Dan's Return to the Blogosphere... Part 1

Spring is here, spring is here,

Life is skittles, and life is beer,

I think the loveliest time of the year

Is the spring, I do, don’t you?

'Course you do.

But there’s one thing that makes spring complete for me,

And makes every Sunday a treat for me.

All the world sings in tune on a spring afternoon,

When we’re poisoning pigeons in the park.

Every Sunday you'll see my sweetheart and me,

While we're poisoning pigeons in the park.

Tom Lehrer, Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.

   Okay, now I want to make one thing perfectly clear before I start this recipe. I am not- repeat NOT- suggesting that you spend your Sunday afternoons gaily prancing through Wollaton or Cae Sgwar feeding arsenic to hapless dumb stupid birds. All I’m saying is if you do plan to spend your time doing so, make sure you take a decent lunch with you. Cheese scons are excellent spring afternoon lunchtime fare, just what you need for picnics, with soup, or on the side of a Ploughmans. Serve them up with a bit of extra cheese, some cold ham, chutney, pickled onions, Branston, salad, all that mullarky, and enjoy while sitting under a tree on a tartan blanket, whilst listening to the distant gargling of a pigeon spending its last minutes wondering why that bread tasted so, well, poison-y.

   I feel I should note also, that these scons to not taste in the least bit poison-y. They taste delicious and flavoursome and wholesome and satisfying and wonderful. Not poison-y.

   Me, I like these with just good butter on them. Some folks like to add jam, which is fair enough, but you can’t taste the cheese if you do that. However you enjoy them, here’s the recipe. Makes about thirty.

Ingredients:

450g plain white flour

6tsps baking powder

A pinch of salt and pepper

100g finely grated strong Cheddar

100g butter

2 eggs, beaten

Cold water

The recipe I had called for a bit of mustard, I didn’t fancy it so left it out. If you try it, let me know how it turned out, I love hearing people’s experiments!

1.     First of all, preheat that oven. Gas 7, 220C. Grease up a baking tray to plonk the scons on.

2.     Sift your flour and baking powder into a bowl. Add the salt, pepper and cheese. Sling in the butter, and rub it all in with your fingers to amalgamate- a word which remains one of my absolute favourite, right up there with hammock and taranau, Welsh for ‘thunder’ (say tah-RRRRRRRRRRRANN-nigh).

3.     Add the eggs and a couple of tablespoons cold water. Mix lightly together with a fork. Pull the dough together into a loverly soft ball of dough. If it’s dry, add more water, if it’s sticky, add more flour.

4.     Dust your tabletop with a good bit of flour, and roll the dough out flat- I’d say between an inch and half an inch thick. This is the stage when you look most like a professional baker, so if people are calling round to join you for scons, get a proper apron on, roll your sleeves up, and make it look like you’re taking this really seriously so they can be suitably impressed by your masterful baking talents^*.

5.     So yes, roll the dough out, and use a glass or a pastry cutter to cut out a few scon shapes, as big or small as you like, but about three inches across is good. Gather up the remaining dough and roll it out again, cut out more shapes, etc. Keep going til you’ve used it all up.

6.     Put them on a baking tray, leaving them a bit of room to expand (they don’t need a lot to be honest), and then sling in the oven for ten minutes. If you need to, do them in batches, just for heaven’s sake don’t forget them, they don’t take long!

And there you have it. Thirty beautiful cheese scons, best served warm from the oven with real butter. Or take them to the park one sunny Sunday for a cracking picnic with your friends and loved ones. Naw… in’t that lovely?

When they see us coming, the birdies all try and hide,

But they still go for peanuts when coated with cyanide.

The sun’s shining bright, everything seems alright,

When we’re poisoning pigeons in the park!

^*Seriously, I tried this in kitchen six (sans apron, but hair back and sleeves rolled up- all I was doing was rolling out pastry but you’d think I was making a seventeen-tiered wedding cake the way people went on. Then they smeared jam all over the scons when they were done, I mean why put cheese in if you’re gonna wipe the taste out with cheap tacky Chinese jam on top?! But I digress. Go back up to the recipe, there’s nothing more to read here. Seriously, go back up. Fine, I’m not writing any more of the recipe until you go back up. So there.

The Tale of Dan’s Year in China- the Ultimatum, The Final Instalment, Y Cloi, 最后的

Or, Tying up Loose Ends, or, There and Back Again, a Bewildered Student's Tale, or, Why Do I Give Each Entry Multiple Titles?

   Ah, China. What days you have wrought. What times we have had. What larks, japes, joys, distresses, madness, laughs, fun, and further madness we have been through together. And now, after a lengthy and busy eight months, that time is coming to an end.

   It’s strangely tempting to end my year on a kind of Bilbo-Baggins-esque reminiscing, wherein I ruminate over the possibility that my adventures are coming to an end, and my time is come and I must sail off to the Grey Havens/Paradise, but of course really, it’s nothing like that. I’ve enjoyed a fantastic year living in a foreign country, and now with a mass of experiences and stories under my frayed, market-bought belt, I am returning home to get on with life back in the UK. Life goes on, of course it does. It’s been a good old year, but I mustn’t get too nostalgic.

   For about a week now, my exams have been finished, and I’m satisfied with how they went. The field diary project on Beijing I got a fairly good result for, which is satisfying given that it was the largest load of balls I’ve ever written. Contrariwise, I got out of an examined oral presentation by instead entering into a Mandarin Speaking Competition in front of a healthy-sized audience and a panel of judges, on one of the most interesting topics I’ve ever written: Chinese legends and western fairy tales. Fascinating to see how different they are (we love blood, torture and horror in the west, by the way, we really do), and fascinating to attempt some translations: Up the airy mountain, down the rushing glen, 我们不敢去狩猎，因为害怕小人 (women bu gan qu shoulie, yinwei haipa xiao ren).

   And now, with the exams aside, we’re pretty much free to engage in leisure. The weather has varied from sunny and clear with the pavement scorching our feet, to heavy, plum-coloured clouds making the air weigh down like a heavy coat on your shoulders, even flinging monsoon-style rains at us. And actually, life here has taken the most unusual term, by strange courtesy of… well, technically unknown, but draw your own conclusions. A couple of weeks back, the internationals all noticed that we couldn’t log on to any international sites, even using our standard VPNs. Facebook, Iplayer, even Googlemail, and for a time, even the Nottingham Uni UK website, were just inaccessible. The university fixed the problem, explaining it was a problem with (blah, blah, smokescreen of technical gabble and mumbo-jumbo), and within in a week, the problem struck again. This time, we got an issued statement from the uni’s internet provider, China Telecom, stating that the problem was “nationwide, and beyond their control”. As I say, draw your own conclusions. What it’s basically meant is that for the last two weeks, international websites have been more or less beyond access, bar a few tiny loopholes. If you’ve seen me on Facebook or Skype, it’s because I took the trek to Starbucks in city centre, who’s wifi is strangely unaffected- students have put a spike in their takings lately, as we flooded the coffee shop to keep in touch with social networking, book flights home, apply for student finance, get internships, research dissertations- all the tasks, important or trivial, that the Great Firewall of China has dictated we cannot do on our own university campus. I can’t even apply to be a helper in Notts next year.

   But with the lack of internet has come a strange freedom. Where perhaps I would have spent a significant chunk of my free time Facebooking, watching Youtube videos (I consider myself above videos of cats playing the piano, but old stand-up videos or how-to on topics from stage magic to DIY can keep me occupied for hours), or playing Echo Bazaar, I now don’t have that option- unless of course I’m willing to pay for it by buying a not insignificant supply of caramel frappucinos. Instead, we’ve all been booted off our computers and have had to actually engage with one another and the world outside! What a strange feeling! While I’m not exactly a recluse- I don’t spend all my time locked to the laptop- I now have virtually no means at all to waste time on the internet, nor do any of us. I am currently sporting a rather magnificent gash on one shin, courtesy of a football match last week. In the same week I lost a very competitive game of Carcassone to Kenrick, and on Tuesday I was able to supply my recently-gained and dare I say, quite extensive knowledge of the human skeleton to a pub quiz I would never have been to if I’d had internet access (I’m proud to announce that our team very nearly got a record-breaking score in that quiz- we could well have done, if the final round hadn’t been on football shirts of the 2010 world cup- Ollie and Dad, where were you when I needed you!) I’ve made lime and raspberry profiteroles, blitzed my way through The Girl Who Played With Fire, worked through a dozen pages of my sketchpad and a new book on drawing the human body, been swimming in the sea, and watched Fast and Furious 5, which is resolutely the stupidest movie I have ever seen. We are in the beautiful situation of not only having loads of time to kill following the end of exams, but our primary form of simply frittering the time away pointlessly has been denied to us. We have days to spend doing whatever we want, and we have to do it profitably! What a fantastic place to be!

   Obviously it does come with problems. My apologies to people back who I haven’t been chatting to enough lately, because the Great Firewall has locked us out. Sending emails requires the trek to Starbucks, and I’m never there long enough to get set up in a decent conversation, so I’m sorry for that. I would have liked to be able to sort my application for student finance next year too. Not to mention the hassle that keeping up with Doctor Who has become (are we all enjoying it? Personally I can’t wait to find out where these running plotlines are going, although please, Stephen Moffat- stop killing Rory, he’s been dead more times now than any Xbox game character I’ve ever controlled).

   So aye, life is good. As Dylan Thomos once wrote, in the play I’ve come to love with time; “Time passes. Listen. Time passes”. And soon, very soon now, I shall come home. On the 15^th of June, in fact, less than three weeks away.

   I feel that’s a good beat to end this blog entry, but at the same time, it feels like I’m not finished. Because I make a point of never redrafting, I’ll leave that slightly awkward transition in there, and now pose the questions that need to be asked, even though I’m sure I’ll be asked them again when I get back home (and will happily answer them again).

   Will I miss China? Sadly, no. I’ve enjoyed my time living in Ningbo, and that’s mostly due to the people here. Had we been in Ningbo, Shanghai, Harbin, Tokyo, Dar es Salaam or on Titan, the moon of Saturn, I don’t think it would have mattered, apart from Titan’s sorely lacking atmosphere and decent pubs. That pun was unintended. The people I have met, both within and outside the uni, both international and Chinese, have been what has made this year so enjoyable. I’ve not developed any particular bond with Ningbo or with China, and there are few things from this land I will miss- though there are some, I must admit. The year away has renewed my love for Wales and Britain. So, maybe sad that I shan’t feel any great remorse at leaving China, but true.

   What am I looking forwards to about getting back? Again, this is largely down to the people I have missed, in Nottingham, in Aberaeron, and all over the place. It’s been a long year away, and though I’ve kept in touch as best I can, it’s not nearly the same. But there are other things too that I’ve missed while abroad. Sausages. Pubs. Aberaeron’s painted houses. The sea, non-UHT milk, being able to lounge, the Welsh language, British adverts (possibly the strangest thing I’ve missed), cider, British countryside, and of course, Improv. Some of these things are just tiny details that make your home your home, others have defined my life. Either way, I look forwards to having them back in it.

   What have I learnt in China/What will I take from my experience here? That I love cooking. Seriously, it’s been my stress relief, my joy, and one of the few things that, when I get it wrong, I want to correct the mistake, try again, and get better. It’s a possible career route for me. Obviously, my grasp of the Chinese language has vastly improved. I’ve also learnt that culture cannot be taken for granted.

   Things like humour, punctuality, attitudes to drinking, even what we might class as “racism” – defining a person by their cultural background and upbringing without taking their individual personality into account- can vary hugely from one nation to the next, and can even be almost absent in certain cultures. We Brits here in Ningbo often judge the Chinese students based on stereotypes, and they do the same of us- and of course, it’s not always right. We make the mistake of thinking because many of them have led sheltered lives and don’t have great interpersonal skills, they are all reclusive shut-ins who can’t make their own decisions. And they hear from everyone they’ve ever known that all foreigners are perpetually drunk or hungover, drop out from school, don’t study, are always late, and can’t be relied on. Of course both sides are wrong to think like this all the time, but it’s an easy mistake to make.

   I’ve learnt a whole lot of lessons about the practicalities of travelling, like to always have a proper map, not a sketch you’ve copied from Google maps, and that sitting still to wait for a bus is often a better idea than striking out by yourself. I’ve learnt to like coffee, beer, and mustard, and have become almost addicted to iced tea. I’ve learnt to make at least a minor effort at keeping fit and healthy. Recently, I’ve learnt how much you can get done if you cut off your access to the internet. I have learnt the entire periodic table, bar about six elements (although to be fair, I would probably have learnt that in the UK as well). Significantly, I’ve learnt that I have no particular interest in pursuing a career in China. If the road brings me back, well, I have the capabilities, cultural knowledge, and language skills to dive back in. But I’m not going to go looking for a return flight. More than anything, I’ve learnt how much I love Britain.

   Will you keep in touch with people from China? Absolutely. Through MSN, Facebook, QQ, and email, there are a lot of people I want to keep in touch with. In time, some of them will come to Britain, and I’ll hope to meet up with them, and maybe show them round. Some will come very soon, some have only distant plans for the far future. Either way, I hope we will still be on good terms when their flight lands.

   Are you going to cook Chinese food for us? NO! I want never to eat with chopsticks again! Blasted tiny, fiddly portions… And all so OILY! But I can now make a bang-up pork pie, some really good cakes, and I’ve mastered the best sticky toffee sauce you will ever find on the planet. This goes similar for “If we go to a Chinese restaurant, will you order the food in Chinese?” No, I will not, mainly because most Chinese restaurants in the UK are in fact based on Hong Kong cuisine, not mainland China. Which means the food is unlike anything I’ve eaten out here, and if the staff speak Chinese, they most likely speak Cantonese, not Mandarin.

   This point of the blog now feels far worse for ending on than the beat we had up there. But as I say, I always submit the first draft of my entries, because that’s way it feels more like you get to read my thoughts as they would stream out in a conversation, rather than a polished article on presenting China to the world. And now, the time has come to end the written tales of my adventures in China. I’m sure you’ll hear more of them- I can’t be expected to live here for nine months, then come home and not talk about it at least a bit! But next time you hear about my adventures, we’ll be face to face, with a pint on the table, or a slice of cake and a cuppa, milk two sugars. I look forwards to it, and not to mention of course, do tell me what you’ve been up to this year! I have always held, and still do, that everyone has a story to tell. I can’t wait to hear yours.

Cheers, and thanks for sticking with me,

Dan

   One final note- if you’ve enjoyed reading my blog, and I hope you have, I can reveal I’ll be returning to the blogosphere in September. Click here for a taster of what I’ll be posting in times to come… Until then, cheerio!


http://dansyearinchina.blogspot.com/2011/05/dans-return-to-blogosphere-part-1.html

   One final, final note. I realise I am not writing the sequel to a crime thriller, and I don't need to post 'tasters' like I'm some kind of multi-million copy-selling internationally renowned author. But as I mentioned, I'm reading the Girl with a Dragon Tattoo books, and they're messing with my writing style a bit.

The Tale of Dan's Adventure in China, Part the Dix

Or, Shoeless Speeches and A Pie in a Pie.

   Some say he is a pirate… some say he is a peasant… some say he is a prince… And some say, Kenrick Davis, that if you ever introduce me to the campus in that manner again, I shall have you spayed. For so was my introduction before I gave a speech in the Fourth UNNC International Mandarin Speaking Competition, where I gave a talk on the differences between Chinese legends and western fairytales (compact version- Chinese legends are nice, fairy tales are not). Tremendous fun, we all had a good laugh giving our speeches and listening to one another’s. I felt tremendously proud of how much of the other speeches I understood, though I’m buggered if I know why the Chinese audience found my speech so amusing. They were tittering the whole way through, and I’ve no idea why! Maybe because I did it without any shoes on.

   Hello, and welcome to the tenth entry of my time in China. The time here has gone flying by, and it’s tough to believe I’ve been here seven months. Tougher yet to believe there’s only two months left, only one of which will be spent in education and exams. Then it’s travel, trek, and finally come home! My days, the time has gone by. And it’s been a good time. But to blazes, why am I talking as though it’s over? There are still adventures to be had, and still stories to be told! So let us settle down and get to it. I have nothing for our Chinglish of the Month entry this time round, so let’s dive straight into the stories!

   My wonderful family came to Ningbo to end their journey! What a joy it was to see them, and hear of their travels. I had a whole magnificent plan to get to Hangzhou (and by magnificent plan, I mean I had given it some vague consideration and Googled the train times), but by the time they arrived everyone was so tired that we spent most of our time relaxing in the hotel! Fine by me- delicious posh food, and my first experience of a proper massage, (a word which I feel ought to be spelt ‘massaaaaaaaage’), which was AMAZING! By the time it was done I was so relaxed you could have poured me into a bowl. There was a slightly confusing moment when the girl got up to kneel on the small of my back and start digging into me kidneys with her knees, but I was too zoned out to do anything more than go “Mnugh?”

   So after I’d recovered from that, and we’d had a couple of days around Ningbo relaxing, the family went home. It was with a very sad wave that I saw them off, and a sudden panic roughly four minutes later when I realised no-one had told the taxi driver where they were going. But it seems the fears were unfounded, as they made it home in one piece. And then my own travels had to continue…

   Field school trip to Beijing. Now, theoretically this was a research trip, where I would be examining tourism off the beaten track, seeing just how frequented the less well-known tourist areas were. It was a WORK trip. Not in any way a LEISURE trip. Hear me? A WORK trip, not a LEISURE trip. WORK not LEISURE. Not LEISURE, but WORK. Very, very, very definitely, A WORK TRIP.

  

   Shame then, that so much time was spent racing through the streets on cheap bikes while dodging traffic, and then lounging about in the sun. Don’t you hate it when a plan falls through like that? Sure, a certain amount of work did get done. But I’m buggered if I’m going to wander through the Forbidden City, a marvel of ancient art and architecture, or stride the Great Wall, one of the very Seven Wonders of the World, and spend the time there counting the ratio of western to Chinese tourists. Forgive my use of a rather non-academic vernacular, but balls to that. I mean really, who needs to know these things? So while under the pretence of collecting data for my field project, I was once again enjoying the marvels of Chinese ancient history, and the stories it unfolded. Better still, I was able to tell a few of the stories meself this time, having heard them last time I was travelling Beijing. Always fun to be the narrator, I must say. So that’s your history lesson there, but what new?

   Well of course, there was much more to be said of Beijing. An encounter with a very intimidating camel- I had no idea they were that big, it was huge! Like a battered old rug draped over a wall made of knees. A trip to the sand dunes, where I may have inadvertently transformed a graceful swan dive into a catastrophic faceplant in the sand (furthest distance I’ve ever travelled on my head), and a stomach-dropping disappointment when myself and Camy (nine names Italian legend) had been waiting all day to go horse-riding across the sand, only to find the horses were off making a movie, of all the ridiculous excuses. Made up for possibly, by the tremendous build-up which certainly did NOT disappoint, which was Outback Steakhouse. I admit it may seem strange to make such a deal of a meal out, but let me tell you, after seven months of fiddling with blasted chopstick-sized portions of piddly rice-and-bits-of-thing, to have waited a whole day…

To have looked forwards to, FOR A WHOLE DAY…

To an AUSTRALIAN RESTAURANT…

With REAL STEAK…

EIGHT OUNCES OF IT…

Cooked AS BLUE AS THE SEA, and DRIPPING WITH JUICE…

   I don’t think I said anything through the whole meal, as I was too busy dying of pure ecstasy. I paid 198RMB for it, which is twenty pounds or roughly two weeks of eating on campus. But it was worth every single penny. This is also why I’ve dedicated what is possibly a disproportionate amount of blog space to describing one meal, but it did make me insanely happy.

   I’m sorry. I’ve now got into nostalgia mode, and can’t remember what else has happened. Thinking about that steak has literally stopped my memory working. What else has happened lately? (This is a further example of me not redrafting my blogs).

   Oh yes! I made a pie. Okay, so maybe that’s not the most riveting thing, but it was a damn good pie. I haven’t yet decided whether it ought to be called cottage pie pie, or deeper-than-ever-pie. Spot the literary reference. And I invented the recipe meself, so I was pretty proud.

   Back on track with remembering interesting things (well, marginally more interesting), I was due to be heading to one of the outlying islands last Saturday, a place wonderfully and most Orientally named Peach Blossom Island (side not- did you know that the opposite of ‘oriental’ is ‘occidental’? I didn’t), (second side note- do I overuse brackets?), but sadly that trip fell through. It was slightly frustrating to get the call saying it was cancelled at half six in the morning when I’d already taken a half-hour taxi journey to the meeting point, but then again Laowaitan is beautiful at 6am, so it wasn’t a totally wasted trip. I mention this for mention of yet another Chinese person who has saved me from getting terminally lost- remember in Harbin when I wandered, panicked, around the streets trying to find my hostel at some heathen time of the night until a nearby Chinese girl took sympathy? Well, while travelling back from Beijing the first time (when I’d been with my family), such an occurrence almost happened again. The bus from Shanghai to Ningbo did something it had never done before- it required a transfer. I didn’t know this. So imagine my surprise when I asked the driver what time we’d be arriving back in Ningbo and got the reply, “This bus doesn’t go to Ningbo”.

You know that feeling of shock when your stomach seems to just vanish into thin air and leave a hole in the middle of your belly? That feeling of “This has gone so badly wrong, I literally cannot begin to formulate a plan of action to respond”? The feeling where you can’t even go “AAAAARGH” because the sound just dies in your throat? Yeah. It was that feeling. Obviously I checked that I hadn’t misheard, misunderstood, or just asked the wrong question, but nope, this bus was not going where I needed to go. Thanks goodness then- thank it every day- that Sara also happened to be heading to Ningbo. Sara, who works in Ningbo and had many interesting stories to pass the bus rest of the journey, and who most significantly, knew where to transfer on the bus. We’ve met up a couple of times since, and hopefully this Saturday meself, her and co. will be travelling out to see Peach Blossom Island, for a good old explore. I do love meeting new folks. She’s also responsible for having given me a long-overdue tour of Ningbo, and do you know what?

It’s quite a beautiful city.

And I shall be sad to leave it.

Naaaaaw… here’s me getting all sentimental. Not much time left before I return home, and so much to do. Although I haven’t mentioned exams and coursework, trust me there’s plenty of them. This clearly says a lot about what my mind is centred on at any given time. But aye, not much time left, before I come home. And though I’m looking forwards to getting home immensely, I may, shock of shocks, be sad to leave China behind.

So let’s make these last few weeks count! I’ll see you all soon (and I suspect, post once or twice before I come home, but until then- up through the atmosphere, up where the air is clear, oh let’s go fly a kite!

The Tale of Dan’s Year in China, Part Nine (My Days, Has it Really Been that Long?)

Or, the Truly Epic Travels, and a Thought for the Day

Well hello, most wonderful people! How long it has been since I last wrote anything on my time here in China, and it seems I am well overdue for another post. Since I returned from Harbin, much has happened- there have been many exciting birthdays, including one sports day where I proved once and for all that I am the champion of British Bulldog despite being terribly unfit, I’ve had many more cooking experiences ranging from the fantastically delicious (pineapple upside-down with custard) to the utterly disastrous (we won’t talk about blackberry tarts), and more importantly than anything, I went travelling with my family, who came all this way to see the wondrous land I’m living in! So much to say, so let’s get started with that old favourite, Chinglish of the Month.

   Since it’s been a while, and I can’t decide between them, I’m going to share two this time. The first was an email asking people to submit fake stories to the student newsletter for April Fool’s day. Although technically there’s nothing wrong with the grammar or structure of this sentence, I can’t help but feel they’re portraying April Fool’s, a rather light-hearted and whimsical celebration of mildly humorous and harmless deception, as being a bit more grim than it actually is. The opening line of the email was:

“Do you want to steal happiness when reading the fake news written by yourself on April Fool’s Day?”

   Have a laugh at gullible mates- yes. Poke fun at those slightly slower on the uptake- fine. Laugh when it’s your turn to be butt of the joke- absolutely, this happens to me rather more than I play the jokes myself. But steal happiness? Grim indeed.

   The second I had to share because it is so, so perfect. If I’m honest, I suspect many people won’t believe I really saw this. The set-up is too contrived, the punchline too perfect. If you saw it in a sitcom, you’d say it was unrealistic. But I swear, this is exactly, exactly what I read on the window of a shop in Wu Zhen, a river town not far from Ningbo which I visited on a weekend trip with Kenrick and some Chinese mates (and got horribly ill, but that’s another story). While looking around all the little gift shops in the town, most of which sold tourist tat, we found a little place that sold porcelain dolls in all sorts of national costumes from all over the world. I recognised Russian, Chinese, Japanese, German, Irish, all sorts. Many of the dolls were of babies, in miniature versions of the national dress. And if your country wasn’t represented, or you just wanted to do something a bit different, you could sit in the shop, take a plain white doll baby, and paint it yourself. “Come and Paint Your Own Doll Baby” would have worked fine as a slogan, but unfortunately- oh so unfortunately- they decided to go with this:

“Come inside and make your own baby”

As my friend Hannah so often says, “oh China”.

   So, all told, what’s been happening? Well, as I said, birthdays and baking and lessons and Frisbee all go on, but the story worth telling today is of my travels to see my family! Yes, my parents and two brothers came on a magnificent holiday to China (and at this time, are still travelling). It being term time for me, I took a week out of lectures to go and see them in Beijing and Xian, and now they’re currently making their way around Chengdu and a couple of other places I can’t remember, before coming to Ningbo this weekend. Last Monday, I made the long overnight train journey to Beijing to meet them, and oh what travels we had! We did all the touristy things- Forbidden City, Great Wall, Summer Palace, Beijing Opera, and an acrobatics show, and it was incredible! Please, pull up a sock and sit down, and let me tell you of these places.

   The Forbidden City, where the emperors resided for over five hundred years, through Ming to Qing dynasties, is a sight I can barely describe. No Minas Tirith, Emerald Oz, or Hogwarts can hold place next to it. For all we look up at the big screen and see these giant castles and cities towering up, we still see them as stories- fantasy. The Forbidden City, with its runways and staircases of solid stone and great painted pillars, stretches out as far as you can see in any direction. The ground on which it is built covers 72 hectares, but that‘s just a number and a word. The courtyards were like football fields paved with stone, and with enormous solid walls twenty feet thick all around, and running between them were walkways and staircases carved with dragons and Chinese lions and longevity cranes. The palace buildings themselves were enormous structures, but the detail was what made them so wondrous to behold- each beam and pillar wasn’t just painted, it was decorated with scenes of Chinese legend, painted mythical animals in blue and green and red, and every roof tile was carved with dragons. To examine the artwork of just one building until it had nothing left to show would have taken a whole day, and the Forbidden City is not called a city for nothing. I could have spent the whole week just absorbing and studying the art there, but there was so much more to see.

   Climbing the Great Wall of China- if the Forbidden City made Minas Tirith look like a Lego set, then the Great Wall makes that scene from Return of the King where they light up the beacons on the mountains look like is was knocked up in an afternoon on Windows Movie Maker. You know, this scene.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6LGJ7evrAg

   The hike up to the wall itself was nothing too tiring, but the wall itself- well, “Great” just doesn’t do it justice. Had I been the one to order it’s construction it would have been called “the Bleedin’ Fantastic Wall of China” or possibly “the This’ll-Blow-Your-Mind-Out-Of-Your-Ears-Incredible Wall of China”. It’s not that the wall is uncannily tall or, in itself, an impressive piece of architecture. I’ve stood on mountains and looked down from far further up, and I’ve certainly seen more impressive mountainscapes. But what blew my mind more than anything was of course the sheer length of the wall. We stood on a fairly central point, and looking down to the south you could see the wall doesn’t just run straight. It curves and winds along the mountain ridges, so you see it sprint away from you towards the nearest mountain peak- then see over there, those mountains on the left? There it is again- you can see the towers, half a dozen of them, standing up on the summits. And behind those mountains, you see the ones higher up? There’s the wall again, running right along the top. Look to the other side of the valley? There it is again. Then turn a hundred and eighty degrees, look north, and it does exactly the same. It climbs fast from where you stand to the top of the mountain- then away, further up and up, from one peak to the next, all the way to the edge of the world as best I could tell.

   I’m not normally one to fill a story with numbers and measurements- if that’s how you tell a story, you may as well be a signpost at the side of the road- but I feel it’s needed here. The Great Wall of China runs to roughly six and a half thousand kilometres. Anything from 6,200km (approx) to 6,800, depending on how you measure it. The coastline of Wales is 1,208 km. A marathon is 42.195 km. Six. Thousand. Kilometers.

Truly, it is the Great Wall of China.

   Well of course those are the two main attractions of Beijing, for me at least. Tian’anmen Square and Mao’s portrait were, well, modern, and the Summer Palace just paled a bit next to the Forbidden City, but there are many more sights and stories that deserve a mention. The Beijing Opera was quite an experience (‘an experience’ here meaning, it was confusing, very culturally different to anything I’d ever seen, and quite bizarre, but interesting), and the night before that we saw an acrobatics show that finally explained why there are nine million bicycles in Beijing while the population of the city is 22 million- because it’s perfectly possible to fit up to twelve Chinese girls on one bike so long as they’re applauded loud enough. I can’t even begin to describe the spinning hamster wheels of death and skipping we saw there, but it was one of the most thrilling performances I’ve ever watched- and naturally my first reaction was “Can I have a go?”. We also visited craft workshops where the enamel vases and jade ornaments are made- both were fascinating, thoroughly renewed my respect for people who’s profession is to make this kind of art with their hands, and beautiful to look at. I also learnt how to recognise real jade (a handy skill, I’m sure you’ll agree) as well as learning a lot about the importance of numbers in Chinese symbolism. Twelve, eight, four, nine, it’s easy to be symbolic when virtually every number represents something or other, but the depth they go to is mind-boggling.

   So that was Beijing- to be honest I’ve hardly touched on my experiences here, but there’s plenty more stories to be told. But the journey is far from over, and we still have Xi’an to cover!

   Ah, Xi’an. The home of the famous terracotta warriors (every time I go to type that my fingers try to spell “panna cotta” instead), as well as being famous for its own great wall. Although the Great Wall of China is vast in terms of how much ground it covers, Xi’an’s famous city wall is MASSIVE. Forty feet high and fifteen feet wide, it is obscene how solid that wall was. As for the terracotta army, again, they had been built up so much I wondered whether they would disappoint. Never fear! If Beijing had scale and geography to awe me with, Xi’an had time and history. The centuries carved into those clay soldiers show through everywhere. Every single soldier is individually carved and totally unique. No small feat given that there are supposedly up to eight thousand of them, and that’s just an estimate. There may be several more buried. And the fantastic thing about each one being individual is that it gives them their own stories. While the soldiers themselves may not be modelled on real people, the sculptors who made them, and the soldiers who defended the emperor in life certainly where. Thousands upon thousands upon millions of people lived, laughed, toiled, and came home to dinner in those days. Did they come home to a family? What private jokes or personal dislikes did they harbour? There is no limit to the number of stories we have yet to hear, both from the distant past and the people we live with every day, which is why it pays to keep your ears open. You never know who might have a good one.

   And since that last paragraph ended on at least a slightly deep note, I’d like to finish this blog entry with one more thought. The other great attraction of Xi’an was a concert of Tang Dynasty music and dance. Phrased like that, I’ve got to admit it doesn’t sound all that appealing, even to me, and I was there. Better phrased, it was a showing of all sorts of dances and songs from old China- some were funny (deliberately so), some were moving, some were simply beautiful to watch, and at least one was very very camp. But I enjoyed it hugely, and the finale, although a little westernised (it felt like the finale of a ballet more than particularly Chinese) was fantastic. And it got me thinking- okay, I may see more Chinese music and dance shows. I may even see better ones, either technically better or ones that I enjoy more. But no matter how much I enjoy any shows I see in the future, none of them will make me feel the same way that one did. Not exactly. Just as every terracotta warrior is unique, with its own face and background, every event and every moment in life is different. At first glance they may appear similar, but examine them closer, and every moment is unique. And so best to make the most of each one! Don’t just come out of a part of your life thinking “Well that was fun, what’s for dinner?”, rather enjoy and appreciate them, for they won’t come round again the same way. And remember their unique stories, that you might tell them again.

   All of which is a rather long-winded and perhaps overly preachy way of saying: Enjoy life, and tell me about it when you do, because I love hearing about people enjoying themselves!

Until next time fellas! Cheers,

Dan

The Tale of Dan's Adventure in China: Harvbin, the Home of Ice and Snow

   After exams had been done and completed, it came upon China the time of Spring Festival, Chinese New Year celebrations. This is when we get our break from studying, much like Christmas holidays back home. It’s traditional for Chinese students to return to their family to celebrate New Year together, and we internationals all go off travelling. Some of the more intrepid students go to other countries- some of my friends chose to visit Vietnam, Japan, Russia, and some even braving it as far as Britain itself!- and some, like myself, travel a bit more around China. Me, being a bit strapped for cash, could only afford a little bit of travel. And I knew if there was one place I wanted to spend a Chinese winter, it was Harbin; one of the northernmost cities in China, very near the soviet border, and famed internationally for its Ice and Snow Festival. Well, how could I miss out? I booked my hostels and flights, bought a new coat- my normal one wasn’t warm enough, I said what should I get, Kat said to get down, I hit the deck (thank you Rhod Gilbert) and made my way up to the frozen north!

   Now, in my defense, it’s been a while since I’ve been travelling in the old hostels-and-maps way, and this is possibly the first time I’ve done long-distance travelling by myself. See, four of us all told- me, Hannah, Kat and Jess- were visiting Harbin, all arriving on the same day, but I had an earlier flight. So I arrived first. By myself. It was dark, I was tired, and unfortunately I’d made the two big rookie mistakes of travelling: I didn’t have a map for where I was going, or a phone number for the hostel. Best I had was a set of directions to the nearest landmark (Harbin medical university) and some walking directions from there. Turns out my hostel is far out on the fringes of town, and none of the airport cab drivers have heard of it. Sooo… this is awkward. But they knew the medical university, so I could surely just make my way there and follow my walking instructions afterwards? Sensible plan?

   Lady Luck it seems was tutting at my naiveté and wagging a finger of disapproval. It could never be that easy. The walking distance from the medical university to the hostel, I later found out, was roughly nine minutes. In the dark, in the cold, tired and carrying a huge backpack, it took me just over an hour and forty minutes to find the hostel. This was when I realised I hadn’t planned very well for this trip.

   The worst bit was knowing that shortly, very shortly, the others would land in their plane, and I would have to direct them to the hostel. They were relying on me to tell them where it was. All this time I was wandering up and down the road trying to interpret my hastily scrawled directions and translate the street signs, I couldn’t stop wondering how I was going to answer the question “Hi Dan, we've just landed, can you tell us how to get to the hostel?” if I was still sitting on one of several identical-looking snowdrifts by the side of the road! I went through every emotion- confusion, annoyance, panic, seeing the funny side, panic again- all the while aware that time was ticking on.

   Fortunately, I found the hostel in the end, and was able to direct my friends there with some help from the reception. I wish, oh how I wish, I could say there had been a sudden epiphany and I’d worked out where I was, or that I’d fluently asked a passer-by how to get there, but no, sadly I was not to be permitted such a dignified and proud solution to my problem. I found it because, as I walked up a street I knew I had already walked up, a Chinese girl came out of her house, told me she had seen me walk past the window several times, and invited me in to find out where I was going. Between her impressively good English and my desperately lacking Chinese, we were able to establish the name of the Hostel, and rather than simply direct me there, she had to walk me the whole way. Turns out at the point I was less than four minutes walk away. So, on the one hand, not my finest start to a journey, but on the other hand, I’m hard-pressed to say which my finest start on any journey has been so far.

   All told though, that was the end of my blunders (pretty much) in Harbin. The hostel was… well, it was a bed to sleep in, not much else really. And as I say, shortly afterwards the girls arrived and I carefully neglected to tell them I’d had too much trouble finding the place (hopefully none of them will read this!).

  

   And then, the next three days we spent exploring the wonderful city that is Harbin! Now, sadly my camera couldn’t cope with the extreme cold, so until we get around to photo-sharing I have no pictures- but they’ll come in time! The cold was truly insane, as we easily hit minus twenty-seven degrees Celsius every single day. Minus twenty-seven! I didn’t know the thermometers went that low! Wrapped in a good seven or eight layers a day, we looked for the most part like great waddling mounds of cloth and fur, hiding our faces in hoods and scarves and facemasks. 

   Oh but it was worth it. The city has a long city of soviet occupation, and it showed. The streets were wide and open to the sky, and all the buildings were small. This being the winter festival too, every few yards there were giant sculptures of bears, horses and figures from Chinese legend built purely from blocks of ice. Even the road barriers and fences were covered over with decorative ice sculptures that glittered in the fine snow. On the first day we went to the Songhua river, which much stretch about a hundred and twenty yards from bank to bank, but in the winter freezes over so solidly that an extra temporary road is built on it, carrying full-sized busses and HGVs across. From where we stood the far bank was a forest of grey pines and fir trees, and the sky above was misty and pale, all hazy with snow. It was beautiful to look at. Little pony-and-carts went up and down on the frozen river itself, making it look like quite the Christmas card scene! We of course paid for the little trip, it was charming. Although with all those coats and jackets on, getting in and out of the cart was a bit of a struggle!

   There were a couple of other touristy things to do- an old war base from the second world war, where Japanese troops performed horrific medical experiments on Chinese civilians, although just as disturbing was how it had now been turned into less a museum and more a piece of anti-Japanese propaganda (opening line on the information boards: “To further their cruel and violent intentions during the war, Japanese soldiers…”). We also paid a visit to an old Russian cathedral, Saint Sophia’s, which had sadly fallen into disrepair, and similarly now served less as a beautiful piece of architecture and more as a warning about not forgetting the past. It wasn’t hard to imagine her in her glory days though, all lit up with a thousand candles and the paintings on the roof stretching high up, echoing the singing of its occupants around… look at me, I’m getting all nostalgic again!

   Oh and of course, we had to try the famous Harbin ice-cream! Now allegedly, if you’re cold, the best thing to do is to eat something cold to help you warm up. That doesn’t make much sense to me, but who am I to argue with QI? Well anyway, Harbin is famous for its ice cream, which weirdly tastes an awful lot like those little milk lollies you had as a kid- with the cows on them. And I can’t remember the name, which annoys me, because we were so happy when we remembered it back up there. Mini-Milk! That’s it. Thank you Google. (As you may have guessed, I don’t redraft my blogs).

   Now, cathedrals and snow on the streets and ice creams are all very well, but they are merely a preface- merely a footnote- next to the World of Snow and Ice, the very epicentre of Harbin’s winter festival. I can’t build this up enough, so let’s dive straight in!

   Even as you arrive, you can’t help but be bowled over. The entrance gate stands eighty feet high and much, much wider, with three great long arches to grant you entry into this wonderland. That alone was built of the same blocks of ice we’d seen in town, but nothing on this scale. And here, built into the ice blocks, where hundreds of LED lights that phased pinks and greens and blues and through all the colours you can imagine, which transmitted through the ice to light up the whole structure. That was shock enough, but it was just a taster. Stepping through and into the Ice World was the most surreal and beautiful sight. Firstly the ground was snow compacted so flat that no footprints indented into it, so it was just perfectly flat, like the surface of a lake. It genuinely felt like walking on water. Right in front of us was a full-sized Russian palace, built from the ice blocks and lit up with LEDs, great towers and staircases that you could walk up among to look around at everything around you. I was bowled over looking around- in one corner, two eighty-foot statues of cross-legged, meditating Chinese gods, sculpted from pure white snow. Nearer than them, an ice maze that from high up I could see people excitedly running around in and jumping up to see over the tops of the walls. Then on the far side, lighthouses and pagodas, all built from ice. And walking on the sea of ice all around us where more of the horses and carts, but not little ponies this time- huge creatures like Shire horses, pulling open-topped carts with whole families peering out with their mouths wide open at the world around them. The air was crisp and dry, and no cold wind blew, and all above us the sky was navy-blue and filled with bright twinkling stars. There is nothing I can type here that will adequately get across how amazing it was to see, nor will any photo capture that kind of magic. It was, frankly, astounding.

   Until our toes got too cold that is, then we came back home for hot chocolate, and some Thorntons, sent by my brothers for my birthday (good shout boys!). Ah, luxury.

   It was with a pretty heavy heart I left Harbin. There was so much I hadn’t done that I still wanted to see (white tiger safari, ice skating, horse-riding on the frozen river, skiing), and the streets themselves were picturesque enough that I was quite happy just wandering among them. Plus it was so good for my Chinese. Harbin people seem to be among the friendliest I’ve met in China, particularly cabbies, who were very eager to chat to the westerners, so good news for me! A perfect chance to practice my language skills. It was a bit of a badly-timed mad dash to the airport to fly back, but at least this time I didn’t have to stop and ask for directions! Travelling back through Shanghai, I eventually made it back to Ningbo (I hadn't planned that bit, though it went unusually well and I made it back in good time), and home again I am!

   "For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move."- Robert Louis Stephenson. Personally, I like to know where I'm going, and next time I shall have a blasted map.

The Tale of Dan’s Year in China, Part the Seventh

Or, Christmas Cake, Meat Pies and German Bread

   Ah, good evening everyone! It feels as though it’s been a terrible long while since I’ve written anything on this blog, and… and it has been. Not since before Christmas last year, and since then so much has happened. Sweeney Todd finally was performed, we’ve had exams, Christmas Day, our pantomime, and my travels up north to the beautiful city of Harbin with its magnificent ice festival. I feel like one of the four yorkshiremen, about to recount tales of all my history and life gone by (“You were lucky to live in a cardboard box! Used to be a hundred and fifty of us living in a rolled up newspaper in t’middle of a septic tank…”). Okay it’s only been a month, but there’s so much to talk about I’m splitting it into two separate entries- one on Harbin, which deserves as much detail as I can give it, and this one on everything else.

   Wow, where even to start? Lewis Carroll would tell me to start at the beginning, and when I come to the end, stop. So, with that in mind, what’s been happening?

Last I posted, it was just before Christmas time, and I told of how we were planning midnight mass and our own celebrations, including a pantomime and a home-made cake! Well, you’ll be pleased to know I’m sure, all of that went remarkably well! The Midnight service was a beautiful gathering, where we all got together in the afternoon to make up Christingles, then gathered in the night to sing everyone’s favourite carols and tell the story of Christmas. The scene of twenty-something students holding up their Christingles and singing Away in a Manger together was quite magical, I daresay! Our pantomime went down very well at the Church service on boxing day, and everyone got very into the audience participation bit. It also came as a worrying note on how long my hair has got- I can only point you to the photos to explain what I mean. But best of all, and I’m aware that saying this will make my head inflate to the size of a space hopper, was the Christmas cake I made! Let me rephrase that slightly- I loved Christmas this year, loved sharing it with fellow students and taking on the task of celebrating it properly, and what I’m most glad about is having taken on the task of making a decent Christmas cake, and having invested over a month in making it properly, it turned out really, really well! Weighing in at over 5kg, it fed a whole church congregation and a lot of students back at uni. All agreed it was delicious, and I shall surely be improving on the recipe next year!

 The wonderful, five kilogram cake. Nearly half of that is icing.

The (incredibly) ugly stepsisters.

Christingle Service. Don't fret, I sang quietly.

   First step down, next up! Sweeney Todd- the play finally went up! After months of rehearsing, much of which had been pretty frustrating, we finally got it going! Kenrick gave a stellar performance as the titular barber, genuinely terrifying several members of the audience as he ran up and down among the seats roaring and spitting and gesturing towards the throats of poor unfortunate Chinese students. Me, I enjoyed the shows greatly, I think I did pretty well as Anthony- the fact my singing wasn’t booed off the stage is an achievement all by itself. We had two strong nights, and the audience thoroughly enjoyed both of them! More pictures enclosed. With regard to my costume, don’t be fooled by the fact my hair is tied back and I’ve got a scarf round my waist- aside from that, it’s all own my own clothes! Nothing to do with my acting either, but in the pics you can hopefully see a scar on my face- this was specially requested by me as part of my plan to play Anthony as slightly less of a pansy than he is in the film. The girl who did our make-up, Hui Chan is incredibly talented, and having never done anything like that before was very much up for the challenge, and very proud of the finished article.

   After the show was done we went out and had a hotpot meal to celebrate all together. A joyous night was had by all, and there was much drinking of beer and singing of songs! Happy, happy times.

 Me and Kenrick. Thinking back, I reckon I must have maintained that pose for about ninety percent of the play.

 The full cast and crew. That's Mrs Lovett behind me.

Sailor's wound. I was sorely tempted to leave it on for lectures the next day.

    Sadly there the joy ended, and we entered into exam times. I don’t want to go on endlessly about them, just to say they went fairly well, I think. Certainly I was happy with the essay I wrote- we had to write four hundred characters on “我理想的爱情/Wo lixiang de aiqing”, which translates to “My ideal romance”. Funny title, but we’ve genuinely spent several lessons covering the issue of romance and what qualities are important in a boyfriend/girlfriend in Chinese. This is a topic I’d struggle to talk about in English, so had to blag it a bit in Chinese. As I say, I was particularly happy with this essay, as it started off with; 我可以写真我理想的爱情用一个很小的句子；她是英国的女性叫凯里马利根， 可是如果我写那个，我的论文然后很短，which means “I could describe my ideal romance very briefly, by saying she’s an English actress called Carey Mulligan, but if I did that then this essay would be very short.” Who says exams have to be boring?

   That’s pretty much all to tell of the last month here in Ningbo- most of the exciting stuff is regarding my travels in Harbin, covered in another entry. I hope you enjoy reading of them, there’s far more going on there!

   Also, you may ask at this point; “What about the German bread you mentioned in the heading Daniel? What of that?” Well, it turns out there’s a German bread market on campus, every Thursday morning. Real, chunky, western-style bread. Finding that out, as well as a recipe for home-made jam, has made me very, very happy indeed!

   That’s all here, but read on to find out why I should never, ever be allowed to travel alone, particularly in frozen cities, as well as a description of the incredibly beautiful World of Snow and Ice…