26 Jan 2006

Winter Holiday Part II 

Day 4: And if the drive to Snowtown seemed bad enough, the drive out of it was worse. Nine whole hours. Made even more horrid by the roads through the mountains, which our tour guide optimistically dubbed the “massage chair roads”, but put frankly was more like being rolled downhill in a barrel half-filled with apples while simultaneously being hit with a big stick. The view was pretty though, driving in the snow on empty roads lined with white pines, even if we practically had to freeze our hands off every half a minute to wipe the frost off the bus windows. (They’re actually not that tacky, white pines, when they’re not made of plastic and plonked in the middle of someone’s living room as a Christmas tree.)

We stayed just outside another of those almost anonymous little suburbia-esque cities, and after dinner went out with about three-quarters of the tour group for supper. Everyone was eager to get out of the hotel, so we piled into a place the tour guide recommended and spent 248 Yuan on meat and fish skewers and got drunk. It was only about nine or so when we went back to the hotel but everything was already closed and the town was literally deserted, except for about forty-five taxis prowling the streets and stalking our every move. Can anyone say tourist trap?

Day 5: I made my first snowman today. He was about a metre seventy-five tall and just as wide, with a rotund belly and a flaring back because we couldn’t be bothered rounding him out. He had four pinecone buttons, orange peel eyes and branches of wheat for arms. He wore a jaunty red scarf and a woolly hat that we nicked from another snowman nearby. The snowman took half the tour group two hours to build, and who-woulda-thunk-it but we all broke out in a sweat in the -15°C chill.

We spent the night in a place run by Chinese-Korean ethnic minority people right by the hot springs at the base of Long White, the mountain range separating China and Korea. It was kind of dodgy. The ran the water from the springs through the walls as heating and sealed the windows shut, so it was absolutely boiling, and there were only five channels on the TV – all in Korean. If you sat down properly on the toilet your knees would have been somewhere around your shoulders and your face would have been squished into the wall. Korean people must be really short.

Day 6: 10 HOURS OF DRIVING. Everyone on the tour bus went stir-crazy so we started singing karaoke and make handprints with eight fingers on the frost-covered windows. Otherwise, we slept. A five o’ clock wake-up call following a stifling, sleepless night does not a cheerful tour group make. More roads piled with snow and pine trees, a mountain in the shape of a sleeping Buddha, and a lake with water that was still running, as if to spite the winter. We had a stopover Changchun, in a hotel that was nearly perfect except for a toilet that didn’t flush. (We had to call in the plumber. Twice.) The TV had 56 channels including HBO, ESPN and CNN, which was really random as we were in the middle of China. But who cares! English TV!!!!! And the Fashion Channel, which showed fashion shows and celebrities and models getting their hair done 24 hours a day, which I became totally addicted to. Good, vapid fun.

Changchun itself is a nice city, very regulated, with the streets in a grid pattern and cops directing traffic at practically every intersection at the city centre. The traffic lights and pedestrian crossing lights are soooo cute – each light has a timer showing you how much longer it’s going to be green or red. The Don’t Walk sign is a red hand that gets bigger and smaller like someone’s pushing something towards you, and the little green man actually walks – if he’s walking slowly, you’ve got plenty of time, but when he starts to run, you should probably start doing so too. The cars still drive through red lights when the coppers aren’t around to see them but at least they actually stop to let the pedestrians cross the street, unlike back in the south.

Day 7: Directly underneath the big red No Smoking sign in the aeroplane toilet is a slot marked ‘Ashtray’. WHAT THE???

22 Jan 2006

“And can somebody turn the heat up? It’s frickin’ freezing in here for Mr Bigglesworth…” 

…And the world would be a much sadder place without Doctor Evil.

Meanwhile, I have been overcome by the irresistible urge to lick a telephone pole. Indeed, I have survived seven days in the perpetually subzero temperatures of the Northeast without losing any extremities, with the strangeness of people in tour groups (like the mother and daughter who bought 230 bucks worth of chestnuts and five pairs of foam-soled furry purple boots), and the horror of public squat toilets. I reckon that’s good enough.

Day 1: Stepping off the plane in Harbin was like stepping into a meat freezer. It really is freaking freezing outside, dropping to about -25°C at night, and thirteen layers of clothing really are necessary. But don’t believe all those horror stories about instant frostbite and your ears falling off without you noticing – I have yet to see an earless, noseless local wandering the streets.

Harbin is really pretty. In some parts, the western-style façades, the bell-shaped roofs, the Russian on the shop signs and the accordion music makes it seem as if you’re walking through Old Moscow. At night (which is really more like mid-afternoon, the sun sets at about four-thirty) all the shops and ice sculptures by the roadside are lit up and it’s as if the old-school streetlamps (you know the type, sturdy wrought iron split like cherries into two lights at the top, last seen in Europe about a hundred years ago) are still burning kerosene. The only thing that was missing was a fresh snowfall, but our tour guide (twenty-eight years old, unmarried to the point of desperate, the poor girl, practically willing to marry any Honky bachelor she can get her hands on) said that it hadn’t snowed since Christmas Eve. All the leftover sludge has solidified into ice and these boots really weren’t made for walking – on slippery surfaces. Bugger.

Day 2: We were browsing a reasonably upmarket department store half an hour before closing time. The bottom storey sold nothing but boots – all lined with fur and fleece on the inside. (And thus we solve the mystery of why Northern women can wear normal leather pumps and heels in -20°C temperatures without freezing to death). We entered the supermarket section upstairs but quickly tired of it – Colgate looks the same in any country. But as soon as we tried to leave from where we entered we were pulled back by the security guard and informed that we were only allowed to leave via the checkouts. Fair enough, we thought, maybe it’s a security thing and they need us to go through the sensors on the other side. And then we started walking. And walking. And walking. It was worse than going through the Ikea maze, just to get out of a simple supermarket, I do not lie. It took us fully eight minutes, and probably 2ks of walking, to get to the checkouts, which were, infuriatingly, directly opposite the entrance and contained no security sensors whatsoever. Right on the dot of eight o’ clock, closing time, a shrill alarm rang and all the shop assistants literally ran out of the place, in a straight line one after the other, like the building was on fire. By the time we’d escaped the supermarket maze they’d turned off the escalators and all the lights. The bottom storey was completely deserted and all the shoes had already been packed away. If we’d been a minute or two slower they would have locked the doors. This is indeed an unsettling phenomenon – why do these people hate their jobs so much?

Day 3: We drove for so long that by the time we arrived at our destination for lunch, it was two hours before sunset. The village (population: 500), simply called Snowtown for reasons that will soon become obvious, is another level of gorgeousness altogether. It really is completely covered in about a metre of untrodden snow, piled up at the sides of the walkways and weighing down the tiles on the roofs. We took a horse-drawn sleigh ride through the winter wonderland everyone’s been dreaming of. It was just like one of those thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles of endless mountains covered by snow-capped pines that no one can ever complete because all the pieces look exactly the same. And the sun was setting and the wind was lifting drifts of snow into the air and… only the most ineloquent, unpretentious word can describe it: wow.

At night I nearly froze my face off after making the mistake of accompanying DD outdoors with his video camera and standing in one place for fifteen minutes while he filmed a single house for the entire period of time (boys and their toys, I swear). But the fireworks were awesome – the young people in Snowtown basically have no other form of amusement so the stalls loaded with a veritable army stockpile of fireworks occupy five blocks along the main street.

One thing that erred on the side of dodgy was the accommodation. In the North, it’s so cold all year round that the people don’t sleep on normal beds; they sleep on ‘kangs’, big stone blocks heated by a coal fire burning underneath, big enough to fit the whole extended family. Now that was all fine and good until they informed us that they’d arranged for five or six people to a kang – and this was after we’d paid 4500 Yuan each for rooms with separate toilets! To top it all off, they expected all 22 of us to share one dingy squat toilet with no hot water, and if you needed to go, you had to take someone else with you because the door required bodily force to be opened from the inside. A lot of people got really pissed off so they eventually moved us to a proper hotel with hot water and beds. Turns out the hotel’s actually an athlete’s village for the Chinese army athletes utilising the ski slopes a few hundred metres away, v. v. exclusive and never opened to the public. So it was all good – we had a decent place to sleep, a place to shower, and I could smile at all the young, nubile athlete boys out my door (YES people, the unthinkable has finally happened – I shall concede that Asian guys are not that bad after all. But only the ones with their natural hair colour. Although some of the others aren’t that bad at all. Oh god. All my standards are being lowered. Somebody slap me, hard, if I start going out with a weedy, personality-less Star Trek weirdo mouth-breather with peach fuzz, bleached hair and a rat’s tail.)

20 Jan 2006

An Australian Girl in China 

I've had so much tea in the last two days that my eyebrows are still twitching. Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen: I am spending a month in the land of the overbuilt, in the great wide country of the mass-produced designer fakes, in the homeland of the stingy Asian who will argue for half an hour to purchase her roasted pine nuts for 50 cents cheaper per pound - the one and only China. I must say it's been a tiny bit of a culture shock, and things definitely ain't the way I remembered it. One thing's for sure, I'm definitely not in Kansas anymore.

You know how all those television tabloid shows masquerading as current affairs programs ("Every anal-retentive, uptight parent should see this: do YOU know how many times your Ritalin-addled, bubble-wrapped, molly-coddled children blink each day?") keep showing that incendiary segment where white people complain about Asians being bad drivers? I think I just might know where all that is coming from - BECAUSE THEY ARE! (Just like Italy and half of the U.S., mind you.) In China, there appears to be no road rules, no speed limits - I've been here four days and I still don't know how fast they're legally allowed to drive - and horns are employed liberally and loudly (that is, where they haven't already been banned for that very reason). People do whatever the hell they please on the roads - driving the wrong way down one-way streets, on the footpath, in the lane of oncoming traffic. As for indicating - wait a minute, WHAT indicating? I'm not sure the cars HAVE indicators! So there's basically no way to tell where anyone's going - hell, I don't even know where I'M going half the time! I swear I've been in three near-crash situations already. In fact, they drive so completely psycho that nobody batted an eye as we overtook a yellow sedan puttering along at walking pace while straddling two lanes - until I looked back and noticed the driver slumped slack-jawed in her seat, having had, most likely, some sort of epileptic fit at the wheel. But god knows how long it took until someone noticed that something wasn't right, because driving like that in China IS CONSIDERED COMPLETELY NORMAL.

And don't even get me started on trying to cross the road as a lowly pedestrian. In China, jaywalking is not a crime - it's an art. I swear, it's traumatized me for life. There are cars, scooters, bikes and motorcycles coming at you in at least five different directions, and no such thing as pedestrian crossings at all. Sure, there are zebra crossing painted haphazardly across the roads, but who gives a damn? It's not like anyone's actually going to STOP to let someone cross! Truly not for the faint-hearted. Best to scuttle along after an old lady or two, whom people will think twice about running over.

The people here have no concept of tact. The epitome of subtlety they are not. They sure don't mince their words here. They are as blunt as a rusty ice pick in an Indian summer. And any other bad metaphor you can care to think of. Case study: a clothing store stocking products for the plus-size gentleman or madam. Do they give it a nice, glossy, even remotely PC name like oh, off the top of my head, Full-Figured Madam, or Plus-Sized Ladies? Oh no. Such pansying around with words is not for the Chinese. So what indeed, I hear you ask, do they call that store? "Fat People's Clothes".

I don't know what in the world the people who run restaurants are thinking when they choose uniforms for their waitresses, but they probably aren't the prettiest of thoughts. Seen in one of those restaurants where you cook your food at the table: a waitress's uniform consisting of a fitted jacket over hotpants over fishnet stockings tucked into knee-high boots. But that ain't it, sister, oh no. It gets worse. The boots matched the jacket. Not just went with, not merely complemented but matched. THE BOOTS WERE WHITE VINYL.

The shop assistants here are downright scary. They are absolutely EVERYWHERE. Back home if you walk into a shop, you would be considered lucky if the solitary attendant grunts in you general direction as she continues her conversation with her boyfriend on the phone. In China, if you so much as glance inside a store, five assistants will ambush you and drag you inside, spouting promises of 20, 40, 60 percent off and bombard you with every item of clothing that you happen to cast your eye past (in a pretty accurate approximation of your size, of course). This happens in every boutique, department store and sidewalk stall, from the five-dollar plastic necklaces to the Louis Vuittons. (And yes, you can actually buy real designer pieces, and at real designer prices too, thank you very much. But hey, they make a damn good fake if you know where to look.) Even in the supermarket section of the more fancy departments - "Ferrero Rocher, madam? On sale today, for only 84 RMB." "We got that box for four dollars," mutters MD, and the girl gives us a weird look and slowly backs away.

But I'll tell you one thing; they sure know how to make a girl feel like an oaf. These petite little Asian girls are so freaking skinny that my mother (who is tiny) (size 8-10 UK, a metre fifty-five at most - she used to be a metre fifty-eight, but honest to god she is shrinking at the rate I'm growing) teeters on the chunky side in China. I, who have been accursed with broad shoulders and non-anorexic thighs, practically have to go to Fat People's Clothes to find some to fit me. That being said, I'm about a metre seventy and a standard size 12, I have the tag on the hem of my jeans to prove it, so I ain't no Michelin man either, although that doesn't stop me from feeling like one here. In fact, the Chinese girls come in so many different shades of tiny that they make about four clothing sizes between your average western comparative sizes 10 and 12. My mother wears a size 28. The really miniscule ones can squeeze into a 23. I WEAR A SIZE 31. (Even the eager-to-please shop assistants do a double take when I tell them what size I wear. ("Sorry, did you mean size 27?") More often than not the reply comes back as, "Sorry, we don't stock that size."))

I walked into a clothes store the other day and saw a cute printed sweater on the sale table. I asked the shop assistant whether they had it in my size. She looked me up and down and asked, "You're about a metre seventy, right?" I nodded. She yelled into the back, "BRING OUT THE EXTRA LARGE!" "THERE AREN'T ANY!" "Sorry," she said, smiling apologetically, "we don't have any in extra large."

Tomorrow I jet off to the North-East for a week. It doesn't rise above -10°C in winter, and it's a crazy idea to go but to hell with that. I'm not taking any chances - I'm going to wear fifteen layers of clothing every day. Cross my fingers I don't turn into an icypole.

Being in China has made me retarded - I've forgotten both how to speak English and how to write numbers.


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