As well as making babies cry I apparently make the elderly laugh. It's a new social rule I have discovered, that if you are over 70 you can laugh out loud at stupid foreigners. Others can only smile, but you can laugh. Given that I was extremely wet at the time, having been caught yet again by an afternoon tropical storm without an umbrella, and failing to gain any benefit from sheltering under a young fig tree, I quite possibly looked a tad woebegone. I must say that I was in fact feeling philosophical - it was warm rain, after all - a feeling that was reinforced by the passers-by. They had umbrellas. I didn't. It was raining. Who needs the Olympics to build a global community?
It was really a very satisfactory day. Armed with a map, improved knowledge of the geography and landmarks, a compass and a 20 minute planning meeting with myself I decided to walk to the river to see if there were dragon boats. People who know how excellent my sense of direction is will be wondering now how I got to write this, as opposed to vanishing off the planet - after all a 5 kilometer walk in a strange city by a man who once got lost 200 meters from home could possibly be described as foolhardy.
To be honest, I don't think I spent more than about 10% of the journey on the allotted route. Either that or the local government has ripped out a major major park (not impossible, the local government is quite keen on development). But truth be told, the river does cut across the middle of the entire city so so long as the compass kept pointing South (which Chinese compasses traditionally do) it would be impossible not to find it. And I did.
On the way I also discovered an Indian restaurant and a mobile phone technician. And a place where people sell boxed food from wheelbarrows to half-asleep taxi drivers. It sounds faintly picturesque, except it was a road running between the middle of two massive building sites. And the boxes were polystyrene - has anything picturesque ever involved polystyrene?
The river was very cheerful. I don't know how much of it was occupied by drgaon boating, because I hung around the one bit of it (two small bridges crossing to an island (sort of) east of Er Sha Island where there was definitely something going on. But in a city of 10+ million on a festival day there weren't so many people around - a lot, but but not relative to 10 million - and so my guess is there was more going on elsewhere. Either that or shopping is taking a bigger toll of traditional Chinese culture than I imagined.
The noticeably big difference between dragon boats in Australia and Guangzhou was a distinct absence of seriousness. And the boats here are enormous, 50 people long, with drums in the middle. And a man with a whistle, presumably so the drummer has someone to follow. And they are made of timber, not fibreglass, so they must weigh tonnes.
No one was racing. This was party central, lots of lolling around on boats, flags, streamers, fireworks, umbrellas and fireworks. It's unlikely any fish were hanging around to eat the poets body. I imagine most of the fish had moved to Hong Kong for the afternoon.
Since the boats were so big and heavy, some people had hired a boat with an engine to pull them along. Not such a bad plan. The basic drill seemed to be to get into a boat, inch yoour way down the bank until you got a turn in the middle. And then again. Did I mention the fireworks?
Not even the rain was stopping this parade, although it did remove a significant bunch of spectators. Not this one though. Not until I'd finished entertaining the troops.
No comments:
Post a Comment