Fuddland

New year, new weblog entry!

I’ll get back into things slowly with a few photos of my winter holiday to Mount Emei, starting with the candles at Wannian Si (万年寺) — the Temple of 10,000 Years.

Mount Emei is one of the four sacred mountains of Chinese Buddhism, and there are dozens of temples and statues honouring Puxian and his six-tusked elephant.

In the dead of winter there were almost no other people staying in the monastaries, and walking through the winter-wonderland forests there were times when we could hear no sound apart from the crunch of the snow under our feet. Even the monkeys were relatively well-behaved.

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.

See, this is what happens when you don’t listen carefully. [Spotted in Carrefour Supermarket’s dog chews section, Chēngdu (成都).]

Latest entry in the SQR blog, “Village schools still struggling to be rebuilt.”

After the earthquake destroyed many of the local village schools in Qingchuan County, it was decided that rather than rebuild each small school, a large central school would be built in the nearest town. Unfortunately, for many of these villages the nearest town could be more than twenty kilometres away, along roads that have frequently been blocked by landslides, or made inaccessible by local rivers bursting their banks during the rainy season.

Read the rest of the entry, and note the coded language. For, “People started to wonder if…” read “Everybody knows that…”.

Getting to know the streets Chēngdu (成都) is proving to quite tricky. Normally I have a fairly good sense of direction, but—after being spoiled by the ease of a navigating grid-based city such as Sūzhōu (苏州)—I’m finding it difficult to get my bearings on the sprawling, criss-crossing roads of Chēngdu.

Compounding the organic layout of the city are two further annoyances. Almost every street is undergoing major roadworks, and every day a different one of them has been cordoned off (slogan: “The inconvenience today is to facilitate tomorrow”). It’s not so much “inconvenient” as “ridiculous” that a taxi going to the supermarket costs twice as much as it does making the return journey.

A more permanent confusion is that the street names in my neighbourhood are all Fang-something-or-other. Fangcao East Road is perpendicular to Fangcao Road, and someone was clearly having a bit of fun labelling the junction “West Fangcao East Road”. And then there are two Fangcao West Roads: First Fangcao West Road and Second Fangcao West Road.

One of the other Fangs (Fanghua Street) is in the shape of a horseshoe: its entrance and exit both intersect Fangcao East Road, which I just know must have led to some confused rendezvous, with both people insisting that they are indeed waiting on the corner of Fanghua and Fangcao East.

But I’m sure it’ll get easier to find my way around over the coming months. Right, time to head off to work. I’m sure my front door is here somewhere…

The good news: following a bout of pretty heavy rain, the massive scary spider has gone.

The bad news: we don’t know where. Eeeek!

The best news: the kitten is still around.

A new venture between the well-known hair stylists and a toy company of my youth?

I’ve been living in Chēngdu (成都) for just over two weeks now, gradually expanding my neighbourhood as I find places to eat, drink and be merry. Our new flat is much larger than the pokey little number we had in Sūzhōu (苏州) [but at three-quarters’ the price], with a marvellous-sized kitchen and—being on the ground floor—we even have a good-sized back garden all to ourselves which we’ll be able to enjoy more once we get some furniture out there.

Actually, there are two other reasons why we’re not currently making more of the back garden. The first, main reason is that a cat decided to give birth to her two kittens there several weeks ago, and being feral she’s rather wary of us. Sadly, a few days ago I found that one of the kittens had not survived. [It was noticeably smaller than its sibling and walked with a limp, so was not off to the best start for a feral life.] It was given a simple burial under a nearby bush, two chopsticks marking its resting place. The surviving kitten seems stronger and we hope it will soon be big enough to escape the confines of the garden and be able to fend for itself.

While I was looking for a suitable place to dig the hole I almost walked face-first into the second reason why the garden isn’t my favourite hang-out at present: the most alarming-looking garden spider I’ve seen.

[There’s not much in those pictures to give you a sense of scale, so let me assure you, those are not taken with a macro lens. The spider is about nine feet in diameter. Think Shelob only scarier.]

My role in my new job has been rather undefined so far, but that’s the nature of the beast as the organisation reorientates itself from focussing on emergency relief towards project-based sustainable development. While I get to grips with looking for grants and putting together proposals there are plenty of other things that I’m much more comfortable with for me to do when I need a bit of a break: sorting out the website; organising and verifying the information that is coming in.

Despite being about 1,200 miles closer to Europe than Sūzhōu, Chēngdu is definitely has a more “Chinese” feel about it, being a lot more inland and, moreover, not trying to soak up the overspill of Western influence from Shànghǎi that Sūzhōu has been attempting over the last fifteen years. It’s the fifth biggest city in China but, much like London, it doesn’t feel overwhelmingly huge. Yesterday I was taken out of the city for the first time, to see a nursery school only a couple of hours’ drive away in the countryside that had partially collapsed in the earthquake. We are hoping to fund the rebuilding, but the contractors have come back with quotes several times higher than originally estimated. Which reminds me, I must look up the Chinese for “cowboy”, I’ve a feeling it’s going to come in handy over the coming months.

The bigger-than-usual National Day holiday is coming up later this week and we hope to see a bit more of the city—including checking up on the pandas I saw over two and a half years ago.

The public zoo here in Sūzhōu (苏州) 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 Sūzhōu. 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 Sūzhōu’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”.