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Published: December 14th 2009
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It’s 13 months since we left the uk and now we’re counting the days till we come home ON THURSDAY. The last 3 months has been very different to our first 8 in China...
We’re the first foreign employees in our company and we've got used to answering to "Charlie Laoshi" and "Tristan Laoshi" (Teacher Charlie and Teacher Tristan). We have been training big groups (up to 250 at a time) of kindergarten teachers.
We've been away from our apartment a lot having travelled to train in more than 10 provinces and loads and loads of cities. Tristan and I’ve spent most of the time apart travelling with our translators but we met up for some free time together in the best places- Guangzhou, Xiamen and Hohhot.
Travelling seperately has been a completely new experience. We’ve both gone for weeks without seeing other foreigners. We’ve had some epic train and bus journeys and have got used to the long distances. I calculated that I’ve spent more than 3 weeks of the past year on trains. I’ve run out of books so have been watching downloaded films on my netbook. The majority of Chinese travellers can just sit and
do nothing (just drink tea, smoke and hock up phlegm) for 8 hours plus.
There are thousands and thousands of cities in China which all, except for the main 'globalized'(!) ones, look basically the same in in the tropical south as in the freeezing north. Blocks and blocks and blocks of (once) white tiled apartments stained greay and brown with big horrid smears from the air con units and all the muck from factories. Huge wide roads with electric bikes and hardly any cars that meet dusty entrances to low rise rows of busineses. Usually a restaurant followed by a hairdressers followed by a pharmacy followed by a restaurant followed by a restaurant followed by a China Mobile shop followed by a ‘massage’ parlour followed by a restaurant and so on. Plus the occasional overdeveloped park with paddle boats on a fake lake, speakers hidden in the trees playing Simon and Garfunkel, outdoor gyms and ping pong tables and street sweepers brushing the dust into the air. All under a backdrop of chimneys and a grey haze above the horizen.
But because we've got to know one of these cities very well, we know that there are loads
of brilliant things about them. The communities are fantastic. Somehow even in very new apartment blocks the communities are really strong and incredibly safe with kids playing outside after dark and middle aged women dancing with ribbons attached to their hands. Despite the one-child policy there seem to be babies everywhere. People do tai chi in the morning in the public squares and aerobics dances to pop music in the evenings. Old people do excercises everywhere from jogging backwards to stretching their legs up onto fences. There's always streetfood, even in winter, and pavement markets selling everything from tea to tights to DVDs to popcorn.
When travelling for work we’ve spent a lot of time in restaurants being treated to local food buy our company’s city agents. The set up of the restaurants is similar in every city, despite having quite different local food. In the entrance there are big steel bowls on the floor with various (sometimes unidentifiable) meat, fish, seafood and veg. Plus some cling filmed plates with a raw impression of what each dish will look like. The floor is dirty, there’s no heating or low lighting. Just a little wooden bar with about as many
waitresses as there are customers standing behind it, in front of towers of unrefrigerated beer, tins of soybean drinks and bottles of Chinese spirits in fancy red boxes. And the obligatory Mao portrait.
Most of these small restaurants are made up of ‘private rooms’. Each of these has a number. Usually something like 188 even though there are only a few rooms in the building. Inside is just a big round table. White walls, often no window and usually no heating. So coats remain on for the duration of the meal.
We get asked lots of the same questions by the people we meet. Are you from America? Can you speak Chinese? Can you use chopsticks? Do you like Chinese food? Does your England have this?...this?...this? (points to each dish on the table). After that my translator takes over and answers questions for me. Whenever a new dish arrives on the table it is spun round for us to dig in first and every one waits for our reaction. Every now and again I throw in a ‘hao chi!’ (delicious! (good eat)) and that gets a lot of laughs.
Towards the end of the meal some massive
Moon festival
Local children built this moon viewing platform so that we could have the best possible perspective on mid-autumn night. question is translated. What is your impression of our China? How was your Britain affected by the economic crisis? What's the best job to have in England?
We’ve eaten local food and street food in so many provinces now. We’ve tried horse, donkey, swan, camel, sheep brains, fish heads... all sorts. We've loved eating sesame noodles, mutton kebabs, lotus stems, dumplings, sweet potato, pulled noodles. The only thing I struggle with is breakfast. My hosts always want to take me to eat a great big Chinese breakfast which is usually horrid. Rice porridge (basically just rice that has been cooked but not drained) plus fried dough sticks, plain steamed bread, pickled vegetables and soya milk. They think it’s balmy that I’d rather wait till lunch (even though it's usually as early as 11:30).
We’re come full circle and are back in the depths of winter having hardly seen rain since September. Clothes don’t matter anymore because nobody ever sees what’s under your coat. Lots of people even wear sleeve covers which they can change and wash instead of having to take their coat off.
We’re ready to come home. We’ve had hardly any contact with foreigners for
a whole year and it’s been brill but we couldn’t do it for any longer. It’s impossible to explain the massive divide between us and the people we’ve met here. They’re just so far away from us culturally and we know that most of them will never travel out of China. China is still its own universe and, apart from the major cities, I don’t think we’d want to be here for longer than a year.
It’s strange because from some angles it looks like America with big roads, big cars, big buldings, big brands etc. But the lifestyles and values are millions of miles away. We respect the people that come and live here forever because even for foreigners that can speak Chinese fluently there are things about life in China that I don't think I could ever understand (like the importance of
face) or accept (like guanxi i.e. it's
who you know).
Once we’ve settled in at home we’re going to miss China like mad. Our friends, or job, our slick apartment, being able to afford to buy anything, riding bikes everywhere and it never raining. We'll quickly forget what it's like to cause a stir
just stepping out of our apartment.
See you soon. It's time for our journey back to the west (an 11 hour flight).
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becky
non-member comment
wowee!
Sounds great guys really excited about having you both back. I think you'll find it very strange - i do and i was only away for 2 months. Cant believe its been over a year! One quick comment- people in India also sit on trains not reading/ playing games but going "haaaaack" ALL day and night and spitting out the window! Maybe England is the odd one out on this tradition?! xxxxxxxxxxxx