I’ve never
spoken as much Chinese as I have in the last week or so. Since previously updating my blog, a good
friend from home has been and gone, meaning I did 90% of the
communication. Obviously this meant
visiting and (in some cases) revisiting certain tourist areas. Nonetheless, this (re)experience was very
different from the first…
My friend Chris, who I have known
since I was eight years old, flew to China recently for a two-week, whirlwind
tour of China. Chris’ holiday began in
Beijing, where he encountered the food, the culture and Chinese people trying
to take whatever they can get from you.
Due to an adverse mixture of positive and negative experiences in the
capital city, he left somewhat disappointed.
Listening to his personal experience I’m glad I didn’t choose Beijing as
my initial city of choice. I say this
for two reasons: firstly, it doesn’t seem foreigner friendly, and secondly,
it’s so easy to get conned when you don’t understand or know anything about the
country you’re going to. We’ve all heard
the stories and none of us want our own one to share.
Things didn’t improve much on the way
to Xi’an. Various tattooed, scarred,
Chinese men (probably gang members) approached Chris and questioned him
intensely on his nice, shiny iPhone.
After which they strongly recommended he rest – how nice of them
right? Understandably, this scared the
bejesus out of him, so he went and spoke to the train guard. Clearly, by this point, Chris had not yet
grasped the fact that only a minute amount of people in China speak English. Even if they did understand him, there’s no
guarantee they’d even want to help the lǎowài - I think I’ve defined lǎowài
previously, but just in case, this is an out-dated term that is still commonly
used in some parts of China.
The long and the short of the story
is that Chris alighted at an unknown train station, where he had the joy of
sitting and waiting for a good five hours for an alternative train to
come. When he finally arrived in Xi’an,
we went straight to a local German bar to catch up. As I mentioned, we’ve known each most of our
lives, so we spoke, laughed and drank a couple of beers as if nothing had
changed. We might as well have been
sitting outside a pub, on the beach, back in Portsmouth; it wouldn’t have
mattered.
Later in the evening, accompanied by
Brian and Andy, I took Chris to the local barbeque that I went to on my first
night in the flat. We always promote
this place to newcomers, so I was relieved to hear that Chris strongly approved
of the food (not to mention the price).
Chinese barbeques are extremely popular in Xi’an, especially during the summer
months. Everybody moves their miniature,
family-owned restaurants out onto the pavements for customers to sit, eat and
drink in the sun.
From here we went to “Nán Mēn”, or South Gate; its European bars
and hostels make it an extremely popular hotspot for Westerners. Just outside of the gate is a small garden
bar, complemented by a lake and some old, decrepit pool tables - this was where
the night really began. Under the
setting sun, beers in hand, we played pool and my new friends became well
acquainted with an old friend. I’ll
spare the details, but suffice to say, everyone enjoyed the evening.
The next morning, feeling a little worse for wear, I forced
Chris out of bed and took him to Bīng Mă Yŏng – Xi’an’s biggest tourist
attraction. Bīng Mă Yŏng may be Xi’an’s
biggest tourist attraction, but after the reunion the night before, it
definitely wasn’t the most exciting. The
Terracotta Warriors are renowned in Xi’an and are a must see for any tourist. Thus, don’t let any of the following comments
put you off going there - however pessimistic they may seem. Walking towards the museum entrance we were
bombarded by inflated, tourist prices, expensive, tourist guides and grandiose,
tourist architecture. I’ve used this
word grandiose on numerous occasions when describing much of the architecture
in China, but it seems especially fitting here.
The museum stretches over a sizeable area, with various
different buildings in distant areas. As
with my earliest experience of China, in Beijing Airport, the size of the
grounds and the scale of the architecture make you feel incredibly small. Furthermore, it makes you feel as if the
“popular” tourist attraction isn’t that “popular” after all, because you’re
surrounded by a vast amount of, well, nothingness. Having paid 150 kuai, we entered the museum,
or at least we entered an entrance; the museum itself was yet to be seen. After stumbling around and trying to discover
some sense of direction, we took the tourist transportation over to the
warriors’ location, a few minutes away.
Chris and I, in all our wisdom, had decided not to get a tour
guide; this may have somewhat hindered our experience of Xi’an’s biggest
tourist attraction. We had very little
idea of the history behind the warriors and so we struggled to realise the
significance of much of what we were seeing.
As it happens, I had done a small amount of research on the sight. If I understand correctly, the core
principles behind The Terracotta Warriors are: (1) the fact that each
terracotta statue is unique, displaying individual faces; (2) previous emperors
would bury real people in tombs, but this particular emperor felt that this was
wasteful and thus, The Terracotta Warriors were built instead; (3) this emperor
not only helped to standardise Chinese, but he also helped to unite China. There you have it.
In between our antics and poor efforts towards sightseeing I was
attempting to teach Chris some basic Chinese.
I’m probably not the best teacher, seeing as I can barely speak the
language myself. Despite this, I did
manage to (sort of) teach Chris the phrase, “I don’t speak English”, which
translates as, “wǒ búhuì shuō yīngwen”. Chinese people seemed slightly bemused when
he uttered this phrase, but then Chris was left bereft when they replied in
Chinese and he was unable to reply.
Chris stayed in Xi’an less than
three days, which flew by in the blink of an eye. He left on the Friday for a city named
Chengdu (home of the pandas), at which point I had to work anyway, but we
planned to meet each other in Shanghai on the Monday, ready for four more days
of antics and further attempts at sightseeing.
Needless to say, when we did see each other in Shanghai, the story became
very similar…
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| Shanghai's "amazing" Sightseeing Tunnel |
One of the main features of Chris’
trip, as expected, was the language barrier.
It reminded me of myself only three months before and it showed me just
how far I’ve come with my Chinese. Don’t
get me wrong, I only know a small amount, but sometimes it’s amazing what you
can do knowing only a little. The level
of English in Shanghai is generally superior to Xi’an’s anyway, and so to a
certain extent you don’t need Chinese as much.
In many ways, it’s a city that, like Hong Kong, does not reflect the
rest of China. Hong Kong is very much “Westernised”, and it seems like Shanghai isn’t far behind.
What this also means, however, is a
higher cost of living. Making Shanghai
quite an expensive city to visit, or at least in comparison to living and
working here in Xi’an. The clearest
evidence of this is when you go out to buy food, drink and – one of Shanghai’s
largest attractions – items from the fake markets. We ventured out in search of one of these
markets, and what we found was a four-story building with hundreds of tiny shops,
selling exactly the same thing. Over the
course of a few hours we explored the market and lost count of the number of
times we heard the phrases, “You want to buy fake
watch/polo/ray-bans/shorts/lighter/dvd/shoes”.
I purposely haven’t paraphrased that as a question, because it
definitely never sounded like one.
The real advantage over my last trip
to Shanghai was a greater confidence with Chinese and, in particular, the
Chinese numbers. Not to mention a
greater knowledge of what the items at the fake market were actually worth. This made haggling especially easy and
extremely enjoyable too. After telling
the shop owners (in Chinese) that I lived and worked in Xi’an as an English
teacher the prices were automatically halved.
Then, using the Chinese numbers I was able to haggle at prices below
that of the Westerners around me, and the shop owners were more likely to
oblige, knowing that the other foreigners were (more than likely) unable to
understand. Happy days.
After racking up a ridiculous spend
of 800 kuai in the fake market we left.
I’d purchased everything from t-shirts, jumpers and polos, to “Toms”
shoes, bags and family presents. That
evening we ventured out again to dabble in Shanghai’s awesome nightlife. By this point we’d made a couple of friends
at the hostel, both of which were from Australia, but hey, nobody’s
perfect. I don’t want to repeat myself,
so like I said before, the story from here is similar to that of our evenings
in Xi’an. Except this time, being in
Shanghai, the evenings were so much better, because Shanghai’s nightlife
definitely has more to offer.
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| Shanghai Hot Pot |
There’s an indiscrete and inherent
problem here. I think the reason I like
Shanghai and its nightlife so much is because it provides a slight sense of being
back in the West, but with a Chinese twist.
However, there are times when it’s too Westernised. One evening we met some Chinese people that
spoke amazing English – almost to the point of fluency. They decided to show Chris, the two
Australians and I around some of Shanghai’s hotspots. Early on in the night they took us to a bar
literally crammed with people. The
majority of the crowd were Western and very, very drunk. There were also some Western girls there,
wearing almost next to nothing… We
clocked on pretty quickly as to what kind of bar we’d been brought to. We told our new Chinese friends that we’d
come to China to experience China and not seedy bars with old, drunken, Western
men trying to buy young Western girls.
For a moment that put me off Shanghai; although I like its
Western/Eastern mix, I wouldn’t want to see it continue in that direction and
lose its roots completely.
Four days passed and it was time to
say goodbye to Chris again. Similarly to
our greeting, we parted ways as if we were going to see each other again in a
few days. This wasn’t going to happen;
he flew to Hong Kong, where he spent the final days of his Chinese adventure,
and I flew to Xi’an to resume my own.
