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Published: September 8th 2010
This is an unusually long entry to start off with, as inevitably there is a lot to say about the first impressions in a place like this... then after this they will be a lot shorter with videos etc. when life starts getting more normal, hopefully...
It seems to have taken far longer to get used to life here than expected. This is not because of the fact that I’m getting through four sweat-soaked t-shirts a day; not because of the initial lack of running water and electricity or the yellow tap water when it finally came on; not because of the cockroaches and rats; not because of fact that we stand out like Gandalf in a hobbit hole; not because of the fact that I get stared at everywhere I go as if I really was Gandalf; not even because of the fact that our first experience of Chinese roads in the taxi ride from the airport involved nearly squashing a girl against a bus with our rusty van-thing, as the bus stopped in the middle of a three-lane carriageway to let her out. All these things have made it ‘interesting’, but the main reason is that everything in Hainan seems to take about 5 times longer than you’d expect.
Firstly, we can’t speak much Chinese. Secondly, they don’t speak English, at all, ever, none of them. While in theory this is BRILLIANT, as we have to figure out how to say absolutely everything in Chinese, in reality it just means we find ourselves acting out body language for ‘I’m locked out of my room again’, and ‘there’s a heavily leaking toilet in there’, for instance. As for setting up something like the internet, you can imagine that discussing wireless modems and DSL connections in Chinese was about 10 times worse than having exactly that kind of conversation over the phone to even the worst of Glaswegian call centres.
A further reason is that as soon as Chinese people see a white guy in a conversation with a shopkeeper/visa-converting police/tuk-tuk driver/coconut chopper, they crowd around in a huge group, all trying to help by offering wrong translations of conclusions that had been reached in the conversation five minutes beforehand, only further confusing the situation and making the discussion last another 20 minutes. When you’re trying to get anything sorted out they will nod and agree when they don’t know what you’re talking about, then you won’t know what they’re nodding and agreeing about, and suddenly you find yourself eating chicken’s feet or being given a pink piece paper covered in Chinese characters and put in a car and driven to a strange place, only to be confronted by more confused people asking why you have a pink piece of paper; you won’t have the faintest idea, so they look at the piece of paper and start having an argument amongst themselves for half an hour before turning to you and asking something like ‘do you have your passport?’ and the confusion continues...
Perhaps the coconut choppers aren’t quite that complicated. Incidentally, it is easy to pick fallen coconuts up off the ground anywhere around campus, but Hainanese coconuts don’t break easily, even when dropped from a 6th floor student accommodation onto a building site.
The overriding impression is that everything is just completely random and bizarre, and every few minutes something happens - or you are told something - or you see something - that just doesn’t seem to have any logical reason to it: like a pair of girls who always walk around campus together in matching silver outfits, moving their legs in perfect unison with each other even when avoiding oncoming mopeds, or a herd of cows strolling along the beach in single file with no herder behind them and no fields to be seen anywhere. The chaos has a great charm to it that keeps it from being scary or bad, and instead makes everything hilarious and exciting. You just never know what’s going to happen next.
Essentially, however long things take, or how incompetent certain people seem to be at their one and only job in life, something about the place makes you feel at ease and happy with it all. I think it is the fact that absolutely EVERYONE we have come across has been incredibly nice to us and tried to help, however ineffective that help may have been. They are all such sociable and welcoming people, always interested to talk to us and make friends, and don’t seem to feel any resentment towards foreigners, only fascination.
Basically everything is hilarious at the moment because we just don’t know what’s going on any of the time. I love it.
That’s all for now! Next entry will be a quick story about two weird and wonderful adventures we’ve been finding ourselves on around the island, both involving the police in unexpected ways...
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Dad
non-member comment
Brilliant!
Keep the reader hanging on, a very clever technique. It all sounds amazing and I can imagine why you find it all such fun. looking forward to hearing more anon.