Slow Boat

Paradise lost (and found)

2010-12-30T17:50:00.024+08:00

Google “Jiuzhaigou” and you get hundreds and hundreds of pictures of sky-scraping mountains reflected in the clearest of petrol-blue waters, fallen tree trunks ossified in the shallow lakes, and, even in a photo, you get the feeling of cool, fresh air in your lungs. That’s why most visitors to China make time for the trip to this national park in the north of Sichuan province either the easy way – by air – or the more interesting way – by winding mountain road in a bus that’s probably seen better days.

In Chinese, “jiuzhaigou” means “nine village valley”. Those villages are Tibetan and in the buildings you see, the language you hear, the songs and dances you watch, the culture is distinctly different to anywhere else in China. So it’s not only western tourists who come by the bus and plane load; it seems like every single person in The People’s Republic makes a beeline for this tranquil, natural paradise whenever there’s a public holiday.

The pictures on Google don’t lie. The “Y” shaped valley is home to the most amazing scenery. Starting at the foot of the “Y”, you pass a string of small lakes including Bonsai Shoals, Reed Lake, Double Dragon Lake and Lying Dragon Lake. The water, clear to the very bed of each lake, is unlike anything else you’ll see in China. But this is the appetiser. Continue on to the small Shuzheng Falls then Rhinoceros Lake and the larger Nuorilang Falls and the feast really begins.

At the split of the “Y” the mountains close-in and the combination of hills and trees, water and blue skies becomes that much more intense. The left route ends at the aptly named Long Lake but the star of the show here is Five Coloured Pool. With a sheer backdrop of conifer trees painted in a palette of a million greens which reaches to the clouds, the different depths of this modestly sized lake – along with the chemical properties of the bedrock – give the water jewel-like properties displaying translucent colours you never even knew existed.

The trouble with something so beautiful is that everyone, naturally, wants to see it. So it’s all but impossible to add to Google’s 83,000 Five Coloured Pool images without a bobbing head or two in the shot. It’s hard to even enjoy the serenity of the place without being jostled this way and that by the swirling crowds around you.

The volume of people wanting to visit Jiuzhaigou presents serious problems of management to the authorities. In an effort to preserve the sanctity of the park while offering the chance to visit to as many people as possible, they have to lay down rules. More specifically, they have had to lay down boardwalks to channel the flow of people and discourage them from charging every which way and damaging the very jewel they came to see. Understandable, then, but I couldn’t help feeling it was a shame to be in such a veritable walker’s paradise but be constrained to these narrow walkways. It felt a little like traipsing the aisles of a supermarket at times.

So, despite the surroundings, it’s difficult to feel the rawness or freshness of nature here. As for solitude, forget it. Swarms of visitors gather at the foot of the valley waiting for buses to take them up stream. The buses come and everyone pushes forward in an almighty and undignified scrum of feral humanity. Tempers flared while I was there, people really got hurt. Ugly. Very ugly. We were then dumped short of the Tourist Centre and funnelled along a narrow path next to the lower lakes where we were literally pushed along by the force of the crowd and quite unable to stop to even take a snap of bobbing heads with a glimpse of the lake in the background.

The courtesy buses ferry punters up and down the valleys all day long. You can jump on or off wherever you like. Some people methodically visit each lake in turn, tick that box and jump on the next bus but that seems to miss the point of being out in the great outdoors to me. Determined to walk a little and hopeful of outrunning the herd, I headed to the top of the right hand fork, where the valley gives way to forest, before making my way back on foot.

It was a decent plan. Sure, the boardwalk was still the only route you could take but it was no longer necessary to walk the lakes in crocodile fashion. The path winds through the trees threading the lakes together: first, Grass Lake which is more like a watery meadow and then Swan Lake whose swans must have migrated when I was there. There’s a long stretch after that to the next string of lakes and most people take a bus to join up the dots. The path, though, continues if you choose to take it, leading you on a good hour’s hike through the trees which occasionally takes in a tumbling mountain stream meandering through the forest.

And not a soul about.

Looking up the sides of the valley as I came out of the woods, the leaves on the trees at the lower levels were changing from their summer greens to autumnal yellows, oranges, reds. With the different colours, it’s as though you are watching autumn happen in front of your eyes. A million shades at once look back to summer and forward to winter, all bathed in a benevolent sunshine. The first leaves, yellow tinged with brown, have fallen on the path or rest on the glassy water like counters. Moving further down the valley, the colours change imperceptibly again and the number of people you encounter starts to increase too.

Some of the most popular and memorable lakes come next. The waters of Arrow Bamboo Lake cascade down Arrow Bamboo Falls toward Panda Lake and on to Peacock Riverbed whose deposits of calcium spread beneath the lens of the water surface like a fabulous fan of tail-feathers.

You leave the national park past several of the valley’s eponymous villages which, truth be told, are not much more than Tibetan themed gift shops selling the same kind of kitsch ‘n’ tat that people buy, take home and sling to the back of some cupboard or other never to be seen again.

It’s the same outside the gates of the park. Tourists think that a Tibetan ‘homestay’ may give then some higher cultural experience but, in reality, a bunch of awkward westerners making small-talk over a stove with a steaming kettle of Tibetan tea in a local’s home which has been hastily re-worked to include rudimentary guest rooms is hardly my idea of getting closer to a culture.

Happily, in my case, the homestay managed to double-book my room the next day so I was forced to change plans and move on. So at eight o’clock the next morning I stood at the roadside, my breath steaming as I braced myself against the mountain chill, waiting for a bus to Songpan.

I had no ticket for the bus. I’d been told it would come at 8.30 and that I could just flag it down. 8.30 came and went but something told me to just go with the flow. An old man joined me at the roadside and, with a mixture of my pidgin Chinese and his animated gestures, he assured me the bus would indeed come. And, of course, it did.

No luxury coach this, the bus was full of locals – workers, families – and a couple of hippy backpackers squeezed in on the back seats. The driver gestured toward the metal wheel arch by the front door which was my seat for the next couple of hours. The guy already sitting there shuffled up a little and offered me a cigarette. We were off.

The road climbed through the mountains, switching this way and that, and the temperature plunged whenever we lost sight of the sun. Then we would turn a corner and come upon a wide, flat plain surrounded by brooding peaks topped with snow and the sun would flick back on filling the bus with a chilly warmth. The mountain wind seeping through the gaps in the rattling windows was so fresh you could taste it.

It took a couple of hours to reach Songpan. The main street stretches the length of the town and threads itself through the massive old stone gates of the original settlement. Although work was going on downtown to modernise – pedestrian areas, newly built shop units and the like – it remains a town largely untouched by out-and-out tourist development. Tatty tumbledown stores line the street from the bus station selling everyday necessities, not tourist tat. Yak meat butchers and restaurants predominate. Hardware and general stores come next, again, set up for local trade: damn! not a souvenir cigarette lighter or Songpan key-ring to be had anywhere.

Two hills tower above the town on each side. Both are good options for a hike, one with a monastery to head for, the other with nothing but a few sheep and cattle munching on its green grass. There’s no clear path, of course, but after a while you can pick up the odd trail here and there. Very soon I found myself high above Songpan and could make out the fortified walls of the original garrison town from which the new one spills out. Pretty Tibetan roofs are jostled and bullied by the blue tin roofs of the latest, more utilitarian buildings. Climbing higher, the temperature dropped but the sun was blazing from a perfect blue sky smudged with perfect white clouds. Not the fittest walker in the world, I’d stop for regular breathers, take a deep breath and just smile at the simple beauty of it all.

Toward the top there was a sheepfold or something, I couldn’t quite make it out. But as I approached, a big dog on a small leash leapt up from lying down and barked furiously. “Okay,” I thought, “bad idea” and so turned and started walking away. There was plenty of hill for both of us. Then, before I could quite make out what the sound was behind me – a slobbery panting – another huge, black and brown dog clamped his jaws around my right calf. The blood was flowing immediately. The pain kind of dull. Something told me not to run, be calm. So in a rather absurdly British way I tried to walk on like nothing had happened, mumbling Be calm to myself and, not really daring to look around, hoping with every fibre that the monstrous animal wasn’t still following me.

Amazingly, it worked. The pain came on, the blood was going into my boot but I kept walking. Calmly.

Once clear, I reflected on how sublimely happy I’d been on the way up and how nothing had really changed. The grassy hill and the scraggy bushes, the beaming sun and pure air, the feeling of freedom and being far away from the everyday were all still there, all still mine. Wild-dog bite or not, it didn’t matter. This was how I prefer to enjoy nature.

Untamed.

.

Not guilty

2010-09-07T10:46:00.011+08:00

I measure my life in construction sites. One day a crane appears, secretly growing taller as it hauls the latest concrete apartment block out of the ground in my neighbourhood. Every day I watch the green mesh sleeve slip silently first upward, later down. I watch the hundreds thousands millions of trips the simple caged elevator makes up the outside of the building, each one delivering workers and materials, each trip making the tiniest contribution to the overall task of building this monster. But still it goes on and on till the job is done.

So, you see, my life is pretty slow. I've engineered a quite absurd lifestyle for myself. Two (long) weekends of work a month is enough. The rest of my time is my own.

I feel a little guilty about this for some reason. It doesn't seem right and proper. You're meant to to work your balls off to be successful, aren't you? Yet here am I, all shorts and sandals with a beer on the bar and a good book continuously in my hand, living the kind of life you normally spend a lifetime saving up for. I'm not rich by any means (and goodness knows I have no pension plan - apart from planning on dying at some point) but I feel so relieved after spending my fair share of time perched on the hard seats of the gravy train to get here.

So, hang it all, I won't feel guilty.

The 12th of August marked four years for me in China. Yes, The Glorious Twelfth indeed. Wow. Four years seeing things a million miles from Newcastle. Four years doing something I thought I couldn't do (anyone who knows me know that standing in front of fifty people and speaking for an hour does not come naturally). Four years of teaching gave me the experience needed to become an examiner of the 'IELTS' English test (which Chinese students need to pass if they want to study at a British or Australian university). It means I can earn the same each month as I had done as a teacher but in a fraction of the time - and without the additional hassle of writing lesson plans or the stress of bringing those plans to life. It also means I get to visit other cities like Chongqing and Guiyang where testing is hosted too.

Happily, one of the dividends of that four year investment is that I have the time to write again. To blog too. And, since last time I wrote, I've also been taken on as a writer/editor by a local NGO which has made life so much more pleasant since writing comes a lot more naturally to me than teaching. So, in June, I had to take a trip to Hong Kong to renew my visa and register it in my new employer's name.

I loved Hong Kong: a metaphorical breath of fresh air. In Chinese it's called 'Xiang Gang' which means 'fragrant harbour'. I wouldn't fancy taking a dip in it but all the water separating the many different islands that make up the city make it a quite unique place. It must be cool to commute on the famous Harbour Ferry from Kowloon to Hong Kong Island every day.

It's also amazing how utterly different this little part of China is to the rest of the country. A sign on the elevator up to the visa office declared that the lift buttons were sterilised every thirty minutes. To be honest, it made me feel a little grubby, unworthy to be using it, but there you go. On the mainland you'd be lucky to get a 'No spitting' sign.

Then, getting the visa was a doddle. This, after a whole two months of delays and setbacks thanks to the mind-numbing bureaucracy in Chengdu to get all the necessary preparatory paperwork done. You'd go to the visa office in Chengdu with all the papers you'd been told you needed only for them to find some tiny discrepancy which would take another trip to another government office in another obscure part of the city before you would return, full of hope and expectation, only for them to find another discrepancy on the same document as before, which they could have but didn't tell you about the first time, which would entail another odyssey to more green-tiled, spit-floored waiting rooms full of visa-worn faces.

That said, the local Chengdu police could not have been more helpful when this jabbering fool turned up with his pitiful Chinese and tried, mainly through hand gestures and a bit of gurning, to explain which official document I needed them to give me to support my visa application. Turned out I was in completely the wrong police station so they threw me in the back of a - rather fittingly for Chengdu - panda car and, lights a-flashing, raced me down to the correct station. Once there, over a cup of green tea, sat outside in the main courtyard of the police station, several cops humoured me until, between their rudimentary English and my hideous Chinese, we communicated.

Yes, the Chinese has not been going well - and that's something that does make me feel guilty. It's frankly embarrassing to have been here for years and be no further on that I was four years ago after my three months of night classes in Newcastle. And the excuses don't cut much ice: "I'm concentrating on learning to be a teacher" at the beginning; "I'm too busy with lesson plans" for the next couple of years; "Nobody in Chengdu speaks proper Mandarin so I can't practise enough"; "It's too noisy in here"; "It's too quiet in here"; "Just not in the mood", etc., etc. Fact is, there's no shortage of 'foreigners' (although, as my old friend William Ward would say "I'm not foreign, I'm BRITISH!") here who have successfully learnt it from scratch. Fact is, I spend too much time at the local English pub speaking, hum, English. Fact is, my memory and application aren't what they used to be. Fact is, I just haven't made enough effort. Nonetheless, I'm giving it one final go now that I have all this free time.

So there is some purpose to life at the moment; I'm not just screwing around. But, for all the hours of study I'm putting-in, once I get outside and come to use it, it's like I'm lingually constipated - nothing with come out - and daily I get more frustrated as though my skull's going to explode and I'll be found one day lying face downwards in a grisly pool of addled Chinese vocab and grammar.

(Incidentally, given Chengdu's reputation of some of the spiciest cuisine on the planet, constipation is rarely a problem. quite the opposite. I went to get some pills the other day for what the Chinese call 'laduzi' - literally 'empty your belly' - and, after asking how long I'd had the runs for, the lady in the pharmacy was a bit taken aback when I replied "For about four years now". Still, I can't stop eating the local food. In fact, my eating habits have changed a lot recently. One of my guilty pleasures used to be have a Big Mac and large fries once or twice a month. You know how it is: you sometimes just get an irresistible urge for a Big Mac and you just can't say no. But, for some reason completely out of the blue, I've totally lost my taste for them. I can't even finish one these days and wonder what the hell I ever saw (or tasted) in them. Ugh.)

Anyway, back to the Chinese: I'm going to give it five months of serious study and, if I can't speak it then, I can at least stop beating myself up about it and so stay here and live with a clear conscience.

The great escape

2010-02-19T16:22:00.012+08:00

I hate Chinese New Year. Everything in China stops for a week or two as everyone travels home to be with their family. It makes it a pretty lonely time to be a foreigner, knowing that everyone else is having a happy holiday while you can't even find a restaurant that's open. What's worse is that when 1.3 billion Chinese are on the move you're going to struggle like hell to get a train, plane or bus ticket to go travelling in China. And even if you do, your destination will likely be packed with local tourists processing behind flag waving tour guides anyway.

So, once a year. I like to escape. 'Escape' not only the endless Chengdu winter but also to avoid the phenomenon of 'China Rage' which creeps up on even the most Sinophile of us. (I don't think I'll ever call China 'home'.)

This year I've come down to Malaysia thanks to Air Asia now offering budget, no frills flights out of Chengdu. But I've found that it's not quite so easy to escape Chinese New Year even this far away from the Middle Kingdom.

The Chinese are everywhere! Along with native Malays and Indians, they make up a substantial proportion of Malaysia's population. So this great escape has been played out to a soundtrack of "Sorry, we're fully booked because of Chinese New Year" or "Sorry prices have doubled because it's Chinese New Year" or simply "Are you kidding? Don't you know it's CNY?"

The large Chinese population means there are plenty of great places to eat. In Chengdu, they believe Sichuan food in the best in the world (this, normally from someone who's never even travelled beyond Chengdu's third ring road). But I've had some great Cantonese cooking out here. And Malay food is good too, although it invariably involves a chicken. Whereas Sichuan food tries to blow your head off with spice, Malay spice is more gentle and varied. And, unlike Thai cooking, it's not full of bits of grass and leaves that you can't actually eat.

The first thing I ate in Kuala Lumpur was 'roti', a kind of chapati which you dip in spicy sauces for breakfast, lunch or dinner. I was in a cheap restaurant next to the hostel and the last of the season's monsoon storms beat warm rain down outside. The rain was a welcome break from the insufferable heat in KL. Airco, even in the cheapest of cheap budget hotel rooms is a must - along with a good mosquito-killing machine.

KL didn't impress me much. In fact, I was booked for two nights but forfeited the second night's money in order to get out quick. Sure, it's a clean, compact and modern city and it's bliss not having to listen to car horns bleating constantly like in China but, how can I put this?, it's boring.

The Petronas Towers are worth a visit, of course. It really is a great building and very beautiful up close. I also took it in through the grubby windows of the observation platform at the KL Tower which is substantially higher than the Petronas Towers' 'Sky Bridge'. Apart from the Towers, however, there's not much else to see across the city. Even the taped commentary they give you to listen to on headphones runs out of stuff to say after a couple of minutes.

It doesn't help that - this being a Muslim country - there aren't many bars and the beer in the few is very expensive. Doh! Why didn't I think of that before I came? On the first evening, tired from the four and a half hour flight, I resorted to the ubiquitous Irish Bar full of desultory ex-pats drinking cheap lager at far from cheap prices. As with KL in general, it wasn't much fun.

The night train took me north. The 'Jungle Express' rocks and rumbles up through the spine of Malaysia, finally rolling up at my destination: Khota Baru, next to the Thai border. Then it was down to Kuala Besut to catch a boat to the paradise beaches - you know the kind - of the Perhentian Islands.

If you're going to go, this is a pretty good time to do it, CNY or not. The hotel owners try it on a little bit but there's no getting away from the fact that this is off-season so prices are pretty good and the immaculate beaches virtually deserted.

The warm, clear blue waters are great for diving or snorkelling. I swam among shoals of brightly coloured little fish which literally bumped into my facemask so unafraid were they. I even swam with small sharks and alongside mighty turtles which drifted up from the sea floor, limbs outstretched like fabulous angels before they took a breath at the surface and then, indifferent to my lumbering presence behind, slid through the sea with no more effort than thinking a stray thought.

Snorkelling should come with a health warning, however. I discovered that spending three and a half hours with your face down in the water results in one's back being roasted to a bloody red. This kind of curtailed any further sunbathing plans I might have had. Ho hum, I never learn. Maybe it's just an English thing, having so little experience of bright sunshine.

There are two principle Perhentian Islands, one named 'Big Island' and the other named - wait for it - 'Small Island'. The latter having a more lively reputation, Mr Stupid here chose the big island and, surprise surprise, once the sun went down it was pretty boring. I found myself making a treacherous journey across a rocky headland one evening to reach the only bar on the island as it was showing football: Spurs v Bolton. (See? I was desperate.) I totally misjudged how difficult it would be to clamber over the rocks and, with darkness falling and the tide rising, was forced to wade around the rocks to reach the bar where, it turned out, a family from Stockholm insisted on watching speed skating on TV all night. Jesus! And I thought I was bored before.

Planning to visit a place called Cherating next, I changed my mind on the speed boat back to the mainland when the guy driving it told me about the attractions of Langkawi Island over on the west side of the country. So, Plan Z... I got the overnight bus to Kuala Perlis and the first ferry to Langkawi in the morning which (didn't I mention it?) is - hooray! - a duty free island!

Given that my back was so bright you could probably spot it from the moon, I was forced to spend the next few days in the shade of the Babylon beachfront bar reading the short stories of Lu Xun, drinking the odd can of Tiger while the rest of the world played on the white sand and gentle blue waters out front. Never liked sunbathing anyway.

There was only one problem. It was just too bloody hot for someone from Leeds. I know I shouldn't complain but, knowing I'd be returning to the broiler of KL soon, I wanted the chance to cool down for a few days. The perfect spot was The Cameron Highlands back on the mainland, a so-called 'hill station' where Brits retreated from the tropical heat back in the day when we ruled the world.

Taking a ferry to Penang and then a bus on to the highlands, I've had a relaxing final few days here, hiking in the jungle and just chilling in the cooler, clearer air.

It'll be back to KL tomorrow and, after that, on to Chengdu and back behind the great Firewall which means this will be the last chance I have to write a blog till the next time I leave China again. (So much for all the optimism before the Olympics that everything was going to change in the PRC.)

Hopefully when I get back to Chengdu the Spring Festival celebrations will all be a thing of the past and I can look back on another new year successfully negotiated. With any luck, I'll get to write again before New Year 2011 so please keep checking back.

If you're interested, there are a couple more photos at http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=39126&id=589175623&l=c75e11433b

Getting over the Great Firewall of China

2010-02-19T16:11:00.002+08:00

As you may have noticed, I've not written anything for months. This isn't solely down to laziness. It's mainly due the fact that blogger.com is blocked in China (along with YouTube, Facebook and a bunch of other sites) so I can't get on it to write anything. Happily, I'm on holiday in Malaysia for a while so I'll try and get something written before I disappear again behind the wall.

Do please keep checking up occasionally just in case I've had another chance to get online.

The cheaper, the better

2009-02-07T11:43:00.027+08:00

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

2008-12-31T17:54:00.003+08:00

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

2008-08-07T16:24:00.010+08:00

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

2008-07-29T12:06:00.007+08:00

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

2008-07-28T17:08:00.018+08:00

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!

2008-07-28T16:35:00.005+08:00

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?

2008-05-27T16:32:00.003+08:00

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

2008-05-21T19:47:00.009+08:00

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

2008-03-29T15:52:00.002+08:00

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

2008-02-06T15:19:00.000+08:00

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

2008-01-24T12:43:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-12-15T18:33:00.000+08:00

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

2007-10-18T10:24:00.000+08:00

"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

2007-08-15T20:31:00.000+08:00

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

2007-08-05T18:59:00.000+08:00

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.

Vowel movement

2007-07-07T17:17:00.000+08:00

I've put off writing for too long now.

It's such an effort sometimes. I guess there are lots of things I could write about: the end of the school year, thoughts on how it all went, job interviews, house hunting, friends' departures to all corners of the country, me staying here in Chengdu, my forthcoming trip to Thailand. To be honest I don't know what to write but if I don't put something down on screen soon I may never do it again.

Think of what follows as a kind of laxative.

The school year barely even whimpered at its end. There was no raucous party, no tears, not even a handshake from our Vice Principal. Even amongst ourselves we couldn't manage a rousing send off when Bick - the first to leave - left. We just went to Cheers, had one too many gin & tonics with our Hui Guo Rou and went to bed by ten. We didn't even say a proper goodbye to the staff at Cheers as we'd planned. Everything just stopped.

Some of the students had made an effort which was nice. Cards and little gifts but, best of all, an exercise book with a 'Thanks' message from each member of one of the senior classes. It feels good to have made some kind of impression anyway. But I still feel a bit of a fraud being referred to as 'Teacher' which is why I'm taking myself off to Thailand to take a CELTA course. It's only a month but it's meant to be intensive and something that's recognised around the world. Better than nothing anyway.

So, what did I 'learn' this year - as I put in my blog byline?

Number one: have a point to your lessons; know what you're teaching and why. Too many times this year I've been no more than a children's entertainer (on a good day) just keeping them occupied for 40 minutes at a time. Having said that, the school never gave us any objectives either so in a way we were bound to flounder.

The school didn't really pay any attention to what we did at all. But it looked good on a Friday afternoon when the D&G mums and the Land Cruiser dads came to pick up their darlings and see - look! - foreign teachers. I have a funny feeling it's going to be a similar story even at university next year.

Living on campus sucks. Sure, it's handy for getting to lessons on time but after ten months it felt like a prison. The bells! Every forty minutes, whether you were teaching or not, there was the constant reminder that you were still at school. The music! At 7.10am every day martial tunes would start blaring before some stentorian voiced woman would screech her rousing message of the day seemingly to the whole of China through loudspeakers fixed to the roof of each school building. The traffic! Everything comes to a halt on Friday when the parents come but worse than that was the roar of buses, one after another, past my apartment on Sunday afternoon: the weekend's over, the kids are back, it's all about to start again.

A complimentary apartment - on campus - was thrown in as part of the job package offered by the university I'm off to in September. No thanks. Apart from anything else, it was bloody awful: a dark, dirty, cold place. We were also told that having anyone - that is, a woman (and particularly a Chinese woman) - stay over would be against 'Chinese morality' and was absolutely forbidden. It wasn't so much the prohibition of having someone stay the night - the chance'd be a fine thing! - but the idea that I would be constantly monitored that got me.

Instead, I've ended up here in a virtually brand new, beautifully appointed two bedroom apartment in Chengdu proper. Twenty minutes from work. Twenty minutes from the centre of town. It's a different world. It used to take up to two hours and several buses to get to the south side of the city; now I can do it in one go and in fifteen mins. And no cockroaches! Not even a mosquito!

They say moving house is one of the most stressful things you can do. Ha! Try doing it in Chinese. Or Pidgin Chinese. This was another learning experience. You wouldn't believe the days of frustration I've spent trying to get my message across to well meaning but baffled estate agents and the grim bedsits they've shown me.

It turns out there are two main types of apartment blocks: elevator buildings and non-elevator buildings. The latter are older style tenements, great for the feeling of living in a Chinese community - old folk playing mahjong in leafy courtyards - but the apartments I viewed were pretty rough. Call me picky but top of my list of 'wants' was a 'proper toilet' - not a squat one - and I'm afraid none of the traditional blocks could meet this most basic requirement. So it was an elevator building for me which basically means a modern block with, surprise surprise, a lift (unless, that is, you live on Floors 1-4 where it doesn't stop for some reason).

So it's from the seventh floor that I'm plotting my next move: to Sichuan Normal University (no, I don't know the significance of 'Normal' either) where I begin my new job in the second week of September.

Great. Two full months to worry about it.

Still, it feels good to have got the blog ticked off the things to do list. I feel better for it.

I'll try and keep a bit more regular in future.

PS. Thanks for the message, Christine. But unfortunately your blog isn't viewable in China either! I'll catch up with it once I get back to the UK.

Then and now

2007-06-23T18:12:00.000+08:00

Amazing what you can do in ten months.

Now the school year's over, hopefully I'll have a bit more time to blog... please come back and check soon.

A night at the Sichuan Opera

2007-05-02T17:29:00.000+08:00

As nights at the opera go, this was more tie-dye than black tie, a mix of old fashioned music hall acts and flamboyant but seriously underfunded snippets of traditional Chinese opera. Writing this, I feel I should really show more respect for one of those cultural must dos of Chengdu but I cannot tell a lie. It was a bit rubbish.

The audience in the theatre was mostly Chinese (this isn't some kind of watered-down montage of Chinese culture put together simply for the uninitiated European). And it started off well: a small orchestra of traditional Chinese musicians got us in the mood with a medley of typically discordant but strangely attractive music. Yes, I thought, aren't I being cultured, enjoying what I had feared might have been a bit of an ordeal for these untrained ears.

Even the first act was terrific. Garishly costumed, fabulously made-up operatic characters swept left and right across the stage, ceremoniously waving their swords and scimitars, tumbling theatrically and strutting victoriously as the good guys won out once again against the bad guys. Hey, what do you know, I like this!

Things went downhill from then on. A trio of women with unfeasibly long sleeves danced rather pleasantly. Another lady came on with a puppet on a long stick which she swished and swashed around with quite some skill, admittedly, but I was starting to force myself to enjoy the show.

A girl did a turn on a Chinese harp and a bloke did a turn on a keyboard. A couple acted out a, presumably iconic, sketch about a henpecked husband which was watchable but didn't quite reach the heights of 'vaguely amusing'. Then two more girls came on and juggled things. Things like bobbins. And plant pots. And coffee tables. In unison.

Now, that's not something you see every day.

The worst was saved till last. You know how someone will always throw the shadow of a bird onto the screen at the cinema with their hands? Well we had a guy who did this for a living. Trouble is, he wasn't really that good at it. So we had to sit through ten minutes of shaky dogs, wobbly cats, fuzzy eagles, deformed wolves and fornicating swans (don't ask...) to make it to the grand finale: a reprise of the first scene, a quick bit of ubiquitous Sichuan face changing and a last bow from the whole cast.

Phew, no encores.

Working holidays

2007-04-30T16:51:00.000+08:00

The Chinese haven't got the hang of holidays at all.

For a start, you don't get annual leave; instead you wait for the government to announce when public holidays are to take place and take your time off with the rest of the country. Cue packed trains, overbooked flights and roads groaning with traffic.

A few days ago, it was officially announced that 'Golden Week' would be between the first and seventh of May this year. It's at much the same time as it is every year but it needs to be officially announced before you can book anything for sure.

Wow, seven whole days free! Well, yes, but there's a price to pay: everyone has to work the weekend before the break to make up for lost time - and productivity. It kind of defeats the object of having a holiday at all. But it doesn't half make you appreciate it when it finally begins!

Wrong end of the stick

2007-04-26T19:02:00.000+08:00

Some friends from the UK came to visit last week and I took them to our usual restaurant. Despite ordering a great number of dishes, the staff chose to give us disposable chopsticks rather than the pucker ones you’d normally expect. It was a bit like getting plastic cutlery in a posh restaurant back home.

I looked around and noticed that every other customer had proper ones – so it wasn’t simply a case of them running out. The only explanation was that we’d been picked out as the only foreigners in the place.

I was furious. What do we have to do to be accepted here?

Talking to a Chinese friend at lunch the next day, it turns out I was half right: yes, we had been picked out as foreigners but not in a bad or offensive way. Pre-packaged, disposable chopsticks are guaranteed to be clean whereas the restaurant’s own ones probably only ever get washed in cold water.

It was a sign of extra care and a courtesy to my visitors to give us the throwaway ones. And a sobering example of how easy it is as a foreigner to get the wrong end of the stick out here.

More than a game

2007-04-07T14:36:00.000+08:00

With 1.3 billion people to choose from, you’d think China could find eleven who were really good at football. It hasn’t happened yet but they will one day. And soon. In the meantime, football takes a backseat to basketball, ping pong, swimming, athletics – and all the other things that China is really good at. It explains why, on the first day of the new football season, Chengdu’s 50,000 seater stadium played host to just 4000 fans. And that’s a good gate by all accounts.

Nonetheless, the potential for football is absolutely huge here. All the major English Premiership clubs have Far East operations. Who knows, they may get lucky, find one or two world class players and get them back to England on the cheap. But they’re also mesmerised by the thought of replica shirt sales by the million if they can only turn Chinese youngsters into fans of Chelsea, Man U or, erm, Sheffield United.

The Yorkshire club is partnered with the Chengdu side and the marketing machine is starting to roll. They’ve changed the name of the club for a start – to The Chengdu Blades. I don’t know, but it doesn’t sound quite right to me and you can bet your bottom renminbi that it doesn’t resonate much with your average Chengdu-ite either.

The website (www.chengdubladesfc.com.cn/eng/) carries breathless reports about Sheffield United’s latest goalless draw if anyone’s interested. And you can get your genuine SUFC replica shirt in the club shop if you’ve got a few more RMB to spare.

The shop was shut last week for the game against Harbin for some reason. And I think there are a few more marketing lessons to be learnt besides that. There’s no food or drink allowed in – or for sale in – the stadium; over-priced refreshments must surely be on Page One of the Football Marketing Textbook.

In case you didn’t know, Chengdu Blades play in the China Jia A League (equivalent to England’s Championship). Last season they finished fifth but hopes of promotion are high this year having spent RMB 40 million on new players. On the evidence of last Saturday, they might just make it.

The standard of football, however, is patchy to be honest. Some of the players could probably hold their own in a Championship side but others were more Sunday League than Football League. The pace of the game, too, was pretty pedestrian; it reminded me of playing on a full size pitch when I was a school kid – the pitch seemed so BIG! Having said that, some of the goals were pretty good and one or two players were very skilful (look out for a guy called Song Wang in the future).

The final score was Chengdu 6 Harbin 0. Each goal was greeted with clouds of multicoloured ticker tape billowing down onto the rows of empty seats and Chengdu’s red army of supporters going generally wild (well, they clapped and cheered a bit). Right in the middle of the main stand sat a phalanx of red-tee-shirted old ladies who sang the most melodic football songs I’ve ever heard, all orchestrated by a big bloke at the front with a huge baton which he used to conduct the brass band.

Yes, the brass band. Perhaps the Sheffield connection isn’t so daft after all.

It's the little things

2007-03-18T18:30:00.000+08:00

The average Englishman is five foot ten. Your average Chinese man is five foot six. Four inches doesn’t sound a lot but it really does make a big difference when everything is designed just that bit smaller.

Take steps. In China they seem to be a tad shallower than in the UK; not a problem until you want to climb a mountain like Qing Cheng Shan which has thousands upon thousands of them. It’s like being a hurdler and having the distance between jumps altered: it completely messes up your stride. But as well as being too small to climb comfortably one by one, they’re also too big to take two at a time. You’re in a constant state of step limbo. It’s the same sensation as riding a bike constantly in first gear: your legs are going like the clappers but you’re getting nowhere fast. (Bikes, of course, are also tiny by the way. I shouldn’t complain because the school bought me one specially but I do feel a bit like Coco the Clown under the Big Top every time I use it. I just need to get a hooter to complete the effect.)

Then there’s buses. Nine times out of ten you have to stand on a Chinese bus and hold on to the ceiling rail or the handles that dangle from them. Trouble is they’re just a bit too low for the likes of me and invariably on a crowded bus you have to put up with these big chunks of yellow plastic banging constantly on your skull. The double deckers are even worse; even Chinese people have to stoop to ‘move down the bus’ so it’s contortion time for us laowai (foreigners).

At home, my desk is so low I can’t even cross my legs. It’s like living and working in a nursery school. The sink in the kitchen is way down there somewhere so you’re likely to slip a disc doing the dishes. And cold feet are an occupational hazard in bed as neither mattress or blankets aren’t quite long enough. (In Xi’an I met a hostel owner who, as part of his renovations, was bringing in brand new, ‘western’ size beds for the sake of his foreign backpackers.) In the bathroom, the shower is at – i.e. not above – head height so you have to crouch in a rather undignified way to get properly wet. Not a pretty sight.

Hey, I know worse things happen at sea and all that, but I thought I’d mention it.

And thank goodness I’m not Dutch. On average, they’re six foot one.

Thanks to shortsupport.org for figures.

Mystery tour

2007-02-25T13:12:00.000+08:00

I’m not sure what the word I’m looking for is. Won? Awarded? Voted? Whatever, Chengdu has become one of China’s three ‘best tourist cities’.

This surprised me.

Although it’s a really nice place to live – well, when the sun is shining anyway – there’s not much here to compete with things like the Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, Terracotta Warriors or the Great Wall. So I went on the Chengdu sightseeing bus tour to find out what I’ve been missing.

There are actually two buses, one going from the centre eastward and the other – an open top double decker – west. With the wind blowing through my hair (I wish…) and camera poised, I headed west first. An hour later, I’d not taken a single picture. There are pretty tree lined avenues, a few temples hidden behind brick walls and the pleasant bustle of a busy city but there’s nothing you can really capture in a single image. While the westward trip climaxed at the rather grubby Jinsha Bus Station, the eastward one at least has a definite destination: the Chengdu Panda Base. On the way, once again, there’s not much to see apart from a lot of shopping zones and quite attractive – even Parisian – apartment blocks but the end justifies the means (as it were).

The Base is world famous for its successful breeding programme of the Giant Panda. There wasn’t a lot of successful breeding going on when I was there though. In fact they were all fast asleep (if you want to see them at their best you should get the 7.00am bus). Still, it is a good place; you get to see the babies in the nursery being pampered in a very anthropomorphic way; lots of red pandas; and several landscaped and leafy enclosures for the giant stars of the show.

I really wish Chengdu well as a tourist city. But sometimes it doesn’t help itself. The tourist map produced by its own Tourism Bureau begins: “Chengdu, the ‘Fourth City’ of China - maybe her beauty is not as grand as that of Beijing… maybe her beauty is not as fashionable as Shanghai… maybe her beauty is not as open as Guangzhou…” But, on the plus side: “Chengdu women are as gentle as the water and can be good helpmates. They are good at keeping house…”

It is true, however, that the city has a very relaxed vibe (just look at the pandas!). It also has something Beijing doesn’t have: a proper river running through the middle of it. So the best part of my day was sitting in the sunshine on the riverbank sipping a bottomless glass of tea, slurping beef noodles and just watching the world go by.

Now that’s what I call Chengdu.

Happy New Year

2007-02-19T20:25:00.000+08:00

It's like the set of '28 Days Later' here at school. Everyone's gone away. All the shops are shut. Worse still, all the local restaurants are shut. I didn't realise what was happening till the last minute so was lucky to get a couple of bits of chicken to keep me going over the weekend. Pretty fed up with it now but I still don't know when Spring Festival celebrations will finish or things get back to normal. At least the American fast food stalwarts are open if I make the trek into town. Colonel Sanders' chicken tastes a damn sight better than mine.

New Year's Eve was Saturday and it was pretty spectacular. I'm not sure if there was a public display in downtown Chengdu - there's actually a ban on fireworks inside the First Ring Road - but I chose to do what I think most Chinese do and stay in, watching the traditional TV spectacular, going outside only at midnight to soak up the atmosphere and sniff the gunpowder thick air.

The TV was fascinating. It was a bit like the Royal Variety Performance in the UK, a mish mash of song & dance with not a second's thought given to pushing any artistic envelopes. There's even a Chinese Lionel Blair who hosted it. Scary.

There were a few things, however, you'd not get on the Royal Variety show. There were three wonderful performances celebrating the army, navy and airforce complete with fantastically costumed dancers wearing combat fatigues, lots of gold braid or white flight helmets respectively. The background video, meanwhile, showed Chairman Mao and Deng Xiaoping, among others, shaking hands and smiling a lot.

Another set piece featured a woman celebrating the fact that it was her responsibility to do the housework. I can't see that playing too well back home.

Venturing down the road at midnight, you have to say the Chinese are good at fireworks. Big, big fireworks. I always remember them being stuck in milk bottles and being lit one by one when I was a kid. But here people buy huge crates of the things which look more like the rocket launchers you see on the back on trucks in war zones. Only war zones are probably a bit quieter.

Talking of which, school starts again on Wednesday. Fingers crossed for a happy new year.

Building sights

2007-02-14T11:47:00.000+08:00

I am so lucky to be travelling around China 'off-season'. Everywhere I go there are very few tourists, prices are lower for a lot of things and I've had the pick of places to stay. There are a few backpackers around and the odd gaggle of tourists who, all wearing the same (invariably red) baseball caps, follow their flag-waving tour leader as they're herded from one spot to another but I'm glad I'm doing the sights now and not with a billion other people in summer.

Even the weather's been brilliant on the whole - clear, crisp and cool days with stunning blue skies. (Here in Chengdu, skies are a uniform milky white; it's like living in limbo weather and it plays with your head. So to get out from under nothingness was invigorating.) But for every Ying there's got to be a Yang: this is the time of the year when the tourist sights get themselves spruced up for the summer (and for the Olympics) so a lot of places I've been to are swathed in green construction tarps and obscured by scaffolding.

Throughout Beijing, streets are lined with hoardings covered by developers' visions of the future: lots more malls basically. Take a peep behind and you see shabby old shops, derelict and aerosol-sprayed with the Chinese character for "demolish". I've got no high horse to jump on here. Expecting Beijing to keep every last one of its grubbiest hutongs would be like expecting London to have kept its Dickensian squalor to "protect its past". It'll be interesting to come back and see what goes up instead in a couple of years' time though.

Outside of the city, too, this is the time to look forward to high season. I took a trip out to the Summer Palace (which, as the information signs all around emphasise, again and again, was ravaged by British and Japanese invaders). It's a huge park whose current form dates largely from the Eighteenth Century (although the park had been a royal retreat since the Eleventh) and is dominated by Kunming Lake which takes up two thirds of the park's area.

A bit disappointing, then, that the lake had been drained when I visited. Still, it was a good day out walking around this monumental puddle, over fairytale bridges, in and out of mystical pavilions and taking in the whole thing from the summit of Longevity Hill (it probably sounds better in Chinese).

In Xi'an too, construction is the order of the day. Even the hostel I first went to was being done out. Apart from making it generally bigger and better, the guy there said they were also putting in longer beds to accommodate foreigners more comfortably. He paid for a taxi to take me to their sister hostel which was in an even better location (it's the Han Tang Inn, if you're interested, and it got a five star rating from me for what that's worth).

Of course, the main thing most people go to Xi'an for is to see the Terracotta Warriors and I was no different. I took a public bus for the hour long journey and blindly got off when everybody else did. It wasn't the Warriors though, but the tomb of Qin Shi Huang - the first emperor of a unified China and in whose honour the Terracotta Army stand guard. As the Rough Guide says, there's not much to see on this huge mound of earth but it does bring to life the stories of what's meant to be hidden below. They say there's an entire city down there with rivers of mercury and heavens picked out with pearls for stars and the emperor's body at the centre of it all. Two and a half thousand year old booby traps await any intruders; I understand that some exploratory soundings have been taken to verify the truth of the legend but no excavation has yet taken place. It doesn't half make you wonder though...

The accidental trip to the tomb also gave a sense of scale to the whole monument. The warriors that have been uncovered are a further two kilometres west from here - God only knows what's in between and still to be found.

Reaching the army finally, you're met first by a vast car park and then the official souvenir superstore. You walk up an avenue of newly built and half-built, generally empty retail opportunities on your way to the burial site itself. To be honest it's all being done in the best possible taste and, as one of the world's top ten tourist attractions, you'd expect there to be a lot of development going on, wouldn't you? (The only thing that got to me was the persistence of the tour guides looking for trade - but I've had my rant about this already below.)

For all the construction going on though - and apart from Kunming Lake - I've generally not been disappointed by the sights I've seen. Crikey, you'd have to have a heart of clay not to be moved by the lines and lines of warriors staring fixedly ahead that greet you in the first gigantic hall erected over the original pit of the Terracotta Army. They say that, although the bodies were mass produced, the heads are all unique; they were all lined up facing east before being entombed beneath massive wooden rafters, straw matting and tonnes and tonnes of earth on top. You've seen the pictures, watched the documentaries and read the articles in National Geographic so there's not much more I can add here apart from one thing: do come and see them for yourself!

Huaqing Pool is on the way back to Xi'an where, for centuries, emperors bathed in the waters from the hot spring (and where Chiang Kaishek was arrested in the 'Xi'an Incident', 1936). Today it's a collection of more modern pavilions and pagodas and the site for theatrical extravaganzas in the summer but, guess what, it was mostly closed for refurbishment when I was there. No great disappointment to be honest.

Xi'an is a lovely city though. I don't know if you've ever come out of the train station in Amsterdam but it's a fantastic sight with the Damrak stretching out in front of you; you feel you're at the heart of things straightaway. I got the same feeling at the station here; you're met by the majestic medieval city wall stretching away into the distance left and right while a huge arch invites you into the ancient city itself.

Thoroughly modern inside the walls, there are still plenty of sights to see but everything is on a manageable scale and you feel like you can relax here much more than in a megapolis like Beijing which just leaves you completely knackered.

But you've got to go to Beijing. You've got to see the Forbidden City. Surprise, surprise, two of the main halls were all wrapped up in scaffolding and mesh when I visited but the place is so vast that you can put the disappointment behind you and move on to the next amazing thing. It just gets better and better the further you go. The designers even had the foresight to build the whole thing facing south so you take all your pics with the sun behind you and, believe me, everywhere you look there's a must have photo. Hooray for digital cameras!

My final Beijing trip was the big one: the Great Wall which was initiated, incidentally, by Qin Shi Huang (remember him? The one under the mound of earth... the Terracotta Emperor... try and keep up.)

There are many different sections of the wall that you can visit. The most popular is the bit at Badaling which is the one you see most on telly. (For some reason I have the image imprinted on my mind of George Michael and Andrew Ridgley being there, way back, when they were one of the first western pop acts to play China. Odd really.) It's been largely reconstructed (oh, not that old argument again...) and is infested with hawkers, lined with souvenir shops, etc., etc. Basically, not the bit I wanted to see.

Instead we headed further west, stopping in the middle of nowhere to pick up a local guide before winding our way on foot up the side of one of the huge hills north of the capital. Two ancient watchtowers looked down at us from the highest ridge.

Eventually we scrambled our way onto the wall itself, standing up to see how it winds miraculously along the very highest parts of all the hazy hills stretching into the distance on all sides. Neatly paved and wide enough for a horse and chariot to pass, you wonder how the hell they did it. How many people died up here toiling in the freezing cold? But what audacity to even think of doing it - let alone getting it done. It's a place you have to see without the paraphernalia of the Twenty First Century to feel the remoteness and the vastness and the loneliness.

It's the one sight in China that I was most glad to find not under construction.

A little knowledge

2007-02-13T14:48:00.000+08:00

She was selling what looked like black pudding from a frying pan at the side of the cobbled street in Lijiang's 'Old Town'. Could it possible be?

"What is that?" I asked in Chinese.

"It's a delicate mixture of pork fat and oatmeal blended with goat blood and a little of the local liqueur which is then roasted over a log fire and smoked for three weeks in a hut on the western side of the Snow Mountain", she replied in the local Naxi dialect...

No, of course not! Who knows what the hell she said? But it illustrates the frustration of knowing a tiny little bit of Mandarin which is rendered completely useless when people actually reply to you.

The black pudding was delicious though.

Not so handy gadgets

2007-02-13T14:21:00.000+08:00

My Sony Walkman, Casio camera and Sony-Ericsson mobile are all beautifully designed. They're small, sleek, stylish and very user friendly. So much thought must have gone into the designs to make hi-tech accessible to a technophobe like me.

But take a look at the bucket of stuff I have to take with me to keep them all working! Is it asking too much for manufacturers to come up with a single recharging/downloading system so you could travel with just one cable?

A different world

2007-02-12T18:45:00.000+08:00

When I left the UK, I wanted to do something "different". Well, it doesn't get much more different than Guilin in Guangxi province.

It also feels refreshingly 'different' spending a Wednesday on a bamboo raft being punted down the Yulong River.

Or simply doing nothing on a Thursday but drink tea on the terrace of a cafe in a village that's not changed much for a thousand years.

The region is one of those 'must see' spots in China with its crazy pointy hills rising eerily above the lazy green waters of the Li River. And the boat trip up the river is one of those 'must do' things (sadly it was a pretty hazy day so my photos don't really do the landscape justice).

I'd met a girl on the train from Kunming called Apple who advised against stopping in Guilin itself; she recommended heading straight for the downstream town of Yangshuo. She turned out to work there in one of the many tourist offices and looked after me very well during my stay!

The guide books describe Yangshuo as a sleepy place, somewhere to chill out. But this is one of the problems with guide books: with the lead times involved in putting one together (and perhaps you don't have the latest edition either) what you read might have been written two or three years ago. Yangshuo is no longer sleepy although it's still a pretty cool place albeit one hundred percent geared to tourism. There are no end of hostels and guesthouses and pretty streets stuffed with souvenirs. (Bar 98, by the way, is a great place for a few beers and one of the few proper, decent bars I've come across in China!)

The new 'sleepy place' is an hour's bumpy bus ride north east to the village of Xingping whose shambolic buildings and muddy lanes date back to Qing times. A great place to chill out for the day, I guess that in a couple of years this'll will be as busy as Yangshuo. If I was a property developer I'd be salivating.

Picture perfect

2007-02-12T17:37:00.000+08:00

Okay. Fair cop. I’m a hypocrite. I slammed the fake, movie set creation of Huanglong Xi village for purporting to be from the Ming Dynasty when it’s actually more bling than Ming.

But I just loved Lijiang, way down in the south west and just a couple of inches from Myanmar/Burma on my big wall map of China.

Largely flattened by an earthquake in 1996, it has been restored/rebuilt so that, ironically, the ‘Old Town’ is in fact newer than the so-called ‘New (modern) Town’. The contrast couldn’t be more clear. Climbing Lion Hill at the very centre of the town, to one side you see a sprawl of pretty utilitarian, concrete buildings but to the other there’s a sea of clay-tiled, traditional roofs all jumbled together, eddying this way and that.

Perhaps I was just lucky to visit in January when there aren’t so many people around (the narrow, winding streets might be hell in high summer) but there was a terrific lazy vibe about the place. Historically even, Lijiang would submit itself to the rule of any new emperor to save them the bother of coming to conquer the place; in truth, they knew that the town was so remote that they could go on living autonomously anyway.

The bus journey to Lijiang confirmed this remoteness. It’s situated on a huge plain surrounded by mountains on all sides – like being a tiny pea on a huge dinner plate. The plain is incredibly fertile, the climate generous, the mountain air pure and the isolation quite glorious. (A further 140 kilometres up the road is the town of Zhongdian which takes this idea of perfection even further by renaming itself Shangrila.)

At the top end of the town is Dragon Pool Park whose crystal clear pool reflects both the park’s pavilions and the majestic Jade Dragon Snow Mountain on the horizon. It’s the quintessential China photo-op and absolutely perfect.

I'll be back.

"But I asked for a sea view..."

2007-02-12T16:38:00.000+08:00

(My room at the Halfway Guesthouse, Tiger Leaping Gorge.)

Gorgeous

2007-02-12T12:39:00.000+08:00

There's a possibility that Tiger Leaping Gorge in Yunnan will one day be flooded as part of another colossal hydroelectric project. Even back in England, it was top of my list of places to visit and, having walked its entire length, it didn't disappoint...

The legend goes that hunters were once chasing a tiger through this 35 kilometer long valley, two and a half hours north of Lijiang. The tiger escaped by leaping across the gorge at its narrowest point - a legendary leap of about 30 metres across the Jinsha Jiang (Yangzi River).

What's definitely true (according to the Rough Guide anyway) is that it's the world's deepest canyon and (according to me) it's a bloody long one.

There are two routes you can take along the gorge: the high and the low. The latter follows the road so it's not such a pleasant hike but you do get close enough to hear the rushing of the water. The high route gives staggering views down to the river seemingly miles below, along the valley in both directions and up to the snowy peaks including Yulong Xia Shan (Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, 5596m).

Taking a bus from Lijiang to Qiaotou before the sun rose, I had met Thomas from Germany and Florenzia from Argentina when we stopped half way for a breakfast of baked sweet potatoes. This was fortuitous. Not only were Thomas and Florenzia great company but when the hike turned out to be a lot harder than I'd expected, it was really good to have their encouragement.

Normally, guide books are pretty conservative in their time estimates but we made the first marker just about on - not ahead of - schedule. And that was the easy bit! The killer was the section called 'Twenty Four Bends' (some say 'Twenty Eight' but I wasn't counting) which is a dusty winding path going straight upwards to a height of 2600m. It was the toughest walk I've ever done but it felt great to have done it.

Some people try and charge through the gorge in a day but we soon realised that wasn't just impossible but would be pretty daft as well. Taking regular breathers was a great excuse to just pause and look around. Every bend brought new, even more wonderful vistas of the craggy mountains opposite all set against a perfect blue sky and clouds merging with the snowy tops.

The 'Half Way Guesthouse' is another example of pretty unimaginative naming but it gave us a good target to aim for. It could have been the roughest hostel in the world and I'd still have been happy to get there; as it happens it turned out to be one of the best I've ever stayed in. My room looked out right over the gorge. It even had an electric blanket on the bed.

We hadn't seen many people all day, which was nice, and there were about a dozen of us who sat down to eat some decent food and to drink a beer or two before tiredness took over. Wow, what a day. I'd forgotten how good fresh air could be!

The second day is a lot easier as you gradually head downwards past waterfalls and through terraces of greener than green fields of rice. The goal today is Sean's Guest House which is halfway between the valley floor and the jagged peaks and directly opposite Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. We sat outside, sipping Tibetan butter tea in no rush whatsoever for a minibus to come from Qiaotou to pick us up.

Now, this is what I'd come for.

Oops! I did it again

2007-02-12T11:56:00.000+08:00

Remember a long time ago in Shanghai I got ripped off by the ‘Art Student Scam’? I thought I was just being friendly to some Chinese students and ended up being coerced into spending over RMB 500 on a painting? Since then I’ve even read about this con in the Rough Guide – albeit a bit late for me.

Well, I’ve gone and done it again in Beijing. Unbelievable. This is the ‘Tea House Scam’. After visiting the Forbidden City, I was going up the hill at the north end to get a panoramic view of the capital when two girls – students from Wuhan, don’t you know – struck up a conversation and kind of drifted along with me as I climbed the path.

Sure, it’s obvious what was happening in hindsight but, at the time, it just didn’t cross my mind what they were up to. God knows, I didn’t want the company but I’m just too damn polite or socially inept to rebuff people. At the top of the hill, however, I managed to distance myself from them among the other tourists and get back to sightseeing on my own.

But they returned and suggested going to Beihai Park. “No, I need to go back to my hotel, thanks.” I thought at the foot of the hill we’d go our separate ways but, as we were going past a tea house, they suggested just having a cup together. Okay, what harm could it do?

Sitting round a small round table, a hostess theatrically brewed a selection of tea leaves and gave us small cups to sample each one. The girls babbled on non-stop. After about eight or ten teas, the ceremony came to a pretty abrupt halt: “it’s time to pay”. The hostess reached for a price list and plonked it, unceremoniously, in front of me.

Was that 65 or 650 Yuan ? Was that altogether or each? And then the penny dropped (doh! finally). I was furious. RMB 650 is about a week’s wages. You could buy a new mountain bike with it. It’s a colossal amount of money. Doing a runner occurred to me but images of police and cells and deportation also occurred to me at the same time. Who knows? Perhaps I should have scarpered but I paid instead. The only small consolation was being able to tell another tourist at another table what was happening before he’d gone through the whole menu.

All I did was try and be nice to a couple of Chinese girls. I hope they rot in hell.

Trains, planes and automobiles. And buses.

2007-02-12T10:58:00.000+08:00

Chinese trains are incredibly reliable and punctual. Just as well if you’ve been booked on a ‘hard seat’ for the eighteen hour journey between Chengdu and Kunming. Another minute longer and you’d probably never be able to walk again.

There are five ‘classes’ of train ticket you can buy. ‘Soft Sleeper’ is a private room with four bunks and steward service; the most expensive way to travel, you can even reserve all four bunks to have the place to yourself. Or you can get lucky and have it to yourself anyway if no one else has taken any of the other ones.

‘Soft Seat’ isn’t available on all trains but does what it says on the tin, really.

‘Hard Sleeper’ describes a carriage that’s stacked with rows and rows of bunks, three high. There’s not much privacy but it’s really not a bad way to travel. The only question is which bunk to take? The bottom one has enough headroom above it to be used like a seat during the day – but your fellow bedmates are as likely to sit on it as you so you can’t always stretch out when you want to. The middle and top bunks are pretty cramped in all directions but if you don’t fidget too much you’ll sleep fine.

And then there’s the ‘Hard Seat’. Ouch. I spent eighteen hours bolt upright on one of these from Chengdu to Kunming. Although the seat’s not literally hard, after that amount of time it might as well be. There’s no leg room, especially as everyone in my carriage seemed to be moving house that day and had all their belongings with them crammed into every available – and unavailable – space.

Finally, there’s the unreserved seat ticket. The cheapest option, it gets you on the train but not much more. If, as usual, all the seats are spoken for, you stand or, more probably, squat in the aisle. It’s grim for everyone and, although people were getting off at each station on my journey to Kunming, only more got on every time as we trundled into the night.

‘No smoking’ carriages are a bit of a joke too since you can puff away at the ends of each one – and there aren’t any doors. As an ex-smoker, that didn’t bother me in the slightest but one thing I’ll never get used to is spitting indoors. In restaurants, on buses or the aisles of trains, people haul the phlegm with dramatic hacking coughs from the pit of their lungs and deposit it with a certain flourish on the threadbare carpet. It’s good etiquette, I think, to rub it in a little with the tip of your foot.

People were really pleasant though. I’ve been on night trains in England and have felt genuinely threatened by fellow passengers tanked-up on lager after a football match or something. Here there was just a sense of stoicism: we’ll get through this, just take it easy. I thought it was great how, when someone left their seat to go to the toilet one of the squatters would immediately take the vacant space and sit down. Returning from the WC, the sitting passenger would give the interloper a few more minutes’ comfort before both exchanged places once more. I like that sort of thing.

In both Hard Seat and Hard Sleeper sections, an army of neatly uniformed stewards busy themselves all through the night checking tickets, sweeping up rubbish, emptying bins, closing curtains, making everything seem as normal as possible. One trolley brings cooked food which smells progressively worse the colder it gets, the longer the journey goes on. Another is stuffed with crisps, beer (hooray!) and pot noodles. As on Russian trains, there’s a constant supply of hot water in each coach so you can make your own tea – or soak your noodles – to keep you going through the night and to wake you up in the longed-for morning.

07.17. Kunming. Tired. Grumpy. I thought I’d get a hostel and take a time-out for a day while I decided what to do next but the taxi driver had other ideas and took me to completely the wrong place. Totally uninterested in my complaints, he wasn’t going to be persuaded by my protestations, especially since I’ve only learnt phrases like “It’s two o’clock in the afternoon” and “The pagoda in the middle is blue”.

So I trudged back to the station. I decided I didn’t like Kunming much. So, great, let’s go on another marathon journey, this time on a bus!

For some reason I thought Lijiang was about one hour away from Kunming. It’s actually nine. But blimey, it was a great journey. The coach was one of these hyper modern ones with really comfy seats; you sit on a kind of upper deck while the driver – and the baggage – is below. Unfortunately it also had video screens which, in China, means only one thing: nine hours of Jackie Chan.

You can also get ‘Sleeper Coaches’ which, instead of seats, have rows and rows of metal bunk beds screwed to the floor. I thought they were pretty cool when I first saw them but imagine they’d be unbelievably cramped and unpleasant after a few hours. Unlike the train you’d not be able to take a walk to stretch your legs. And as for road safety… hmmm.

Another thing I’ve learnt recently is that you’re never likely to get stranded anywhere. Wherever you go there will be private mini buses jostling for your custom ready to take you to the nearest town for a few kuai. Or likely as not you can pick up a lift from a private car – just make sure you agree a price first.

After Lijiang (in the south west), road and rail journeys took me to Guilin (in the south east) where I discovered that sometimes special discount deals on flight tickets can make flying a viable proposition. Because you’re making trips within the country you tend to forget that the actual distances involved are often the equivalent of going from Leeds to Istanbul – and you wouldn’t think twice about hopping on a plane for that, would you?

The in-flight food’s not too good though. Last time I had one sachet of desiccated bits of lemon and another of gherkin slices. Oh, and a fairy cake.

The overall service is good but, from Beijing, I ended up flying from an airport that isn’t even mentioned in the guide books. It was all a bit third world, an ex-military airfield I think that has been quickly converted to civilian use. There was a couple of hours delay but they gave us a free hot meal and it was no real hardship.

Coming into Chengdu, I thought I’d save a few kuai by taking a private car instead of an authorised taxi. Not a good idea, to be honest, especially late at night. Once I’d got in, the driver had to keep doing circuits around the airport car park while he searched for a second passenger (if he stayed in the same place, he’d get nicked). That was a surprise for a start but eventually we drove off into the night. Only then did it occur to me that he could dump me anywhere and I’d not be able to do anything. He could take my money, my passport, everything. Oops. I tried desperately to recognise any passing landmarks to reassure myself but in the end we made it to CFLS safe and sound. And, what do you know, he even stuck to the agreed price.

Phew, it's nice to be home.

Not very Michael Palin

2007-02-11T18:49:00.000+08:00

I’m afraid I told a rickshaw driver where he could go with his bloody rickshaw. I’d told him I didn’t need one already. So what’s the point of following me and mithering me even more? I’m hardly going to say, “Oh, actually you’re right, I do want to go somewhere. It had completely slipped my mind! Thanks, let’s go”.

For the last three weeks I’ve been nagged and nagged and nagged mercilessly: postcards, picture books, tourist maps, little terracotta figures, those magnetic bean things, military medals, Mao buttons-badges-posters (you name it). Hey, everyone’s got to make a living but why can’t they take “no” for an answer?

It’s like being bitten by mosquitoes. One’s no problem, a minor irritation. But they just keep coming. And the more of them you squish or swipe, the more that turn up to have a nibble. And that buzzing, the buzzing that seems to come from nowhere!

The worst was at the Terracotta Army and the tour guides there. As you’d expect, they spoke good English but, weirdly, none knew the word “NO”. By the time I’d made the twenty minute walk from the bus stop to the entrance of the actual site, I was pretty hacked off. The final would-be official guide was quite staggeringly rude, implying I was too stupid to appreciate the exhibit without her help (how could a mere westerner possibly understand the complexities of Chinese history?) We had words; her last, spoken with real venom, were “I hope you live to regret it”.

Yes, welcome to the Eighth Wonder of the World from your friendly representatives of the Chinese government.

It’s not been the only thing that’s wound me up recently either. Take queues – or the absence of them. Up to now I’ve been pretty philosophical about the scrum to get on the bus. It’s just a different culture, a different way of doing things, nothing to get hung up about. But when you’re in a queue of just two people and a third person pushes in front, you start to wonder what the hell is going on? And what’s the point of pushing in a queue boarding a plane for god’s sake? Your seat’s reserved so what do you achieve by shoving others out of the way? Or, this is the best, why would you jostle and push in the line as it shuffles its way past Chairman Mao’s pickled body? Wouldn’t you actually want to hang back a bit and prolong your visit rather than hurrying to the other side of the hall as quickly as possible? In single file, everyone gets exactly the same view, you’re not allowed to stop to gawp or take pics, so why shove the person in front?

Why, why, why?

Does Michael Palin, ambassador for everything thoroughly British and good, ever lose his temper? Does he get ripped off in restaurants where the ‘English’ menu bears no resemblance to the local one – in either choice of food or prices. Does he get pissed off with having to haggle for absolutely everything: “But I haven’t got time to haggle!” Does he perhaps tire of people in restaurants not just casting a curious glance but staring fixedly at the apparantly amazing sight of a foreigner? Does he ever wonder where the line is between being respectful of other people’s culture and just having the piss taken out of you?

School Rules and Regulations

2007-01-09T18:14:00.000+08:00

1. Devote your love to the motherland, the people and the Communist Party of China.
2. Observe laws and regulations and develop awareness of law. Observe the school rules and regulations and observe social morality.
3. Love science; study hard; be always ready to think, to ask and to research; take an active part in social activities.
4. Treasure life. Observe safety measures. Keep fit and hygienic.
5. Develop self-respect and self-confidence and keep healthy and civil living habits.
6. Take an active part in physical labour; keep industrious and frugal; do whatever you can by yourself.
7. Be filial to your parents; respect your teachers and elders; be polite to others.
8. Care for the collective, get on well with your classmates, help each other and care for others.
9. Be honest and always keep to your word; correct your errors once you find them out; be responsible.
10. Love nature and care for the environment we live in.

No thanks

2007-01-08T20:57:00.000+08:00

The Chinese take the piss out of foreigners because we say “Thanks” for everything. Xie xie this, xie xie that. They think it highly amusing because for them “thanks” is something you say when there’s something worthwhile thanking someone for. Or to put it another way (as someone did recently to me): “If you say it all the time, how will I know when you really mean it?” So where we say “That’s okay” or “It’s a pleasure”, the standard Chinese response is Bu yong xie – no need for thanks.

(Thank you for reading, by the way, you were great.)

A corner that is forever England

2007-01-08T20:44:00.000+08:00

Wherever in the world that English is ‘taught as a foreign language’ there’s a phenomenon called ‘English corner’. It’s a gathering, outside of school hours (and, often out of school entirely) where keen students can come together and talk, you guessed it, English. The other day Bick and I got invited up to the local university to be guests at one. It was quite exciting to begin with: we were treated like pop stars and literally mobbed by about a hundred students – happily, mostly girls which was nice. An hour and a half followed having more or less the same conversation about whether I like China, what London’s like (“Is it really foggy all the time?”) and (sorry, Winston Churchill, Wellington, William Shakespeare, et al) David Beckham.

A long way to come to avoid Cliff Richard

2007-01-08T18:56:00.000+08:00

Let’s face it, “Misteltoe and Wine” is the worst Christmas song ever. Funnily enough, you don’t hear it much here. Nor any of the other dozen or so tunes that take over the British airwaves before the big day. That’s not to say it’s a Xmas free zone though; I heard stores pipe carols like “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” to the heaving hordes of shoppers (rather memorably back-to-back with “Small Dick Man”). Some make no effort at all; others dress their windows elaborately. Department stores, tea houses, karaoke bars – I’ve seen them all with the same, curious, fifties-style happy Santa face and Merry Christmas script swathed in pretty raggedy bits of tinsel.

However, there’s no official Christmas holiday; my school doesn’t mark it and, perhaps, frowns a little on too much being said about it at all. In general, it’s just an excuse to spend lots of money for no good reason (sounds familiar, huh?). Similarly – for no good reason – the thing to do at Christmas is buy an inflatable hammer and hit people with it on Christmas Eve. I’ve asked and asked but NOBODY knows the significance beyond the assertion “It’s fun” (which is also debatable).

We were given Christmas Day off by the school (only, I think, because we asked for it) and tried to make the most of what we had: duck legs instead of turkey and a melange of winter vegetables expertly cooked up by Rachel in her tiny kitchen. Wine, beer, presents and an afternoon of playing cards followed. Perhaps it was the hangover from the previous night’s session or perhaps it was just inevitable given our situation but an air of gentle melancholy had sunken upon us by the time we parted. We were back to work the next day.

Some of the kids had marked Christmas at home in the weekend (by “marked” I mean they got some presents). But I noticed no real excitement about the whole business either in the run up or in the aftermath and I decided not to devote too much time to it in lessons. Rachel set aside no less than four weeks for it up to the 25th culminating in cutting out snowflakes which the kids got to stick on the windows of their classrooms.

Said snowflakes were torn down, however, along with the cut-out Christmas tree posters. The teachers felt she’d overstepped some invisible mark: even a pretty secular snowflake was too much apparently.

I did just one lesson on the subject (there was no way I could compete with snowflakes) and it was a lot less controversial. With my pedagogic hat on, I began with a quick discussion about Christmas to gauge, as much as anything, what they knew already: “Old Man Christmas”, “Christmas socks full of presents” and “Christmas postcards” was about the sum of it – along with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. So, with my Santa hat on instead, we played that old Christmas favourite Pass the Parcel (Yes, I know, I know…). Hours and hours I spent wrapping fourteen Christmas presents in layers and layers of festive paper (Note to self: NEVER do this again. EVER.) Bafflement reigned to begin with but slowly, and once I’d explained things more clearly, they got the idea so that in most cases the game was a hoot. And that even when I couldn’t find the ‘Xmas Tunes’ on my Walkman so we passed the parcel to George Thorogood and the Destroyers singing “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer”. All very Christmassy.

Or – it just had to happen, didn’t it – the power went off in one of my classes so, highly trained as I am, I improvised… by singing.

Those poor, poor kids, is all I can say.

Also unchristmassy, I was tempted to corruption by stopping the music when the best behaved kids (or the ones who’d given me Christmas cards) got the parcel. But, in the end, I did it fair and square. Invariably it was the class troublemaker, bully or loudmouth who won it that way every time. A lot like life really.

What other Christmas things could I do? How about getting them to listen to a seasonal song a couple of times and fill in the missing words? Brilliant! But carols? Too religious I’m afraid. Pop tunes? The lyrics are all way to complicated. So: something slow, simple, with clear lyrics and an unmistakable Christmas flavour.

Hmmmm, let me think.

I may have avoided Sir Cliff but this year, for eight times a day, every day for a week, there was no getting away from White Christmas and bloody Bing Crosby.

Good excuse No. 4028: There was an earthquake…

2007-01-04T17:39:00.000+08:00

Honest! The recent hiatus in my blog was caused, not by laziness as is usually the case, but by the earthquake near Taiwan which left the whole of China without the internet and email. Funny, fifteen years ago we’d barely heard of the www but take it away now and it doesn’t half leave you feeling isolated and out of touch. Still, I bet I didn’t miss much. No doubt Chelsea just went on winning. And I bet you they’ll never go ahead and execute Saddam...

More blogs are ready but the connection's still pretty dodgy so I'm not sure how long it'll take to get them uploaded. Please keep coming back to check!

A colder eye

2006-12-14T14:40:00.000+08:00

It's turned cold. While it’s not sub-zero or anything extreme, it’s worse than that in a way: a damp, clinging cold that you never seem to warm up from until you get back into your bed at night. Waking up, it’s cold; walking to school, it’s cold; the classrooms are cold; the restaurant at lunch and in the evening is cold. It’s a far cry from the 35°C temperatures which welcomed us all those months ago, the tee-shirts and shorts and ice cold beers in the open air. But it’s symptomatic of another subtle change – an inevitable one I think. Up to now the blog has been a wide eyed catalogue of enthusiastic observation where everything has been new and interesting. But gradually a routine sets in, the holiday high is interspersed with more and more moments of reflection, more doubts and questions or criticisms as I observe things now with a somewhat colder eye.

I suppose it’s not quite the 9-5 routine I left behind in the UK (especially when every day begins at 6.30 with a burst of Ode to Joy or The Blue Danube Waltz or some other classical favourite blasting from the loudspeakers all around the roof of the school) but a pattern has definitely established itself. Sunday-Monday night is sleepless, wondering if what I've planned for lessons is going to work; you wouldn't believe the nightmares I've had. So Monday then comes and lessons begin. Normally one plan (either Seniors or Juniors) will be fine but the other will inexplicably bomb. Tuesday and Wednesday are spent adjusting-changing-fretting over the plan which by Thursday is starting to work and by Friday is probably the best lesson plan ever. Saturday is ring-fenced as a day-off whatever happens. Then hey, what do you know, it's Sunday again - 'Lesson Planning Day’. I’m sure it shouldn’t take a whole day but there you go.

Generally there are four lessons in a day which doesn’t sound like much but it adds up to well over 500 individual pupils each week. And, although you might be in class for as little as 80 minutes on a quiet day there’s never quite enough time to get off the campus and do anything fun.

I go to 'Cheers' of an evening; it used to be for a few beers and a book or a chat with the others but it’s become way too cold to hang around so food has become fast and beer brisk. Open to the elements on two sides, you also need to dress for dinner there now: I’ve become a ‘hoody’ since winter took hold. I’ve a fleece and a waterproof on top of that too. At least I don't get food stains on my shirts anymore.

Hoody, fleece and waterproof is the new uniform inside school as well. Heating? Pah! Get those windows open and let the fresh air in! Funny, I think it's all to do with SARS and not passing on germs but everyone will happily sneeze at a hundred miles an hour in all directions without a second thought.

At home, too, all my neighbours have their windows wide open and simply put on an extra layer as the temperature drops another degree in their living room. For me, the air conditioner is turned to ‘hot’ and blasts out warm air 24x7. It’s like living in front of a big hairdryer.

What frustrates me most, though, is my failure to make good progress with learning Chinese. With an 18 hour working week I can hardly use the excuse that “I haven’t got time” although that’s exactly how it feels. My daily routine takes me between my apartment and school and restaurant and back, during which time the only Chinese I need is the word for ‘beer’ and the phrase “pork and mushrooms”. Sometimes I’ll get into a faltering conversation there, which is great – briefly. But what I’d expected was to be immersed in a Chinese Babel where I’d simply be forced to learn or (better still) where I couldn’t help but do so.

Excuses, excuses, I know.

Another preconception was that there’d be more interaction with the Chinese teachers. (This is a little disingenuous too because at the very beginning I was incredibly relieved that we weren’t being closely monitored in case they found out I didn’t have a clue what I was doing!) One or two will stop to have a quick word as they pass in the corridor and most will smile or nod a ‘good morning’ but beyond that, nothing.

No social interaction is one thing but there’s no professional interaction either. We’ve no idea how we’re doing or whether we’re doing what we’re meant to be doing. We hardly see our boss, the Vice Principal. And when the school gets students to produce English plays for a competition no one thinks to ask the English Language Assistants to get involved. Is it possible we're only here to tick a box on a parent's checklist: native English speaking staff? Check.

As I said before, it’s inevitable that some readjustment from my dewy eyed enthusiasm would take place and I’m sure some further adjustment will happen, pendulum-like. Still, I’m counting the weeks to our Spring Break which begins in mid January (four lesson plans to go).

They say it starts to warm up again in March. In the meantime, I’m happy to weather this downturn and just wrap up warm.

PS. Thanks Danny & Faz for your kind comments. Even if one of you is just a cat.

Thanks for the comment, Faz the Cat

2006-12-13T11:44:00.000+08:00

... but who are you?

Another day, another temple

2006-12-06T16:27:00.000+08:00

I'm not sure if the title of this entry displays honesty or pure philistinism, but I am sure you know what I mean. This one was the Qingyang Gong Temple which, to be fair, was different insofar as it's not up a mountain but within the sprawl of urban Chengdu on the first ringroad. (Ringroads to Chengdu are like the holes on the belt of a middle aged man.)

As you can imagine, Chengdu First Ringroad is a pretty busy street full of cars and car horns, scooters and suicidal pedestrians slipping between, shouting a lot. All the more weird then, to step through the gate of the Qingyang Gong temple and find that you leave all that behind; not spiritually (you know me better than that) but literally!

Oh, perhaps it is getting to me a little bit because I really enjoyed this visit. Originating from the Ming Dynasty and added to in the Qing, there are are a series of pavilions or halls dedicated to Taoist deities including the Three Purities Hall which houses huge golden figures. At its entrance are two bronze goats, worn smooth by visitors hoping for a bit of good luck to rub off on them.

Each of the other shrines, in clouds of sweet incense, harbours more gargantuan deities, gold and colourful with eye popping expressions. And all around are trees as golden, at this time of year, as the gods themselves.

I find myself warming to the Chinese approach to restoration now too. Thinking about it, you keep your home in good nick by constant repair and replacement; and that, really, is what's happening not only here but in Beijing too, where the Forbidden City is undergoing a fifteen or twenty year overhaul project. Where the village of Huanaglong Xi just felt wrong a few weeks ago, contrived and downright plasticky, this one felt right - possibly because the entire ambience of the place has been preserved along with the wood and the paint and the tiles.

Next week I'll be off to a wholly different kind of temple. A huge structure with bright colours - mostly blue and yellow - it's a brand new one dedicated to sheer consumerism. And its name is Ikea China.

Hooray! It's exam time!

2006-11-16T18:35:00.000+08:00

I remember thinking when I was a kid - or maybe even when I was a student (a long time ago, either way) - how wonderful it would be to have no more exams ever again. Or how wonderful it'd be to dot that final fullstop on that final sheet of the final exam ever.

Of course you never mark that actual moment in reality; it's only in the future that you realise that you have indeed done your last one.

But this week has made me look back on that thought and really appreciate the fact that, yes, I'm bloody privileged to have got all that business out of the way now.

Not so for the kids at CDFLS. They should be used to it really since they're constantly tested (not to mention the fact that they have lessons from eight in the morning till as late as nine at night). The Juniors actually have tests every Sunday when they return from an all too brief weekend trip home (although they'll have spent most of the time doing their homework even there; and many kids' homes are too far away to make getting away viable so they're stuck in school permanently).

But no, you don't get used to exams do you? And it affects different people in different ways. In the run up to exam week I had classes who were completely shattered from all the work they were doing, others were more fractious, others grumpy or just subdued.

The best one for me was having a fight break out in a class last week. Two lads on the other side of the room just suddenly launched themselves at each other, fists flying everywhere. I literally had to tear them apart before reseating them in opposite corners and continuing the lesson (which, funnily enough, went well from then on, some tensions seemingly released).

Exam time means something else entirely for us Teaching Assistants. It's a chance to relax and get away for a couple of days. It'd have been great to run those two days into a long weekend but, hey, life's not like that, is it? So some of us decided to take a day trip to Qing Cheng Shan, the mountain home of Daoism about 60 kilometres west of Chengdu.

At just 1600 metres, it's not the tallest of the Daoist sacred mountains but it still gives you fantastic views across yet more mountains from its templed peak.

Daoism? Taoism? Hey, it doesn't really matter because the whole philosophy is about 'going with the flow'. More than that, it's about getting in tune with nature and Man's place in it - or, more specifically Man being a part of it. The key word there (did you spot it?) was 'philosophy'. When Lao Zi mounted his water buffalo 2600 years ago and disappeared into Tibet (and, better still, into solitude) all he left behind was a meagre few pages as a summary of his thoughts on The Way of Power. Or, basically, what he thought life was all about.

It was a philosophical treatise, not really a religion at all.

Nonetheless, Qing Cheng Shan - and many more so-called 'sacred mountains' - are dotted with elegant shrines (and sometimes full blown temples) among the trees, the rocks, the springs and waterfalls. I've yet to work out why the shrines and temples are necessary at all when there's no god involved and who one is actually praying to but I'm still a novice at this. Can I get back to you on that?

One thing's for sure: I'd never make a good pilgrim. Walk up a mountain - even along beautiful paths cut over centuries among towering trees and greenness everywhere? Hell, no. To the cable car! We did, however, walk the last few hundred metres to the Shangqing Gong (which features calligraphy by Chiang Kaishek oddly enough) and the tower which crowns the summit (featuring a gaudy twelve metre tall golden buffalo which wouldn't be out of place on a carnival float).

Further gaudy gifts are available from the concessions in each shrine and, as a westerner, you're pounced on and harangued to buy buy buy. I spotted the calligraphy that tops and tails this blog entry and, even after bargaining, am sure I paid through the nose for it. From what I gather, though nothing is straightforward in translating Chinese characters to western meaning, it's to do with endurance, patience and perseverance: just what you need at exam time.

Exclusive: the Pat & Rachel tapes

2006-11-13T20:15:00.000+08:00

So I said to my English teacher colleague, Rachel, "Put on your blouse".

Surprised, she replied "I can put on my blouse. I can put my blouse on. I can put it on."

"Put it on," I repeated. Just to make sure.

For years to come at Chengdu Foreign Languages School, students will be torn between (or totally confused by) a Great Yarmouth 'Ba-r-th' and a Leeds 'B-a-th', a southern 'Gl-arse' and a northern 'Gl-ass', now that Rachel and I have spent four weeks laboriously recording 120 lessons' worth of repetition dialogues for them.

"Can we stop now?" "Yes, we can. We can stop now. Yes, now we can stop. Yes, now it's time to stop."

Back to school

2006-11-02T20:03:00.000+08:00

I can write the Chinese character for “I” now. It’s only taken three months to manage this. And now there’s a mere 4,999 more characters to have a ‘working’ vocabulary. We have lessons every Wednesday at 9 o’clock; the lessons are good but I can’t help thinking that once a week just isn’t going to be enough (especially if I don’t do my homework). This week I’m meant to study the sentence “I teach at Chengdu Foreign Languages School”, part of which you can see in the picture. I have to admit there’s something satisfying about getting the characters right. It’s not just the technicality of the letter (like knowing the difference between a ‘b’ and a ‘d’) but when you do it right it simply feels right and looks beautiful.

It’s helping in restaurants too. Gradually I’m starting to recognise the odd character here and there so I can, for instance, pick out a chicken, pork or beef dish. It might be chicken soup or beef testicle but at least I’m not totally bemused by a Chinese menu. I can spot the character for ‘big’ as in ‘big reductions’ or ‘big portions’ which is handy; and I know the character for China which, as you’d expect, you see everywhere. Knowing the difference between ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gents’ is useful too.

Speaking-wise, I’m terribly lazy. If there’s someone else with me I’ll let them do the talking so I don’t practise as much as I should. I really need to get out on my own and make myself talk (hell, I don’t say much at the best of times – even in English!). But come January we get six weeks off and I’ll be travelling properly on my own for the first time since I’ve been here.

Can’t wait.

Man Utd 2 Chelsea 1

2006-10-31T21:31:00.000+08:00

It's a sad scoreline but there's still everything to play for. Two red replica tops spotted in school to just the one glorious blue one, so far. But I'm doing everything I can to turn this around over the course of the season. I've already got an entire class of Juniors whose favourite player is Shevchenko. Now we just need to turn their raw enthusiasm into replica merchandise.

(Oh, and this just in... a familiar story, I'm afraid: Newcastle nil Liverpool nil.)

Was it something I said?

2006-10-31T21:07:00.000+08:00

Sadly the good people of the People's Republic can no longer read my blog. Perhaps it was that very subversive piece on mooncakes or the savage irony of those noticeboard photos, I just don't know. But the blog is now completely off limits to anyone in China - including me. Hopefully you can still read this even if I can't. Otherwise, as they say, watch this space. Literally.

True too.

2006-10-25T23:16:00.000+08:00

Hope so...

A question of taste

2006-10-23T20:59:00.000+08:00

The Rough Guide to China describes Huanglong Xi as "a charming riverside village [of] understated Qing dynasty streets - all narrow, flagstoned and sided in rickety wooden shops". Some 40 kilometres south of Chengdu, the original village dates back to the Seventeenth Century but, to be honest, I'm more ancient than most things in the Huanglong Xi of today.

There's conservation, there's renovation and there's reconstruction. This charming village is very much in the latter camp. It also has its own logo which can't be a good sign. Through the 'traditional' gateway which was nearer four months old than four centuries, you are channeled along the main drag, a traditionally flagstoned tourist superhighway lined either side by souvenir shops brimming with the latest traditional tat.

Immaculately decorated rickshaws with immaculately dressed runners charging very untraditional prices parked themselves at the top of the street. We passed them to find more streets from yesteryear. Oliver, our guide for the day, excitedly pointed out the Qing Dynasty bank and the Qing Dynasty gambling den with their papier mache props and bicycle lock padlocks to stop you getting too close.

Elements of the village are actually genuine; every gnarled twist of the nine hundred year old banyan tree which is propped up by huge carved dragons ('Huanglong' means 'Yellow Dragon', by the way) was thoroughly real. The Chinese Opera stage had a sign claiming it to be 'remarkably preserved' though I wouldn't bet my life on it; the buildings in the temple kind of looked old but they just didn't feel right. It felt like a film set - which is actually was for, among many other movies, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

To the water next. To be honest it's a pretty pointless trip up the grey green river passed a couple of fishermen, a boarded up temple and some holiday homes but it's a relaxing way to while away an hour before lunch.

Oh yeah, lunch. Deep breath now: crispy deep fried prawns, rice topped with sugar and strips of pork, bowls of tofu, stewed eggplant in spicy sauce with garlic, a kind of egg and tomato omelette, a haunch of boiled pork with crispy crackling, spicy bream in a hot sauce, chicken with red and green peppers and peanuts, salty shredded potato, 'Twice-Cooked Pork" (everyone's favourite, this one: pork that's been roasted and then fried mixed with a rich sauce and a variety of fried vegetables), stewed seaweed soup and garlic cabbage. All washed down with a crisp cool beer and finished off with an inexhaustable supply of cleansing, refreshing green tea.

Tasty.

No smoking

2006-10-18T16:17:00.000+08:00

It’s a myth that everyone smokes in China. Sure, it’s not like England where smoking is akin to being a Communist in fifties America. It’s okay to have a tab in the staff room at school, or to smoke in the corridor (although even that is unusual to be honest). Before I came, I had the impression that all teachers smoked in class too but I can now confirm that to be absolute bollocks.

It’s the same as being told before I came out here (Alan H, are you reading?) that I’d have to do ‘night soil’ – put the contents of your toilet bucket outside for collection and use as fertiliser. No, after more than two months, I’ve not had to do that. (Wait, though, for the inevitable blog entry on Chinese-style toilets in general: the sights and smells, the squatting, the very communal experience of it all…)

Buses are smoke-free. Planes, of course. Shops and offices generally too. Women, on the whole, don’t smoke – and if they do the word on the street is that they’re ‘on the game’. Strange, then, that Chinese men find it normal (expect, even) for western girls to smoke: you can see how their minds work.

In restaurants it’s okay to light up but, there too, you find it’s a small minority who choose to do so. It’s okay in taxis as well. In fact, drivers will often offer you one. Travel books tell you that smoking is so much a part of the culture that you’ll actually offend people by refusing the offer of a cigarette. More rubbish, I’m afraid.

On 23 January 2007 it’ll be two years for me without one. Happily, I don’t think living in China is going to change a thing on that front.

True.

2006-10-10T10:30:00.000+08:00

The Wild West (Part Three)

2006-10-10T09:56:00.000+08:00

For all the planning that goes into uprooting to China or even just getting away for a few days, it’s the unplanned and unexpected things that turn out to be special. The trip to the lakes on the second day came from a chance meeting in the hostel and, looking back, I'd not have missed it for the world.

So it went with the third day too. We had climbed Paoma Shan in the morning and found ourselves at a loose end in a bar after lunch (by the way, Tibetan butter tea is probably the best drink in the world; it’s like the most comforting hot milk before you go to bed that you’ve ever had – but with the comfort factor multiplied by a hundred).

We went for a wander to the bottom end of Kangding in the vague search for a temple. “The bottom end” is probably a fitting description of south Kangding although there are plenty of apartment blocks being built there; somebody somewhere knows a good investment when they see one.

Passing a group of saffron robed monks loading a truck, we headed up a bank and turned a corner to find a small hut where Buddhist nuns were turning vast prayer wheels and chanting rhythmically. A little further on was the entrance to the monastery itself.

Wow. A grassed courtyard is surrounded on three sides by the monks’ accommodation. Straight ahead is the business end of the monastery: rows and rows of coloured prayer flags draw your eyes toward the shrine. Huge white banners shrouded the entrance from view and the whole building was crowned by a colourful, carved roof with characteristic upward pointing eaves. Behind the curtain and in a dimly lit cloud of incense a single monk oversaw worshippers from high on the left hand side. Everything was a festival of colour: reds and golds. And dead ahead was a huge benevolent-looking Buddha figure gently welcoming you inside.

Now, I’ve not got a religious bone in my body but, as with great cathedrals, anyone can appreciate the theatricality – the sheer drama and beauty – of a place like this.

Coming out, we passed ‘The Knapsack Inn’, a hostel similar to the ‘Black Tent’ where we were staying. We thought we’d check it out and have a relaxing cup of tea in the hope of maintaining that Buddha vibe a little longer.

Just inside the gate in the yard, a Chinese couple were crouched around a ‘range’ style wood-burning stove. They invited us to sit down and have a drink. So we did. And even without talking everything just felt right. Smiles can say so much.

Monks wandered by, going to or from the temple. More smiles. Two or three more people came and sat down: one, a Canadian guy called Philippe, seemed to speak the most authentic sounding Chinese I’ve heard from a westerner and made me want to learn it even more. Chat, chat, chat; baked potatoes appeared from the stove; a spicy Sichuan sauce came from the kitchen. An American fellah, a couple of Japanese, a Brit, a Canadian and a few Kangding locals all meeting for the first ever and, no doubt, last ever time in the middle of nowhere under a beaming sun and it was perfect.

That evening, we couldn't find a place to eat. While looking though, Bick had seen a catholic church sitting incongruously on the high street and wanted a closer look. With no door at ground level we ventured up some metal steps to the side and came to what looked like a church hall – or, more specifically, a church hall cum soup kitchen. But the head man welcomed us in anyway and we found ourselves in a Sichuan ‘hotpot’ restaurant. To describe it as ‘no frills’ would be to exaggerate its sophistication but we were in now. And we were hungry.

It transpired to be the best ‘hotpot’ experience I’ve had while here. Basically you sit at a table with a gas ring in the middle in which a huge pot of boiling, spicy stock is placed. Then you drop in all kinds of wonderful things – meat, vegetables, fish – till they’re cooked through and wickedly spicy. It’s a bit of a connoisseur thing in Chengdu; here it was ‘all you could eat’ for twenty nine Yuan (just under two quid).

We ate and ate and ate. And drank. Finally we had found a place in China that used a decent sized glass for drinking beer (normally it’s served in shot glasses, would you believe? The Chinese don’t have a high tolerance for alcohol.) Then, with a glance here, a “Hallo” there, a tentative “Cheers!” or “Ganbei!” we gradually got to join the blokes at the next table. They, with hardly a word of English and we, with hardly a word of Chinese, decided a good time was common ground enough to meet on and we ended our holiday, as we began, with an accident – this time a happy one.

The Wild West (Part Two)

2006-10-07T22:13:00.000+08:00

An eight hour trip became one of about nine and a half but that didn’t really matter anymore. And, in any case, the journey was so spectacular that we’d have happily stayed on the bus even longer.

We sped on through colossal gorges, wild gashes slashed through rock and greenery. Everything was green. Green was the only colour. But it was in a whole spectrum of shades and tones that made it seem that here were all the colours you’d ever need.

Valleys were stitched together with elegant bridges leaping across craggy voids. The narrow road switched back and back on itself again creeping higher and higher. We looked down on monumental dams plugging still lakes and furious rivers tumbling to their destinations, rope bridges spun between their banks.

It was night when we pulled into Kangding. Rain. Pouring rain in the dark. Tired and a little disoriented we found the hostel and negotiated a price to make us feel we’d not been ripped off. We slept well.

A foaming river tears through the middle of Kangding and a procession of lamps shaped like Buddhist prayer wheels usher it from one end to the other. Lonely Planet sums the place up well: “there is a tangible sense that you’ve reached the end of the Chinese world and the beginning of the Tibetan”.

Three mountains tower above the town, one inscribed with a huge Buddhist mural on its bare rock face and each one strewn with faded prayer flags. A chill, fresh breeze reminds you you’re well away from the city now.

Sipping Nescafé first thing the next morning, our day took an interesting twist. Four Chinese tourists at the hostel said they were taking a minibus to Mugecuo Hu, one of the highest lakes in northern Sichuan, and would we like to share the cost by joining them? The decision didn’t take much making.

All squeezed together in a rackety old microbus, we headed north up the Yala Valley to Mugecuo Hu whose name literally means ‘Wild Men’s Lake’. Lonely Planet (again) warns travellers not to stray too far from the paths as it is also home to “wolves and other wild beasts”…

We arrived at a Glastonbury-like muddy field with cars skidding in the mush and middle-aged ladies negotiating puddles in high heels. Even the toilets with their open pits and holes in the floor were festivalesque.

But, after a chain of further (mini)bus rides, we escaped the crowds and reached the lake. Pure white clouds swaddled the dark peaks surrounding the lake and swooped down in the wind to the water’s surface. All along the far bank there was a wooden walkway punctuated by pavilions where you could buy yak meat on skewers. Blue skies gave way to rain but that simply made the view more spectacular still.

The next day, we took on Paoma Shan – one of the mountains (well, it’s a great big hill) that surround Kangding for views that my photography skills probably fail to do justice to. The route begins with a wander through a lamasery where rows of prayer wheels beg to be turned to have their prayers within them spread on the wind. Through a tiny wooden doorway (curiously, with broken glass set in concrete along its lintel) we found erratic stone steps leading steeply up the hillside. Faded prayer flags marked the route as we rose higher above the town and measured ourselves against the truly impressive Gongga Shan mountain (7556m) alongside.

It took about an hour to ascend, quite literally, through the clouds. Mountains were all you could see in every direction. The air was fresh and the sky was blue (a revelation to any resident of Chengdu). But peace, quiet and contemplation? Forget it: building work is going on to transform the summit into some kind of Tibetan theme park.

We decided to get close to Tibetan culture in an altogether better way and came down for a good old fashioned Kangding night out…

The Wild West (Part One)

2006-10-07T13:49:00.000+08:00

I’ve been meaning to mention Chinese driving for a while. It’s mad. It’s like there are no rules, you just get from A to B as quickly as possible and to hell with everyone else. Yet, despite this apparent chaos, you see remarkably few accidents.

There is a system at work; it’s just the opposite of what we’re used to in the UK. There, the assumption is that you – the driver – take responsibility to drive as carefully as possible and not make any mistakes that could affect other drivers. Here, the assumption seems to be that you expect the other guy to be a maniac and so you concentrate on avoiding him. You expect to see cars coming towards you on the wrong side of the road. Or to be overtaken on the nearside (the term 'undertaken' is grimly appropriate). Or for that car jesuslookout! to pull out in front of you with no warning whatsoever.

It’s why Chinese traffic is so bloody noisy; it’s not that people are enraged and pressing their horns in frustration or anger, rather they are simply letting other drivers know that they’re coming – to warn them of their presence (which, I believe, is what horns were fitted to cars for in the first place).

But sometimes it does go wrong.

We took a bus westwards this week to visit Kangding way up in the mountains at a height of around 2600 metres above sea level. That’s over two and a half kilometres upwards. And the only roads are gloriously narrow and windy ones which meander along towering valley sides. If you’re a truck driver though, the fact that you’re 500 metres above a treacherous ravine is no reason to slow down or to drive on the correct side of the road. A... B. Quickly!

The blue truck carved into the red one. The whole of the left side of the cabin – the driver’s side – was crushed. I guess only the huge weight of these massive dumpers kept them on the road at all and stopped them tumbling down the cliff face. When we finally passed the accident both drivers had been extracted; God knows if the blue driver survived but a good hour after we’d stopped we saw an ambulance threading its way through the backed up traffic.

Over the moon

2006-09-27T16:29:00.000+08:00

Well, after working a full eleven and a half hours every week for nearly four weeks now, I think it’s high time we had a holiday. And, what do you know, it’s 'National Holiday' time. Not only that, but we'll be celebrating the 'Mid Autumn Festival' shortly too!

Not a moment too soon.

Teaching’s tough. Okay, the hours in front of students don’t sound a lot and we can have up to five hours off between lessons, but with the preparation time, the time spent tweaking things and the constant feeling that I could be doing this better, I for one am exhausted. There’s the frustration too, of giving a lesson to one class and it going down really well and then giving the same lesson to another class and it falling completely flat. Why does that happen? What should I be doing differently? And, considering I’m only a pretendy teacher in the first place, should I be worried at all?

Perhaps, perhaps not. But it’s doing my head in so I’ll change the subject.

The Mid Autumn Festival (or ‘Moon Festival’) happens annually on the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the Chinese lunar calendar which, this year, falls on 6th October in the good old western calendar.

It’s the time when the moon appears at its brightest and largest. In the west, we call it the ‘Harvest Moon’ and, in fact, the ‘Moon Festival’ is pretty much akin to our Harvest Festival (or ‘Thanksgiving’, I guess). As the other name suggests, we’re also bang in the middle of autumn by lunar reckonings.

(It’s all a bit ironic really since there’s more chance of seeing the sky raining blood and frogs than of being able to actually see the moon through the constant grubby white cloud cover.)

So there’ll be no “We plough the fields and scatter…” for us this year. Instead, the traditional thing to do is simply gaze at the moon (if you can see it), sing Moon Poems and eat (you see a pattern developing here) Moon Cakes.

Sure they sound like something you eat to get stoned, but these are little buns filled with lots of delicious things like sesame, red bean and lotus seed pastes, melon seeds, coconut, walnuts, almonds, minced meats, dates, little salted duck egg yolks, ham, dried flower petals, orange peel and plenty of sugar and fat. The cakes are decorated with symbolic clouds, moons and (I’m not quite sure why) rabbits. Think of them as a kind of rich fruitcake or plum pudding and, to be frank, you’ll still be nowhere near knowing what they’re like.

The main thing, though, is that we get next week off work. This isn't actually anything to do with moons and mid autumn but is the so-called 'National Holiday' to mark the founding of the People's Republic of China on 1st October 1949.

According to Chinese custom, we’re leaving holiday preparations to the last minute. But the plan is to go west to a town called Kangding, a place rich in Tibetan culture although not quite in Tibet itself. The journey, let alone the destination, is meant to be spectacular as you rise about 3000 metres into the Daxue Shan mountain range along treacherous winding roads before dropping into a vast plain nestled among the peaks.

I’ll keep you posted.

Let me show you around

2006-09-23T21:29:00.000+08:00

Can I show you my apartment? First impressions aren't too promising; it's a big old block of concrete flats basically. But make it past the dubious smells in the hallway and up one flight of stairs and, hey, second impressions aren't fantastic either!

Really, I can't complain. It's a very good sized apartment by either Chinese or British standards and a damn sight better than a lot of places I've lived in before.

The kitchen's a bit basic: two gas rings and a combi microwave that I've still got to get my head around. The most adventurous thing I've cooked in four weeks is a Pot Noodle (but, rest assured, they do a higher class Pot Noodle over here). One day I'll get round to cleaning the wok that came with the place, but so far I've not had an hour free to do so. And, while we can get a fabulous full meal - including beers - in the village for less than a quid each, wok cleaning is not high on my list of priorities right now.

There's hot and cold running water. In fact the cold never stops running but that's not really a problem. And I'll post a picture of my kitchen cockroach when I catch him (so far he's been a bit camera shy).

The living room and combined dining area is spacious and airy; I tell vistors that I brought the Sixties style furniture over from the UK but I didn't really.

The guest room cum study is attached to the bit where I dry laundry. This room will probably get shut down for the winter as there's no central heating in the place so I'll be conserving whatever heat I have in the main living area. No kidding, we'll be wearing our coats, hats and gloves in the classrooms come December and probably at home too.

Next, my bedroom, again without any heating beyond a bloody thick duvet...

And finally, to the bathroom which is kind of rudimentary. Extensive use is made of open pipework which means that all kinds of odours can efficiently be shared throughout the whole building. Everything you need is here, it's just a bit rough - not to say mouldy - around the edges. Still, now that the leak from upstairs has been fixed you no longer need to wear a baseball cap to take a pee. Which is nice.

Old git

2006-09-23T21:19:00.000+08:00

For the first time in my life, someone gave up their seat for me on a bus yesterday. It was a young kid from my school. I like to think this is a clear demonstration of the excellent manners Chinese children have and the high esteem in which they hold their English teachers.

If in doubt, clap

2006-09-18T21:23:00.000+08:00

The Chinese have this wonderful convention whereby if anybody claps then everybody claps. It avoids those weird John Redwood moments when you're not quite sure what's going on but you can look like you're in tune with it all, a part not apart. Rather embarrassingly, our classes clapped when we were first introduced; but, using this convention of clapping back, you don't really feel a complete tool at all. You clap them for clapping you (and then they clap back).

So it was today as well. After a few attempts which had been rained off, we were officially presented to the members of the school by Mr Hu and Mr Yin (our bosses) and various other school VIPs.

I'd imagined it being a bit like the May Day parade at Red Square with us looking down on the goosestepping battalions and up at the fly-past of Mig jets.

It was slightly lower key than that but there were hundreds of kids in military ranks before 'us dignatories' (I've never been one before - have I spelt it right?) and a detachment of white uniformed cadets who raised the Red Flag with great ceremony. We listened intently to the speeches and clapped each one earnestly (see what I mean about clapping?) until it was Mr Hu's turn to speak, half in English and half in Chinese. He introduced each of us by name and we each stepped forward and bowed respectfully to the school. And everyone clapped again. God, I love this place.

Bloody tourists

2006-09-17T13:56:00.000+08:00

Yesterday Bick and I went to Leshan, a city about two hours' drive south of Chengdu and home of the world's largest stone-carved Buddah. Begun in the ninth century AD, it took Buddhist monks eighty years to create; one and a half hours, however, was too long for us to wait in a heaving maelstrom of humanity to take the stairs from its head to its very big feet.

It was probably a question of expectations. In our minds' eyes it had been meant to be a day of peace and reflection, a chance to stand back and wonder at the devotion that had gone into creating one of the world's amazing man-made artifacts. But from the moment we got out of the taxi it was clear that Bick's much looked-forward-to meditation session was not going to be on the agenda.

One hundred and five quai is a lot of money to your average Chinese person; and now that we've been here a month we, too, are more in tune with the Yuan than the Pound or Dollar. We're being paid a good wage for China (the equivalent of about $300 a month) and a hundred quai is about a full day's wages. Steep.

Still , having come this far, there was no turning back so through the gate we went.

We wandered for about an hour and, to be honest, were mighty impressed. Nestled in lush green foliage, weird statues and carvings entertained our way toward the main prize: the mightly Buddah. Some pieces may have been more modern than ancient, but other parts were quite staggering. Climbing, climbing, climbing, we came upon a typical Chinese archway through which was a courtyard beyond which were a thousand steps at the top of which was a Buddah statue in the shadow of its own pagoda-like roof. On each side of the stairway, thousands of red-ribboned padlocks had been fastened to the rope handrails, each one with a prayer for good things to happen. A mist of incense followed you as you made your way up the steps to the top before you could look back without giddiness to survey the jungle below.

Sadly my photos don't do the carvings from the caves there justice but I do love the shot of the twigs in the crevice of a rockface; we saw these all round the trail but I'm afraid I don't know the significance. Answers on an email please.

The place was gorgeous; Bick and I picked our own ways through and hardly met a soul as we wondered just how far away the main prize was.

Turnstiles - the ones they have on the Tube - seemed a little out of place. But through them we went in order to get to Buddah's Paradise. I kid you not. Buddah's Paradise is a ramshackle collection of concession stands selling tea and tat beneath big Pepsi umbrellas. From nowhere - or from everywhere more likely - there were thousands of people milling around sucking lollies. Gradually they were drifting up yet more steps to yet more tea stalls until we finally caught a glimpse of a big head, a big Buddah's head. We'd arrived. We joined the throng and pushed and jostled in true Chinese style to press ourselves against the barrier and look down on this wonder of the world.

Look, of course it's impressive, magnificent, stunning and "how the hell did they do it....?". But the spirituality meter was reading Zero. There are steps leading down each side of the carving to its feet (which up to twelve people can clamber onto at once, by the way) but you'd have had to spend an hour and a half in the scrum to reach there: the statue's sole, I suppose.

So we took our snaps and fled.

(Note to self (or anyone else thinking of taking the trip): try taking one of the boat excursions. At least you'll have a pleasant little jaunt on the river and you will get to see the full height of the statue without any of the pushing and shoving.)

On the way out we were fleeced again, this time in a restaurant. The view from its balcony was spectacular and it even had a shabby elegance clinging to a cliffside but the prices on the English menu were some 200-300% more than we're used to paying in Cheers. It left a bad taste.

And my point? I suppose I just wish I'd got here sooner - as a traveller rather than as another bloody tourist.

Tip

2006-09-17T12:38:00.000+08:00

As a rule, I'm a complete idiot when it comes to giving tips. In restaurants I'll always leave one whether I've had good service or not. And I'll also leave one even if there's an automatic service charge. It's stupid but I hate the idea of being thought of as being 'tight'. And, hey, the waitress was probably doing her best and it's the bosses I really blame, etc. etc. Taxi drivers are the same: why on earth do I give them more than they've asked for? All they've done is drive me from A to B which, doh!, is their job! I've even tipped a plumber for coming round and fixing a leaky tap. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

No such problem in China though. We had a really good meal the other night in Chengdu and, like you do, we left a modest tip and thought no more about it as we left. We were a full two hundred yards down the street outside when we heard "Hallo! Hallo!" being shouted behind us. Here was our waitress clutching the twenty yuan note desperate to give it back. It's simply not the done thing here to leave tips. And I, for one, am very glad that that's the case.

Finger lickin' good.

2006-09-15T21:19:00.000+08:00

Shanghai revisited

2006-09-11T11:52:00.000+08:00

"Shanghai revisited." That's what we call a "metaphor". We haven't literally revisited Shanghai but we are looking back at time spent there as though we were visiting it for a second time.

Yes, children, here we go again...

Shanghai was a tale of two cities: one I liked and one I didn't care for too much. We had arrived at Pudong airport surprisingly fresh after about thirteen hours on the plane. According to our body clocks we'd just been through a normal night and, personally, I'd had a good night's sleep. Thank god I don't smoke anymore though: thirteen hours would have killed me!

So we went to the carousels to wait for the baggage; mine came straightaway but others weren't so lucky. Quite a few of the British Council teaching assistants arrived to discover their bags hadn't followed them. It would be nearly two weeks before they were reunited with their stuff. That's really not what you need when you arrive, tired, in a strange country where the temperature is over 35 degrees and the humidity is palpable.

Met by people from the British Council, we were bussed swiftly to our accommodation - a compound about 40 minutes' drive on the bus from the centre of Shanghai. We're getting used to this: cities in China are just so huge that the forty minute drive is quite normal.

It cost 2 RMB to get to the centre, about 13p by my reckoning, and by 'centre' I mean right in the shadow of the Jinmao and Pearl Towers. Naturally they were our first ports of call and a trip up the once tallest building in the world was de rigeur. We blagged our way into one of the fancy restaurant bars near the top to sip green tea and sit back to reflect on finally arriving.

The schedule arranged by the British Council was pretty intense. Having arrived on the Sunday we were down at the Bell International Language School bright and early on Monday morning for the opening presentations, orientations, lectures, seminars, workshops and discussions. Not always one hundred percent useful or interesting I think the timetabling could have been better and I don't think it would have been unreasonable to have given us a bit more time over the two weeks to explore Shanghai a bit more. But hey, it's all water under the bridge now. And I did come away from Shanghai knowing a lot more and having a lot more confidence in my ability to teach so they must have done something right.

The Shanghai I liked was the neighbourhood around our compound. Even after a couple of days it felt like 'home' to be walking down the highstreet or taking the short cut back from the school. We spoke virtually no Chinese but could get by at the roadside food stalls by pointing and miming and smiling. We'd also been warned that we'd get stared at and, sure enough, people just stop in their tracks as though this white face was the strangest thing they'd ever seen. There's not a hint of animosity but just curiosity; and if you said "Ni hao" the wrinkled brow would turn to a beaming smile.

On the other hand, a lot of people will shout "Hello!" which, again, is meant for the most part in a friendly way. But sometimes, to be frank, they're just taking the piss out of these "old foreigners". Gradually your ear tunes in to the different tone and you learn to either reciprocate or just keep walking.

I liked most of central Shanghai too. Taking the obligatory boat trip, I saw the happy mix of old and new along the grey green river as huge freighters barged past on their way to the sea. Construction cranes are everywhere as Shanghai builds towards the sky but the 'heritage' buildings are still there, especially along The Bund, their colonial grandeur now topped with proud red flags.

And then there's the old city where the narrow streets and original buildings have been retained and, so far at least, have defied the developers. Here's where you get your tourist souvenirs, your expensively packaged tea and your name written in Chinese hanging on a fake gold chain. But the further you go in the more interesting it gets with the sights and sounds and smells of the food stalls and, it has to be said, the drains!

All this was the good Shanghai: the hustle and bustle, the easy going pace, the homeliness of it and above all the friendliness of the place. But walk town the bustling shopping street of Nanjing Road and the 'hustle' turns to 'hussle'. Beyond the Chinese script, this could be any city in any country in the world with all the brand names you could just as easily see in Sheffield as Shanghai. Worst for me though, was that the friendliness I'd felt before had been hijacked by pimps and hawkers targeting the westerner and nag nag nagging him (hallo!) to come see beautiful girl (hallo!) come buy Rolex (hallo!) come buy this come buy that. I got taken in by a group of so called students who purportedly wanted to speak English with me and then said that they were down from Beijing to exhibit their paintings in a special show. Come, come and see because we have to go back to Beijing tomorrow. So along Nanjing Road we go, me naively thinking "well, I'm meant to be a teacher, after all", chat, chat, chat, up five storeys of an unprepossessing building and down a long corridor to an anonymous room decked with a hundred paintings, mostly with traditional chocolate box scenes. They seemed to have a remarkable grasp of English as they described in detail the symbology of each (and, it's just occurred to me, how one of the paintings was the last one painted by their late professor... oh dear, how dumb can I have been?). Now I knew I was being hussled to buy but still didn't grasp the totality of the set-up. Asked which was my favourite, the next question (or maybe imperitive) was "You must buy it. Our school is very poor..." I just wanted to get out of this little room full of impeccably polite strangers. Picking one that I really did like (which, in retrospect, I'm glad about) I handed over the money and fled, hot and flustered and full of anger - anger that grew the more I thought about every detail of the scam and the way that it tainted my entire experience of Shanghai.

Lessons learned (or is that 'learnt'?)

2006-09-09T21:25:00.000+08:00

"Hi. My name is Patrick. And I like football."

So began my first lesson to Senior I Class 7A way back when, last Sunday . So too began my second, third, fourth and fifth lessons too - all the way up to lesson number 18. It was a good lesson plan and I wasn't going to change it for anyone.

So, I've been a teacher for a week and I got through it without getting the sack. On the contrary, we (along with all the proper teachers in the school) got a little bonus on Friday. Better still, one of my classes made a card for me, wishing me all the best for Teachers' Day (which is tomorrow, by all accounts). I find teaching so rewarding.

The very first lesson, I have to admit, was a bit ropey but, then again, it was only the third time I'd stood in front of a class and the first time it was one hundred percent for real. But over the week things have got slicker, I've not had to refer to my notes at all and, best of all, I've learned how to go with the flow, to teach 'off-piste' I suppose and not be constrained by a fixed-in-stone plan.

As for the kids, they've been great. Naturally some classes are more lively than others but they've all made the effort and the nightmare of a completely mute class just hasn't happened. Some classes even ended up in applause for goodness sake! There's a range of ages and abilities not only across classes but within them too which makes things a little tricky. But with a little encouragement, even the most reticent ones at the beginning have had the confidence to get up and say their piece by the end of the lesson.

We begin by introducing ourselves to each other and saying what we like. Happily they have all adopted English names for their classes; more happily still, they haven't limited themselves to the conventional Peter, Paul and Mary names either. I have a 'Cabbage', an 'Onion' and a 'Potato'; a 'Yummy', a 'Yoyo' and a 'Yuki'; 'Toyota' and 'Morgan', 'Angel' and 'Doom Freedom', 'Monkey', 'Bear', Arthurs 'One' and 'Two' plus 'Dolly', 'Daisy', 'Ada', 'Flora' and 'Nora'. Last, but definitely not least, I'm teaching 'George W Bush', 'Blair' and 'Napoleon'.

The lesson goes on to introduce them to a bit of my life in England. You would not believe the reaction a simple photograph of my Mum and Dad can have on a class - "handsome" being the most frequent response... Forget fancy teaching aids and your multimedia shennanigins, just show them a picture of my brother, Julian (whose name always raises a laugh for some reason), and the lesson takes on a life of its own. I did a different lesson in the middle of the week all about mobile phones which involved cutting up endless strips of paper so the class could piece together a dialogue; it involved laboriously putting the strips in makeshift envelopes and ensuring I didn't duplicate - or omit - any strips in any envelopes. It took hours to prepare but didn't have half the effect of an old photo of my Mum & Dad in their Sunday best on board the QEII.

Oh well. You live and learn.

Supersize me

2006-09-07T21:57:00.000+08:00

Three weeks in China and I'm now an XXL. Life's been good but surely not that good: Chinese folk tend to be on the small size and so when I go to buy clothes I have to think big. I really didn't get this the first time, insisting to the baffled shop assistant lady that I was "M" not "L" (let alone "XL") and yet every shirt I tried on had my belly hanging out in a rather unpleasant way. (That said, there is a habit of Chinese men to roll their tee shirts up above their bellies but below the nipples - let's face it, that would just be undiginified - to cool down in the absurd heat we've been having recently.) Finally I got it; but god help anyone bigger than me. Do they do XXXXL?

Not going to the pub every night and drinking five pints seems to be doing some good as well. Curious, that.

Food-wise, I'd kind of expected to be surprised at how fantastic every meal was. But, not surprisingly when you think of it, some meals are good, some are pretty downright dodgy. It's like turning up in Newcastle and going to Fisherman's Lodge one day and the Greenmarket the next: there's a whole range of stuff on offer. Only once have I regretted a meal from the night before - but I regretted it for a full twenty four hours if you know what I mean...

Here at the school there's a canteen serving three meals a day which is really handy if a little unappetising. Generally we'll go to Cheers of an evening and giggle with the waitress as we navigate blindly through the menu. Bick's got more Chinese than the rest of us but even this is limited to things like "Beef?", "Pork?", "not too spicy" and "NO TOFU!". Somehow we're managing to get some pretty good meals on a good day; and sometimes we end up with a washing up bowl in the middle of the table with luke warm goo and fish heads in it.

But then there's "the Hackman's Place". The Hackmans were American teachers who were here last year and, we're told, they went religiously to this one restaurant in the village on the other side of the university. Sure enough, the food is a cut above the rest. Hell, it doesn't matter what you order, you're not going to go far wrong.

That's not to say that there aren't pangs for the good old comfort foods.

We had cheese tonight.

It was like cutting up a lump of hash in Midnight Express. How did they get that past the guards??

Peanut butter is at a premium. Proper bread is to die for. Coffee? You'd better be prepared to dig deep. But no worries, McDonalds is here (and here and here and here...). KFC is here and Pizza Hut. Harry Ramsdens.

Okay, I made the last one up.

Happily I've not succumbed so far but I'm not so naive to suggest that there won't be a time when ONLY A BIG MAC WILL DO!

Take this weekend for example. We're debating about going to Dufu's cottage - once home of China's legendary poet - or to the giant Buddha statue at Leshan or to Chengdu's famous Daoist temple. But one thing is writ in stone: bacon butties at the ubiquitous Irish bar on Sunday morning.

Now that's what I call culture.

Make mine an extra large.

Goodbye blue skies?

2006-09-07T13:33:00.000+08:00

I took this shot from the plane on the way to Chengdu thinking that it might be the last blue sky I'd see for a very long time. And sure enough, when we got here skies were a pretty grubby greyish colour and you could just about make out the sun beyond the murk.

But, as we turn toward autumn, the temperature is gradually falling and we've had a couple of torrential downpours. I was caught in the first of these, a refreshing kind of shower to take the sting out of the summer heat until, that is, the rainwater got in my eyes. Boy, did it sting!

Down the road (a couple of hundred miles) they'll be grateful for any wet stuff in Chongqing which has suffered its worst drought in years. Temperatures topped 40 degrees at the height of the summer and the glass panes on its skyscrapers began to crack. I believe that there too the worst of the summer is over although it'll take a while for river levels to return to normal.

But, after the rains, the skies have cleared here in Chengdu and we've had some beautiful days. No longer do we need the airco on constantly and there's even a little chill in the air of a morning as we head toward the back end of the year.

They don't put air conditioners in the homes in the north of China, just central heating. Down here, it's the other way round. I'm starting to wonder just how cold things could get...

Where am I?

2006-09-03T21:42:00.000+08:00

Funny, you travel five and half thousand miles and you still have catching up to do. The idea was to write a blog every night with my witty and insightful, er, insights into life in China but now it's way too late for that. Hopefully if I plough on like nothing had gone wrong in the first place, I'll be able to drop in stuff about the last three weeks as we go along.
But then again, I am a bit drunk at the moment so who knows?
But then again, again, beer is only 20p a bottle. And it's really good stuff. We've tried Snow Beer, Qing Dao Beer and "If only I had a Chinese characters set on my keyboard I'd tell you" beer which is actually pretty good too.
Our 'local' is called Cheers. Well, it is now - if only in our tiny expatriate minds. For the first couple of nights they brought us a menu when we sat down but now they know better: a round of beers first and then the Chinese roulette (a much happier version that the Russian one) of ordering food.
"We" and "us" (before you think I've gone all Margaret Thatcher on you) are: Rachel from the UK, Hero from Japan and Bick & Nadia from the USA. And guess what, I couldn't have asked for a nicer bunch of classmates. Bick and Rachel kindly posed for me outside the school; the other chap in the other photo is Oliver, a Chinese English teacher (you know what I mean) who is looking after us. More of him later, no doubt.
It's taken a while, but the chopsticks are working now. For my first few meals in China I always felt like the runt of the litter: everyone else was digging in furiously and all I was managing was a single grain of rice rested precariously on two wobbly chopsticks. And all of a sudden all the food had gone and I'd have to look wistfully forward to the next mealtime.
Ah, there's so much to chew over now: how terrorists just had to threaten the weekend I was travelling, the deprivation of flying without hand luggage (apart from anything and everything you could grab in duty free), the two weeks in Shanghai where I truly became a teacher (ha, ha) and the arrival in Chengdu - my home for a year and, who knows, maybe more?
But, hey, I've made a start. Your guess is as good as mine as to where it'll end up.