Strange Suzhou Spring?

Last week it was bitterly cold. Rainy. Icy. There was even a slight spattering of snow one day. It truly seemed that we were at the start of a long winter.

Today I woke up bundled on my 6 layers of clothes. Hat. Scarf. Thermals. I braced myself for the chill of the outside. Stepped out with trepidation. And it was spring. Blue skies, warm air, people cycling on their bikes. Surreal. In each shop I went to I had to remove a layer of clothes as it was just too damn hot.

Global warming anyone?

Chinese Toilets

I have had my fair share of bizarre toilet experiences in China. In Beijing there's a mall that has toilets you go inside, close the door and you can see through the doors and walls to everyone OUTSIDE the toilet (slightly unsettling.) I have had to get off a crowded bus to pee on a motorway verge, in sight of the entire bus. People took photos of my giant, white bum and compared it excitedly in Chinese to the moon. And, of course, there have been the many hutong toilets - holes in the floor, no partitions or door around so you squat and watch everyone around pee. Lovely.

This week I went to the toilet at work. A normal toilet. Normal door. Normal walls. No one peeing beside me. I had my glasses tucked into the top of my shirt. As I leaned over to press the flush on the toilet, the glasses fell out and were sucked away. Sucked away. My. Very. Expensive. Glasses. Gone.

What do you do in that kind of situation? I laughed slightly hysterically. I ran out of the toilet, found Alan and shouted 'I've just flushed my glasses down the toilet! What do I do?' He looked at me like he didn't understand the words coming out of my mouth. I had a class to take. I ran along to the classroom, burst in the door and said 'I've just flushed my glasses down the toilet! What do I do?'

It turns out that this may be a situation that has never really happened before. No one knows what to do.

Toilet life seemed to go on as normal. The glasses were irretrievable in everyone's opinion. I was gutted.

Two days later I passed the offending toilet and noticed two ayis furiously plunging at the toilet. Later, a sign appeared stating the toilet was 'out of order'. I'll say. Then a mechanical pumping machine appeared and started churning water in the toilet. Signs appeared everywhere stating: 'please do not flush paper or tissues down the toilet.' What about glasses I thought?

The ayis said that people kept going to the toilet, kept flushing and it would block. They didn't know why. I tried explaining. It didn't translate. I gave up on the glasses.

About 5 days later I got an email: "Morning all, Anyone left a pair of Ray Ban glasses in the toilet (staff only) on the second floor? They are with me now." Surely they didn't mean IN the toilet?

They did. Smeared glasses were returned to me. I don't think I can ever wear them again.

Winter of Discontent

Suzhou winter has well and truly arrived. Suddenly. 

Two weeks ago I was cycling around in a pair of shorts and a vest and now I am wearing every piece of clothing I own while still inside my house. 

The Suzhou cold is not a Scottish cold. It's a cold that gradually sneaks into your bones and before you know it, you can never remember having been warm. Summer is a distant memory. IT'S ONLY BEEN TWO WEEKS! In Scotland, houses have central heating and double glazing. Apparently that is unheard of Suzhou way. I don't know how. In so many ways China is futuristic and modern and ground-breaking but when it comes to heating: not so much. South of the Yangtze = not very much heating. North of the Yangtze = heating, but only after a certain day of the year specified by the government. All the flashy, modern apartments of Suzhou have all mod-cons. Bar heating. 

Some apartments have underfloor heating (not ours) but due to a current shortage of natural gas in China, you are only allowed a certain amount of gas every month to work it. If you run out, you aren't allowed to buy more. Otherwise, you have to turn your air conditioning unit onto 'hot'. You have to have it on all day to have any effect. If it's a particularly cold day, your bones stay cold and your face heats up like you've got a bad fever. The effect on your skin is not dissimilar to nuclear fallout (I expect.) Various other things are also working against us. When it rains, water pours in through the bathroom window. All our clothes are damp. There is a problem with our boiler which means that we have to keep the window beside our kitchen open ALL THE TIME. 

Coffee gets cold as soon as you pour it because the cups are so cold. I kid you not.

Hot water bottle central, 50 layers of clothes and a look out at the amazing view from our apartment and i'm sure the winter won't be too long. Please God. 

Red Hair

Last Sunday I dyed my hair red. It’s pretty damn red. The change has proved more controversial than I'd anticipated. I have been surprised and amused by people’s reactions. Apparently in Suzhou it is de rigueur to tell people that you think their hair looks crap. Here are a select few comments:

“So. Did you mean your hair to turn out like that?”

(to me) “Oh. That’s… well… that’s certainly a change. Do you like it? Do you really like it?” (to Alan) “What do you think of that?”

“What possessed you to do that to yourself?”

“Oh. It’s you. I’ve been looking all over for you. I didn’t recognise you with your hair like that I thought you were some sort of wayward teenager.”

“It must be pretty tough when you’ve got hair like that to pick out clothes that match.”

“Chinese people think red is a lucky colour but they’d never have their hair like that.”

(at a Halloween party) “Where did you get your wig?”

The Million Trees Project

Roots and Shoots Shanghai aim to plant one million trees in Inner Mongolia to help offset China’s carbon emissions and reduce the effects of desertification.

My Eco Club group at school aim to raise enough money in our school to plant 1,000 trees. Trees are 25RMB (about 2 pounds, 50 pence.) By selling bamboo tree ornaments and wrist bands on Monday this week we raised enough money to plant 264 trees: only 736 to go!

You can offset your carbon emissions by planting trees. Go to: http://www.jgi-shanghai.org/Content.aspx?ItemID=164

The Hunt for the Pink T-shirt

It’s not very often that you need to find a pink t-shirt at short notice. We were positive. A quick 15 minute jaunt along Shiquan Jie should do it, then dinner. Then relax.

We left work at 5 o’clock. We sat on the bus for about half an hour and it didn’t move anywhere. I have now nicknamed myself the ‘five o’clock bus fascist’. My feeling being that if you’re not on the bus at 5 o’clock then you’re missing the bus, the bus is leaving without you. The 5 o’clock bus leaves at 5 o’clock. Not so.

At around 5.30 the bus driver shouts at us to get off the bus. Well he shouts a lot of things in Chinese that we don’t understand and gesticulates towards the door. He drives off leaving us in the same place we started. It transpires that he has gone to help out another bus that has crashed. Obviously.

So. We get on another bus. A bus that spends half an hour driving us in the wrong direction round the lake and then dumps us and tells us to get on another bus. Deciding our luck with buses is not particularly good we sack it off and opt for a taxi. The taxi driver does not seem pleased about our destination. He calls someone and puts them on the phone to us. The person on the phone asks where we are going. We tell him. This happens another three times before the taxi driver dumps us at the opposite end of the (very long) street from where we want to be.

We begin the very long walk, laden with bags from work. At first there is an absence of pink t-shirts. Shops have EVERY other colour of t-shirt other than pink. Then we spy some pink t-shirts. Ones with feathers, diamantes, giant pictures. No plain pink t-shirts. Where is Primark when you need it? We split up and arrange to meet in half an hour, pink t-shirts in hand. Neither of us can find the place we arranged to meet and spend 45 minutes looking for each other. I accidently knock a man off his bike and cause a ruckus. We trek UP the road, DOWN the road and eventually get a bloody pink t-shirt around 9.30. Only 4 and a half hours later.

We have dinner and get eaten alive by mosquitoes. Pink skin to match the pink t-shirt.

BUT: we did raise nearly 600 quid for breast cancer charities. 

China Wedding

So. We were in Beijing for the national holdiay and we got asked to go to a wedding. Well, less asked and more told we were going to a wedding. It didn’t seem to be an issue that we didn’t really know the bride or the groom or that we didn’t have an invitation.

Weddings begin at 11.05 I am told. It is an auspicious time. Many things in China are about luck. We went for dinner at a friend’s house and she gave us some apple pears she had picked to take home with us. She had to give us five, because four is very unlucky. Four, “si”, in Mandarin, sounds incredibly similar to the word for death: “si” but it’s said in a slightly different tone. The wedding was held on the eighth day of the month. Eight is a VERY lucky number. The Beijing Olympics began at eight minutes past eight on the eighth of August 2008. Eight, “ba”, is lucky because it sounds similar to the word “prosper”. But more importantly for a wedding, the number eight when written as a figure looks remarkably like the character for “double happiness”: 8 - 囍. Weddings have double happiness characters etched everywhere. On chocolates; projected on the wall and even the confetti explodes into tiny, red (a lucky colour) double happiness characters as it floats from the sky.

We turned up to the wedding not really knowing what to expect and it certainly delivered the unexpected. A giant Rolls Royce decked out in pink tulle rocked up and people crowded around it with giant tubes over their shoulders. The tubes were not too dissimilar to a rocket launcher. This is the China version of confetti. I would call it extreme confetti. It explodes with a similar sound to a rocket launcher and blasts millions of pieces of confetti into the sky. If you’re not careful it could blast one of your body parts into the sky with it.

As the wedding party crowded on the stairs to have their picture taken I stepped around to where the photographers were to take a picture myself. Mistake. Before I know it Alan and I are thrust into the photo and carefully maneuvered to the front. We grin cheesily and slightly awkwardly admist a bunch of strangers and shout “Aubergine!” at the cameras. “Qie zi”, meaning aubergine, is the Chinese version of “cheeeeessee” when posing for a photo.

Upstairs, the reception hall is like something out of a Barbie castle. Everything is draped in further pink tulle. Double happiness characters and emblazoned on every available space. A giant cinema screen sports a picture of the bride and groom in a field of purple flowers. On the tables there are chocolates, sunflower seeds and piles of cigarettes. In many ways it is like a theatrical production. There is a handsome ‘presenter’ who shouts into a microphone. The crescendo of his voice seems to have no relation to the meaning of his words. He shouts and shouts louder and builds up to a climax and I expect a burst of applause but then he just starts a new sentence and builds it up in the same way. There are full on theatre lights everywhere. Shortly before 11.05 the groom appears. He walks down the ‘aisle’ with a bouquet of flowers. All spotlights are on him. A version of a Spice Girls song plays in Chinese as he walks. He introduces a film which has many different shots of the bride and groom posing in traditional Chinese costume; dressed up like emperors; wearing Western wedding clothing and frolicking in autumn leaves. 11.05 strikes. The giant doors at the back of the hall open the groom walks halfway down the aisle towards the door accompanied by blaring music by Enya. He gets down on one knee and offers the bouquet up. The bride enters and takes it. They walk back to the stage.

Things get better from there. The bride and groom light a giant wreath of candles in the shape of a heart. They fill up a pyramid of champagne glasses. There are speeches by various people. We are mentioned in two speeches. At one point we have to stand up and wave when our name is called and the whole wedding applauds us. The best bit is a ‘game show’. On giant screens it flicks through everyone’s name at the wedding. A guest shouts ‘start’ into the microphone and it flicks faster, then they shout ‘stop’ and the person whose name it lands on wins a piece of elaborately wrapped tupperware. Brilliant. I even got to shout ‘start’ and ‘stop’!

Then we ate. Cakes made into hearts. Pigeon heads and various other unidentifiable substances. During the meal we toast the bride and groom and their families and have our picture taken with nearly everyone in the hall.

What a day! We were completely blown away by how generous and welcoming everyone was and how much they wanted everyone to be involved.

We were also introduced to a combination of three letters worth remembering in a lot of situations: ‘T.I.C’. This is China.

Train Tickets for Golden Week

I have just purchased six train tickets to Beijing for the Golden Week holiday in October. Or at least I think I have. It wasn’t simple.

I should make two things clear: there is no simple, one click website to buy tickets on and you cannot rock up at the station to buy tickets.

I emailed approximately 20 travel agents to ask them to book me train tickets. Ponder the range of responses: “you need a Chinese person to call a telephone number”; “I will stop to try and find ticket for you now” and “I can say it’s not possible to find us from Shanghai.” Hmmm…

From my various emails I managed to establish that tickets are only released for sale 10 or 20 days before the train’s departure. Only 10 OR 20 days. Not a month, not a day, not 10 AND 20 days. 10 OR 20 days. 

We wanted to buy hard sleeper seats. There are six of us traveling and hard sleepers have six berths in a room. One travel agent informed me that there would be no hard sleeper seats available. At all. Bear in mind that this was more than 10 and 20 days before the train’s departure so, in theory, no train tickets had been sold yet. In theory, all of the tickets were available on the train. Hmmm...

At last I found a travel agent who was delighted to book me train tickets on a soft sleeper (4 berths), not a hard sleeper. The only glitch was I had to travel to Shanghai to pay her the money. When I told her I was unavailable to travel to Shanghai until the weekend she wrote back: “It's great, we will recommend you visit Beijing in winter not October. It's lower season, some time the weather is not so cold. I have been there in December one year before last year, it's no more crowd people and you may get some good price from hotel and airline. Trust me. I think you don't need to trains ticket of soft sleeper this time.” But I do need the tickets! I do!

I asked a Chinese woman I know why it was so difficult. When she found out there were actually tickets on the train she suggested I had been a complete idiot not to just quit my job and go to Shanghai to get the tickets. It is the 60^th anniversary of the founding of the PRC and everyone in China is going to Beijing to celebrate. The woman said: “you don’t have a choice about the tickets. You have to take them. Do you know how many millions of people live in China?” Well, duh.

I felt a bit stupid and instantly emailed the travel agent back saying I would do anything to get the tickets. Anything turned out to be dashing out of an aerobics class drenched in sweat; jumping in a taxi; driving through a giant tunnel under a lake; tackling downtown Suzhou traffic at rush hour; meeting a random woman in an alleyway; handing over cash and meeting an Australian man. 

I still don’t have the tickets in my possession…

Indian Summer

A summer in India. We had so many hopes, so many picture postcard ideas: the jazz of vividly coloured saris; the calls of chai wallahs in the old bazaars and the smells of rich Indian cooking served on bright banana leaves. Whatever.

On the train from Pushkar to Chandigarh the nightmare began. The colour slowly drained from my boyfriend’s face. Sweat lashed from his forehead. Returning from the toilet he reported that he HAD to get off the train. As we drew closer to the next stop – Delhi – he began to vomit – at great length.

Anyone who has ever been to a train station in India – especially at night – will know how grim it is. Unbelievable poverty everywhere. Men grope you. Rats crawl over your feet as flying cockroaches bat off your head and scuttle down your t-shirt. I stumbled down Dehli’s old bazaar with my luggage, my boyfriend’s luggage and my boyfriend propped over both shoulders. People tugged at my shirt, I stumbled into puddles filled with human faeces and, believe it or not, I collided with a stray cow’s horn. I pulled us into the first ‘hotel’ I could find. The man offered us all manner of illegal substances and he highly recommended a ‘bang lassi’ – we declined. The bathroom wall had an easily climb through-able hole in it and two migrant workers were asleep on the balcony. Sweet. Baby. Jesus. I think you can probably guess what the sheets were like. My boyfriend moaned and hallucinated himself to sleep as I perched on the end of the bed and wondered how the hell we could get out of there.

The next morning, my boyfriend stopped vomiting long enough for me to persuade him to get out of Dehli. Let’s go to the mountains! The Himalayas. Cool, fresh air and beautiful, panoramic views. It was an Indian ‘honeymoon’ destination and – what the hey - we booked into a honeymooners hotel. Bliss.

We took the ‘toy train’ – a single gauge railway to Shimla. I could have out walked the damn train. ‘Toy’ was not a quaint, jokey adjective – our knees were up to our chin and our backpacks strained on our backs. It was then that the sweat began to form on my forehead. I spent the best part of the eight hour journey vomiting through the hole in the floor of the train which passed as a toilet directly onto the tracks – with my backpack still on my back.

It was no honeymoon. The hotel was rancid. We were too weak to move anywhere and, rather romantically, we took turns to vomit and explode with diarrhoea in the squat toilet. There was no shower, just a giant bucket full of icy water and we took turns pouring glacial cups over each other to wash away the spew.

The Last Train From Glasgow Central Station -

Is full of people with chips. Chips in bags and chips on jackets. And a woman crying. A man giving high fives to strangers and giving up smoking and announcing to the passengers "Ah hope none of youse smoke. Ah hope none of youse never smoke!" And a woman shouting at her phone because her husband won't collect her at the station. An emotional man ranting about how great it is to see his mate after months; how great it is to have a proper night out with him; it's brilliant to see him again: he's his best mate; he's always, always loved him; he respects him. He stands up to get off the train and his mate shouts "Ah don't even know who that bugger is!"

We're off to Dublin...

Two things about Dublin: everyone is super-helpful and many, many people there are Polish.

I was stunned by how easy it was to get around in Dublin. After a year of living in Vietnam I have pretty much accepted that if I don’t know where I’m going then I will just have to wander around permanently lost. Locating something – the post office, the hospital, your passport - will almost always be by complete accident. Sometimes you can even be in the place you’re looking for and not know that you are there. This is particularly true of police stations which do not look at all like police stations. Instead they look like sparsely decorated living rooms with four men smoking outside. It is important to state that asking someone for directions is not an option. There are many pitfalls. I have outlined two below:

You ask someone for directions and even though they have absolutely no idea where you are going, they will give you directions just to please you. Those directions could be to anywhere – their mum’s house, a noodle soup stall or a street that sells only padlocks. Almost always, the directions will help you to become more lost and will navigate you further away from the place you actually want to go.

You are met with a smiling face. You ask for the directions. The person you have asked raises their right hand to head height and swivels it furiously. Their brow is furrowed. If you persist in asking directions, for example, by shouting loudly and slowly in English “WHERE. IS. BANK? BA N K?” then you will simply be met with a double handed swivel.

So, in Dublin I took a while to adjust to the fact that I could simply ask someone WHERE something was and they WOULD TELL ME where it was. Unbelievable. We asked a bus driver how to get to Sandyford. “Ahhh. Sandyford. Now why would you be going there? Never mind, that’s none of my business. Sandyford. Now I’m not personally sure but I will find out for you in a jiffy.” He asked his fellow bus driver friend who didn’t know. He then picked up his mobile phone and inquired about the bus to Sandyford. He hung up the phone, drew us a map stating clearly where the bus to Sandyford would depart from, wrote down the number of the bus, told us what stop to get off at, directed us to our hotel from that stop, told us Glasgow was great (he’d been there often), wished us a lovely day and then gave us 50 Euros. Ok, he didn’t give us 50 Euros but what brilliant, helpful, pleasant directions. We actually made it to Sandyford. Not a swivelling hand in sight.

This helpfulness did have its downsides. In the queue for the Guinness Storehouse the people in front of us asked for some information from the sparky, young girl selling the tickets. And boy, did she give then information. She practically gave them her inside leg measurement and donated them her kidney. I was willing and praying for her to swivel her hand or direct them to her mum’s house.

Walking down O’Connell Street in Dublin a familiar sickening feeling rose within me. I could hear the familiar chimes of frikking ABBA. ABBA haunt me wherever I go. They sometimes even haunt my dreams. This time it was Thomas Cook workers demonstrating about the closure of Thomas Cook branches in Dublin meaning the loss of around 70 jobs. Four of the staff were dressed as Abba and were dancing on one of O’Connell Street’s statues singing. The Thomas Cook boss is called Manny Fontenla-Novoa and apparently the cost of the job losses is not even a tenth of his annual bonus, the song ran: “Manny, Manny, Manny must be funny, in your rich man’s world. Manny, Manny, Manny – YOU’RE A GREEDY PIG.” (www.ipetitions.com/petition/savethomascookjobsinireland)

One of the most interesting things we did was visit Kilmainham Gaol where many of the leaders of Irish rebellions have been executed including many of the members of the 1916 Easter Rising. The jail is now a museum and well worth a visit. The personal stories of the prisoners and their lives are incredibly interesting. One of the executed prisoners, Michael Mallin, was second in command of the Irish Citizen Army. Before he was killed he wrote a letter to his wife and children explaining his hopes for them. One child, he hoped would become a priest. He did. He is now 96 years old and living in Hong Kong. He has donated the letter to the museum and it is now, amongst many other fascinating letters, on display in an exhibition entitled ‘Last Words’. He visited his father’s cell in Kilmainham Gaol the day before we were there. (http://www.1916rising.com/bioMallin.html)

The start of the holidays...

Back in sunny Scotland for the Summer. Brilliant. So nice to be in a temperature where my hair is not a constant afro and my mascara isn't smudged under my eyes making me look like some kind of demented banshee.

In Ho Chi Minh City it got dark soooo early at night that in a strange way, despite the heat, it almost always felt like it was winter. The light nights of Scotland are fantastic. On my first night back I went to my cousin, Nick's, leaving party and there was still light in the sky at midnight! After years of thinking I was done with the Scottish weather and brutal winters I am a changed person. Rain? Aye. Snow? Belter. Seasons? Absolutely - I'll take four.

After a year of dinners consisting only of one baguette and half a packet of dried "chicken" flavour noodles (with no MSG added - it may be there in the first place but they didn't ADD any extra. Bonus.) I am LOVING the food in Scotland. There is something wrong if a day goes by and I haven't indulged in at least one cake or pastry. Today was a two cupcake day. You can't argue with that. I have also been reaquainting myself with the wonders of steak pie and fish and chips. I would like to take this time to big up the humbled pickled onion. Pickles rock.

It's been great catching up with family and friends. I have been galavanting around the place and going on drives in my folks' natty new car. I've seen plays in the Botanic Gardens in Glasgow; jaunted (is this a verb?) round Edinburgh; gulped cider at T in the Park; hung out at King Tut's for Diamond Sea and even triumphed in one round, yes, one round at the pub quiz in the mighty 'Tyre. (It takes 8 minutes for the light from the sun to reach the earth and a female lobster is called a hen. FYI.)

So... tomorrow it's off to Dublin for a few days.