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.
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
