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Published: April 7th 2011
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Without wishing to stray below the belt, although after seventeen of these some would say it's about time, this is going to start with a quick word on toilets. This is because I've been ill for most of thelast week and so a good portion of my experiences over the past few days have been exclusively bathroom based. Don't worry if you don't like the sound of this though, there's a nice bit about Ping Pong coming up later on.
I was told before I got here that my flat would have a Western toilet installed as part of the contract. Naively I asked why this was necessary and then (because nothing gets past me) questioned what a Chinese toilet actually was. I was told to imagine a toilet without the toilet - which, as you will be able to imagine, is a hole. A hole which takes a decent amount of lower body strength to successfully make use of, and which I have become convinced is one of the reasons that everyone here seems to be so fit and thin, and why China is not full of twenty-seven year olds who have to groan and hold their knees when
getting up from a chair. The hole thing and the fact that the toilet paper must be put in the bin and not flushed, means that they are rarely places that you feel like spending any quality time, unlike Western ones, which I and many others treat like personal, quiet and well-lit libraries. Obviously, being here you want to try and experience as much Chinese culture as possible, but a proper toilet is a luxury that I make no apologies for.
Of course it should be said that saying anything about 'Chinese culture' is all but impossible given that I'm in one small city in the middle of the place and is a little like living in Rotherham and trying to make observations on European culture. I'm pretty sure that given that there are about 1.4 billion people in this vast country, any attempt to sum up anything based on one or even a handful of cities is cripplingly flawed, but if nothing else, hopefully that will be something else to look at and discover more about over the next few months.
Something else I'm curious to discover more on is what the favoured sports are here. So
far I've seen very little indication that football is even acknowledged as being a thing that exists, which is not what I had been led to believe. The only evidence so far being a guy in an Arsenal shirt, an AC Milan fan, a woman at work who fancies David Beckham and a rather bizarre late-night rerun of the Serbia-Ghana game from the last World Cup on tele about two weeks ago. (Apparently there is a sports channel, but it's on cable and I don't have it.) In terms of what you can see on the streets, the major sports seem to be table tennis and badminton - although basketball also appears to be quite popular which does seem odd in a country where I, at 5 foot 11, am looked on as being inordinately tall.
The sports clothing shops back this up as my search for any kind of Chinese football top has so far been fruitless because the shops are full, almost exclusively, of badminton and ping pong shirts. Even on a leisurely stroll through the square in the daytime, you will see table tennis tables full of guys with their own bats (?, racquets? paddles?) playing
at 100mph spinning the ball in fifteen directions at once, looking like they should be in some kind of Olympic team rather than just playing in a random square in a random Chinese city. To make this worse, these guys are usually doing at least two of the following whilst playing like this; talking, eating, drinking, smoking, arguing, sitting down. All pretty humbling for someone who was runner up in the Annual U14s Outdoor Doubles Table Tennis Tournament at a camp-site in Montpelier in 1995.
The badminton is a similar story as many's the time I've been walking to work early on a weekend morning and seen hordes of people striking up their own impromptu games in the People's Square. Last week we just sat out in the sun for an hour on a day off amongst all the people playing cards and Mah-jong, and two middle aged women found a few square yards of space and so just started playing. Middle aged is probably being kind as they looked like women who, if you saw them on a bus, you'd seriously consider giving up your seat. Either way, they were playing fairly energetically for about twenty five minutes
and most of the rallies were long enough for me to feel a bit tired just watching. Of course, I speak as someone who knows that, when playing badminton, if my opponent returns my serve then the point is lost, but it does make you wonder just how good some of the other, younger, more agile players must be.
And, after all that there's Tai-Chi. Not a sport, more an activity like chess. (I stayed at a hotel in Jinan which had it's own chess room! I was to intimidated to go within a knights move of it but I enjoyed knowing it was there). The Tai-Chi is incredible to watch, any slightly isolated or detached space in a park, by a river, on waste-ground etc. seems like the place of choice to practice. Even just sitting and watching it is a relaxing thing to do, although it is pretty unnerving when you walk past a group of trees and catch a glimpse of a figure moving really slowly in the shadows. Tai-Chi or no Tai-Chi, I've seen far too many Japanese films for my first thought not to be 'Ninja!'
Obviously, there are other things that go on too. There are three snooker tables outside on North Street in the Old Town that I'm working up the courage to grace with my presence, there's the guy I saw yesterday who was playing tennis on his own with a ball attached to some string and a weight, and also what looked like a number of croquet pitches (? lawns? greens?) located underneath one of the bridges over the river. As it turns out, while they may have looked like croquet pitches, the game being played seemed to have more in common with billiards, and truthfully looked pretty light on rules of any form as it seemed to be mainly about the guys playing, shouting a bit, laughing at each others shots, and generally having a good time - Chinese culture in a nutshell really.
Pura Vida.
Dave
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