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Blog 6 - Xi’an, Macau and some thoughts before part 2
Wednesday 1st July 2009.
Well, I’ve been my usual sack self, and of course done things and not written them down, so here is a little account of 2 more places visited...
Thursday May 28th - Sunday May 31st
It’s the Dragon Boat festival which means we have 2 days off from teaching, and so with flights pre-booked, we took the opportunity to spend the 4 days in Xi’an. It’s a bit of a mission, Xi’an is up over and to the left a bit in China, so it was a good 2 hours flight to get there, but it’s worth it because here are the terracotta warriors.
Xian’s old town is basically built in a big square, surrounded by a massive wall. You go through the wall to get into the city, and in the middle there is the Bell Tower, and nearby, its sister, the Drum tower. The hostel I stayed at was over the road from the bell tower, so I had quite a view from my bedroom window!
The first place explored in Xi’an was the Muslin quarter. This is an area, of street after street after street, all tucked within each other, crammed full of market vendors selling anything and everything you can possibly think of associated with the terracotta army. There are bottle openers, back scratchers, key rings, replicas of every conceivable size, you name it. Also loads of other junk - various crafts, mobiles, shadow puppets, handicrafts, silks, and food on sticks, in buns, fried, steamed, wok-ed, churned, salted, its mad. It’s also crammed full of American tourists, which makes the prices ridiculously high, but if you know your Chinese numbers and can say “really?” in Chinese with theatrical disbelief and walk away, you can get better prices, and have great fun! There was a lovely man in a silk shop whose English was really good, and laughed at my Chinese, which I think must be getting better as up till now it had only drawn blank faces.
Within the Muslin quarter, is the hidden great Mosque, which I think was better hidden before they put up the enormous tourist signs pointing you in its directions...but it IS in English, so you never know, it may have fooled the CCP? To all intents and purposes, it looks like a fairly generic Chinese temple square with various outbuildings; however, the central minaret (which you don’t get to see) is disguised as a pagoda - ingenious!
After roaming around the Muslim quarter, one has to take the obligatory visits up the bell and drum tower, which are both truly lovely, and the bell tower still has people inside, putting on the bell ringing performances throughout the day. We saw them at 11am and they were already looking really bored, yet perked up for the Chinese bells rendition of Old Lang Syne, which was bizarre to say the least for a number of reasons; 1. I wasn’t drunk, 2. I’m in China, 3. It’s June but happily, 4. Still no one knows the words after the first line.
On the roof of the two towers, you get swooped by flocks of kamikaze swallows, who all day and night are to be seen endlessly circling and diving in and out of the eaves up in the roof. Extraordinary really, they never get you, but they come VERY close!
The whole of the next day was spent at the Terracotta Army museum. It’s a good hour out of the city, and you think you’re on the road to nowhere, but don’t forget, they were discovered in a farmer’s field so stands to reason really....
A little history for those who don’t know. The army, are life-size terracotta people, all individually made and painted. They all have unique expressions and stances, and there are LOADS of them. One of the main dudes in ancient China (Qin Shi Huang) clearly thought he was gonna have some trouble in the afterlife, so he had them ordered to be made, and made they were, with chariots and horses, the whole shebang. They were carefully arranged in underground chambers and covered over. Sadly, as what happens so often with this kind of thing, the underground army got broken into and big burly men with fire and nasty tempers (I saw the film) who came in and knocked off heads, set stuff on fire and generally caused a great big mess. Anyway, time went on and all was forgotten until in the 1970’s a farmer was sinking a well in one of his fields and pulled up, well, I don’t know, but I like to think it was a head, and lo, the underground chambers of the Terracotta army was discovered. The field has come on in the last 30 odd years, and now there resides a concrete paradise of museum, cinema hall, and of course, the 3 pits that have been uncovered. We followed Lonely Planet’s advice and went to the pits in reverse order, which is definitely the best plan. Pit number 3 is small, and all you really see are a few of the men standing around, mainly with no heads. It’s a little puzzling as you’re not sure what you’re looking at, I hadn’t read that part of the Lonely Planet Guide, all the signs are in Chinese and it’s a lot smaller than you would imagine. Plus, you’re up quite high, the pit is below you and so you can’t get very close. Without lingering, pit number 2 is enormous, but seems to be filled with, well, more concrete. Ah. I have just read Lonely Plant, and LP says this contains 1300 warriors and horses but is still being excavated. Read,” it’s still all underground and you can’t actually see anything”. Then however, you get to pit number 1, and as soon as you walk in, you’re faced with the sea of faces you recognise from so many pictures. And it’s enormous. And they’re still unearthing more. The pit is maybe the size of a football pitch, and you can go all around it. While you’re not particularly close to the figures, you can certainly see them clearly, all lined up, men, horses, and it really is very very impressive. There’s not much more to say about them really, I have put lots of photos in the accompanying photo email, but I guess it’s one of those places you can’t really describe adequately enough to those who’ve not been there.
The hardest part of the day is actually getting OUT of the place, running the gauntlet of hawkers and sellers who want you to buy their punnets of apricots, terracotta figurines, dog and wolf furs, and all manner of nick naks and nonsense. It’s not until you get on the bus to go back to Xi’an that you realise a) that you’ve been standing up all day and b) how tired you are.
Xi’an city walls are also walkable, although I got on a bike and wasn’t I glad that I did! To begin with, it was great to be back on a bike again, and I do miss George, locked away in his shed at home, (unless Pam and Arthur have sold him to feed their coke habit) and the wall is long long long and the view isn’t really of much. Instead, it becomes more of a challenge to get round in the allotted time before they charge you double in the 36 degree heat. The other fun game is to avoid cycling off the sheer 7 foot drops by the stepped areas. The slight incline, coupled with the monotonous grey of the flagstones, mean that drop off edges are invisible, and there are no signs alerting you to this fact, or a nice line of yellow paint. How I love those lines of yellow paint at home. I’ve not seen a single one here.... Not paying attention at the last minute and malarking about on ones bicycle, could lead to a nasty accident....but then one must remember, one is in China and should always be on the lookout for deadly drops, open man hole covers and other vast arrays of tripping, falling and toppling off the edge of things type dangers.
For an evening very well spent, and much unexpected, I went to the Big Goose pagoda. It was fate really, I was aiming for the little goose but got there at 6pm and it was shut, so jumped in a taxi to the big one. And while it IS massive, I couldn’t actually find the door in. BUT, the park it sits in is one giant stepped fountain and at 9pm, China puts on a light and water display, to music, of the kind you’ve never seen. There were crowds of people, and I was lucky to have been there since 6.17pm and so had a good spot. Having no idea what to expect, it was only pure luck that the water jets that came out of the wall were 6 feet to the right of where I was sitting, otherwise that would have been a very rude awakening indeed! For the next 4o minutes, water dances to music, with the compulsory neon lights of course, while children run in and out and get SOAKED, couples dash in for their photos to be taken, and some smart alec tries to saunter casually though under a brolly but is so wet by the time he’s even gotten halfway across, just looks silly and everyone laughs at him. The Chinese rarely scold their children. I’ve never seen more than a sharp word from the odd mother, but I have to say, the two boys near me who were putting their hands into the jets and thus redirecting the spray at the crowd, should have died from the looks they got and they soon stopped doing it. This is what I have found with the Chinese. While I hate to call them “the Chinese”, at times, this is certainly the case. There are moments, fleeting though they are, of real breaths of communalism. I think I may have just made that word up, but what I mean, is when faced with something, be it a foreign English teacher, or 2 boys pissing everyone off in the fountain, the energy of the crowd around you changes to one of mutual whatever the feeling happens to be. In this case, it was a combined “get your sodding hands out of that water and stop pissing about you sods. Where are your parents”? And you REALLY feel it. It’s bizarre. Perhaps this happens in England too, I’m just too engrained and don’t notice it, but the collective hackles were certainly raised, and you know exactly who they’re for.
Another event in Xi’an - a security man fell down some stones steps where we and lots of other people were sitting. He really fell, and clearly hurt himself and his walkie talkie went skidding away from him and he got a nasty dirty mark on his white shirt. And no one moved, or batted an eyelid. I was going to go down and see if he was ok but didn’t as I wasn’t sure if it would make him “lose face” (which may or may not exist but is a whole other conversation). Someone pointed out his walkie talkie to him and off he limped. It was similar to a girl in Beijing who was working in a supermarket standing at the end of an aisle crying her eyes out and everyone sailed by her and didn’t ask if she was ok, or even look at her. Sometimes there are such loud cries for help, yet the silence from the collective blind eyes is heart breaking. Juxtaposed to this, within half an hour of the security man falling down the steps, an old man came over to me to offer me some newspaper to sit on (as I was sat on the floor). Dirt is clearly a bigger issue than personal injury...but I’m not surprised. China likes to be clean.
Friday 5th June - Sunday 7th June.
We went to Macau. Well, we went to Zhuhai again on Friday, and crossed the border first thing Saturday. We had a bizarre experience in Zhuhai though. Generally speaking, the taxi drivers of China fall into 2 categories - a bit sullen and simply drive in silence or phone their mates to tell them they’ve just picked up a westerner, practice their English which is usually “hello!” followed by lots of laughing, and lots of looking in the rear view mirror. But both kinds get you to where you want to go and don’t rip you off. Zhuhai however, being the border town of Macau, is a mixed gaggle of all kinds of conceivable people - tourists, locals, migrant workers, beggars, touts, it’s like the bar in star wars, it’s a real space cowboy, dog eat dog, people sleeping on the pavements, always noisy, always people asking if you want a taxi here, can I have money for this, rabble rabble rabble. The taxi we got into to begin with, wasn’t going to put his meter on, and claimed the fare to the motel was “liu shi quai” - that’s 60 Yuan to you and me. Outrageous. We have done this journey before, and it’s no more than 30, more like 20. After demanding he put the meter on otherwise we get out, (the car was actually moving at this point), he reluctantly turned it on, and then proceeded to do laps of Zhuhai, twice over the same bridge, (we didn’t even need to cross the water) but then hit the rush hour traffic, got bored and dropped us off where we wanted to go, having got the fare up to just under 30. Bah.
Anyway, we had a lovely meal out that night, I stuffed my face with Portuguese seafood rice in honour of it being my 1 year anniversary with the boy, and ate every kind of creature that ever swam or crawled in the ocean. Good times.
The next day, we crossed to Macau. You have to fill in swine flu declarations everywhere you go now, but they let us in and we wandered and wandered. Macau was a Portuguese colony, so it’s strange, you get to the centre and you forget you’re in China. It’s very lovely, and the famous egg custard tarts are more amazing than they had been in my dreams. Pricy, coming in at $6, but worth it! We traipsed all round Macau, went up to the fort, sat on a canon, and went to the museum, (which wouldn’t let you in until you stood on a machine that shines a green light to show you didn’t have swine flu. We passed, flying colours, but left me fairly bemused about how a machine could possibly know, and that why it was ok to enter the country with swine flu, yet not the museum. Hmmm. )
It was a stupidly hot day, so we were well tired by the time it got dark and we had a look at the flashing lights of some of the casinos. Macau is a work in progress, but it’s going to be immense. It’s already impressive, with ridiculous buildings and of course, the compulsory neon, but give it a few more years and it will be like Vegas wasn’t even trying. We went into a Chinese casino and it was a very strange place indeed...I was expecting the lights, the noise, the drinks, all the stuff you see on CSI but here it was 4 blackjack tables, people drinking milk and smoking, and all you could hear was the odd “click click” of chips. I went for a wee and we left after accosting some Americans to let me swap my potatas (that’s not their real name) for Hong Kong dollars, which clearly, can be spent in Hong Kong (where I will be again) rather than Potatas, that you can only spend in Macau (where I won’t be again) as these are the 2 currencies here and the stoopid cashiers won’t change less than $100. (So you know, HK dollars and Macau Potatas have the same monetary value).I think he thought I was on some kind of con, his girlfriend certainly did, so I had to be very persuasive, but I’m sure he spent his 33 potatas on something splendid and didn’t give it another thought. It did make me feel a bit like I was on the Real Hustle though, and that made me feel a bit uncomfortable. Not because it’s a shit show, but because I felt like a bit of a criminal, even though I hadn’t done anything wrong. Anyway, I’m rambling...
So we left Macau, through a rather unceremonious tunnel, signed another “I promise not to have swine flu” declaration, and re-entered China. Or at least Zhuhai, which I think is a totally whole other place anyway.....
And now....
I have finished my classes, which has been strange. I have a new little friend, Helen, who I meet for lunch or dinner still and she has got me mozzie cream and a shiny new USB as a leaving present which was soooo sweet of her. I gave her a grammar book, a dictionary, and some other bits and pieces, (Edgar, clearly the winner) and our English club got us little presents...it left me with all a bit of a lump in my throat. My main class sat and ate lychees, and ice cream with me and we had dinner, and then they all trickled off one at a time, and my other main class sat and had a few beers with me last night, so they’ve all gone, and I’ve spent the last 2 weeks sorting out the next stage of my plan.
The plan.
I’m not going to teach in September, I have decided that I had lost sight of what I was here for, and in the teaching I have done, have achieved what I wanted. Now, I want to get a proper look at the place, and have worked out a route and a budget that should hopefully get me to Beijing in October without having to sell a kidney. Mind you, this all depends on whether Hong Kong will give me a 90 day visa...if it doesn’t, I’ll be home a whole lot sooner!!! But I have a fabulous trip planned, beginning in Shanghai and ending hopefully with a cruise down the Yangtze. I’m a bit scared, as I will be on my own in places where no one will understand what I’m saying, but also excited...if I can do this, I can do anything and the next phase of my plan will be to take over the world.
This blog has been shorter than I imagined, and a little convoluted, but I wanted to get something down before leave for Shanghai the day after tomorrow. I ate pig stomach the other night, and salted dried cuttlefish yesterday. I have eaten great food, and I have eaten some very dubious food indeed. I have sweated and simmered, I have felt lost and alone, but touched by simple kindness. I have been ignored and also listened to. I have felt humbled and empowered, sadness and joy. Zhongshan has been a real mixed bag for me, and now in the days before I leave, while I am not sad, I am looking forward at days ahead that hold I don’t know what in store for me with a little trepidation... Needless to say, I will be armed with my camera and a smile, and hope for the best.
Wish me luck!
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Jane Jeffs
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Good Luck Lucy
Brilliant photos and blog - look forward to the next instalment