A Free Lunch

Laura: "Well, look at it this way: If anyone back home asks, they won't believe what you did for National Day."
Amy: "It's certainly priceless."
Chris: "Definitely 'without price'..."


October the 1st is China's National Day. This year the Powers that Be are making a thing of it being the last National Day before the Olympics starts. All us Foreigners were invited by the University to go on an all-expenses-paid trip up to the top of Mount Tai by bus and cable-car, see some official show thing, and have a free lunch at the Ramada afterwards. Now, as we're now officially residents of Tai'an (our residence permits having come through the day before with the minimum of tussling at the PSB) we can get a local pass for the mountain quite cheaply and go up it whenever we like. But bus and cable car are both quite expensive, so we thought it would be well worth taking up the offer.


Alas, the weather was not kind. For days and days it had been swelteringly hot, but a few days before National Day it all started to go a bit English. There was heavy rain in the night, and drizzle in the day. The trees started shedding leaves with enthusiasm. October the 1st dawned with greyness and wetness. Knowing it would be colder at the summit, Chris wore the thermal T-shirt his brother gave him, a shirt, a jumper, another jumper, a fleece and a raincoat. And a scarf. I was marginally less spherical-looking, having better natural insulation. I stopped at one top and one jumper only, plus famed Coat of Impermeability.


We all loaded ourselves onto the two mini-buses. The South-Asian contingent from the New Campus also came, and all of us from the Old Campus had taken up the invitation apart from Nonna, a Russian who has gone to visit her daughter who is teaching a few hundred miles to the south, and Emmanuel, who took a fall a week or so ago and done something unpleasant to his knee on top of an old sports injury. In perfect accordance with Sod's law his room is three flights of stairs up so he's been stuck up there, getting cabin fever and overdosing on the internet. We've been dutifully dropping by most evenings with food and conversation; he's nearly right again, but decided to sit this one out.


The bus chugged along slowly in an 'I can do this all day' kind of way. We went through the main gate, up through the crowds of tourists, up past the half-dozen police check-points that had sprung up to marshal the holiday crowds. I was squeezed onto the end of a seat next to a larger-than-average South Asian, and had to cling to the seat in front of me at the bends to stop myself slipping down the stairwell. Grace (one of the American children) found something to burst into tears about behind me. Outside through one window the leafy trees gradually thinned out and conifers took their places. On the other window always a white gulf of clouded space framed by a few branches from overhead.


At the halfway point the buses stopped and we all got out, rearranged ourselves, and filed on to the cable cars in groups of six. By now we were actually inside the clouds. The cars launched themselves forwards into the whiteness one by one... the perfect white world viewed from the inside was broken only by the occasional treetop passing silently underneath, or a returning car emerging ghostlike from the other direction and then fading away again... I was unnerved enough to have to clutch my seat and pray silently for the first minute or so, but managed to get over it quite quickly. It helped to consider that the ride was considerably less dangerous than the coach drive we'd just had.


The cable car went almost to the very top. We only had to climb a few flights of stone steps before being surrounded by temple architecture, small food outlets, photographers and suchlike. The visibility was worse up here, and although it wasn't actually raining we all got wet pretty quickly just from walking through the mist.


I managed to slip down one small flight of steps in a wonderfully embarrassing but mercifully painless way through failing to consider that each step was considerably shallower than the length of my shoe. My feet skidded out from under me; I went bonk bonk bonk down a couple more steps before my bottom and both hands came into contact with the ground. I yelled "I'm all right!" to all the concerned faces that had just turned round, and came out of it with nothing worse than inconvenient dampness.


In certain areas of Taishan there are verses and observations from the ancient famous carved in beautiful calligraphy into the rock face. We managed to see a couple before the mist closed in too much further. But all too quickly we were herded before a red carpet along with the rest of the foreign group, some school children, some TV cameramen and some plastic covered chairs. We waited... we waited... I admired the kagools of the military/police people standing around in dress uniform; they have hoods which are specially designed to fit neatly over their hats without disarrangement.


Finally the People Too Important to Hold Their Own Umbrellas turned up, the plastic was taken off the chairs so that they would have a nice dry seat, and stuff began. TV personalities asked the school children questions about the Olympics and awarded Olympic mascot dolls to the correct answers. A dignitary spoke into a microphone that had been disastrously affected by the damp. A group of students from Beijing Institute of Something and Something chanted slogans, sang quite badly, and handed out inexplicable packets of tissues to the crowd. A group of kids dressed as the Olympic mascots said little prepared speeches and sang a ditty. A small woman with a pudding bowl haircut began to rap...


For each act a new group of Chinese would swarm in front of us to take photographs. The military men in green coats would herd them backwards off the red carpet, which meant backwards into our group. After several repetitions we were at the back of the crowd. By this point we'd been standing at the top of a mountain, in a cloud, in the cold, listening to things we didn't understand for over two hours, so we decided we didn't mind, and sloped off to join the South Asians who had been wisely huddling under a tree some way away for the last half hour or so. Chris was nicely warm in all his layers but had wet feet. My feet were toasty and the rest of me was fine as long as I kept moving about. Laura was fine thanks to the power of full length thermal underwear, but Lola was suffering a bit.


End of the presentation! Back along the path, down the steps, onto the cable car, onto the bus, down the mountain, round the mountain, off at the Ramada! The Ramada is the swankiest new hotel in Tai'an and boasts huge expanses of marble, gilt, and European food. Served buffet style. Confusing. But tasty. There were even brie and stilton in the pudding section and God knows how far away they'd come from. The stilton was a bit weird due to having been stored with fruit but it was still nice to see them. (In case you didn't already know; central China is more or less a Land Without Cheese.) Thoroughly warmed, revived, and plied with food and beer, we decided that the whole mountain episode was had been really rather fun and something to look back on. Very Chinese.

---

---