Over The Counter Culture

Quick update – I’ve only just pushed the wrap-up of our tour to China to the blog (here) but since China we’ve spent 2 weeks in Japan, just under a fortnight in Bangkok and the northern rainforested and silver-sand-ed Thai island of Koh Chang, and are currently doing an extended visa run into Cambodia, via the Tomb Raider-featured temples of Angkor. We’re not in the region for long enough to get lost in this curious country or the rest of the region (Laos and Vietnam appeal, but will be left un-bothered by us), and we’ll be diving back into Thailand very soon.

Love to all, P

Stats:

• Time spent in China: 30 days
• Spending whilst in China: £570 (£18/day)
• Photos added to album: 500 (maxed out Google’s limit!)

Stops:

• Beijing (the whole 9 yards – vibrant, friendly, fantastic treasures, cool art scene, fantastic eating, thoroughly modern and efficient post-Olympics infrastructure; shame about the air pollution that all typically deprives it of blue skies)
• Zhengzhou (a mallrat hell hole with non-English-speaking locals largely unreceptive to foreigners, pricey electronics superstores, ugly signage and dilapidated concrete housing)
• Xi’an (lovely open city with great eating, a lively Muslim Quarter, the tedious Terracotta Army, great trekking to nearby sacred mountains, warm people and good nightlife)
• Nanjing (a buzzing but not altogether pleasant city, home to the gut-twining Nanjing Massacre memorial and museum
• Suzhou (relaxed, open, ever so pleasant canal-veined town home to preposterously manicured, finicky Chinese gardens copied all around the world)
• Shanghai (a busy, charmless metropolis too caught up in its affairs to offer a backpacker much – but after the sun sets, blessed with great nightlife, though you have to seek it out)

It may be a post-Olympics afterglow, we felt very welcome indeed (and not for our money!), and were surprised by how much curiosity awe were generating; I’d imagine China’s extremely safe to travel in, too, no matter how far from the beaten path you stray – we saw very little in the way of scams (beware overly long taxi rides, and unexpectedly expensive menu items in watering holes the locals aren’t too fond of) and rarely if ever worried for our safety. Transport is largely flawless – clean, modern, reasonably cheap, and serving the right routes at the right times; though taxis can be expensive around the big cities – best avoided.

United as a country very early on and a real crib of advanced human society throughout the ages, China’s cultural wealth cannot be understated. But having lived under authoritarian Communist rule for so long, there’s clearly a lot of aspects to Chinese society that casual observers such as us will have missed despite spending a month there – a veil that I guess only more permanent arrangements (working/living there) provide you with an opportunity to lift the veil a little.

Present-day curiosities

• Gigantic, luxurious Internet cafes wasting thousands of man hours every day as spotty Chinese teens play World of Warcraft curled up in their rented armchairs
• Culinary curiosities- silkworm, sheep’s spine, various penises (“Sheep’s Dick” listed on one menu we saw)
• Insane table service – lining up, sometimes three waitresses-abreast, waiting for you to peruse the menu – sometimes jumping in and pointing, turning pages (from your hands!), garbling some Mandarin at you…
• Mao’s Mausoleum – the most elaborate, revered waxwork setup you’ll ever encounter. Shhhh!
• Overly ‘renovated’ (read – reconstructed in the style of’) tourist sights
• Tourist groups – everyone wearing the same hat and dumb/astounded expression, herded by a sqawking megaphone-wielding lecturer – grrrrrrrrr
• Everything shrouded in persistent grey mist – modern urban sprawl, barren countryside, sharp mountains and beautiful national parks alike
• KFC. The Colonel’s everywhere.
• You love it. Suzhou’s best club night.
• Bizzarre modern art. Trying too hard? Too little to say? Or too much?

Verdict? Loved pretty much every moment there. It’s a country in the ascendant as a fiercely strong economy and world power, its people love it and take pride in it, and it has so much to offer the foreigner – I’d expect myself to return at least for deeper tourism; or more likely seeking a move there if work allows it.

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.

Bad pun, I know. Nihao y’all. It seems we’ve been enjoying our Chinese leg so much, blogging about it has taken a dramatic back seat – time for a little update. After a long, empty flight (stretched out on rows of seats we had to ourselves) via misty Hong Kong we landed in Beijing just as the sun was setting. The modernity and cleanliness of Beijing airport left us stunned & excited – and heralded the stark contrast between China and India, which we had greatly underestimated.

The immediate difference is in wealth – Beijing’s streets are awash with pretty women, sparkling Audi’s, glittering skyscrapers, highly fashionable clothes shops, hairdressers (ugh) and shopping malls (ugh^2).

The 2008 Olympics still echo everywhere – products proudly proclaim their endorsements, posters still line the streets, public transport is efficient and obsessively clean, the mascots are still all over the state-run TV programmes, and security is tight and well-drilled at all the recently renovated tourist spots (in a few cases over-renovated, losing some of the authenticity that’s so vital to the enjoyment of a visit to an ancient relic of China’s immense cultural baggage – though it does make for nice photos!). There’s no sign yet of a hangover from the party the country had hosting the events.

What a relief it is to have left a dry country. Alcohol is everywhere in China, served rather warm (highly unfortunate since Chinese beer’s pretty bland) in tall green 600ml bottles that wll set you back 40-80p (more in bars). Bars are few and far between away from tourist areas, but its not uncommon to see tables in restaurants with half a dozen or more empty bottles stacked up at one end as groups of drunken middle aged chinese men see in the night with noodles, noise and smiles aplenty.

The food is brilliant. I eat Indian and Chinese food in equal measures back home but whilst the food in India left me preferring the sloppier, spicier and sweeter English take on curries, Chinese food has far, far exceeded the predictable Chinese takeaway menu classics of back home. The quality of the street food here is the first thing to mention – eating on the cheap is a really enjoyable and diverse experience and though you don’t often have a clue what you’re being handed, it’s not often an unpleasant surprise, and the large crowds that form and sit at makeshift tables around the brightly lit, fuming foodcarts give you an easy way to pick out the best ‘establishments’ as well as provide plenty of banter whilst you wait for your food to cook.

The prevalence of meat dishes in Chinese cooking was a welcome change to the primarily veggie Indian fare but the Chinese are certainly less sqeamish about their animal intake – chicken feet, duck neck and lamb spine are just some of the horrors on show, and we weren’t particularly impressed when an expensive hotpot was brought out for us stacked over the brim with actual spines, broken into short rib-sized pieces bubbling away in a smelly brown brine, by waitresses wearing Inter Milan, AC Milan and Celtic football shirts!