Tuesday 31 May 2011

Character assassinations



Chinese characters are fascinating. Each of the over 47,000 known symbols is a combination of both art and function, with each character representing a syllable. Most educated Chinese people would know 3000-4000 of them, as a large proportion of characters are archaic or obscure variants, but even so, this really puts the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet to shame. I stared in wonder at the religious texts, page after page of perfect script with sweeping curves and delicate lines in complex patterns and unfamiliar shapes, and saw it as a piece of art in itself, without any understanding of what the symbols were supposed to convey.


It seems other Westerners feel the same but it's pretty stupid to get a tattoo of 我愛水獺 purely because the symbols are aesthetically pleasing ["I love otters", in case you were wondering - well... at least that's what Google translate tells me!]. Although mistakes do happen.


But it's not just Westerners making fools of themselves. The drive for individuality in China, a country of 1.4bn people, is pronounced, and in a country with limited freedom of expression the lowly T-shirt has become the medium of choice. Everywhere you look you see teenagers in their baseball caps and basketball trainers, sporting eye-poppingly garish T-shirts with slogans like "Harmony Is Everything" or "Pugs Do Drugs", and for the large part the sentences at least make some sense. But every now and again you see an absolute gem of bad grammar, bad spelling or other assorted Chinglish - "Wear The Style What It Ever Does" or "Cotis tnctsen is to the hishsst dnty" [sic - although "sic" doesn't really do it justice here] - with the wearer and the manufacturer obviously oblivious to how nonsensical it really is.


But after spending hours searching through racks of budget tees for a particularly bad example I could take home and wear ironically, I had to give up. I guess I'll have to settle for a souvenir Beijing tee I bought from a tourist stall. After all, who doesn't love BJ?


BeiJing of course





Sunday 29 May 2011

Beijing to Taiyuan



I was advised that Chinese train ticket offices in major stations are mayhem. “Make sure you buy your onward tickets as soon as you arrive” warned the Lonely Planet. Surely that’s a bit of over-reaction, I thought. Like when it says you mustn’t accept money with your left hand while entering a yurt backwards, on pain of death. Guidebooks always exaggerate to make you feel like you can’t live without them. Having said that, I love the Lonely Planet, or “the bible” to give it its other, more common name. It gives slightly autistic people like me all the information one could possibly want about an area - major sights, the rat-less hotels, restaurants with little-to-no e coli - but it makes me want to plan too much in advance. For this bigger trip I was relishing turning up without bookings, with no cares and no plans and going wherever I fancied. China, as it turned out, doesn’t really do the whole laissez-faire thing.

Ok, that’s a bit harsh. It certainly didn’t help me arriving on their national May holiday, when all transport is packed to the brim with domestic holidaymakers, but it certainly took more effort than I expected. I arrived at my hastily booked, seedy business hotel in Beijing and asked about train tickets.

“Can I buy a ticket to Taiyuan for tomorrow?” I asked.
“Tomorrow? Good luck. Go to station now and buy there.”

“Is there any other way?” I asked “Internet booking? E-tickets? Buy on the train?” not wanting to make the 90min roundtrip to the station.
"No, just station"

When I finally arrived at Beijing main station it was a hive of activity, with hundreds of people swarming around the 30 or so ticket booths. I made a bee-line for the information desk and asked if they spoke English in stilted Mandarin (one of the few phrases I tried to learn on the plane journey - again, a little more planning would have been handy). Blank looks all round. Maybe I said it wrong. I pointed to the characters in the phrasebook.

“Ahhh,” the assistant said and after repeating the phrase back to me with imperceptible tonal differences, “go to counter 18 - she sometimes speaks English”.

Mandarin is a tonal language with 4 or 5 ways of saying each vowel (rising, falling, rising and falling etc) and can have totally different meanings e.g. ‘ma’ can mean ‘mum’, ‘horse’, ‘hemp’ or ‘scold’ depending on the way you say it, and if you get a tone wrong, it apparently makes the sentence wholly unintelligible to the native ear. Couple that with my natural tendency to go up at the end of a question and down on a statement and it caused no end of problems.

After queueing at counter 18 for 30mins without moving I gave up. There must be an easier way. I went back to my hotel and asked reception again.

“Well, you can buy from the state train ticket office next door. No commission.”



Great.
-----

 

Beijing is big. Really big. In the same way that Greater London is a large area of satellite towns inside the M25, Greater Beijing has swamped a region the size of Belgium (that's no exaggeration), with 6 city ring roads and a seventh in the planning stages. Luckily most of the major city sights are clustered together. As I knew I'd be back in Beijing several times before the end of the trip I decided to leave the heat and haze of the city and head out to the Summer Palace for the afternoon.


 
Built around manmade Kunming lake, the palace grounds cover several square kilometers and has impressive sounding temples, halls and pavillions e.g. "The Hall of Benevolence and Longevity" or my personal favourite, "The Temple of Excessive Moisture".

Back at my hotel in the evening, the phone rang. "Ni hao, do you want massage?"
In fact throughout the trip, every night I stayed in a cheap business hotel I got a call asking about "massages", whether I'd like some "hot water" or some other euphemism for physical activity with a happy ending. Although all the Chinese business hotels have signs in the lobby stating that prostitution won't be tolerated, I find it hard to believe that the hotels aren't in on the game. And it seems it's not just limited to cold-calling single men - some of the girls I met also had calls to their room but when they answered the caller would hang up. I suppose to a Chinese "masseuse" reading the hotel register, it's not immediately obvious which western names are boys and girls...

The following day I used my hard-earned ticket to Taiyuan. In the carriage I got plenty of stares from the other passengers, and pointing and giggling at the "waiguoren" [foreigner] or "laowai" [arguably more offensive word for foreigner], depending on their perception. A little child ran up to me to show me his battery-powered, crawling, flag-bearing PLA soldier toy with electronic machine gun noise. Entertaining for the first 15mins, but mixing 3 hours of continuous gunfire with ear-blisteringly loud Chinese pop eminating from the phones of velour tracksuited Chinese chavs and I was daydreaming of an alternative use for the emergency hammer.

Chinese Trains

Trains are definitely my favourite form of transport. Cars are too slow and uncomfortable over long distances and plane travel loses the sense of scale. There’s something romantic about train travel, seeing the scenery change slowly between regions or waking from the sleeper and finding the air a little warmer or more humid nearer to the destination.

In its efforts to modernise and to cater for huge and ever-increasing demand, China has undertaken huge transport projects out from the economic centres, replacing old, chugging trains with sparkly state-of-the-art high-speed services and even super-futuristic Magnetic Levitation (Maglev) technology, the thought of which is enough to give scientists like myself a massive physics hard-on.

However I have some issues with Chinese train travel:

1. Be at the station 1 hour before the train departs.

Having lived in London for 7 years, I find this hard to stomach. Most Londoners spend around 38% of their life running for trains. The thinking being who would arrive more than 10mins early for a train when you could be eating organic hummus and tweeting on your i-Slab in that nice little deli around the corner?

I once arrived only 45mins early for a train in Luoyang and was personally rushed through the airport-style security checks and directed towards the platform by over-attentive staff, only to be packed into a filthy waiting room like cattle for the best part of an hour.

In Chinese stations you’re not allowed onto the platform until a few minutes before your train departs, which means everyone pushes to be at the front of the barriers in the waiting room almost 30mins before the train arrives, despite each person having a reserved seat. China, I’m carrying a rucksack, backpack and suit bag, and I’m taller than you. There will only be one winner if you push.


2. Train toilets

While the toilets in your bog-standard (pardon the pun) Virgin train here in the UK are often not the most sparkling examples of the water closet, the Chinese train toilets can be a little worse. Ok, so they’re not as bad as the average Moroccan train loo, which is essentially a hole cut into the floor, through which you can see the track whizzing underneath as you squat, while simultaneously getting a dry bidet from the draught under the train. The problem with squat toilets vs. western style is balance and on a moving train it appears that even the locals struggle with their aim. Either that, or it’s intentional marking of territory with the whole carriage operating some sort of timeshare scheme for the cubicle floor.

After hyperventilating in order to use one particularly bad example, the experience left me wondering whether you can get diphtheria from just looking at a train loo and had me scrubbing my hands with anti-bacterial gel with a vigour that would put Lady Macbeth to shame.


3. Station signs

“Ok” says China, “I’m going to run some trains with no tannoy announcements or digital displays for the next station.”

“Ok, fair enough,” I say “I’ll just check the sign on the platform as I pull in.”

“Ah, but what if the sign is only in Chinese script?”

“Not to worry, I can do a quick check in the guidebook and quickly match the characters of my destination with the script on the sign. No problem.”

“So what if I only put one sign on the platform at the far end, so you only see it as you leave the station?”

“I hate you.”


4. Your complimentary slippers are too small

Baby's first blog

I hoped to start writing this little travel blog during my short trip through China, but a combination of the Great Firewall and the fact that I didn’t get my act together means I’m typing it retrospectively in the somewhat less exciting environs of my flat in South West London.

I originally intended to make a little trip to Shanghai for a friend’s wedding, but for reasons outside my control (namely being handed my redundancy) I decided to max out my visa and see more of the country.