Wo shì lǎoshī

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…

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.

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.