Over The Counter Culture

I feel terrible not posting more regularly but like my scrappy travel diary, falling behind on travel writeup is all too easy - like New Year’s resolutions. We’re in Japan now so time to cut my losses on China, rush a couple of posts on it out the door, and get back to fresher things. Here’s a summary of our big city experiences in China - Beijing and Shanghai.

—- Beijing —-

Definitely somewhere I’d like to live+work. There’s little doubt that the preparation for the Olympics played a strong role in transforming the city, but for me the most significant positives are longer term chanegs than even the 10 years or so since China readied itself for one of the greatest Olympics ever.

Beijing’s a cool mix of small but clean hutong (traditional quarters) and wide, efficient (but slightly alien) boulevards, a regular grid of four- or six- (or eight!-) lane roads populated by modern cars, buses and electric scooters (we really didn’t expect the latter - but it turns out China is the world’s number one market for electric vehicles - the two-wheelers alone sell 20 million units a year, and are more common on the streets of Beijing than bicycles. Towering skyscrapers line the financial district - elegant, not oppressive as might have been expected as symbols of financial power in a communist country. The Forbidden City is too beautiful and deeply amazing an experience to be adequately put into words. You can glance through the photos here.

Like the rest of our China adventure, communism was more conspicuous by its complete invisibility in the world around us, than by its presence or interference in our travels. I can’t speak for the average Chinese person, but we saw no obvious cause for complaints; and amongst the natives with whom we were on good enough terms with to bring the subject up, none had a bad thing to say about it, astoundingly. Chinese nationalism is strong, which is not something I normally like to see in a country, but doesn’t appear to carry the negative/competitive/defensive baggage frequently espoused by the BNP in the UK, or patriotic citizens of the USA or Russia. Curious.

We happened to be in Beijing, visiting its many national treasures like the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, Chairman Mao’s mausoleum, the Olympics sites, the Temple of Heaven, and several of its famous shopping streets right in the middle of ‘National Day Golden Week’, which causes a nationwide tidal wave of domestic tourists larger than the entire populations of England and France put together. And Chinese tourists, as we repeatedly found out, like snaps with foreigners. There were one or two days when Daz, Tom and I were in more photos added to the cameras of giggling Chinese, than I took that day. Astounding! We’ve had nothing like that from the Japanese

White Rabbit - maybe a little *too* much fun for some

There’s a lot to Beijing that we didn’t get to know or see but that would come in due time with residence there. We chanced on the discovery that clubs can get surprisingly busy on Wednesdays (we went to a deep house / electro night at a pretty good club called White Rabbit, DJ’ed in turns by a laconic Swede and a pair of talented too-cool-for-school Chinese DJs). We’d have loved to have seen more of Beijing’s Underground City, currently deemed a state secret and sealed off, built during a tense period with the USSR to house 300,000 of Mao’s darlings through a nuclear winter of 6 months or more (replete with bars, rollerskate rings, factories, temples and theatres). The food on offer was delicous and came in quantities designed to be shared between tables of small Chinapeople (i.e. big enough, as main courses, to feed Tom and I, hungry hippos though we are).

—- Shanghai —-

Shanghai is not a city for good first impressions - largely charmless, built up, smoggy and smelly, irritatingly equally (if not more) expensive but less cared for than post-Olympics Beijing. But it grew on us, despite not having as much to love as Beijing, Xi’an or Suzhou (though the latter’s proximity to Shanghai - a short blast along the 350km/hr CRH (Chinese bullet) trains is a definite bonus for quick breakaways). It had a very cool club - Shelter - which we returned on Saturday for a more mainstream, buzzing tech house night, after an odd, sofa-bound Thurdsday night club sesh along with perhaps just a dozen punters in the converted air-raid shelter listening to too-cool DJs spin clicky, glitchy IDM, breakcore and abstract hip-hop records…

We spent our last night in Shanghai - and our last night in China - with a splurge: an all-you-can-eat buffet consumed in turbo mode (having left ourselves just 45 minutes til closing time) in a rotating restaurant overlooking the whole of Shanghai (or at leat, what’s visible of it through the haze, at night). Evidently, we took *full* advantag of the buffet’s offerings, despite repeated pleas by the waiting staff for us to get out. The two most vivid memories of Shanghai will perhaps be the World Financial Center - a perforated blade-shaped skyscraper beautifully tracing its way into the night sky - and the Maglev, a five minute, 30km, four quid, 431 km/h blast to the airport on a system that will never (over the expected life of the system) recoup even its capex, let alone day to day running costs; a thrilling communist vanity project.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 6:47 pm and is filed under Lifestream. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.