Fuddland

Aspects of living in an entirely different culture from the one I'm used to.

This category is a subcategory of China.

This category also has the following subcategories [number of entries in brackets]:

• Christmas in China [4]

Something I’d not seen before, but is apparently very common here: parents post their child’s personal details (age, height, job, salary — all the important stuff) on a washing line at the park, for other parents to check out and, if they like what they see, set their own child up on a blind date.

To me, that “When in Rome…” expression is merely meant to encourage you to be a little adventurous. It means, “run naked from the sauna and jump into the freezing waters of a lake in Finland”, not “club a baby seal to death while passing through north-east Canada”.

It is not anywhere near a justification for abandoning the common courtesy and manners that you’ve been brought up to respect, just because you have seen some locals behaving in a way that wouldn’t rub in your home country. So while in China it might be—legally and traditionally—all right to light up a cigarette at the table while others are still eating, when you’re British or from the US, Canada and any of the other countries of the world that have realised just how stinky that smoke is, you should know better and I will give you a withering stare over the top of my fork until you stub that filth out.

Similarly, if you’ve travelled by public transport here, you’ve probably seen some Chinese people listening to music on their mobiles without the use of headphones. This is intensely annoying. You know damn well it is, because when you were living in your homeland, whenever anyone had his or her headphones bleeding music into the surrounding air, you tutted and rolled your eyes and exhaled with exasperation. But the thing you haven’t quite got is, they tend to listen to music like this only on public transport—crowded bus journeys that will be over relatively soon.

So why on Earth you—and I’m now talking to the Western man at the table next to me as I write this—think it’s all right to sit in a cafe, playing music on your laptop speakers when there is already muzak on, is beyond me. It’s easy to tune out the muzak, but as soon as you add your inane tinny beats to the mix, it becomes a spasmodically syncopated annoyance that is impossible to ignore. [And you haven’t even ordered anything to eat or drink.]

Last week I had the perfect storm of North American man who had already proven himself to be the worst speaker of Chinese in the whole of Chinadom when attempting to communicate with his local girlfriend, sitting three feet from me smoking a cigarette, oblivious to where the smoke was drifting [yes, all over me], playing Stand By Me on his iPhone speakers and singing along, in a cafe where people are trying to read, at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. The girlfriend was steadfastly ignoring him. I wish I knew her secret.

The public zoo here in Suzhou really needs to work on its publicity. I’ve lived here for over three years and it wasn’t until about two weeks before I was due to leave that I learned that the zoo houses two of only four known remaining Yangtze Giant Soft-Shelled Turtles—possibly the largest species of turtle in the world.

Even more worrying, of the four that are left, three are male. The sole remaining female lives, along with one male, here in Suzhou. The other two males are in Vietnam. A conservation breeding programme is in effect, which I learned about through a public talk given at The Bookworm, but you really wouldn’t know it just from visiting the zoo.

The water in the turtle pond is part of Suzhou’s network of polluted canals; the pond is open-air and there are no staff on hand to stop idiotic members of the public throwing cakes, biscuits, bread, soft-drinks, as well as spit and litter into the pond; there is construction going on all around, which is apparently going to lead to a much-improved living environment for the turtles, but the stress of all the noise and chaos isn’t really going to help these last two hopes for the species to produce any offspring.

Almost as soon as they were introduced, despite not having seen an opposite member of their sex for a very long time, their instincts took over and the female deposited some eggs in the pitiful sand pit at the top end of their enclosure. Half were collected by the conservation staff and placed into three different incubators [three different temperatures], and half were left in the sand to develop naturally. But none survived.

The female is around 80 years old and the male could be 100, or perhaps older, and if their life-expectancies are similar to other species of turtle then they may only be in middle-age. Turtles have been known to reproduce virtually up until they die of old age, so there may still be a chance that future batches will be more successful, but so little is known about this particular species that they’re not even sure if they are giving them the right diet—although it’s a safe bet that biscuits and spit are not exactly part of a natural diet.

For political reasons, there doesn’t seem to be much chance of the other two males being given a shot at becoming fathers anytime soon—at least, not through natural means. At the talk, the possibility of using artificial insemination was discussed and is an option they are considering. It’s worth mentioning that just a couple of years ago, there were six of these turtles left, but two died while the conservation programme was in the process of being set up. If the female passes away just as suddenly, that’s it: another extinction, right under our noses. Perhaps being well aware of her critical importance, the smaller female stayed well away from the public end of the pond, but the big male swam over and gave us a chance to see this incredibly rare creature from just a few feet away.

As well as enjoying the delicious dishes, we played a few non-drinking games at my leaving dinner.

Don’t guess the number

Person X [secretly] writes down a number between 1 and 100 [not inclusive]. The players take it in turns to guess what the number is—or rather, what it isn’t. After each guess, if it isn’t the number on the paper, the guessing range is narrowed by whatever the most recent guess was.

For example, suppose the number to guess is 76. Player A [wrongly] guesses 23. Now the guessing range is narrowed to between 23 and 100. Player B guesses 87, so now the range is 23 to 87. And so on, until someone lands on 76 and has to perform a forfeit. [In our case, the forfeit was eating one of the hot chillies.]

Handy hint: Chinese people are quite superstitious about their numbers so if you want the round to be over quickly, write down the lucky 8 or 88. If you want it to last for a long time, write 4, 14 or 44, all of which would be considered unlucky.

Lip-reading

A variation on the Telephone Game [which is the less offensive name for what the British call Chinese Whispers]. The first person thinks of a word or phrase and mouths it to the person next to them, without the other players being allowed to see. They are only allowed to mouth it twice. The phrase gets passed around the circle until the last player says what he/she thinks it is.

This game is probably quite boring in English, but since Chinese is a tonal language, it is a lot harder to read what is being said from the shape of the mouth alone. When it was my turn, I started with “tiger”, which morphed into “rat” along the way and finally emerged as “teacher”.

As I made my way into the empty meeting room at just before half-past two to observe the three-minute silence, I thought about telling my colleagues what I was doing, but decided against it: it’s a personal choice, and I was interested to see how many people actually stopped work to mark the first anniversary of China’s worst natural disaster for thirty years.

I was surprised to find that no-one else stopped what they were doing. Not in my office, nor on the street below. I had been told that the city air-raid siren would sound at 2.28pm, lasting for the full three minutes, but over the sound of car horns and construction, I could only faintly hear the siren carried on the wind from the downtown area a few miles away. Either the Industrial Park area, where I work, doesn’t also have one, or for some reason it was not used. From the 28th floor I looked up and down the street, into the construction sites and at the cars and buses, to see if I could spot anyone who had downed tools or pulled over, but people were seemingly oblivious. I asked several [Chinese] friends in other offices in the area if their companies, or even they themselves, observed the silence, but no companies did, and most individuals didn’t either.

This is not to say that the nation is at all unsentimental about the tragedy: there are plenty of events taking place all over the nation to commemorate the earthquake, not least a day of specially-dedicated television. Given that many of the office blocks around here shook with the force of the quake, 2000 miles from the epicentre, I just thought more people here would mark it too.

Our building is having its windows washed this week—by men hanging from single, very old-looking ropes, with no back-up line. Here’s what that looks like from the 28th floor.

Unlike a lot of the foreigners living here, who either hop in taxis or buy themselves a nifty scooter or electric bike, my primary mode of transportation is the public bus, which I take to and from work every day. It’s a pretty rare sight to see a foreigner on the bus—so much so that I am as guilty of gawping at any that get on as much as the locals do [but being careful not to make the kind of eye-contact that suggests that just because were both born abroad that somehow means we should become friends]. Taxis are reasonably-priced and, unless it’s pouring with rain or between five and six o’clock in the evening, are readily available almost anywhere in the city, but you really can’t beat the bus for value for money: one or two yuan [depending on the bus number and whether they have turned on the air conditioning] no matter how far you’re travelling—that’s less than 10 or 20p at the current exchange rate.

But despite the money factor, it has to be said that my daily journey is usually my most stressful part of the day. I’m regularly stuck fast in a ridiculous traffic jam that is usually simply due to the vast majority of drivers [including the bus drivers] lacking the concept of “give way”: any attempt for cars to enter the stream of traffic from a side street, or perform a U-turn, is not met by patient fellow drivers halting for a few moments to allow the car to complete its maneuvering. No, the drivers [and cyclists] simply try to continue on their way, inching around the car on either side, crossing over into the oncoming-traffic lane and being met head-on by a stubborn vehicle whose driver also isn’t going to do something as courteous as to slow down to prevent the impending stand-off. This cues excessive and useless use of the horn until somebody finally acquiesces, backs up a quarter of an inch and the jam magically disappears.

It boils my blood and drives me bonkers to watch, helplessly, these situations unfold, so why do I continue to use the bus instead of investing in a bike? The answer is in the question: it’s really to try to develop a more tolerant attitude to situations beyond my control. By boarding the bus, I know it’s quite likely something will happen that will have me rolling my eyes in exasperation, but this is, if I’m honest, just me wishing that the world worked exactly like I think it should, and it’s probably a good idea if I try and get used to the fact that that’s not likely to become a reality, so I should try and meet it halfway. The spoiled little children that happily occupy an empty seat while their doddering grandparent stands—hanging onto the handles for dear life as the driver weaves around cars that dare to drive somewhere close to a reasonable speed—are not really acting insensitively: the grandparents insist. Is it any wonder that many of them grow up into the surly inconsiderate teens that don’t think to offer their seats to elderly passengers?

One thing that has been puzzling me recently is the attitude to a rain-splashed seat. It’s been raining here pretty much continuously for the last month or so, and it’s inevitable that sometimes the plastic seats on the buses are going to get wet due to an open window. Nobody [not even me] likes to sit on a wet seat, and it’s quite amusing to watch a newly-boarded passenger flit from seemingly empty seat to empty seat, recoiling from each one like it’s a venomous snake about to pounce when she sees that the reason no-one is sitting on it is the fact that it’s got a few drops of water on it. [Note: I say “she” but it is just as likely to be a bloke.] When all options have been exhausted, she will make a song and dance about taking out a tissue and wiping the seat dry—struggling not to put whatever bags she is carrying onto the ground of course, knowing that it’s quite probable that someone has either hacked up a wad of phlegm or that a toddler has urinated freely onto the floor at some point earlier in the journey. So there she is, desperately trying to keep her balance as the bus continues to careen in the aforementioned manner, with her heavy shopping in one hand, wiping down the seat with the other until it is finally deemed dry enough to sit on.

Now here’s the bit I really don’t understand: should an occupied seat next to her become free, if no-one else immediately moves to sit on it, she will take her wet umbrella and place it on the empty seat. I simply cannot for the life of me fathom this behaviour: she’s just gone to considerable effort to make a seat dry enough for her to sit on, and then she goes ahead and makes another seat wet, so that some other unfortunate soul has to go through the same rigmarole that she just did.

The only upside of it all is that watching this performance play out in front of me distracts me from the fact that we’ve been stuck at the same point in a traffic jam for the last fifteen minutes.

Signs on display in each and every carriage of the metro train in Nanjing:

1. Please don’t chase and create a train disturbance.
2. No spitting.
3. Stay clear from tracks.
4. Please offer your seat to those who need it.
5. No swinging.
6. No climbing.
7. No littering.
8. No smoking.
9. Do not touch.
10. Do not hold back the door when it is closing.
11. Care the gap.
12. Do not lean on the door.
13. Do not get on/off the train when the door light flashes.

In case anyone is thinking that it’s a bit late to be writing about how I spent my Christmas, I should mention that today my company finally took down the seven-foot-tall Christmas tree that has been mildly annoying me with its presence every day since Epiphany.

I understand why an English training centre would want to acknowledge some of the Western festivals—since I joined this company we’ve had Halloween, Thanksgiving [whatever that is] and Christmas events—but I think it’s as important to show that they know [not to mention teach] about when things traditionally finish and life returns to one not filled with tinsel, plastic foliage and flashing lights. [Actually, I think that last one might be a little hard for them to swallow—after all, this is a country in which each and every tree is lit up in garish green as soon as the sun sets, all year round.]

When I grumbled to a few people around the office about the tree’s continued display, I was told that the reason it was still up was that it “looks beautiful”, but it looks as though my grumbling about this half-hearted approach to acknowledging Christmas has paid off—although now I don’t get to officially moan about it in the monthly Teachers’ Meeting tomorrow. Bah humbug!

According to legend, a terrible monster called Nian came on the first day of every year, to devour livestock, crops, and the odd village child or three. To appease the beast, people laid food outside their doorways in the hope that it wouldn’t go on to dine on the occupants inside. But it was a hungry fellow and the losses continued.

Later it was found that Nian was somewhat scared of the colour red, so people dressed in red; decorated their homes and streets with red scrolls and lanterns; gave their children red envelopes with money inside [quite luckily for the children, the only paper money that is red in colour is coincidentally the highest in denomination, the 100RMB note]. This went some way to ward off Nian, but still he came.

But then the Achilles’ heel was discovered with the advent of gunpowder: fireworks and firecrackers. The bangs and pops and whizzes and booms and ka-bloooies scared the behemoth far away. The people joyfully rejoiced.

This tradition of making the skies thick with smoke and causing so much din and clatter as to yield ordinary conversation next to impossible, night and day, for two weeks straight, has prevailed every Chinese New Year for hundreds of years.

But I think this Nian chap has probably gone now. Could you maybe stop with all the noise? Thanks.

I had oh-so-very high hopes for the first photo.

I’d been wanting and planning and saving to buy a new camera for quite a few months now, so I knew it had to be something special. Maybe I’d head out to some relatively nearby mountains at dusk or dawn and capture the sun’s light scattering into unusually-breathtaking reds and oranges; or perhaps Lake Tai would miraculously freeze over and I’d stumble upon a cute local family venturing out on their ice-skates. And then I thought, a personal photo would be more meaningful in years to come, and yet more images filled my head.

Of course, all this was made unceremoniously moot by the saleswoman who opened the box and made sure that I took a photo there in the shop to prove the camera was in working order before I left. And so the very first image that I composed, brought into focus and saved on the memory card was of three tripods against the blurred background of several camera counters.

Occasionally I get asked to help with some simple Chinese-to-English translations for company signs and notices, which to be honest I am somewhat reluctant to do—as every ex-pat will testify, half the fun of living out here is smirking at the Chinglish all around us. Nevertheless, I know in the long-run it’s probably a good idea to have warning signs that actually say what they mean to say, and the translation process is not without its giggles, as I found last week when I was asked to look over about 150 signs a company planned to put up all over its factory floor and offices.

The English level of the Chinese woman who had already proof-read the signs was, thankfully, of a high standard, so there were not too many problems: I suggested “locker” instead of “personal storage bureau”; “promotional material” instead of “propaganda”; and a more succinct “Fire Extinguisher Instructions” instead of, “How to Operate the Dye Chemical Powder Fire Extinguisher”.

But one phrase stumped me for a while: I could see that the Chinese version was a 15-word sentence that ended with five exclamation marks, so clearly this was important, but their English suggestion simply said, “Be closer!”

I didn’t recognise all of the Chinese characters, and the part that I could kind-of read with some help from my dictionary seemed to say, “Somewhat closer; say again, somewhat closer. Good manners is closer and closer to you,” which didn’t make a lot of sense in a factory-floor context [or any other context I could think of]. So I asked the woman where this sign was supposed to go; she flushed slightly and said, “In the bathroom.”

I thought for a moment. “Above the toilet, by any chance?” I asked, to which she replied, “Exactly.”

Yup, this sign is to remind people to put their bottoms as close to the ground as they can when they perch over the squat-toilet. I’m still puzzling over how to translate it as politely and euphemistically as the Chinese version.

Looks like I was too hasty in my applauding of the understatedness of the restaurant’s choice of Christmas decoration: they’re now going for the “more is more” school of thought.

Oh and, shear … sheep … wool … okay, a slightly tenuous link for the sake of a pun, but still not as bad as the joke from my cracker at my early Christmas dinner yesterday: what do elves learn at school?

Christmas decorations in China, just like in the rest of the Christmas-recognising world, generally fall into two categories: cheap and tacky or over-the-top, as shown by the two examples below.

The owners of the office block where I work managed a particularly pathetic display. This, believe it or not, is the finished display:

Those crackers look like they were arranged by a powerful sneeze. So it was a pleasant surprise to see a local restaurant taking a different tact, opting for a nice Christmas red and—staggeringly—without a single light bulb in sight. At first I wasn’t quite sure what they were doing wrapping yarn around the trunk and branches when I snapped the photo on my way to work—or why they needed two men standing guard to do it—but it all become clear when I went by again the next day.

A quick growing-my-own-tree tree update: no tree yet.

Although we do already have a traditional tacky foot-tall plastic tree, I hope you all agree that there’s no way I could not buy this:

Especially when it’s apparently as easy as “1, 2, 3, tree.”

I have opened, planted, and watered. Just how long I wait for stage 4, I’m not really sure. Watch this space!

With half a billion or so potential reserves, China really has no need for a national service, but a couple of high-school-teacher friends of mine still had a week off work recently thanks to their students all taking part in boot camp: all senior high-school and first-year university students must take part in between a week and a month’s worth of military training, which has been the nationwide policy since a certain student up-rising in 1989.

I talked to a number of my adult students to find out what goes on, and what they thought about it, and the answers have all been generally the same. Some, but not all, had taken part in basic combat training, but for everyone it was nothing more than a lot of marching or standing in formation [more than one person told me they had to stand in the full glare of the sun for up to three hours, without protection], being yelled at, and no messing around whatsoever, in order to instill a sense of discipline, order and good old patriotism. And pretty much everyone—male and female alike—agreed that it did them good to go through it.

I suppose it’s purpose is to counter the much more relaxed pace of Chinese university life when compared to the high school system: in the latter, the students gradually build up to twelve- to fourteen-hour days of study, in which the parents and grandparents literally wait hand and foot on their single offspring in order to allow them maximum learning time, all leading up to the notoriously difficult and stressful university entrance exam. In contrast, the university system is much like that of the West, with much less classroom-time [depending on the chosen field of study] and more opportunities for—shudder—socialising, which is of course a worry for the powers that be, hence the effort to instill a bit of social order into them from the get-go.

Every now and then I get to hold an open “Culture” class in which I choose some aspect of foreign culture around which to shape discussion activities. Since yesterday’s class fell on the eleventh of the eleventh, I took the opportunity to introduce the students to the idea of a Remembrance Day.

I’ve always found it quite surprising that China does not have an official day with the same notion of remembering those who have sacrificed themselves for their country—the closest they come is the festival of Qingming Jie, but that’s primarily to remember ancestors, and not specifically about fallen soldiers—so after giving them a run-down of the ceremonies and traditions of our version, I asked them to come up with their own: when it should be, and what events should take place. Here are the suggestions of appropriate dates:

• April 6: the day after Qingming Jie, in order to get two days off work in a row

• September 18: the date of the Mukden Incident, when a railroad in Japanese-occupied modern-day Shenyang was dynamited, allegedly by Japanese militarists as a pretext to full-blown war

• July 7: the official date of the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937

• December 13: the anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre in 1937, during which tens of thousands of civilians and prisoners of war were murdered [estimates range from 100,000 to 300,000 people] at the hands of Japanese soldiers

As for the events, as well as the universal idea of a period of silence [suggestions ranged from one to three minutes], floral wreaths, monuments and so forth, and even though I am aware of the general feelings towards the Land of the Rising Sun, I was slightly taken aback by this idea from one softly-spoken, generally-amiable student:

We should invite the Prime Minister of Japan, tell him to kneel down and cut open his own stomach.

This pretty much sums up the feelings that many Chinese still have towards the Japanese today; the above student wasn’t at all shy about his desires, nor were his classmates in the least bit shocked—in fact, surveys indicate that the current generation harbours much stronger feelings than those that actually witnessed the atrocities. It’s widely known that schools teach children from an early age about the “humiliations” China has suffered at the hands of the Japanese over the centuries, although some of the other students were more open and suggested they could invite “some friendly Japanese people”. I tried to get them to focus more on the commemorating-the-fallen aspect, but some feelings are more deeply ingrained than a single hour-long class can placate.

I realise this place has built up a few cobwebs over the last six weeks or so, but I’ll be doing some dusting and hopefully back into the swing of things soon, including the return of the genuine, actually-posted-from-my-mobile Moblog, thanks to a gorgeous new phone, although it appears that sending and receiving data over the mobile network is relatively prohibitively expensive out here.

[Interesting-ish aside: I can access Wikipedia from my phone’s web browser, but it’s blocked when trying to access over a standard internet connection.]

Anyway. Anyone still listening? How’ve you been?

You might be thinking that, when embarking on a flat-hunting mission, choosing which agents to go with is a difficult step: after all, how can you really know which one is going to try and screw you over the least? Thankfully, the short answer is that they’re all going to try squeeze as much commission out of you as they possibly can, so the decision is largely influenced by one simple question: what freebies do they give you?

Upon making your first arrangement to view a flat, you’re presented with a small goodie bag, and there’s a couple of moments of intrigue as you plunder its glossy contents. Most of the time it’ll just be full of brochures and business cards, but we did receive one gem: a 140-page booklet entitled, “Doing Business in China”.

As well as some genuinely useful information regarding setting up or engaging in businesses for the first time in China, there are also some amazing pieces of cultural advice, including:

• how to distinguish between guanxi, which we’re told is “not evil, or even bad, but it is selfish”, and your bog-standard corruption

• a table of the differences in thinking patterns between the East and the West, which tells us that in resolving conflicts, a Western person will go for a simple win or lose, whereas someone from the Orient, if they cannot reach a win-win situation, has the mindset of “to lose is to win” or “lose in order to win”. While this might give one the emotional or moral high-ground, I think that eventually the shareholders are going to get a little tired of losing, even if it is in order to win

My personal favourite section concerns the expat life in China, specifically what the booklet refers to “trailing spouses”. The following is copied verbatim.

Some wives—especially those without accompanying dependents and/or who do not have to work because of their husband’s generous expatriate remuneration package and/or who have no particular career or skill—relish the idea of becoming a “bungalow bunny”, joining the ladies who lunch at their interminable coffee-mornings, sports activities, mahjong parties, shopping expeditions, etc. If you are one such, then you will not be disappointed!

Those blasted interminable coffee-mornings!

Other wives—even those who do not have to work because of their husband’s generous expatriate renumeration [sic] package and/or have no particular career or skill—harbor ideas of being a working wife in China as a way of killing time while hubby is at the office, rather than becoming a “bungalow bunny”. Perhaps teaching English? The fact that they are not qualified and/or not well-educated does not seem to deter them. After all: should not the Chinese be grateful for the opportunity of conversing with the English-speaking wife of a foreigner, rather than making do with a China-educated Chinese teacher of English. If you do not already have a successful career at home, you are unlikely to in China—although there are some who are the exception to the rule.

Having met a good few expatriates in my time, I can unequivably state that being born a native English speaker does not necessarily mean you’re able to use grammar or even pronounce words correctly.

Far away from life-long friends and family, a wife loses her entire natural support network at one swoop; and the older she is—just like moving to a new neighborhood in the new country—the more difficult she may find it, and the longer she may take to make new friends, for a variety of reasons (such as: difference in age, values, education), not least cliquism. No matter what the books say, or others tell you, expats can be as cliquish as they come, especially the long-term ones who tend to vote conservative with a capital C and may resent sharing their circle of friends with newcomers barging in on “their” scene.

Do I detect an ounce of bitterness? Maybe if the author didn’t generalise quite so much, he or she might get invited to a few more parties.

1. Find two lovely friends who want to share a flat with you for the next six months.

2. Contact a few estate agents and give them your specific requirements—in this case: three bedrooms [due to there being three people], two bathrooms [due to two of the three being of the female variety], convenient location, and under a certain monthly rental price.

3. Start viewing the possibilities offered by the agents, which will include:

   • places with only two bedrooms and a sofa-bed in the living-room
   • places with only one bathroom
   • places with asking prices above the limit you’ve specified

4. Emphasise to the agents that the requirements you gave were actually requirements, as in: we require three whole bedrooms, two whole bathrooms, and we can’t pay more than the figure we gave you.

5. View places that satisfy all of the requirements except for the price. Discover that, like everything in China, the price can be negotiated once an interest in a particular place is expressed.

6. Express an interest in a particular place.

7. At this point one of the lovely friends who wants to share a flat with you will sadly have to pull out for various reasons, leaving the remaining lovely friend and yourself with a budget two-thirds of the original, and unable to afford the very nice place in which you’d just expressed an interest.

8. Explain your new requirements to the agents: all numbers are now two-thirds of the previous requirements, to the nearest whole number.

9. Wait a week or so, then get quite nervous because the moving date is rapidly approaching and if you’re going to have to go through the rigmarole of negotiating prices, then things need to get sorted out pretty darn quickly.

10. Receive a message from your most promising agent asking if you’re still interested in the three-bedroom, two-bathroom, too-expensive place you were interested in before.

11. Explain, again, slowly, your new requirements to the agent.

12. Wait a few more days.

13. Lose all hope when the agent tells you that, for all the suitable flats she’s found, none of the landlords is willing to let them for just six months—they all want a contract of at least a year.

14. Go out for a drink.

15. Casually mention to the owner of the bar that you frequent that you’re looking for a flat. He’ll tell you that he’s moving house this week and you’re welcome to take his old place, which just happens to tick all of the boxes in your list of requirements.

Hurrah!

I had to buy this just to prove I didn’t make it up. I’m familiar with flypaper: the sticky sheets of paper one hangs up to trap annoying, potentially disease-spreading flies. Never used it myself, but I’ve seen it in movies and stuff.

Whilst I can’t deny it’s a fairly logical extension of the idea of trapping potentially disease-spreading things, I still feel a little uneasy that there’s such a thing as ratpaper.

The thought of coming downstairs in the morning and finding several starving-to-death rats stuck to a piece of paper isn’t a particularly pleasant one. Although the image of a too-curious cat walking around with four sheets of the stuff stuck to its paws is almost comic enough to tempt me to use it.

Walking home from teaching last night, it was already dark but a nice warm evening, and as I strolled along the road I heard faint music coming from the canalside. Looking over, I could see a lone elderly man sitting cross-legged under an illuminated tree, playing an erhu. I stood and watched him for a minute or two, but I was too close to the road to hear him properly so, after almost carrying on my way, I decided to wander over to have a better listen.

I made sure my footfalls were loud enough so that he knew I was approaching through the trees, so he stopped as I got closer and we had a nice little chat in Chinese, except for the part when I forgot how to say the verb to smoke so had to refuse his offer of a cigarette with a mime. He kept saying he was no good at the erhu as he’d only been playing for five years, but I said I’d like to have a listen all the same.

He was right: he was dreadful. I could have made a better sound by taking the instrument from him and smashing it against the tree [which took all of my strength to not do].

To make matters worse he kept stopping and saying how bad he was, forcing me to be all polite and tell him it was very good, all the time pondering the cultural dilemma of precisely how long I should stay and listen before making my excuses and leaving. Was two minutes long enough? An hour and a half? I hadn’t come across this piece of essential cultural know-how in my Rough Guide book, so had to go with my instincts and managed to head off after about five minutes of aural torture, telling him I was going to have something to eat—something no Chinese man would ever begrudge me.

Read the rest of “Uneasy listening”…

Whilst the Christian world gets on with all things Easter, this weekend saw the Chinese festival of Qingming Jie, which goes by any of the following translations:

• Clear Brightness Festival
• Festival for Tending Graves
• Grave Sweeping Day
• Memorial Day
• Tomb Sweeping Day
• Spring Rememberance

Whatever you call it, the traditions are the same: on the fifteenth day after the Spring Equinox, people honour and remember their ancestors, with a graveside clean-up and offerings of food, tea, wine and other goodies. It’s another busy time of year when train-travel isn’t recommended, as city-dwellers travel back to their hometowns to join their families in the sombre festivities.

As if sensing that I’d not been inspired to post anything for ages, I’ve been gifted with a couple of interesting, “You don’t see that every day” type things. Presenting, firstly, the Men Painting a Building Hanging Precariously from Ropes and Only Using Rollers:

Detail:

And for the main event: Man Strapping a Fridge-Freezer to His Bicycle:

For the first few weeks after I arrived in China, whenever I overheard a couple of elderly gents chatting in Chinese on a park bench, I found myself assuming that they were exchanging pearls of wisdom garnered from their experiences and learned readings of the teachings of Confucius. It wasn’t until I started to get a handle on understanding Mandarin that I realised that, most of the time, they’re talking about food, or the price of food, or how long its been since breakfast time.

On the first day of a new Business English course for an insurance company, held in their office meeting room, I gave them a few minutes of conversation practice based on the dialogues we had just gone through, and as they chatted to each other I wandered over to the display cabinet to look at the various certificates, plaques and trophies it contained. Given the intense growth of China’s economy in recent years, and having met and taught more than a few business professionals out here, I was assuming that they were all very serious “Business of the Year”-type awards. Office employees can work very long and hard hours—eight in the morning until eleven or twelve at night is the norm rather than the exception—so their efforts have to be occasionally rewarded with some sort of recognition, right?

Having learned a few characters of Chinese, I was able to spend a few minutes trying to figure out exactly what each achievement was. The largest trophy—a gold cup with an engraved plaque on its base—caught my eye, and I could immediately recognise the characters for Suzhou and the industrial park area in which many new companies are based, and the date: December 2002.

“Okay,” I thought, “this is going to be something like Best New Start-up or Employer of the Year.” But then I recognised two more characters: 乒 and 乓—pīng and pāng.

Yep: ping pong. It was a table tennis championship trophy. Disappointed, I turned back to the class to check on the progress of the business conversation exercise I had set.

They were all talking about food.

Read the rest of “18.02.07”…

Read the rest of “And, you know, some other stuff”…

Read the rest of “Chicken feet are my Everest”…

Read the rest of “Suzhou’s beggars”…

Read the rest of “My first Chinese wedding”…

Read the rest of “Getting into hot water”…

Read the rest of “Ding Shan”…

Read the rest of “National Day”…

Read the rest of “Tourism”…

Read the rest of “Fresh”…

Read the rest of “Notes on Chinese public toilets”…

Read the rest of “Musoings”…

Read the rest of “DVD hee hee”…

Read the rest of “Benxi Zoo”…

Read the rest of “School visit”…

Read the rest of “Chinese Chess”…

Read the rest of “The name game”…

Read the rest of “For the chop?”…

Read the rest of “[Don’t] spit it out”…

Read the rest of “Contesting stares”…

Read the rest of “Scrubbers”…

Read the rest of “A new friend”…

Read the rest of “Restrictions”…

Read the rest of “Baba’s misunderstanding”…

Read the rest of “Chinese food: here it’s just called “food””…

Read the rest of “Milestone missed”…