Dodgy Massage, National festival, backstreets of Haikou

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We showed a taxi driver the chinese characters for 'massage' and he took us to a place down a back alley somewhere. I'm glad Ben went first, because this is what happened to him! He still has red circles on his back over a week later.

Whilst in Sanya, we also joined in with the Chinese tradition of mid autumn festival - a national holiday. In this part of the country, they celebrate by flooding to the beach in their thousands, sitting in mini-territories marked out in the sand, each with incense sticks and a little shrine with cakes and fruit and candles. A lot of them seemed to be bowing down and praying to the shrine. The picture is not clear but the whole beach that you could see on the panorama video on the last entry was full of people of all ages.

We attracted a lot of attention from drunken families and teenagers, all coming into our little circle to start over-friendly conversations and immediately exchange numbers. So much so that a TV crew came over and asked us to speak Chinese to their camera for the news! After trying ten times to say one particularly long and difficult sentence that they wanted us to say, eventually they just told all five of us to sit there staring at the full moon and smiling, while they filmed… Very cheesy. The whole night had a very cheesy, happy happy lovely lovely atmosphere to it, actually, because all the Chinese people were sitting with their loved ones in love-hearts drawn out in the sand, under the full moon, dancing and clapping and making offerings of fruit and incense to their neighbouring groups, decorating each other's territories with candles and shapes in the sand etc.

Back in Haikou (university town), I took some detours down back-alleys to find out more about the poor side of the city, and here are some of the photos. Strangely enough, even in amongst the proper slums, I felt completely safe and the people were just as eager to start conversations with me. When I was taking a photo of one woman's house, she kept saying 'Do you foreigners not have houses like this?'. There were a few people in the shadows who looked desperately thin, but generally they seemed to be smiling a lot, playing with their kids and gossiping away, even before they had seen me.

I didn't manage to go inside a house, obviously, but I did get taken to a Chinese friend's student accommodation yesterday: they somehow fit six people in a room the size of mine with no air-con, on hard bunk beds with no mattress, just literally a wooden plank and a bedsheet. They all study in there together on one desk underneath one of the bunks, and must somehow negotiate when they all go to sleep/talk/study etc.

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Photos

Mah Jong on pink chairs
very common scene - standard street activity amongst the older people

chicken battery
this guy loved chatting away about his chickens, and was really smiley

Comments

[anonymous]

So didnt u get a massage then ?

[Pete Tupper]

who's this? and yes I did but mine just consisted of him yanking my limbs away from their sockets and putting all his weight onto my spine and clicking my neck, rather than sucking my skin into plastic tubs.