China: 28 days, 10 cities; magnificent historical and cultural and scenic sights.
Our trip encompassed so much that is so different from our other experiences, and it all reverberates in our heads: there is a need to write and share. So this is how we have done it - this blog is China 1: a quick overview and array of odd and interesting stuff; China 2 talks about our travelling experiences on trains and buses, China 3 looks at three-wheelers (? yes!) and China 4 will give a quick photo-story of our trip.
China Overview
Every iconic picture we had in our heads of China, we saw....
Magnificent lakeside parks with pagodas, tea houses, people flying kites (here, Hangzhou West Lake), dancing, individuals / groups doing tai chi and other sports;
in every city, card and Mahjong players (here, Dali); wonderful and curious displays of crafts; calligraphers and artists at work.
Amazing huge historical and cultural places: one feels an astounding sense of history and cultural heritage here… and a sense of the huge egos and tyranny of imperial rule attached to many of the historical sites, temples and palaces.
Mega cities… the contrasting architectures of old and modern cities, and evidence everywhere of the construction underway for the projected urbanisation of tens of millions of people: roads, tower cranes, apartment blocks. But still tiny villages which modernisation has passed by, homes and lifestyles as they have been for generations.
Architectural features and lovely rooflines… so different from what we know, and so distinctive in different parts of the country. Here, a courtyard home in a Pingyao village and a typical solid Tibetan house in Shangri-La.
Traffic is undisciplined and chaotic; streets are clean (with rigorous programmes of street washing and sweeping), whilst the air is dirty. Outside the cities, intensive use of the land for agriculture (even tree farms intended to claim back the Gobi desert and stop the terrible sand storms) but lack of mechanisation currently (there are lots of bodies to provide manual labour).
Meanwhile, what often lives on are the little incidents and observations that form remarkably sharp memories.....
No English here
A constant thread through the trip: our lack of understanding of what the people / menus / signs were telling us. And hopeless inability to communicate our needs! Almost no English is spoken in this country (slightly more than none in Beijing). There are 1.3 billion people in the country: there is a lot of Mandarin spoken!
What to do? Have all that you need written in Chinese before you arrive: Hotel names and addresses; places you need to get to (e.g. train station, park, south gate); needs (more toilet paper, fresh milk, no MSG please).
All difficult to predict, so we loaded an English – Chinese translator onto the iPad and off we set. Option 1: Write it down; it translates. Lesson: before you use this, translate back from the Chinese to see what the thing is telling the Chinese reader! Initially we could not understand why the translations of our polite and informative and complex sentences elicited reactions ranging from bewilderment to outright panic. It was only after we tested the machine by getting it to translate its Chinese effort back into English that we gained new insight into ‘lost in translation’ and counted ourselves lucky to have escaped arrest. The very easy “Please fetch us at 5am outside the hotel” became, on re-translation back to English “We are out of the hotel, please”. Imagine the potential for mis-translation!
Option 2: hold down the microphone button and speak; what you have “said” gets printed in English and is then translated; all done and dusted then! Or not: Irene’s verbal request to the taxi driver for “sixty”... became “sexy party”… which caused the iPad cover to be closed in a flash, and alternative ways of communication to be chosen (like: arm waving, louder speaking, counting fingers and toes; we had to get his involved in this too, of course).
Photographing the Westerner
Western tourists apparently add curiosity value to the lives of locals. We frequently found ourselves the focus of attention, were photographed (sometimes surreptitiously, sometimes not), and were sometimes approached to be photographed with the owner of the camera (once requested to please wait while she fetched her Mom for the photo too).
This often provided its own challenges, as we invariably had no idea what the person was trying to say to us. Suzhou railway station: a lovely lady spoke fervently and passionately to Sonja and me, and we understood not a word. She repeated it (we suppose) and we decided it was time for the voice translator. It worked! The lady was asking determinedly if she could have her photograph taken with us.
Food and drink.
Peking (Beijing) duck: delicious… The most memorable meal. In a month we consumed many lovely meals: good meat, fresh vegetables, delicious flavours. In the south we got to enjoy yak meat and yak yoghurt, the street dishes of the minority groups and everything threaded on a stick and barbequed. Everywhere, we appreciated the endless cups of Chinese (flower) tea that start hydrating you from the moment you sit at the table.
Of course, there are VERY strange things on Chinese menus, from the perspective of a westerner. In this vein, we passed up opportunities for dry deep fried haretail, worms and insects, all the odd parts of beasts (like coriander cow tendons, and “clear cooks the bulls penis” in this menu), and of course all dishes with abalone or shark fin.
Small cafes with only chalkboards and menus written in Chinese were intimidating, best approached by pointing at other patrons’ dishes (and always showing the Chinese “no MSG” card). Shopping for backpack snacks in supermarkets was entertaining and we avoided many packets of dried-but-soft fish or other protein snacks; nuts were always safe and wonderful while we resisted "Strange-Taste Horsebeans": it just did not sell itself! Fruit and veg stalls were always marvellous and reliable.
But hold on: Peking duck the most memorable meal? Correction: a meal at a local Datong café near the railway station gets that award.
The menu had no English writing but had photographs of the dishes so what could go wrong? Rolf ordered what looked like a meat dish with tomato and greens; Delwin a chicken stew. There was a variety of emotion in the café that night: mirth and delight of the locals as they saw the horror then chagrin then mirth of the foreigners when receiving their sheep’s head (complete with brain, eyeballs and poor dentition) and stewed chicken (feet and rooster head, particularly the cocks’ comb as most-delicious-morsel).
Cold beer? No way. Beer is room temperature (except in touristy spots). In one restaurant, observation of the lack-of-frosting-and-condensation on the beers on the table led us to shake heads and point to the Tsingtao (great local beer) in the fridge nearby. The waiter shook his head but at our insistence eventually gave up and brought us the beers from the fridge. Did not work. Lesson: fridges in China are not switched on, and are simply a means of storage.
The sounds of China.
This is, unfortunately, lusty hoicking and spitting.
Also hooting. When it comes to things that should WARN you by their noise, they don't... Like electric motorbikes in Beijing.
No nappy rash here.
Chinese babies (particularly in less modernised cities) do not wear nappies from very early on, to promote early toilet training. Instead, they wear crotch-less pants (a slit from front to back) with nothing inside at all; this little Beijing baby is moving unhampered by fat nappy and revealing the baby jewels!
Whistling and other noise techniques are used to encourage them to go, they are rewarded, and soon learn to identify the need and go.… all very easy!
Toilet walls
On the toilet topic, this may look like an odd one, but we think it remarkable that people can write graffiti on toilet walls whilst in the squat position.... (the toilets are eastern type squat pans). There are some gifted multi-taskers!
It must be said, however, that there was no graffiti on the walls of those bus-stop "restrooms" in which the toilets were long narrow slots in the concrete (‘long drops’) with half-walls at the sides and no doors at all. An inspired technique to thwart the graffiti artists as even they are in a hurry to finish up in these circumstances.
Another notable point on this shitty topic is that one always pays for these loos, absolutely certain that the facilities will be of the most basic and completely un-serviced. And there is never, never any toilet paper.
Big brother is watching
Cameras are prolific: they watch over streets, restaurants, hotels; driving along the highway your photograph will be taken many times. There is a large police presence, not all in uniform, but they are not in any way intrusive or threatening.
Attempts to get to facebook or blogs (ours or friends’) were futile: there is a stranglehold on social media sites, although apparently China has its own sites of this genre… strictly controlled.
Questions to do with politics, posed to guides, were deflected neatly and left unanswered.
The South African R10 note
Situation: rural restaurant near Pingyao, the only foreigners, regular stream of people coming to peer at us through the windows.
Sonja was searching her purse for money and took out a South African banknote. Within seconds there were people surrounding her, fascinated by the banknote. It took us a while to realise that they were fascinated by the picture of the rhinoceros on the R10 note and its aphrodisiac properties. Such a great horn…
They were unimpressed by the elephant, lion, or buffalo on the other banknotes.
Bed linen, towels and carpets
Ok, so it is our fault for choosing to pay as little as we do for our accommodations. But still: surely they could replace the sheets and towels once they have indisputably become rags! And cleaning the carpet once every ten years would have no adverse impact on the profits…
Nonetheless, we had some good accommodations, sometimes in old courtyard homes that had been converted to hotels. In one of these, we slept on a kang bed: a traditional brick/clay sleeping platform that takes up half the room and has an interior cavity that takes the flue from the stove… thus heating the bed. The photo does not show the torn linen, and anyway the cover was artfully placed!
Entrance fees
Speaking of money: in general, we were happy with the places we stayed at in the US$25 – 30 bracket (the linen was at least reasonably clean, albeit torn / mended / frayed); food was inexpensive; if you want to buy clothes you could afford it ($1.00 for three T-shirts near the Great Wall!?); meter taxis were cheap but... aaaargh…. entrance fees to tourist sites were astonishingly expensive. These cost us far more than our accommodation; go prepared. (South Africans: take lots of R10 notes and auction them to raise funds!)
Superstition
Chinese people have many superstitions and those to do with numbers appear particularly powerful.
Task: buy a Chinese sim card for the cell phone. At this stage in Beijing, we had a local guide and asked John to help us. Complicated by the fact that he has never apparently bought one and did not know where to go, when we had overcome this hurdle (by telling him to shut up and look at our Thai sim card – Chinese people speak in long paragraphs!) he enrolled the assistance of a man from our hotel and we walked the streets.
Easy: a tiny store selling anything-you-like and including China Mobile sim cards was nearby. We were asked to select a preferred number from a list, and said it did not matter; when pressed fervently to choose one, Irene pointed at one. All of this was accompanied by incessant and increasingly heated conversation between John, the shop owner and hotel guy, none of which we understood. We made ourselves heard and pointed out our “chosen” number, the shop owner went to get it and to our surprise John and hotel guy burst out in fury and strode out of the shop, gesticulating in heated conversation. We were dumbfounded, and raced after them, asking what the problem was. They ignored us in their heated discussion, until we physically restrained them and insisted they speak to us.
John was unhappy with the store as it did not offer either a big enough selection of numbers or numbers that were auspicious, and this would be bad luck for us (and, probably, him too, as the introducer). Oh, my word!
We drew the incident to a close eventually by returning to the shop and choosing another number, which we assured John would be lucky for us. It was 15210264587. He undoubtedly does not understand the thinking of these foreigners; the Chinese believe the number 8 to be lucky (the pronunciation of the number eight and the word for prosperity are similar) and 4 to be unlucky (its pronunciation is similar to the word for death), but this number gave us no trouble at all!
Finding the hotel
We are left with the impression that taxi drivers do not know their way around their areas of operation (particularly when it comes to finding accommodations in the ancient cities) and we have discovered that on-line booking agencies give you incorrect addresses.
Put these two together, and it sums up to two exhausted old venturers struggling along for miles with their backpacks trying to locate home-for-the-night. This despite the fact that we always had the document that gave the name and address of the hotel or guest house in English and Chinese.
So, this may be a blog about moments, but there are memories of hours of foot-slogging; generally involving a search for someone who could speak enough English to understand our predicament and phone the guest house and get help from the (non-English speaking) manager.
Our searches always provided us with opportunities for sight-seeing, contact with local people and of course good exercise (the photo above masks how steep and uneven the streets of Lijiang!) and the only aspect that caused us real irritation was the fact that the street numbers provided by agencies were wrong on at least two occasions… but who knows who is at fault here: maybe the owner of the guest house changed his street number for one which was more auspicious!?
Anyway, we have luck on our side as a couple because Rolf is only two years older than Irene (if there was a 3 or 6 year age difference it would have been unlucky, apparently) and we feel very lucky to have taken this trip to China and enjoyed such a sensational journey together. It really was fantastic…. And there are more tales to come, so watch this space!
Our trip encompassed so much that is so different from our other experiences, and it all reverberates in our heads: there is a need to write and share. So this is how we have done it - this blog is China 1: a quick overview and array of odd and interesting stuff; China 2 talks about our travelling experiences on trains and buses, China 3 looks at three-wheelers (? yes!) and China 4 will give a quick photo-story of our trip.
China Overview
Every iconic picture we had in our heads of China, we saw....
Magnificent lakeside parks with pagodas, tea houses, people flying kites (here, Hangzhou West Lake), dancing, individuals / groups doing tai chi and other sports;
in every city, card and Mahjong players (here, Dali); wonderful and curious displays of crafts; calligraphers and artists at work.
Architectural features and lovely rooflines… so different from what we know, and so distinctive in different parts of the country. Here, a courtyard home in a Pingyao village and a typical solid Tibetan house in Shangri-La.
Meanwhile, what often lives on are the little incidents and observations that form remarkably sharp memories.....
No English here
A constant thread through the trip: our lack of understanding of what the people / menus / signs were telling us. And hopeless inability to communicate our needs! Almost no English is spoken in this country (slightly more than none in Beijing). There are 1.3 billion people in the country: there is a lot of Mandarin spoken!
What to do? Have all that you need written in Chinese before you arrive: Hotel names and addresses; places you need to get to (e.g. train station, park, south gate); needs (more toilet paper, fresh milk, no MSG please).
All difficult to predict, so we loaded an English – Chinese translator onto the iPad and off we set. Option 1: Write it down; it translates. Lesson: before you use this, translate back from the Chinese to see what the thing is telling the Chinese reader! Initially we could not understand why the translations of our polite and informative and complex sentences elicited reactions ranging from bewilderment to outright panic. It was only after we tested the machine by getting it to translate its Chinese effort back into English that we gained new insight into ‘lost in translation’ and counted ourselves lucky to have escaped arrest. The very easy “Please fetch us at 5am outside the hotel” became, on re-translation back to English “We are out of the hotel, please”. Imagine the potential for mis-translation!
Option 2: hold down the microphone button and speak; what you have “said” gets printed in English and is then translated; all done and dusted then! Or not: Irene’s verbal request to the taxi driver for “sixty”... became “sexy party”… which caused the iPad cover to be closed in a flash, and alternative ways of communication to be chosen (like: arm waving, louder speaking, counting fingers and toes; we had to get his involved in this too, of course).
Photographing the Westerner
Western tourists apparently add curiosity value to the lives of locals. We frequently found ourselves the focus of attention, were photographed (sometimes surreptitiously, sometimes not), and were sometimes approached to be photographed with the owner of the camera (once requested to please wait while she fetched her Mom for the photo too).
This often provided its own challenges, as we invariably had no idea what the person was trying to say to us. Suzhou railway station: a lovely lady spoke fervently and passionately to Sonja and me, and we understood not a word. She repeated it (we suppose) and we decided it was time for the voice translator. It worked! The lady was asking determinedly if she could have her photograph taken with us.
Peking (Beijing) duck: delicious… The most memorable meal. In a month we consumed many lovely meals: good meat, fresh vegetables, delicious flavours. In the south we got to enjoy yak meat and yak yoghurt, the street dishes of the minority groups and everything threaded on a stick and barbequed. Everywhere, we appreciated the endless cups of Chinese (flower) tea that start hydrating you from the moment you sit at the table.
Of course, there are VERY strange things on Chinese menus, from the perspective of a westerner. In this vein, we passed up opportunities for dry deep fried haretail, worms and insects, all the odd parts of beasts (like coriander cow tendons, and “clear cooks the bulls penis” in this menu), and of course all dishes with abalone or shark fin.
But hold on: Peking duck the most memorable meal? Correction: a meal at a local Datong café near the railway station gets that award.
The menu had no English writing but had photographs of the dishes so what could go wrong? Rolf ordered what looked like a meat dish with tomato and greens; Delwin a chicken stew. There was a variety of emotion in the café that night: mirth and delight of the locals as they saw the horror then chagrin then mirth of the foreigners when receiving their sheep’s head (complete with brain, eyeballs and poor dentition) and stewed chicken (feet and rooster head, particularly the cocks’ comb as most-delicious-morsel).
The sounds of China.
This is, unfortunately, lusty hoicking and spitting.
Also hooting. When it comes to things that should WARN you by their noise, they don't... Like electric motorbikes in Beijing.
No nappy rash here.
Chinese babies (particularly in less modernised cities) do not wear nappies from very early on, to promote early toilet training. Instead, they wear crotch-less pants (a slit from front to back) with nothing inside at all; this little Beijing baby is moving unhampered by fat nappy and revealing the baby jewels!
Toilet walls
On the toilet topic, this may look like an odd one, but we think it remarkable that people can write graffiti on toilet walls whilst in the squat position.... (the toilets are eastern type squat pans). There are some gifted multi-taskers!
It must be said, however, that there was no graffiti on the walls of those bus-stop "restrooms" in which the toilets were long narrow slots in the concrete (‘long drops’) with half-walls at the sides and no doors at all. An inspired technique to thwart the graffiti artists as even they are in a hurry to finish up in these circumstances.
Another notable point on this shitty topic is that one always pays for these loos, absolutely certain that the facilities will be of the most basic and completely un-serviced. And there is never, never any toilet paper.
Big brother is watching
Cameras are prolific: they watch over streets, restaurants, hotels; driving along the highway your photograph will be taken many times. There is a large police presence, not all in uniform, but they are not in any way intrusive or threatening.
Attempts to get to facebook or blogs (ours or friends’) were futile: there is a stranglehold on social media sites, although apparently China has its own sites of this genre… strictly controlled.
Questions to do with politics, posed to guides, were deflected neatly and left unanswered.
The South African R10 note
Situation: rural restaurant near Pingyao, the only foreigners, regular stream of people coming to peer at us through the windows.
Sonja was searching her purse for money and took out a South African banknote. Within seconds there were people surrounding her, fascinated by the banknote. It took us a while to realise that they were fascinated by the picture of the rhinoceros on the R10 note and its aphrodisiac properties. Such a great horn…
They were unimpressed by the elephant, lion, or buffalo on the other banknotes.
Bed linen, towels and carpets
Ok, so it is our fault for choosing to pay as little as we do for our accommodations. But still: surely they could replace the sheets and towels once they have indisputably become rags! And cleaning the carpet once every ten years would have no adverse impact on the profits…
Nonetheless, we had some good accommodations, sometimes in old courtyard homes that had been converted to hotels. In one of these, we slept on a kang bed: a traditional brick/clay sleeping platform that takes up half the room and has an interior cavity that takes the flue from the stove… thus heating the bed. The photo does not show the torn linen, and anyway the cover was artfully placed!
Speaking of money: in general, we were happy with the places we stayed at in the US$25 – 30 bracket (the linen was at least reasonably clean, albeit torn / mended / frayed); food was inexpensive; if you want to buy clothes you could afford it ($1.00 for three T-shirts near the Great Wall!?); meter taxis were cheap but... aaaargh…. entrance fees to tourist sites were astonishingly expensive. These cost us far more than our accommodation; go prepared. (South Africans: take lots of R10 notes and auction them to raise funds!)
Superstition
Chinese people have many superstitions and those to do with numbers appear particularly powerful.
Task: buy a Chinese sim card for the cell phone. At this stage in Beijing, we had a local guide and asked John to help us. Complicated by the fact that he has never apparently bought one and did not know where to go, when we had overcome this hurdle (by telling him to shut up and look at our Thai sim card – Chinese people speak in long paragraphs!) he enrolled the assistance of a man from our hotel and we walked the streets.
Easy: a tiny store selling anything-you-like and including China Mobile sim cards was nearby. We were asked to select a preferred number from a list, and said it did not matter; when pressed fervently to choose one, Irene pointed at one. All of this was accompanied by incessant and increasingly heated conversation between John, the shop owner and hotel guy, none of which we understood. We made ourselves heard and pointed out our “chosen” number, the shop owner went to get it and to our surprise John and hotel guy burst out in fury and strode out of the shop, gesticulating in heated conversation. We were dumbfounded, and raced after them, asking what the problem was. They ignored us in their heated discussion, until we physically restrained them and insisted they speak to us.
John was unhappy with the store as it did not offer either a big enough selection of numbers or numbers that were auspicious, and this would be bad luck for us (and, probably, him too, as the introducer). Oh, my word!
We drew the incident to a close eventually by returning to the shop and choosing another number, which we assured John would be lucky for us. It was 15210264587. He undoubtedly does not understand the thinking of these foreigners; the Chinese believe the number 8 to be lucky (the pronunciation of the number eight and the word for prosperity are similar) and 4 to be unlucky (its pronunciation is similar to the word for death), but this number gave us no trouble at all!
Finding the hotel
We are left with the impression that taxi drivers do not know their way around their areas of operation (particularly when it comes to finding accommodations in the ancient cities) and we have discovered that on-line booking agencies give you incorrect addresses.
Put these two together, and it sums up to two exhausted old venturers struggling along for miles with their backpacks trying to locate home-for-the-night. This despite the fact that we always had the document that gave the name and address of the hotel or guest house in English and Chinese.
So, this may be a blog about moments, but there are memories of hours of foot-slogging; generally involving a search for someone who could speak enough English to understand our predicament and phone the guest house and get help from the (non-English speaking) manager.
Anyway, we have luck on our side as a couple because Rolf is only two years older than Irene (if there was a 3 or 6 year age difference it would have been unlucky, apparently) and we feel very lucky to have taken this trip to China and enjoyed such a sensational journey together. It really was fantastic…. And there are more tales to come, so watch this space!
Next challenge - learn Chinese or Mandarin. You obviously need to be kept busy. This was so interesting - onto part 2
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