led around for fifteen minutes by an equally grumpy camel owner. Boy, you should see the photos: this one is of some sand, this one is of some more sand and, oh, this one is of... you get the picture.

My guide then took me to the Cemetery of Kings in the centre of Yarkand. Many religious sects and schisms have grown up over the centuries and some pray to the remains of previous rulers although this is considered pure idolatry by the mainstream. As everywhere in old Kashgar there was a kind of Dickensian mist hovering everywhere, a smoky fog in an uniformly earth-brown landscape. Buildings, trees, people, everything was burnt umber. Through the fog we passed fantastically old men crouched among the tombstones, faces scoured and eroded by time, beards all gone to seed. One carried a dead chicken to be offered to some spirit or other while another raved mystical predictions about my tour guide's past, present and future. And about his father's. All in all, it was an insight into Xinjiang's medieval past I'd not been expecting.


There was so much more I wanted to see and do in Xinjiang but time was against me. With Spring Festival approaching the whole of China was about to mobilise as everyone returned to their hometown. Even so, I still managed to leave things too late: all trains out of Urumqi were booked up for three weeks solid so I had to fly back to Chengdu (on a ticket costing three times more than it had a week before). It was one of those holidays where you find yourself lying when someone asks you "How was your holiday?" and you feel obliged to say "Yeah, it was great!". You could say it was "an experience" and an interesting one to be sure. But I think next time I'll come in the summer.

More pics at: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=88432&l=2db4c&id=589175623

Well, yes, maybe, probably.

I came across an article the other day comparing Chinese and Western business cultures. It said that, where Western culture thrives on the black and the white of things (the facts!), the Chinese way is to live and work in a world of uncertainty.


The title of this blog entry is the verbatim answer from my boss to the question "Will I teach the same classes next term?" He wasn't being deliberately difficult or evasive; that's just the way he views something in the future. I guess he's right: who really knows what will happen in two months' time for goodness sake?


Even the government does it. National holidays aren't officially announced until a couple of days before. And a friend of mine invited me out for a meal but couldn't tell me which day it'd be on; finally she texted on a Saturday asking if I was up for it but - even then - that she would call later with the time.

I've wrestled with uncertainty all term, never quite sure what I'm meant to be doing or whether what I am doing is, actually, that which I am meant to be doing. Or not. But, looking through the uncertainty goggles, perhaps it simply doesn't matter. Perhaps you should just do what you do and see what happens; it won't be the end of the world if it doesn't work out. And, after all, it can't 'go wrong' because no one said what would be 'right' in the first place!

Probably.

Uncomfortably numb

"Slow Boat": how appropriate for the interweb's laziest blogger. Oh well, better late than never I guess.


It's been fourteen months now and I seem to speak less Chinese than I did when I first flew out. My teaching's not getting any better either. I tell you what: platitudes aside, teachers don't half earn their money. He Li, my Chinese teacher, organises her lessons in a way that I can only dream of. But it leaves me feeling like not only a rubbish student but a rubbish teacher too.

You'd think I had the dream gig here with only seven 90 minute classes to teach and a working week that begins at 1pm on Monday and ends at midday Wednesday. I spend the other four days of the week, however, planning and fretting wildly about the next week's lessons: it just isn't fun anymore.

Moving up to a university post hasn't been the panacea that I'd hoped. It turns out I had better and more interesting conversations with my high school students last year than I do now with first and second year uni students.

Of course I can't blame the students for me simply being out of my depth but I do wonder what even the best teacher in the world would do to teach 'British Culture' to a class of fifty youngsters with no interest whatsover in the subject and - this is the key thing - whose English is barely good enough to say their own name. And what's the point anyway? It's like me taking chemistry lessons in French: why make the subject even more difficult than it was in the first place?

You wouldn't believe the different strategies I've tried to drill some Britishness into my three Sophomore classes. It began with lecture style classes using the text book they'd given me: a very dry tome with key historical, political and geographical facts about the home countries. Lead balloon time. I tried using ready made culture lessons provided by the British Council but was told (by my students) that they were pretty dull too. What they wanted was informaton about more everyday things in Britain - what it's like to live there. Okay, then. How about a lesson about British food? British social customs and manners? Zzzzzzzzzzzz.


Last gasp: I'll show a movie (damn! I mean a film...) and then discuss the cultural references. Easy for the students, easy for me, luvly jubbly. Ha! What a nightmare it's been. My snide copy of Braveheart wouldn't play for a start so I went to Plan B: Notting Hill. Or Notting Bloody Hill as I affectionately know it now.

The disasters had only just begun. The computers in the so-called 'multimedia classrooms' had no DVD software installed so I had to install my own. (These are the same 'multimedia classrooms' that have chalk blackboards instead of whiteboards or even overhead projectors.) These multimedia classrooms have been designed with floor to ceiling windows on two sides so, even with the curtains closed, the room is constantly bathed in light which means that no one can see what's being projected on the screen. The final straw was the projector itself literally blowing up.

I could see its point.

It's taken three weeks to show the film. Three long, long weeks. I've seen it seven times - without counting the other times I watched it at home to prepare. Safe to say it's not one of my all time favourite flicks.


University over here isn't anything like at home. It's just a continuation of being at school. They're not young adults, just older kids. And they're treated like children too: single sex dorms; compulsory exercise at 6.30 every morning; I even have to take a class register at the beginning of every lesson.

Then there's the unreality of the whole business. At the end of the year, no one's going to fail the course. People don't fail here. There's a whole spectrum of universities to apply to with the best students going to universities like Sichaun University ('Chuan Da') and the lesser ones going to institutions further down the list. Institutions like Sichuan Normal University ('Chuan Shi').

Funny, at the beginning of the year, I asked them to fill in a questionnaire which asked them, among other things, why they wanted to study English. Some said it was "the lesser of several evils", some said it was "because my parents told me to". Terrific. I'd been told I would be teaching "highly motivated English majors". Ha! About as highly motivated as I am for the first lesson on a Tuesday at eight o'clock in the morning.

I was invited to a party by some of my students last week. Boy, is it not like Britain. This was no ill organised and random drink fest with loud music, lashings of beer and the odd bowl of salted peanuts. Instead, I was led by a couple of girls into a vast lecture theatre filled with 300 seated youngsters all primed to 'just go crazy' as just as soon as they're told it's okay to. The word 'random' didn't come into it at all. There was a carefully planned programme of sixteen singing, dancing, poetry-reading and comedy-sketch acts.

I was given two glow-in-the-dark glow-sticks to wave as though I was at a Bon Jovi gig - and a girl. Oh, what fun I had waving them to karaoke-ing students, casually murdering every song they sang. No one seemed to care that the microphone didn't work, that the singing was out of tune and that this was about as much fun as (what's the most tedious thing I can think of?) attending one of my lessons.

Postcard from Phi Phi

This is a bit more like it. The teaching course has ended and now, finally, it's time to relax.

About a 40km boat ride east of Phuket is Phi Phi Don, the larger of two islands that appear out of nowhere in the middle of the Andaman Sea. The smaller one, Phi Phi Leh, is where The Beach was filmed, chosen no doubt for its idyllic isolation. We sailed past. It looked like a watery version of an Asda car park, packed with boats of all kinds queuing-up around the bay as film-struck sun seekers jostled for room on the iconic sand.

The main village on Phi Phi Don is unashamedly touristy. Brightly saronged and shorted tourists are flushed along narrow streets past shops selling all manner of tat till they tumble out onto the main beach on the other side. As wall sized photos in some of the cafes show, this is one of the spots most devastated by the tsunami in 2004. You'd not think it today: the place is buzzing and new buildings are still being thrown up before your very eyes.

I hopped into a taxi - a long boat water taxi - and headed a bit further east to the quieter Long Beach instead. I proceeded to get myself thoroughly sunburnt ending up looking like a matchstick: skinny white body with a bright red head.

As I was gently grilled on both sides, I had time to reflect on a fantastic five weeks in Thailand. I've mentioned the smiles before but, especially coming back to China, it's the attention paid to manners and politeness that I'll most miss.

There's one other clear distinction between China and Thailand. In the latter, foreigners are known as farang and in the former, laowai. But the Chinese use their word in a vaguely pejorative way and normally when they assume you don't know what they're saying. But the Thais go out of their way to embrace outsiders with, for instance, taxis carrying stickers hollering the slogan "I love farang". It's still oddly distasteful to be referred to as a foreigner in the first place but at least it's in a positive way!

A final difference: descending towards Chengdu airport, blue skies gave way to smog. It'll be a while till I see stars at night again. But, still, I've really enjoyed my five week long breath of fresh air.

Postcard from Phuket

I had a little stone in my shoe yesterday morning. It was really annoying. Nag, nag, nag, it went all day. Yet it was still there when I came home in the evening. That’s how intensive a CELTA teaching course at the ECC Language School is: there’s just no time to do anything but work.

So after three weeks I’ve not even seen a beach, not had as much as a sniff of the sea. No sipping cocktails of an evening in a beach hut as the waves kiss the shore but rather a first floor room in a Phuket boarding house overlooking (and overhearing) the main drag into town.

It was only when I got here that I discovered that Phuket town is nowhere near the sea anyway. Doh! All the white-sandy beaches are at least a bus ride away; the very best ones are a bus and a boat ride away.

Thailand’s great though. After China the sensation is the same as untying shoelaces that were too tight. Relief. It’s partly because I can get away with speaking English, I guess, which makes everything so much easier. But – surprisingly for a country under military dictatorship – there’s a feeling of freedom; people just seem happier. Above all, it’s the smiling that gets you (it's a way of life here to try and ignore bad stuff and just laugh at everything). So even if it's yet another tuk-tuk driver saying "Where you go?", you can't get annoyed and just have to smile back. It's therapeutic too; smiling makes you feel good.

It's yet another lesson learned among so many from the last few weeks.