China200809

That's all folks

2009-03-10T19:06:00.000-07:00

That's it, I'm back in Australia now. I'm going to start a couple more blogs, but I haven't decided quite what to call them yet. Details here when I know.

Thanks to all the readers, especially those who commented.

Take care.

Not just the main bits

2009-03-10T14:21:00.000-07:00

It seems to me that every time I get to HK I spend a few hours in or around Kowloon-side's Tsim Sha Shui and or Central. Central is a dystopian pre-mall, where only the poor and the labourers actually walk on the streets. The rest of the population, which in Central is very white - not exclusively, but very - travel through air-conditioned passages from lift lobby to shopping centre. It's not quite possible to avoid unmediated air yet, but that seems to be the common vision behind the architecture & urban planning. It's the weather. Like many of the colonies, it's a good place to make money, but you wouldn't want to live there. I don't know how long it will take HK to stop being a colony - but ten years hasn't made much impression.

Although, to give HK it's due, it's not alone in wanting to create a perfect synthetic world. it seems to me that the underlying vision of all the marketing/advertising departments in all the world is that the perfect life is one that is conducted via electronic communications device in a fully designed space. It's a touching unanimity, given that a conspiracy theory probably isn't a reasonable explanation.

This trip I was determined to see more of Hong Kong than the tourist-in-transition bit.

I sort-of succeeded. Anyway, I saw a bit more than I had previously managed.

Being, as you may have noticed, a bit of a sucker for boats, I was keen to see Aberdeen which is famous for retaining a chunk of the old-fashioned live-on-a-boat ambiance. As you can see, it should be famous for adapting brilliantly to the consumer age. Once, dinner on a floating restaurant was a something to be negotiated in a fairly ad-hoc kind of way (and I'm sure it's still possible to do it that way, although I doubt any of the boats see it as a sideline these days. Even on the small sampan restaurants, it's pretty clearly their main business. Not that I am complaining, it's just that what looks like a scene from 50 years ago ago is in fact uniquley touched by its current age) But now the main game is this floating restaurant, which has taken over the centre of the harbour. Well, this bit of the harbour anyway, Aberdeen ahrbour is not a simple place. In a triumph of pragmatism though, you can see the
rear of the restaurant here. No use wasting paint on what the punters can't see. That may have to change though, because residential developments are starting on the shore opposite the backside of the Jumbo floating restaurant, and I'm assuming it won't be good business for them to antagonise the potential clientele residing in that building with a view of the water.

You can also see, in the top photograph, the three crossections that define hong Kong island - the water, the high-rise, and the hills. This is part of its undeniable charm in fact, because no matter how much I might mock, there is a great buzz in stepping off the Star Ferry, and passing through the lobbies of the skyscrapers to emerge into a mountain. OK, no Star Ferry around this side, but the rapid transition from water to mountain via construction remains the same. Well, the Chinese invented landscape painting about 1200 years before the Europeans (strange but true),, and it's called "mountain-and-water" painting still (and considered to be the most difficult painterly skill) so I guess the fascination with the relationship between the water and the land is not unique to me.
Wanchai looks a bit like Central, and in fact it is pretty much adjacent to Central (the Admiralty subway station intervenes) but the difference is that the walkways aren't so polished as Central, and they largely take you down to the street where you find yourself in the kind of streetscape popular with Jackie Chan chase scenes; lanes, stalls, lots of people, neon lights, bars, a sex industry, small shops, crowded restaurants. In fact we had lunch in a crowded Vietnamese restaurant where the proprietor correctly identified as tourists (was it the three cameras?) and provided specific, clear and correct instructions on how to catch the bus - HK $10 - to Aberdeen rather than wasting Hk $70 on a taxi. We didn't manage to find the bus depot though, which is how I know the cost of the taxi. We DID catch the bus back, thus confirming our restaurateur's expertise.

I pretty much couldn't have said anything good to you about Tsim Sha Shui, which is the pointy end of Kowloon, until I found this park. In point of fact, I have walked past the sandstone walls of the park - raised about 10 metres from street level - about ten times in my life, each time too busy to stop and investigate, and each time promising myself that next time I would. Along with water, I'm quite partial to secret gardens. (More influences of childhood fiction consumption).

If you are in Tsim Sha Shui, don't do anything except visit the park. Don't shop, don't eat, don't talk to strangers. But do visit the park. The flamingos were the most unexpected nice feature of it, but the expected features (trees, lakes, walkways, flowers, seats, people) are just as nice. And I'm using nice in a very positive way here - oasis/refuge nice.

We visited a couple of other places, Mongkok (need a hotel room for an hour?) and Sham Shui Po (mahjong clubs with the swish-click of the shuffle penetrating through the smoked glass windows to the street), but primarily with shopping in mind, so no cameras which was possibly an error, since they were interesting places and we didn't find anything to buy. After China, what the HK tourist brochures call a "retail market" is a distinct anti climax, perhaps one or two smallish floors of stalls. In China there would be 4 adjacent buildings, each bigger than the last and each with 8 floors of stalls and things smaller than stalls (is there a word for that?). The effect on us was that we would walk through a HK market waiting to see more, and there there wouldn't be any. So we'd set off for the adjacent building, but there wasn't one. So then we'd give up. Of course, maybe we misread the guides, but I don't think so. It's just that Hong Kong is actually a small place, something that I never noticed before because coming the other way (from Australia) Hong Kong puts more people in front of you in ten minutes than you would ordinarily see in Sydney in a week of Chinatown restaurants, and that tends to make you think it's a big place, contrary to the map.

Pearl River journey

2009-03-06T17:33:00.000-08:00

It has been a significant desire of mine to travel from Guangzhou to Hong Kong by boat. This has been ridiculously hard to organise - none of the locals seemed to know anything about it (note to self; how much do I know about Sydney?)

Anyway, after many false starts I finally tracked down 2 TWO! options. One from Nansha (which is in Panyu, the southernmost region of greater Guangzhou) and the other Lianhuashan, also in Panyu. Internet research turned up booking numbers for the Lianhuashan option, so that's where we left from. Subsequent research in Hong Kong revealed that it would also have been possible to come from Nansha, and in fact that there are several other destinations around the periphery of Guangzhou that also run ferry services down the Pearl. As originally expected, the Pearl is still, despite trains and highways, a pretty serious avenue for commerce.

Thinking about all this, I realise that Guangzhou has an official population of 12 million (estimated 16 m) and that that probably doesn't include the population of Foshan (West) and Zhongshan (South0, which are the two adjacent urban areas. I say adjacent and I mean exactly that - if you weren't armed with a map you wouldn't be able to spot the borders by any visible change in topography. So potentially that's 36 (48) million people, still in a geographical area not significantly bigger than Melbourne, and I still haven't included Dongguan, which occupies most of the space between Guangzhou and Shenzhen on the East side.

So maybe, with 60-odd million people in 6000 square kilometers, it's not surprising that I didn't quite find everything out about it in 12 months. In fact, it's not surprising that most of the people who live there don't know everything about it. It's almost surprising that they know anything about it. (Mind you, I probably need to check those population estimates out. They may be a bit on the high side.)

Anyway, HK by boat. A dream come true. It was, alas, a bit damp & a lot foggy, and the windows of the ferry were extremely dirty/salt-encrusted, so I don't really have photographs. In fact, by far the vast bulk of the boats we saw were fishing boats, ranging from 2 person outfits being rowed to massive multi-crane combination fishing & processing vessels. Quite a few dredges, also not surprising in a delta - if you look at aerial photos it's striking that there is in fact usable land in the region, and I'm guessing that managing the course of the river is a serious occupation for quite a bunch of people.

There were a lot of empty general cargo boats as well; I don't know if anything can be read into that because I don't know what the river looks like in good economic times. The boats we saw looked mainly like local cargo - either single container or small general cargo - so I'm not sure how they would be influenced by the export industry downturn. The internal Chinese economy is said to be holding up reasonably well. We did see a couple of international container ships though - one so big it seemed to take minutes to motor past it. It was colossally long.

Ancient city of the great eagle

2009-02-25T17:35:00.000-08:00

Last month of the job has been a madhouse, scrambling to tie up loose ends created over a year of never having enough time. It should be clear, shouldn't it, that if you couldn't finish it in the previous eleven months, it isn't going to be finished in the last one. Still, never stopped me trying. (And indeed, I did finish some things)

Liz & I still managed to get out for a few excursions though, this one to yet another of those things Shenzhen notionally lacks, to wit, places of historical interest. Admittedly, this particular place is 40 km outside of the city itself, but it is still inside the special economic zone that is Shenzhen. It's also true that Guangzhou friends claim it is in Dongguan, not Shenzhen, and that 30 years ago this would actually have been true - and for the previous 1200 years at that. But as of this moment in time, it's in Shenzhen. The map says so.

Welcome to Dapeng. More specifically, for the touristically inclined, welcome to Dapeng Gucheng (The ancient city of Dapeng - see the "pin" below).

On the greater peninsula that terminates in Hong Kong are a number of lesser peninsulae - there's probably a technical cartographer's term for these - and on one of these on the east side of the greater peninsula (SZ is on the west) Dapeng, the 'new' city occupies the north of the lesser peninsula and Dapeng the 'old' city nestles on the south.

'Dapeng' means 'great/noble/old/rich roc' - I can see this will need more research. I'm 99% sure that when the Chinese invented the word 鹏 they weren't thinking about a Euro-Persian mythological bird, despite what my dictionary says. Lucky we don't have to translate place names, but there is resonance in the literal meaning of place names, even if it is a purely imaginary resonance. 'Beijing' - 'Northern Capital' - hints at the complex and dynamic history of China. In the case of 'Dapeng' it's not hard to imagine eagles/ospreys/albatrosses drifting on the thermals and updrafts provided by the beaches and cliffs here. No need for mythology - around here fish turn into birds through the process of digestion.

There's a lot of development of recreational housing for the rich along the east coast, so there are numerous expressways being laid down to get their owners back and forth from the city in good time. However the development hasn't reached anything like the eyesore stage yet - it's a very pleasant part of the world right now. There's also a scenic - bumpy - coast road, taken by the bus we came back on.

(The above copy courtesy of my attempt to get hired as a consultant to the real estate industry)

Back to the ancient city of Dapeng...It was a day of failing camera technology (note to self, buy more spare batteries). If you run out of film, you can buy more anywhere, at least for the time being, although the boxes of film are starting to fade in the sun. There are a lot of film cameras in China still, but people who can afford tourism sufficiently to come to the distinctly unfamous venues don't have them. All my cameras now have proprietary rechargeable batteries - devices using double AA's suddenly looking like a useful alternative (but not an environmentally sound one). And I suddenly realised why I need to upgrade my mobile phone to get a decent camera in it - these picture come from my current mobile which is about three years old and hence the resolution is pretty rubbish. But maybe better than nothing?

Consequently, I don't have many pictures. I'm still squeamish about photographing people too, so one of the best pictures I saw I wouldn't have been able to photograph either. Still, apparently writing about it doesn't have the same effect.

DPGC is another (like Zhaoqing that we've seen, and doubtless others) small former city of sufficient significance to have had a wall and a mixture of sufficient insignificance and prosperity (no-longer-required walls make excellent sources of building materials for the not so prosperous) not to have lost it through expansion, invasion or modernisation.

This is a view from outside the South gate - no cars inside.

DPGC was a naval base, whence the local navy fought the first skirmish of the Opium Wars (opinions on who was victorious depend on which side of the HK /SZ border you are buying your books, because the British still exercise significant control over the story of Hong Kong despite their political departure). Victory by the local admiral (SZ-side history now) saw him elevated rapidly in imperial prestige, and saw his family similarly prosper over the next three generations. His house, a 40-room mansion, is here.

One of the things I like about these small cities is that I can grasp their scale without too much trouble. This is a walled city you can walk around in an hour. A 40-room mansion sounds like a big place with a lot of rooms, but actually the rooms are very small and the layout very simple, so I feel able to understand more about it. For instance, there are courtyards about every two rooms, in every direction. They're not for decoration, I finally realised, they're for light. They are really light wells. Of course, in the massive mansions that constitute the average tourist destination, the light wells have expanded to such a size that they are decorative courtyards first, and light seems to be not a problem. Maybe it's possible to extrapolate the principles of architecture from Windsor Castle back to a terrace in Marrickville, but not for me. Tourism is (usually) a wealth of information about a very small minority of people. That's possibly dawned on other people before now, but I'm a bit slow.

Still, I wondered what principles could be extrapolated from a 40-room admiral's mansion to the single room of an, say, AB's single room? But almost immediately I found one - light is still an issue and I saw two kids sitting at desks in an alley doing their homework (with all due diligence) to prove it.

Most of the houses inside the wall were very small, and not particularly private in that the one room is the room into which the front door opens, and it needs to stay open to get light in. So it's almost impossible not to see that life for a lot of people is pretty stripped down. I'm reminded of the comment by one of my colleagues who said that when he and his wife moved into a 45 meter squared flat they couldn't believe how much space they had.

I passed one half open door - it was so dark that it was almost impossible to see inside, but there were clearly people inside because there was a very curious noise coming through the doorway. Actually, I had to walk past a couple of times until I worked out what it was (not squeamish about eavesdropping) but then I realised it was the sound of mahjong tiles being shuffled. This was fantastic, because in stories of China that sound is extremely famous, and so little mahjong seems to be played around Guangzhou these days that I hadn't heard it previously. It is a fantastic sound, well worth its storied reputation. (There's a Chinese idiom for it but I can't remember it)

Apart from admirals' mansions & temples, there's been a very good restoration of the granaries in the centre of the city. Again, these are something that doesn't usually get restored (lacks glamour), but are actually the sine qua non of the walled city.

This is the view North from the top of the centre of the city, which is where the granaries are located. It's a location that has protection on all sides except the ocean, really a quite neat piece of siting. Although ultimately rendered irrelevant as maritime technology meant the local harbour was not big enough to support boats useful for naval warfare.

I'm guessing there was a fair bit more here, both to be seen and possibly deduced, but it probably needed research beforehand, because it's a site in progress as far as tourist information is concerned. If I come across any, I'll post it.

Boats

2009-02-02T05:01:00.000-08:00

Every since I got to Guangzhou I have been deeply puzzled by the absence of boats. One of the worlds great commercial cities (and I'm completely serious about that, it may look a bit battered but it's not altogether easy to comprehend how much of the world's trade goes through Guangzhou - thinks to self, I wonder where the statistics on that would be?) and a bloody great river, and no boats? There must be boats! But one thing is for sure, the boats have been exiled from the main part of town.

Anyway, I thought the Spring Festival would be a good chance to go boat hunting & I combined it

with an excursion to the old military academy - of which more later. Obviously the first picture doesn't look much like a boat picture, but in fact, I caught a bus to the end of the route along a road which appeared to contain nothing but warehouses and factories and it ended here with a railway line next to a massive highway next to a river. Railways next to roads mean freight. Freight and rivers mean boats.

Hah!

Possibly not the most impressive looking boats in the history of the universe, but to be frank, it's

exactly the kind of boat I've been looking for. You can hire these kinds of boats (Liz and I did it in Harbin in 2002) and go on excursions undreamed of by travel agents.

Now these boats on the other hand, are serious working boats, and also living boats. Maybe you can see the tree-in-a-pot to the right of the flagpole? Fantasy #2 - travel on one of these boats for a few months up and down the rivers of Guangdong. There are a lot of rivers - it would keep you going for a long time.

And these are the guys that tell you that from time to time there are seriously big boats around. The main two industries that I saw coming along the road today were timber & car parts, and the raw materials coming off these boats are mainly timber and steel. This is the blunt end of town (Actually, all ends of the town are blunt, it's just the middle where a certain delicacy tentatively rears its head).

Note the air quality - those derricks aren't more than 100 meters away, and this is a day, which, back in Tian He when I set out this AM, I would happily have called clear. I wonder what it's like

down here in the middle of a booming global economy in mid summer before the wet season comes along?

This is a military boat, one of a large number at the naval academy which is what the old military academy has metamorphosed into. All very decorative - I don't think these boats have any significance other than decoration and perhaps training for extreme beginners. They looked a bit old and relaxed to me - not that I know much about naval vessels.

I don't know why the fascination with boats - it's been with me for a long time, but on the other hand, I've never been so obsessed as to go out and actually buy one, or even learn to sail one. Really, I know absolutely nothing about them at all (OK, they are damp). Maybe it's a Swallows and Amazons complex. Mind you, I may not know why I'm barmy about boats, but I can have a shrewd guess about why I don't actually have one. I bet when it's your own boat, and not somebody else's, that there's a lot of hard work involved in looking after it and making it work.

Jinan university

2009-01-26T00:21:00.001-08:00

This is Jinan University. In fact, this is the main teaching building where all/most of the undergraduate classes (on this campus) are scheduled. it's too big to fit into the picture (and I couldn't be bother ed walking backwards). It actually goes up about another six storeys.

I actually gave a lecture here (as a guest speaker) on translation theory in Australia. Sadly, they didn't invite me back, but I think they have pretty strict views on academic hierarchy. If I get my Ph.D, then I can come back. It would be a nice place to work. Not a very likely one, though.

This is on campus student accommodation. I was talking to one of the students here - there are 15,000 roughly & accommodation is the big problem inhibiting growth.

Jinan University is a university anyone in the world can come to based on their native country's university entrance exams. That makes it pretty rare in China, where most of the undergraduate entrance (for international students) would be by university exam. Mind you, this particular Sunday I didn't see much sign that anybody was taking the offer up.

This could be called "paperbark drive". I don't know why the white paint, but either white paint or rope winding is very common on Chinese trees. I don't think it's related to visibility, because I've seen it on many trees that were nowhere near a road.

It's a very pretty campus. Elsewhere there are ornamental ponds with pavilions, a couple of large fountains, lawns, all that you could reasonably require. Another thing I like about the campus is that it peters out into the rest of the world towards the back - the front is an imposing us v. them, but at the other ends it's not easy to say where the university ends and the city begins.
So far as I could tell, this was not actually part of the campus (although I'm deducing that as much because I don't think academics are so well paid that they can afford to create this streetscape as from anything else). It was an absolutely perfect winter day, about 15 degrees and sunny at around midday - I actually thought Spring was coming (but the weather this week has disabused me).

It's not all hubbub.

The Hill

2009-01-25T23:19:00.001-08:00

Behind the East railway station is a hill, and I've been wanting to climb it since I got here. I made an abortive foray once before, but this time I enlisted some moral support from one of the teachers and we jointly summitted. Which is a somewhat grandiose claim, although the hill was sufficiently steep to make me realise that it's not enough to give up smoking. You also have to exercise.

Regular readers will recognise the top of the Communications Bank building - this picture is taken looking south, on New Year's day. It's still hazy.

There's a kind of feeling that Guangzhou ends at the railway line - mainly because from where I live in Tian He, you can't actually see past the hill that I am now standing on. Here is some of the northwest unseen Guangzhou - if the day was clear you could probably see across to the foothills of the Baiyun mountain - they're over there somewhere. The green building in the middle foreground is actually a shell under construction, wrapped in green gauze to minimise the dust escaping out from the construction. It's not so easy to tell from this shot, but the trees/undergrowth are almost indistinguishable from the Sydney surrounds.

Just for orientation with other photographs, this is the view south again, at a wider angle. Low to the right rear you can see the railway forecourt - looks different during the day, doesn't it? The IKEA building is under the yellow cupolas. The buildings towards the left rear are the rear building in the Concordia compound where I live. The large building to the right of that (behind the pinkish thing) is the Westin Hotel. Note the eucalypt in the extreme right foreground.

This is the view directly North - it is actually possible in reality, maybe not so much in this picture, to see that human habitation is thinning in this direction as you finally reach the outer edges of the city.

There is a building on top of the hill (actually I'm standing on it), which has been demolished in the not too distant past, but also a few signs of other, older buildings/constructions that have fallen into decay over time, rather than through direct intervention. Something that was probably a water tank. Maybe some old fortifications - although if they were of historical military significance, they'd probably be signposted, and they weren't. The most common sign was "Don't dispose of lighted cigarette butts or firecrackers" - good advice, because in summer it would be a tinderbox.

Night at the East Railway Station

2009-01-19T04:40:00.000-08:00

There is no risk of astronomy taking off as a hobby around this part of town. Nor does it look as though there will be any cessation of demand for Australian brown coal. This is the China Telecommunciations Bank building, viewed from the railway station forecourt. On the right edge, the Southern Electricity Board. Just behind it, the International Trade Building.

The grass between the camera and the buildings is covered with decorative strings of lights as well, just in case anybody is passing overhead.

This is taken back in the other direction, looking up to the station from the front of the bank. Neat, hey? The effect of the tunnel of trees up the left hand side is fantastic, and the columnary without superstructure is also stunning. It may cost a fortune in electricity to run, and it's a hairsbreadth off tacky, but it's much more palpably ambitious urban sculpture than typically floats around Sydney. True, it's also a little Bladerunner-esque as well, but there's a materialistic sub-text to Bladerunner that I'm quite in sympathy with.

Winning all prizes for lighting though is the Westin, seen here reflected in the obligatory water feature. I'm sure I'll grow out of it, but I can't resist these reflection photographs. I like that the reflection is clearer than the thing itself. I don't understand it, but there you go. It's also a puzzle that the name is so blurred, given the picture was taken with a tripod & a remote control.

Leaving the railway station but not the bank, this is Guangzhou's tallest building viewed from the sports centre side. I'm not sure quite why Amway has such a big foothold in China, but given that they have it's not a surprise that they have buckets of money to blow on advertising. It's interesting too that all the residual light from the railway square behind is invisible in the photograph. It's a tribute to the human eye really - I have a much more complex image of the shades of light in this image. If I exposed this long enough for you top see the staion glow, the fireworks would have saturated themselves out.

Even at night the haze of pollution is visible. I like this picture, but it doesn't have much story to go with it. But note the trees - they are everywhere and they really add a great feeling of comfort to the city.

More on the Botanic Gardens

2009-01-03T06:07:00.000-08:00

This caught my eye, but I can't particularly remember for what reason. Now it just looks like a half open water lily.

This is reputedly an exemplar of the tallest tree in China - grows to 80 metres in Yunnan. That's going to be a pruning challenge in the years ahead.

I like the fact that the architects have used tree trunks as supports for the roof. It's a nice contrast with the galvanised steel girders. (behind the tree)

Cute.

This is the regional flower, but I have forgotten its latin name (must take a notebook with me next time).

Never saw a tree that wouldn't look better in a pot...actually I really like these oversized "peng zai", much more than the stereotypical Japanese ultra-small ones. It doesn't seem possible that the root system in that pot could support that tree - I wonder how long they last and how much maintenance is required?

Botanic gardens - at last

2008-12-28T04:29:00.000-08:00

I finally tracked down the Botanic Gardens & since I was feeling a mite cooped up (winter) I decided to go in spite of the fact that it looked like it might rain at any time. Naturally it started to rain about half way there.

I thought when I looked at the map that it would be semi-rural but I didn't take into consideration the impact of a population of 17 million people. At least from the road, there is no evidence whatsoever of rurality. It's possible that the factories/shops/flats don't extend particularly far back from the road; but I think it's more likely that my map is out of date.

I'm a bit curious though becasue Guangzhou is actually surronded by mountains. I think I may have mentioned (about the second week that I was here) that I had been to a place called "Five Mountains" and there weren't any. It turned out today that that was unfair. The place is called "Fifth Mountain" and as we drove through it it was noticably higher than Tian He (where I live).

(Place names are tricky. There is an island called "Second Sand Island" - I spent months trying to find the "First Sand Island". Naturally there isn't one, but I discovered that "Big Sandy Headland" was in fact once an island until the civil engineers go to it and attached it back to the mainland.)

Camellia garden

In fact, while trying to get out of the gardens at 5:29 - they don't give you a map - I found a sign that said "Fire Stove Mountain" (to give a literal translation) which suggests that spending more time in and around the Botanic Gardens could lead me to the Guangzhou wilderness. With a name like that, I feel a spot of vulcanology coming on. Mind you, I have a nasty feeling vulcanology is the science of rubber. Still, you can take a punt on the idea.

The gardens are huge. I did see a sign that said how many hectares it was but that kind of thing never means much to me. I prefer the "There is no way in the world you could walk around this in a day and see more than 30% of it without proceeding at forced march pace" measurement. Or you could go with the fact that they do a busy bike & golf cart rental business in summer.

It's either because I am vaguely English, or possibly from Melbourne, but I quite like walking outdoors in winter. It was raining, but it was a curious kind of rain that seemed to be more like rain than drizzzle, but leave you much less wet than a drizzle would. So even though I was without an unbrella (because I am a goose) aprt from a brief period where I felt obliged to take shelter in the conservatory (left) I was quite happy to walk around in the rain. If I come down with pneumonia tomorrow, I guess it will have been not such a good idea.

Note that there is just as much mist inside the conservatory as there was outside. The information board at the front gate says that the gardens have been operating since 1954, but there is a huge amount of work going on. Most of everything looks substantially new - less then 3 years old, given how fast things age here.

The plant pictures are delayed by technological considerations. I can't really comment on the plantisng except to say that they have a lot of stuff. And the plantings are quite seriously massed for the most part, which is sort of good I think. It gives a bit of a feeling for how things might look indigenously, although, to be fair, massed cacti is probably more a statement by a landscape gardener than an actual recreation of an arid plantscape.

Another interesting feature of the place is that there is some seriousl archaeological work going on. Once again, there has been a great attempt to combine archaeology with public viewing but unfortunately the viewing pits were suffering from chronic condensation and poor drainage. So I didn't see very much and unless it's rock we're supposed to be looking at, I don't think anybody will be seeing very much in the future. Preservation is a tricky business.

I may have mentioned elsewhere that there is a bit of southern pride motivating the presentation of the archaeology - elsewhere there is the Nan Yue "emperor" / "jumped up garrison commander" debate; but in a way, anything that gets history public is OK (until we move into history as an excuse for invading the wherever).

Let's be blunt though - this is a little overstated. It's interesting that the bas-relief has outlasted the Stalinist architects who introduced it to China; until the 1940's it was not at all a Chinese thing. It seems now to pay much more attention to the reality of Asian faces than the Russian version (now it's the high end women's fashion industry that seems unaware that it's in Asia). It's just, perhaps, that the nutritional inputs of a Neolithic fishing village (I know we're on the slopes of a mountain now, but it was a fishing village then) seem to me unlikely to support such muscular physical development.

So as not to lose the habit

2008-12-26T05:32:00.001-08:00

I realised I haven't written anything since November. So, just to keep the hand in, here's a miscellany of things that haven't really fitted in anywhere else.

Being in Sydney in early December has been a bit of a distractor in terms of blogging. Pretty much every available other minute was spent preparing to be away from work and catching up with work after I discovered that I hadn't prepared well enough. Plus travel shopping & christmas shopping. I can't call myself a veteran of the markets yet, but I have to say I'm getting more comfortable there. I've found a couple of friendly vendors, at least.

This is not China. This is Goulburn. I would say that on the basis of my recent brief visit there, this is my favourite building in Goulburn. It's really very cheerful. It must have caused quite a stir when it was built - it seems much brighter than a conservative rural community's legal profession could have been expected to embrace in the (I guess) 1930's. It's obviously not Goulburn's fault that it hasn't rained there for a decade or more, but the other thing odd about this building is that the rest of the city and surrounds are just drained of colour. And it might be the only 20th century building in the city to have caught my attention.

This on the other hand, IS China. This is more views from my living room window (and me testing a new camera). I 've always liked timelapse effects. One of the interesting things about this camera is that it is teaching me about photography; I was always skeptical of people who buy extremely expensive accessories, but look at the stationary cars at the traffic lights and you can see that, according to their headlamps they have all just samba-ed sideways. That obviously isn't very likely and the actual fact is that between my shaky hands and

the crummy lightweight tripod (given away free with camera), that's the result of the vibration caused by pushing the shutter button in a 1.5 second exposure.

This is also from the living room window (the intersection is down and right). The trick here was to get a crisp shot at night of the flashing neon. The great joy of digital photography - I finally worked out how to do it without using up a roll of film and a week's developing time. And no, I didn't take 100 shots and pick the best. I have tried that technique - it sort of works, but you spend an awful lot of time picking over the 100 shots, with no actual guarantees. This is one of 8, in fact, each with a different combination of settings. It's a better picture than a sign, though.

Art - this is my best effort so far I think. Leaving aside the faintly claw-like unleafed branch in the middle. It's quite tricky really.

I'm hoping this is good enough to let me move on to plants and/or orchids. I know it's wrong to be impatient, but I can practise when I get home. It's going to be hard to find a teacher in Sydney though.

I think I may have already blogged a picture of this a couple of months ago - if not never mind.

I like this picture because there are some mornings where the light is just extraordinary and walking down the road can't help but make me smile. Even though it's winter that morning light is still spring-like. This isn't actually a picure of the particular road where I most frequently notice that effect (it's nearby), but it seems to have some of the luminescence. The light might be coming out of the tree, instead of shining down on it.

City of bridges

2008-11-29T19:37:00.000-08:00

There's more bridges here than in Venice I reckon - I wonder if anyone has counted them? Here's a sprinking from a 5 kilometre stretch on the inner-ring road. I think I counted 12, but not all the photographs will fit.

Actually, we'd have to start be defining a bridge because what you can see on the left are really elevated roads, as in, hmm, we need another road so we'll just put one up here, outside your window. So they're bridges in one sense, in that they go over things (roads), but I'm not sure how long a bridge-over-a-road can be before it has to change its name and be called a road. I mean, if it's a bridge over an ocean, I think it can be 70 kilometres long and still not have its identity under dispute. And certainly the Penang bridge is 13 kilometres long, and no-one is arguing about whether that is a bridge. But the fact that water is underneath it does seem to remove all doubt.

More of the same kind of phenomena, but note the passing pedestrians. Definitely a footbridge. But how long does a footbridge have to be to start wondering if in fact it is an elevated walkway? Guangzhou has some quite long ones.

Cars above and cars below. It's not actually possible to tell where this footbridge, if it is a footbridge, comes down to earth. Maybe it doesn't - Hong Kong for example is full of footpaths from the 4th floor of one building to the second floor of another.

The shiny buildings come into their own on these clear sunny days.

It's the second last day of autumn and the sky remains blue and the pollution remains low - mainly coming from the cars on this ring road. You can see from this that it's a myth that Guangzhou is a sea of people. Bits of Guangzhou are awash with people. The road underneath this bridge, for example. Other bits aren't.

This bridge must be fairly new, because in the main, when possible, the footbridges are covered in plants or planter boxes.

This is the kind of scene that has helped me warm to Guangzhou. OK, there is a lot of traffic. It's pretty much as bad as Sydney. But look at the trees! They didn't have these in 1990, but now, they're everywhere. (OK, maybe they were here in 1990, but if so, they were very very small)

And you can see the creepers creeping across the bridge from each side. When they meet in the middle, it'll look something like this....

Pretty, isn't it?

Which Sydney pedestrian bridges look like this?

Economic crisis

2008-11-15T02:40:00.001-08:00

Two stories related to the economic crisis:

Every day the pollution is lessening.

I went to the bank to transfer some money back to Australia. First you have to buy the AU$ - between the time the teller gave me the quote, and the time the two of us had finished the paperwork (about 40 minutes, they take paperwork seriously) the dollar had fallen sufficiently further that the teller had to give me change. Sufficient change, in fact, to compensate me for the Commonwealth Bank's outrageous charge for banking my money for me. ($15)

People

2008-11-14T19:02:00.000-08:00

China is of course famous for having lots of people. Here are some of them. This is Beijing Rd, Guangzhou's slightly most famous shopping district. I prefer Up-and-Down Nine St. myself, but there isn't much to choose between them. I wouldn't actually buy anything in either place, unless I felt like some haggling practice.

Haggling is not actually a deeply fundamental necessity in much of Guangzhou - my art teacher, for example, won't let me pay him by the hour, or even by the class. He has a 6-step plan for me to learn to paint & and his scheme is to charge me for each step, no matter how many classes & hours each step takes. I however know my talent is more than somewhat limited - I can't possibly allow this or the guy will be traveling for two hours every weekend for no return. He may think there is no-one unteachable - but I can still remember years of swimming lessons to no avail. And I have a dim feeling I may have failed art in about Year 6 or 7.

So anyway, haggling is not necessarily essential elsewhere but here it is. It is absolutely essential. I have heard a local start off at 10% of the asking price and settle on about 25%. It's pretty extreme. Furthermore, I have to say some of the stuff is beyond complete rubbish. I've seen watches here for about 20 RMB, and even if I got them for 5 RMB I'd still guess they were overpriced.

None of this deters anybody, as you can see. Indeed, it doesn't even deter me. If you stay off the main drag there's lots of good things around.

I may have mentioned Beijing Rd previously as it is an example of "public archaeology", something I think China is getting really very good at. (My photos didn't come out though, it's not so easy to photograph through glass). Not visible here, but slightly north & south on this strip of road, excavations have uncovered roadway going back to the Tang (400-ish CE), Song (1100-ish), Yuan (1300-ish) and Ming (1400-ish). These have been restored & encased in glass so they are permanently on display in the busiest place in downtown Guangzhou. There are also fragments of city wall and city gate in the southern section. Other places still have their walls intact (Xi'an being a particularly spectacular example, but Zhaoqing locally as well), but the cost of keeping a wall intact is that what is under it cannot be seen. The interest of this exhibition (quite apart from the ingenuity of the presentation) is the visibility of the layers from 4 dynasties. The Nan Yue palace has the same impact, although it has maybe 8 or 9 layers. But it would be a pity to restore just one of them thoroughly and thus lose the rest. For those like me who are imagination-challenged, seeing the multiplicity of fragments from the multiple historic periods is immensely valuable. Each fragment functions as a kind of frame in a film, and viewed together they create the impression of continuity.

I find that Guangzhou provides me repeatedly with that feeling of continuity. Maybe I should say that I find myself musing on issues of continuity a lot while I'm in Guangzhou.

This on the other hand is Shenzhen. I never find myself musing about much in Shenzhen. (Cue pun) This is not the most crowded the street gets - that happens around about 6 PM, but it gives you a fair idea. There's more serious begging here than around Guangzhou as well. Somewhere off-camera is a girl aged between 5 & 15 (depending on nutrition) who specialises in holding on to a spinning wheel by her teeth. Not a dependable way of making a living, but she is one of many buskers. Except the buskers don't look quite as well fed as they do on Circular Quay.

People in Shenzhen tell you they could never live in Guangzhou because it's not safe. I live in Guangzhou and NOWHERE in Guangzhou makes me check my pockets and hold on to my bag like here. The only reason there aren't pickpockets (if there aren't; my feeling is just that I haven't met them yet) is the large number of public security officials hanging around.

No doubt there's someone from Shenzhen writing the same thing about Beijing Rd.

Autumn arrives

2008-11-09T00:14:00.000-08:00

So what, you may ask? Well, it's nearly winter and we're all still sweltering in 98% humidity and high 20's. The swimming pool's closed (and empty, so no point climbing the fence), there isn't aT-shirt in the shops (although you can stock up on left over stock at wholesale prices anywhere that is selling them, if you feel you can take the fashion risk of being out of it next year. Needless to say the remainder tables are surrounded by crowds of not women). Autumn fashion is just about on its way out the door as well with winter only weeks away. Autumn's absence has been causing tension all over town.

The other thing about autumn is very strong winds cleans the air even better than the mid-summer rains.
To wit, you've certainly seen that building before if you've been paying attention, but in no photo previously taken my me in Guangzhou has the sky ever looked like that. I mean, that's a proper sky, guv. Wi' clouds an' evrything. Really. No tricky play with digital editing, just azure.

You can see the clouds better in the next one on - I know the sky is a different colour, but that's due to trick photography. I was practising ways to trick the fully automatic exposure controls, and I have found one.

Even that extremely annoying gold building looks OK under a sky this strongly coloured.

(more to come)

This guy will be happy too. Obviously that isn't the world's largest block of peanut brittle right at this minute, but some time in the recent past it surely was. last weekend that was going to melt if he didn't finish his deliveries by about 10:00 am. This weekend he can probably switch to retail around 11 o'clock and make some extra money.

Also, cycling today is the kind of thing you might think about doing for pleasure. Last weekend it was something you would do to lose weight, or because you had no choice.

It's not unambitious, is it?

Imagine how devastated you'd be if you fell off the bicycle (happened to me once going down Williamstown Road when the chain jumped off the sprocket). Or how angry you'd be if some idiot ran into you. Twenty years ago if you'd been doing this (and no-one actually was that I saw, which might be a whole other discussion) it would have been a bicycle but now it'd be about 50:1 on it would be a car. They don't call it brittle for nothing.

It's tempting to think that there is something a little idyllic about a world where you can earn a living selling peanut brittle from the back of a bicycle - that's the "real China" that everybody is worried might be vanishing. But think about that guy's stress. Take a look at his back - it's the back of a man who is worried about many things. OK, it might be the plummeting value of his share portfolio - but I think the balance of probabilities is against it.

just a week in Guangzhou - nothing fancy

2008-10-31T17:28:00.001-07:00

I'm not sure if I'm winning or losing the battle with technology, so whether or not I get any pictures into here remains moot at this stage, but I certainly have found a lot of it to play with. Starting off with the simple ambition to get movies from the mobile phone onto my computer where people could see them, I have ended up with 14 new programs on the laptop. Since all of them were free, none of them is without idiosyncrasies. But just as I think this is ridiculous, I realise that I can actually shoot a video with my phone, edit it on a computer, add a Beethoven soundtrack (say), add a few special effects, subtitle it & distribute it for pretty much nothing (given that I already had the mobile phone & computer). So what if it takes 14 programs? If I could remember which one to use when, it would probably only take about 4.

Kafka's - view from my couch

Last Sunday I went back to the coffee shop Liz & I discovered, Kafka's. It's conceivable that this is some kind of a deep-ish joke - but it's hard to be sure & the Chinese appropriation of any random passing English word for a dash of marketing cachet makes it hard to be confident about intention.

Missing from the photograph is the wall of books - mainly about Tibet - which adds the final touch of niceness, really. It's like having coffee in a library, only more comfortable. it's certainly quiet enough to be a library. On the two occasions that I've been there now there hasve beem miore staff (3) than customers (maximum 2). I'm not sure if their cat is staff or a customer.

This is really a multi-layered nostalgic experience. The flooding natural light and the absence of air-conditioning for overhead fans plus the clogging humidity immediately make me think of a coffee shop in an outback/rural country town. There's one in Gympie, and Balmoral, and Goulburn, and Seymour, and Ballarat, and ... The one in Berwick probably has airconditioning now, and maybe the rents are too high for it to sprawl like this.

Of course, those rural coffee shops are reconstructing the inner-urban proto-European coffee shop of the 60's, Pellegrini's, Tomani's (Tiamo) and their folk-music analogues (of which the Twilight in Kew is the only one I actually set foot in). It's really very kind of someone to put a potted history of my coffee-drinking life into Guangzhou, just in case I get homesick. The coffee is really excellent - priced a bit like Grange though. With the Australian dollar where it currently is, the coffee starts at $7 a cup.

I'm tempted to make it into my office & claim them on expenses.

Macao etc.

2008-10-25T18:09:00.001-07:00

This is not quite the first view of Macao you get from the ferry coming over from Shenzhen, but the camera was packed away at the time. This is from the dock next to the actual ferry terminal itself. For those, like me, who were beginning to fear the death of sea transport, the whole Shenzhen/Macao/Hong Kong ferry scene is a big relief. It's buzzing. Ferries arrive and depart for eithe Hong Kong or Shenzhen - admittedly mainly Hong Kong - about every 15 minutes. The ferry terminal building is clean & well laid out & signposted. The information booth knows the answers to your questions.

Liz and I set off from the heart of Shenzhen with about 5 bags of luggage - so we wimped out of the metro and caught a taxi - to Shekou, which is the ferry terminal for Shenzhen. Research had shown that there is a 30 minute lead time required to clear customs and immigration - it may be one China, but included in the two systems are border crossing formalities of the usual kind - but we arrrived at 8:36, bought tickets at 8:37 and were on the 8:45 ferry with a minute to spare. Probably the fastest border crossing (outside Europe) I have ever experienced. Lots, well several anyway, old fashioned one-family working boats spotted in the seas around Shenzhen. I have a new retirement fantasy n0w, I've always wanted to live on a boat.

What you actually see approaching Macao is first the bridge in the picture below (from the other side) followed by extremely cheerful terraces in a multitude of pastel hues. With the sun shining it's a mokment of heart melting niceness. Shame the camera wasn't out.

I'm having some problems with organising these pictures, which is going to affect the narrative flow, so, sorry, but, pay attention!

The view of the bridge is taken from the bar (closed at the time) - well, one of the bars - in the "mediterranean" section of the regional architecture theme park that may possibly be sponsored by the Babylon Casino (you can imagine the decor, I didn't photograph it) and fills up the waterfront from said casino around to the ferry terminal. The bridal party below are in "Ancient Rome" - the groom is trying to decide whether to hit us (Liz is laughing at the bride's sneakers) or share in the joint ridiculousness of it all.

I'm pleased to report that the universal sense of absurdity prevailed. I do hope their pictures turn out nicely though - it was a bloody hot day to be poncing around in full wedding clobber.

A nice additional roman feature is the halloween pumpkins on top of the arch in the background. Very, what?

The picture below was taken for contrastive purposes, a spot of ancient China meets Casino-land (hovering in the background).

Ho ho ho... this is not ancient China.

This is "Tang land". Both the foreground and background are the same age - in fact the background is one of the slighly older casinos (I think), so the foreground might be newer.

None of this is without charm, disturbing though that is to report (like admitting McDonalds has redeeming features, say, food value). Tacky yes. But the discreet charm of the ersatz can't be denied.

So, Macao, home to more fakery than Las Vegas? Not quite yet. Get away from the casino district(s) and the older colony emerges. The 3rd photograph back - charming yellow buildings - is in fact a photograph of (admittedly newly painted) genuine 19th century Portuguese-architected (coolie-built) buildings. In the centre of the old town there are lots of these - a very solid afternoon's walk worth.

A day is enough to see Macao really, unless you have a historian's interest. It's remarkably small. To run a marathon you would need to do 3.5 laps of the peninsula; it's about 3 x 3 km. Taxis and food are absurdly expensive, by Chinese standards at least, and the only service the taxis provide is keeping you out of the heat. You can walk anywhere.

The Old Railway Station (Guangzhou West, or should that be North?)

2008-10-14T06:08:00.000-07:00

This is the hotel Vicki, Bindi & I stayed at in 1990. It's not a hotel now & the lobby has been turned into a real-estate salesroom.

Other than this hotel & the railway station, nothing is recognisable. Apart from anything, this area is now right in the middle of the massive wholesale clothing markets, so the whole area is buzzing. In 1990, there were shops selling 5 washers - as in the nut & bolt kind - in a saucer. The only mall was the Friendship Store, which had an interior stocked with 1960's leftover appliances, and which only foreigners, with their special FEC - "foreign exchange currency" - could enter. Most people on the street knew two words of English "Change money". American dollars were the best - worth up to 50% more than the bank rate - but even FEC had a black market rate.

Well, the money changers are still there, but only two accosted me in the afternoon. Now I feel the money changers are there as a convenience, to save you going to the bank to conduct business. Their rates today are worse, not better, than the official rates.

In 1990 I was "arrested" for consorting with money changers. IWhat actually happened is that an elderly man on a bicycle rode up behind me and the 50 odd money changers previously surrounding me vanished & the elderly man turned out to be a member of the police who took me back to his hut for questioning. He only spoke Cantonese, so that didn't work very well & eventually I had to take him to a bank so they could explain that travellers cheques & exchange fraud don't easily mix.

The policeman in the blue shirt - that's his chair on the median strip - reminded me.

This little guy was on the bar table in the hotel where we stopped for airconditioning (and a toilet break). He sells horoscopes for 1 RMB.

Apparently my favourite colour is black?

In this hotel we found a cup of coffee that was even worse than Starbucks, and even more expensive. So, Schultz is doing something right.

I still haven't mastered the flash on this camera - but you knew that aleady.

Nan Yue Palace plus plus

2008-10-04T03:09:00.000-07:00

Archaeology, slap bang in the middle of town.

This (the Nan Yue palace) is pretty impressive for the simple reason that in a development-minded city it must have taken extraordinary strength of character from someone to prevent this site being turned into a carpark and/or a foundation for a shopping centre. And leaving aside its impressive value as a symbol of political sensitivity - I guess it also has symbolic value as the South seeks to re-assert its story as being equally as valid as the North's - it's a pretty impressive site. There is a lot going on.

The map above roughly indicates the boundary between Qin and Nan Yue in 219 BCE, just minutes before the successful Qin invasion created the first China ("q" is pronounced similarly to "ch"). The Qin established a commandery in Guangzhou (then called Pan Yu, at least the bit with the commandery in it) and started importing Han nationality farmers/soldiers to settle the area, whilst simultaneously - I assume - handing out dukedoms and earleries to those of the locals they thought might have influence. The map is not contemporary to that period though. It's just illustrative.

Not for the first time I wish my hands were steadier so I didn't have to carry a tripod around to get pictures you can read (because I DONT carry a tripod around, so the fine print on this is beyond me), but this gives you an idea of how central this is to Guangzhou - the road running through the centre from East to West is Zhong Shan Road, which you can comfortably see on Google Earth & any decent map of Guangzhou. Beijing Lu, one of the major shopping districts runs down one side. Somewhere is a developer weeping tears of rage.

The dark red line is the site & the orange line is the wall of the old Panyu commandery/city. Liz and I have walked around that wall looking for signs, but they are long gone. It's still a nice walk though. You can see that the palace
took up a pretty fair chunk of the city - probably not surprising given the newness of the settlement and the importance of the army. This, I guess, was more of a military city than anything else.

The layout of the dig is roughly discernible from this schematic - the olive green is Nan Yue, the purple is Song, the green is Southern Han. On the right you can see a reservoir/drainage pit, with an articifical stream running into it. There are walkways dating back to the same period, suggesting a garden. Judging from the pillar footings, someone in the Song dynasty stuck a couple of quite large buildings down in the middle of the garden.

Not labelled here are the Ming and Qin areas, which mean that the site covers a minimum of 1700 years.

The site is roofed for protection & the light is really not very good, nor is photography encouraged. To be honest, a good book or a decent documentary can give you a much better iea of what is going on.

I like this artefact though - as they've dug down the archaeologists have left a pillar remaining undug & labelled each of the layers to give you an idea of how archaeology works, and also to give you an idea of how many layers of activity are on the site. From the top, 2 layers of modern, 1 layer unlabelled, 2 layers of Qing (the lower being a fairly massive chunk) - switching to the left side the 7th layer is Yuan (Mongol) so we might hypothesise the 5-6th are Ming, then the 8th & 9th layers are Southern Song, the 10th (moving back in a little towards the middle) is Northern Song, below that Southern Han, below that is the Tang dynasty, followed by 2 I don't know, the Nan Chao & the Tong period. All of this rests on a layer called Han Dynasty (the real one) and the whole pillar is therefore resting on the Nan Yue level. (If you had studied archaeology in North China you might be tempted to call that the Qin Dynasty...) So that is 1700 years in a 2 meter pillar of dirt. There is a difference between knowing something is true becasue you read it in a history book, and seeing tangible physical evidence of it. You really have to ramp up the scepticism beyond anything plausible to dismiss this; when I look at it I have to think about the 100-odd generations and the millions of people that this can represent. We live in a constructed world - and the construction is not only ours.

Nan Yue Mausoleum

2008-10-04T03:08:00.000-07:00

This is another really well set up site for public visiting. This is the top of the mausoleum, so what you see is the roof. Above is a steel & glass pyramid that is approximately congruent with the hill that has been removed to ge to the tomb. So it's still possible to get a feeling from outside of how this hill fitted into the surrounding landscape. It's also possible to go down into the mausoleum itself, which is smallish, but with seven rooms (Tutankanem only had four, if there is any point in the comparison).

The contents have been put into an adjoining museum - whose architect must have had a fair sense of humour because the museum has both its own "Louvre-like" pyramid, repeating the theme of this one here, and "Egyptian-esque" external bas-reliefs. So far as i know, any connection with Egypt is coincidence, so I guess the museum design might be a tad tendentious. Still, it made me smile. Possibly another coincidence is the vast amount of Egyptian artiface looted by the french under Napoleon - so the Louvre reference is also apposite.

What a fantastic thing archaeology is. (Probably not the world's easiest career though.) The Nan Yue mausoleum is one of 2 Nan Yue sites in Guangzhou, the other being the palace which I mentioned elsewhere. The mausoleum is, so far as anybody knows anyway, a vastly simpler site. Just one mausoleum, nothing before, nothing after. When you think of the amount of pillaging of tombs that went on in, say, Egypt, and I assume in parts of China too although I haven't researched that yet, it's extraordinary that this one was excavated completely untouched in 1983. I mean there it was, a bloody great mound sitting in the middle of the suburbs, untouched for 2000+ years. No legends of buried treasure? No idle curiosity?

In the nineteenth century somebody built gun emplacements on one side of it, and no accidental discoveries.

Along comes another developer, starts digging up the hill to build an apartment block and suddenly, there it is. Imagine how unbelievably excited the archaeology department must have been. It's a small site, but it is really really interesting. Actually small sites are better in some ways for the tourist; you don't get quite the same feeling of scratching the surface (of course you are, but feelings do count). I've been back once since the first visit, and I'll probably go back another couple of times. I get museum burnout because there's really too much to think about & since I don't really know exactly what to look for/at, it can be a bit confusing. I think museums generally do a lousy job of providing supporting information & context. This one actually tries pretty hard, but my museum Chinese is, well, underdeveloped.

I can't claim to be such a great artifact photographer - it's a "no flash" museum as well, but here are a couple of my favourite things.

This chap was holding up the base of one section of a massive seven-part Chinese screen. If you can get a screen-sized view of it, he has a fine demonic grin and vicious teeth. He doesn't look remotely like anything I associate with "Chinese" - which I freely admit may be ignorance on my part - I would have guessed Central American.

Or alternatively, an early prototype for a computer game.

This "rhyton" is much more stunning than the photograph - the jade is translucent, and amazingly thin. I've seen a lot of jade in China, and frankly I'm starting to think that plastic is rarer and more intersting, but this restores jade to its proper place in the preciousness scheme of things. It's a piece that makes me start to understand the evil collector mentality - wanting it is very easy.

Drinking horns always make me think of Norse gods (Thor in particular, drinking the ocean to create the tides) and the chosen translation into Greek makes it hard to avoid thinking westwards, but of course, anybody hanging around with horned animals is highly likely to work out that the horns make good cups. And Guangzhou is, don't forget, the city of five sheep/rams/goats. So, no jumping to conclusions.

This is another of those things - again I don't know how clearly you can see the picture, but the carving is very finely detailed. There's a dragon, a phoenix & a rhinoceros in there if you look hard enough. It's a clasp, somewhat more elaborate than the hooks-and-eyes of the pre-velcro cheap fastener.

One of the small things that I liked about it is that it had been broken and mended in its original lifetime; so he may have been the Nan Yue emperor, but he wasn't a nothing-that-isn't-perfect-enters-my-sight kind of emperor. More frugal. Better balanced. Perhaps not quite so rich.

Calling him an Emperor is something of an ambit claim, in point of fact. I have also seen him described as a governor. Certainly his grandfather started off in the South as the governor of the Qin empire - but Qin didn't last long & in the time it took the Han dynasty to get itself organised the Qin-colonised Yue areas naturally acquired a degreee of independence. And from the Han dynasty point of view, an independent kingdom of Han ethnic stock in the South wasn't a high priority, so long as they weren't too independent. So it made sense for them to authorise/collaborate in the Nan Yue kingdom. Of course, eventually all that independence and talikng about kingdoms got the local people unduly excited, and the Han acquired an emperor whose idea of control was more focussed on physical control, and thus after 4 generations (and in a pragmatic sense 3, because the last generation of infant emperor probably wasn't more than a dying optimistic gasp) the Nan Yue kingdom was no more. (But see the history of Vietnam for an alternative view of events)

Zhaoqing

2008-10-03T03:03:00.001-07:00

Zhaoqing is a very cool place. Its practically mandatory to go somewhere during the national holiday, being me we left it to the last minute, but settled on the popular destination , the poor man's Guilin, Zhaoqing. As the poet apparently said, take some water from West Lake [famous, in Hangzhou] and seven crags from Yangshuo [famous, near Guilin] and voila, it's the Seven Crags of Zhaoqing.

Here are a lot of other people going somewhere during the national holiday. This is the long-distance waiting room (#4) at Guangzhou East.

Carefully framed as this is (by the ferry window on the right) it might just be Guilin.

But although this seems to be all that Zhaoqing is famous for in Guangzhou, when you get there there is a lot more.

We were fiendishly lucky to get a hotel room, in fact. The city was so busy with tourists that even the local taxi drivers, usually commission hounds when it comes to finding you a hotel, were refusing to cooperate. We got the last room in the place we stayed & while I was filling out the forms about 5 more people got knocked back.

But the good luck with the room meant that we were going to like Zhaoqing, and we found a lot to like. This is the South Gate of the old city in a city wall which is not completely synthetic - in fact looks pretty old in places. Of course questions of authenticity abound in tourism, and in some ways, who does care if it's real or a copy, apart from the archaeologist? I mean, I do, but I'm not really sure why, or that the reasons are readily defensible.

There has been a city here since Han times (BCE), but I guess the wall here is Qing/Ming fragments. During that time Zhaoqing was the main provincial city (governor's seat) so I expect the facilities would have been well maintained. Matteo Ricci, the Jesuit who opened China to Western intellectual eyes, was here for 6 years learning Chinese. And architecting a church. Very talented man.

This is actually the outer gate & we tried to get up to the inner gate but the space between the two is filled by a large hospital. Despite our best attempts we weren't quite able to navigate through the hospital to the next gate - we could see it, but we couldn't climb up to it.

Another thing I liked about Zhaoqing is that the Pearl River - actually maybe it is the West River - is still a working river here. For someone who has spent about 200 hours of his life in boats, and most of that in the 168 hours of one week, I am a complete sucker for boats. I love them, or at least, the idea of them. I don't have one becasue I doubt I would ever actually use it (I know the difference between fantasy and reality) but I still like to watch other people using them.

In fact Liz and I spent days trying to find how to get to Zhaoqing by boat & one of the reasons the trip was a bit disorganised was the amount of time we spent looking for boats instead of booking hotels. It was nice to see the boats, even if they have stopped running from Guangzhou. (In fact, it appears that the boats now go from Huangpu, about 30 km south of Guangzhou to Gaoming, about 30 kms by bus from Zhaoqing.) I did in fact try to find out form a couple of girls hanging around the river's edge if there were ferries from Zhaoqing, but they thought not. Although they weren't thinking completely clearly because they were trying to photograph me clandestinely with their mobile phone and I scared one of the witless by walking towards her. And she spoke riverboat putonghua, which I didn't study in school.

This is a photo from the window of the hotel, the Shanshui or 'mountain & water' chain. This part of China, and in fact all the way from here to Shanghai if you stick within a couple of hundred kilometers of the coast, could not be better described.

We just had time on the last morning to dash back down to the river to look at somebody's mansion - nice enough in itself - which contained more revolutionary history: one of the divisions of the armies involved in the Northern Expedition(s) set off from here. But the other half of the mansion was deveoted to a museum of inkstones, which are a local handicraft, produced from the nearby mountains. Inkstones are a new product for the wealthy middle class demonstrating its connection with China's traditions - but nonetheless some of these inkstones were superbly carved. Not really practical for me to bring home, so I was compelled to leave them all there. And the camera broke down, so no pictures either.

Wholesale clothing markets

2008-10-03T03:02:00.001-07:00

I was busy trying out the video on the camera & I didn't get any stills (these are the best of the 1st shots from the videos). I've cobbled together a HOME MOVIE with the clips, but I haven't quite worked out how to show it off to the world, yet. Give me time.

Anyway, these stills don't really catch the feeling of this place. This street runs down between the Wan Tong retail & wholesale markets and the I-have-no-idea shoe market. These are the markets I but stuff at - not that there aren't plenty of other markets but I'm not sure there is enough time for me to become an expert in these places. So for now, anyway, these are they. There are more people here than you could possibly work out what to do with. Ok, there are more people in Indian markets. But so what?
There are also belt markets and watch markets and cuff link markets and wallet markets and probably earring markets and underwear markets, as well as underground markets, handbag markets, just stuff markets everywhere. And there are the people selling stuff, making stuff, buying stuff wholesale, buying it retail, carrying the stuff from one place to another, looking at stuff, feeding the people doing stuff with the stuff, and other people watching the stuff happening.

Somehow these three photgraphs don't seem to have the right amount of stuff in them. Hence the still not available video, which will give you a bit better idea.

What really interests me about this place, and all the other markets, is that they are a kind of education in economics and commerce. For a start, imagine that you can see the entire fashion industry of Australia - 20 million people - in one place. You start to get an idea that there's a lot going on behind the boutiques that you don't see. Then you realise that actually, in Guangzhou you are looking at the fashion industry of Australia, plus a large chunk of the rest of the developed world, and it's a bit headspinning. I find myself wanting to look at some statistics - how many people? How many pairs of jeans/shoes/ear rings/etc/etc to which parts of the world? What's it all worth? It's also a bit of a grim confession, but having been here in 1990, and comparing it with now, I have to confess that I am developing a lot of respect for the free market economists. Here, now, you can see it & it might be a bit intimidating - although I guess if you know your business it isn't - but it's undeniably a better way.

The other thing that strikes me, is that actually, this is the history of Gunagzhou. It has been the intersection of China with the rest of the world, and the intersection of Chinese trade with the rest of the world for a long time. Not the only intersection, as there were the silk roads, but absolutely the maritime intersection. It was the frustration of only being able to do business in Guangzhou that drove the British into some of their least savoury post-colonial manouvres. And there has been trade between Canton and South East Asia for at least 2000 years. The Arabs knew Canton in the 8th century. The Chinese from Canton were trading with India along the coastal routes at least 1400 years ago. So when I stand in Beijing and look at a heavily restored 18th century palace, I'm not sure that perhaps I'm seeing as much history as I do standing outside a market in Guangzhou. That market, barring minor interruptions, has been in continuous existence since BCE.

It's a thrill to hold a Byzantine coin and feel that you are directly connected to something 1200 years old. But that coin is dead. If you buy something in the markets of Guangzhou you can participate in something 200o years old. It's not an artefact. It's special.

Da Sha Tou and the ferry that wasn't

2008-09-30T21:15:00.001-07:00

I like Da Sha Tou. It has the fabric markets, the camera markets & a lot of trees. It used to have the wharf for the overnight ferries up and down river as well, so being big fans of ferries and following our trusty, if somewhat dated, guidebook we set out to find it.

Optimism tempered with fatalism was the mood - none of the locals, including the real natives of the city, that I work with believes such a thing as an inter-city ferry exists. But Liz & I know from experience that the lcoals don't always know everything - in Hangzhou in 1999 we had to find the actual riverside wharf to catch the ferry up the Grand Canal, no-one knew about that either. On the other hand, in Harbin in 2002 we had to hire our own boat to make a trip down the river.

We started well, with a very crowded looking ferry office - but they only sold "up and down the river" cruises. They also told us there were no more ferries, and helpfully gave us instructions to the bus station. The bus station told us that the bus we wanted didn't go from there, and helpfully provided what I am convinced was a random number - since no matter how bad my pronunciation is, I refuse to accept that our destination could possibly have been interpreted as one of the Number 57 bus stops.

Er Sha Dong
Xing Hai Yin Yue Ting
Da Sha Tou
Zhu Hai Guang Chang
Ai Qun Da ?
Shi Zhong Yi Yuan
Hua Di
Shi Wei Tang
Qiao Dong Xiao Qu
Zhao Kou Ke Yun Zhan

I ask you, which of those could really be taken for Zhao Qing?

Of course, the fault was to a degree mine, because I don't speak Cantonese & have made about as much progress with it as I have effort put into it (one new language at a time is enough for me), and the bulk of the conversation seemed to me to be in not Mandarin. So maybe I misunderstood some critical piece of information. It wouldn't be the first time that I have discovered an unhelpful local was actually an incompetent listener (me). It's very tempting to blame everybody else.

Anyway, the last stop on that bus route does actually take you to a ferry. One day I will catch that bus and find out where the ferry goes to. Not Zhaoqing though, because I am now convinced there isn't one. The reason that I am convinced is that I have discovered why there is no ferry, and it is a combination of 2 extremely plausible reasons. Firstly, people have been building roads, and roads are faster. That is the history of the world, so no reason why it shouldn't be here either. Secondly, there's a Chinese government department responsible for creating business opportuniteis for the locals - basically something I am in sympathy with - and one of theri favourite tricks is creating transportation needs. As for example at Huashan in Xi'an, where a perfectly good train station at the foot of the mountain has been closed in favour of the next station down the line, thus creating a need for taxis & minibuses. The Guangzhou-Zhaoqing ferry (formerly convenient, if not very fast) is now the Huangpu-Gaoming ferry. Huangpu is a one hour bus trip out of Guangzhou & Gaoming is at least an hour on the bus out of Zhaoqing. Sadly, these market creating activities have caused the ferry to vanish in any meaningful way.

I wonder if it's worth it to bring it back just for the tourist market? I can't be the only person that loves riverboats.

Anyway, getting back to the mainline, we set off to walk down the riverbank and visit every possible wharf. This we did & sadly, found only blisters. And a ferry that crosses the river to the other side - well that's not nothing.

We also found where the police boats park, and possibly where the police boatmen live. It's a little bit run down, and I guess it's so close to the water that it is rat infested, but the block of flats adjacent to the police wharf is potentially the best address in Guangzhou (well, no-one else has a private pier). You might feel the need to move the coconut sellers along - it's nice to see a police station that feels so openly comfortable allying itself to free-floating commerce, but the left-over husks aren't pretty.

This turned out to be a day when we were doomed to walk. Finding a taxi is a bit of a challenge a lot of the time & you have to position yourself very strategically close to where people debouch from taxis and then, fend off other competitors for the newly vacant cab. usually missing a couple of cans gives you enouh information to adjust the game plan but on this particular day, nothing was working. We must have walked another 3 km before we finally commandeered one on the edge of the art district.

It's the grand final

2008-09-30T21:11:00.000-07:00

Expatriate rites of passage - watching the grand final in an Irish bar, complete with sullen Geelong supporters. Free beer from the publican - nice of him really since I won't be back next year.

Anyway the right team won, from my point of view, and it was a fantastic game for 2 and a 1/2 quarters.

I had to take the afternoon off work on the basis of an Australian religious event.

Liz in Shenzhen

2008-09-29T05:36:00.000-07:00

I've been in Shenzhen about 17 or 18 times and the consensus of all, local and foreign alike, is that it is a city without a history. In a way that's true - like Shanghai, Shenzhen is what it is now because of trade with Hong Kong in the last 30 years. But in another way it's not true because people have been living in and around the area for a long time, just not in big cities. I had to work on the Friday we after we arrived in Shenzhen and Liz spent the day on the internet researching the city, and came up with a list of about 20 things to look at - from Neolithic villages to tombs of ancient kings. Stay tuned. There is a bit of southern pride reverberating through Guangdong, justifiably so since it was peripheral to the various Northern empires for substantial amounts of its history; not perhaps enough to call itself another country, but certainly enough to want to mark the distinctions between Han and Yue.

We haven't visited those sites though. We only really had time to stop off at Windows on the World. I'm cowering because the sun is in my eyes, not because a giant kangaroo eater is approaching the giant kangaroos.

I don't think I can describe Windows on the World. On the right behind me is the Parthenon. Behind that is the Eiffel Tower. The Golden Gate Bridge is being build across the road to my left front - the smaller kangaroo is looking at it. I think you can take it from there.

Around and about

2008-09-28T05:58:00.000-07:00

Liz arrived last week on Thursday & I flew down to Hong Kong to meet her. I was flying from Shanghai and I had hoped to catch the Mag-lev (400+ km/p/h) but it doesn't run until 7:30 and I was on an 8 am international flight. So bugger. Maybe next time.

The new airport in Hong Kong - well, new to me - is not at all spectacular, but I'm sure it's a lot less hellish for the locals in Kowloon who used to live next to the old one. Apart from being expensive, the public transport access from Lantau to Central is fantastic. In fact, it's a pretty fair model of the perfect airport-city combination.

I was in Hong Kong in 1990 but I spent 3 days confined to a hotel room so most of what I remember is actually from 1975, when I wasn't paying a lot of attention. In 1975 Central was full of expensive shops. In 2008 Central is full of very expensive shops. The tall buildings above the expensive shops have changed - they are taller and shinier, but you know, tall shiny buildings are just tall shiny buildings. There's a Leunig cartoon from the 70's in which all the building reflect each other's reflections so they just disappear.

It's possible to walk around Central without ever actually going outside - walkways link most of the buildings. There's two possible explanations for this - architects are all geeks who grew up watching/reading dystopic science fiction, or it's a good idea never to be outside. You can choose.

It's not so easy to decide where to meet in a city you don't know - one of the landmark hotels I thought of actually has vanished - especially when the transport is not completely reliable. We decided to meet at St John's Cathedral - fairly easy to check that there was only one of those. So it proved to be, and we met there on the first attempt. (The cathedral may still be in the same place, but someone has managed to build a shopping mall underneath it while no-one was looking)

It's a short walk to the Peak tram from St John's, so we went there. It's very steep - it is so steep in fact that it gave me the chance to use the word vertiginous in conversation - another lifetime ambition realised. The tram terminates in a shopping mall, which makes it another typical piece of Asian public transport, but to be honest, it would be a great thing to live on the Peak. There are a lot of trees, and a fine view. I presume it costs an arm & a couple of legs to do it, but to get off at one of the intermediate stations - Macdonnell, say - and wend your way home across the mountain would be a fine way to end the day. On a par with catching the ferry home to Balmain.
Hong Kong is a complicated place. Central & the rest of the island generally are rich & polished. There are obviously a lot of extremely rich people there. Kowloon-side the shops are smaller, the building older and the streets are more crowded. If you go out to the outer edges, then the whole place starts to look seriously run down. It's hard to believe that there aren't a lot of extremely poor people as well - in 1976 they were made visible in the form of a very large shanty-town; the sort of slum where everybody lives under their own bit of corrugated iron, but no-one has any walls. I didn't go looking for it this time, and I hear it's been moved on.

Anyway, we got down from the peak and it was time to move to Shenzhen - we tried to catch a ferry up the Pearl river, but the ferry terminal has been converted to a shopping mall and we ended up on the MTR (which has taken over the KLR, the line that runs up to the border). Nothing much to say about that trip, except a tip for young players - don't assume that because Tsim Sha Shui & East Tsim Sha Shui have similar names and a connecting tunnel you can easily walk there. Better to catch the train at one and zig-zag via the connecting station (which we didn't do, so I can't tell you the name). Still, it wouldn't be Hong Kong without a trip on one ferry, the Star from Central to Kowloon. Unlike every other form of transport in HK, it's ridiculously cheap. I guess it's subsidised to allow the workers a cheap way to get over from poortown to richville.

Since then it's been mainly work. More later.

Sun Yat Sen - and Guangzhou

2008-09-14T20:17:00.000-07:00

I went to the Sun Yat Sen Memorial Park Sunday - it was unplanned & unscheduled (I took a bunch of teachers out for breakfast to celebrate the Autumn Festival). Can't help mentioning that we went via Shamian - to show a couple of the people who hadn't seen it before - and saw 11 wedding photograph parties, definitely a new record. I guess it was the public holiday.

Anyway, being unplanned & unscheduled, I only had the mobile phone with me for a camera - I might go back some time and retake these photos because they were quite interesting.

It's not a fantastic museum, but it's a better attempt than the one at Martyrs' Park with which it inevitably overlaps (history being what it is) to some extent. And the hall, which you can see behind the statue, has a really fine interior, including a stunning dome and some very 30's stained glass panels around the dome - pale beige & washed out pastel blue & greens. The effect of light is very fine, almost glowing.

Anyway, Sun Yat Sen - who had many names - was one heck of a guy & I suggest reading about him elsewhere in more detail. All I can say is that personally, as someone who has on several occasions struggled to persuade 3 departments in a large company to move in the same direction at the same time towards a mutually beneficial end, my admiration for major political figures continues to grow. That any politician can achieve anything is remarkable - that they can achieve as much as SYS in such an enormously complex political environment is nothing short of astonishing. The museum suggests he died of overwork - easy to believe.

The museum does manage to give at least some impression of this tumult. But what particularly caught my atttention was some of the material about Guangzhou, so I'm really just going to put this down here.

This is an attempt to show all the historic Guangzhous superimposed on a schematic of the modern city. (I believe that if you double click on the picture you will get a larger version.) YOu can see the effective boundary of the modern city along the railway line. Or you could check out Google Earth.

The legend tells us: (sorry, couldn't manage to format this any better)

The small solid black rectangle is the original Pan Yu, the settlement in the Qin Dynasty (221 BCE). The current Pan Yu is about 15 km south.
Slightly to its left is an unfilled rectangle representing the Yue wall during the Han Period (Yue is the family who gave their name to the language spoken in the South, we call it Cantonese, but formally it is "Yue Hua" or maybe "Yue Wu")
The surrounding cross-hatch identifies a wall/area dating back to the Three Kingdoms (250 CE).
The diagonally hatched area is the Song Dynasty Guangzhou.
The heavily dashed line is the Ming Dynasty wall
The Qing wall extensions are shown by the dots on the left and right sides of the Ming Walls, leading down to the river.

Not a skerrick of those walls is visble today.

This 19th Century (well, it was drawn in 1900) map gives you an idea of the Qing walls, 11 years before the Qing dynasty ceased to exist. By this time Sun Yat Sen was criss-crossing the world raising money & consciousnesses to establish a republic.

The pink section on the left of the city walls you could probably characterise as the outgrowth of international trade. Shamian, about which I keep banging on, is the orangey-saucer shaped "island" at the bottom of the pink.

This map dates from 1647 which is very early in the Qing Dynasty. It shows the extended walls leading down to the river very clearly. Another thing that you can see in this map is the idea that Guangzhou is surrounded by mountains - not a feeling I particularly have, I suspect partly because of pollution and partly because of skyscrapers, and to a large degree because I spend most of my time indoors. But it has been the city of five mountains, and there is still a subway station called just that (another cluster of universities) and the next picture emphasises it even more.

Clearly not painted by somebody interested in urban geography, this dates from somewhat later in the Qing.

It's quite an interesting perspective - there is absolutely nowhere in the south you could look down on Guangzhou like this. So it's a mind's eye drawing.

This picure gives you a little idea of the way in which Bai Yun mountain has foothills that actually come right down into the city. The Sun Yat Sen memorial is built on the last hint of a foothill, providing a kind of balancing point between inside and outside the city.

It's worth having a look at Google Earth (again). There is an excellent photograph in it called "Pabellon de Sun Yat Sen" which looks back down onto the hall from the lower foothills. You can also, from slightly higher up, follow the line of the foothills back into the mountain proper.

notes on audio video

2008-09-11T05:26:00.000-07:00

audio

No video available, but this is a cleaned up version of the same soundtrack.

=====

Notes to self: for video from the phone, which is badged .mp4 but is in fact .3gp, copy/move it to the PC, rename it so the extension is correct, then:

Use mp4cam2avi to extract the video signal (make sure to select video only)
Use mob3gpcon to extract/converet the audio signal (make sure to select audio only)
Use Windows Movie Maker to edit the video & audio back together, save as "for PC use" which producess a .wmv file.

Not really an ideal process. Can't use "Super" (can't even test it) without a higher resolution screen. "G-Spot" very handy tool. Wavepad at least adequate for simple audio cleanup (high & low band pass filters, must find out what that actually means. Don't use the noise filter for violin music! Audacity doesn't like Windows-encoded files (eg the .avi that comes out of mob3gpcon. Need to explore more with WMM (eg, can the audio be mixed back into the AV track?)

Update: Finally got around to testing "Super" and it is indeed. The distributors describe it as just a GUI connecting a whole bunch of other programs - that seems unduly modest. It handles the 3gp conversion, both audio & video, re-encodes as required, provides a host of handy things you might want to do, isn't sensitive to file names & pretty much seems like the only tool you'd need for coding/decoding. All I need is a bigger screen & better resolution, juut like it says on the box.

Might look for a better freeware editor than WMM, I think.

More Martyrs

2008-09-08T23:25:00.000-07:00

Well I've delayed writing this because I have been trying to include a recording - sing ho for technology. Since probably no-one is interested in the details except me, I'll just say HO again, and move on. No sound track is available at this time.

I went back to Martyr's Park - which as I noted last time is a very nice place to do nothing on a hot day, and nothing has changed. Last time I was there on a Monday and the museum was closed. This time it was a Saturday, so I got to go to the museum, of which more later.

Being a weekend there were more people here than previously, but it was still a long way from crowded. Some people playing social badminton (no net, very popular, more popular then table tennis), some people practising tai chi with swords, one solitary maniac practising his wushu/kongfu.

But the highlight for me was the guy playing/practising his erhu, the two-stringed Chinese violin (although it's played like a viol from chin to knee, but it's not fretted). Cue technology...ohhh. Anyway, the erhu is one of my favorite instruments and well played it's astonishing. There are a few beggars who play it - one pair in my district features a blind erhu player led along by a rope - but they aren't usually particularly good. This one was really good. Probably the best I've heard not on CD. Fortunately the modern mobile phone records sound - although mine only records it as part of a video - so I was able to get the last 60 seconds of his performance. I hope I didn't upset him by listening/recording & that it was just coincidence he finished when I sat down.

I'll keep trying with getting the recording uploaded. Everything else has worked eventually.

Note: recording uploaded semi-successfully. Click here => Erhu

The museum is housed in a great building, one of the sites of various Republican party meetings back in the days of Sun Yat Sen, who is understandably big in these parts. The museum itself is a little disappointing, but has its points. Useful for language lessons, anyway. Nine types of halberd, each with its own name. Now I know - or might, if my memory worked at all. Mind you, knowing would be a rather private satisfaction; not likely to get to show the knowledge off.

Modern historiography being what it is, getting the Chinese side of the Opium Wars isn't really a big deal. In fact, their treatment of the British was positively restrained compared to my history lecturer in 1976. What was interesting was some of the old maps, for a couple of reasons. One is that I found out Guangzhou was a walled city, which I half-knew, but don't recall seeing actually mentioned anywhere previously. There are place names which sound like old walled city place names - but there is absolutely nothing left of any walls, so I wondered how long ago the names were actually relevant. Well, certainly 1850 and beyond, I now know. In fact, the river side of the city had a double wall; I guess that makes sense, a kind of secure trading area doubling as a buffer in case of attack from the river.

The other interesting thing was that stuff happened at some of the places I've been to, and other places that I will go to & none of that stuff seems to be in the guidebook(s). It's good to be able to say, you know, here there was one of 9 cannon emplacements during the Taiping rebellion. (or was it the Opium wars - I will have to go again with a notebook)

Skipping though the party political history, not because it's not interesting, but because it's rather name overloaded, to the war against Japan, and there were some very nasty photographs indeed. Blunt. Brutal. Ugly. On one level, there just aren't enough war photographs on public display really. On another, I guess it angers as many people as it educates.

That's about it really. No photography allowed in the museum, and the ones I took didn't turn out very well. But I'll finish with a picture of this guy - I'm going to have to find out more about him. He seems to have a statue everywhere, and yet I've never heard of him before. He must be seriously local, and seriously well-regarded. I mean, you can be a big man in your lifetime but if everybody hates you, when the civic statuary budget comes up in committee after you die, it just always seems to be overspent.

Here he is again. Looking younger. Ye Jian Ying, for those who are interested. I've got at least one more, in bronze, if I can find it.

Just behind the Culture Park

2008-08-30T18:49:00.000-07:00

I brought some black-and-white film back from Penang, which has been challenging the local developers because who uses film any more? And B&W - I think one shop I went into was surprised to discover that there was such a thing as B&W film. Eventually I asked someone at work to find out where I could get it developed, because no-one in the shops around my district seemed to have an clue. She returned a few days to say there was a shop behind the culture park which sold B&W film - seemed a fair bet they could develop it. Where's the culture park? I asked. Near Shamian. OK, well in fact now you mention it, I remember seeing it on the map when I was visiting Shamian, so no problems.

In fact, I was quite happy to have an excuse to head back to Shamian because it's a cheerful place, so I leapt on a train Saturday and set off for : "Yellow Sands" subway. Did I make the obligatory sarky remarks about vanished glories last time I blogged on Shamian?

Anyway, this is the vision from the pedestrian overpass between the subway station and Shamian. I'm thinking the last time the sands were yellow here was at least 300+ years ago.

However, I did find some yellow...

Of course there are things you expect to see in China, which are what people call "the real China" but is actually just one particular memorialised part of it. Annoyingly, no matter how much I editorialise in my mind about this, I am still very pleased so see a man on a bicycle carrying bananas. Perhaps it's the aesthetics of it all - they were VERY yellow.

Note, Shamian, another couple falling prey to the evil wedding photographer.

it took a little bit of map & compass reading to find the culture park, because Guangzhou's road system is 3 dimensional and it isn't completely clear from the maps which roads go under or over which other roads.

But on the way there I observed that I was in the garment district - another garment district, not the one in the north near the old railway station.

Actually, no bundles in this shot...

This picture should give you an idea - the bundles are packages of clothes from the wholesalers, typically 2 or 3 items in a range of sizes. If your shop needs more than one bundle, then someone will be trolleying it (centre) to you. And if you aren't in the business of selling clothes here, then you're in the business of wearing them (girls, left & right). And this is a quiet spot of the road where I could pause to get the camera out.

One entrance to the market

The hub of all this is a market, I guess mainly wholesale, but I'm sure possible to do retail as well.

The place is surrounded by wrapped bundles of clothes, in piles, unattended but labelled, waiting for either delivery or collection. I am sure it all works, but it's hard to believe looking at it.

The market is surrounded on 3 sides by the fashion business, and on the 4th - Culture Park. Hmm. So behind Culture Park is a fashion district. And somewhere in this fashion district is a shop that sells B&W film. What's your guess - is the only non-clothing shop in the district going to stand out or be invisible?

I was fairly confident it would be the latter, but nothing daunted, map & compass in hand, I set out to scour the area semi-systematically. I found every conceivable button, braiding, tassel, elastic, banding, coat hanger, mannequin, fastener, bead, beading, sequin shop. Not just shops, streets of shops. Let's say, at least 50 button shops - and I must have missed some. I found a lot of restaurants all jam-packed. I found people selling polystyrene boxes of food prepared in their kitchen - food that in some cases looked better than at least one of my local restaurants - I found people drinking beer from teacups. I didn't find a film developer. Apart from that small defect, it is a really buzzy part of town.

Beats any terrace windows in Newtown

And, not without architectural charm either.

By this stage I'd moved so far away from the culture park that I'd pretty much given up on finding film shops. But I was having a good time exploring, and crucially, I wasn't lost, so I thought I'd just keep zig-zagging my way North until the subway appeared or my feet gave up the ghost.

Abruptly - as in, cross one street - I found that I was in the printing district. if you wanted to start a design business here, you could sit in the street on a couple of milk crates with a laptop & a customer. When you had the design ready you could go & buy the paper, get the papershop to deliver it to the printer next door, who could pop around the corner to get the ink, or if required, buy a new machine for a new process. Naturally, if there were any problems, spare parts, electricians and engineers are at hand. This is another whole district devoted to one industry: in fact mainly driven by the advertising printing for all the clothing shops next suburb South. Mind you, I'm not completely sure about the economics of all this. There were an awful lot of people asleep in their shopfronts.

Equally suddenly, I turned a corner into the toy district. And about 200 metres along the main road, that turned into the homewares district.

And then a cathedral. I almost didn't see it because it was impossible that it should be there. you could have videotaped me for a paradigmatic image of "double-take". It's just there. Not a single foreshadowing sign for tourists or dislocated worshippers. However, I guess this is how a mediaeval city worked - districts organised by crafts and a cathedral in an attention grabbing location. Not that I want to imply that Guangzhou is mediaeval, more that patterns of urban geography are repetitive and re-emergent. I wonder how much of the patterning here is organic and how much planned?

Anyway, the day's mission was to develop a film and by now it was pushing 3 o'clock. As it happens, I found the 2nd hand camera district a while back - which curiously shares its suburb with the fabric markets, the one fashion component I hadn't seen all day. To further demonstrate the estrangement between the fabric markets & the clothes markets, it's not even a close walk. And the tailors in the fabric district are slowly shifting over from clothes to curtains for the new apartment buildings. Howsomesoever, it seemed like a fair bet that where there were 2nd hand cameras, there would be a B&W film developer. And so there was. I wonder how the pictures will turn out? That's an emotion you don't get with a digital camera...

The Cameron Highlands

2008-08-29T19:08:00.000-07:00

Tea plantation auditioning for an advertisement

To be fair (although to whom I'm not sure) there isn't much difference between the Cameron Highlands and any overdeveloped touristy vaguely mountainous area - say the Dandenongs (or Blue Mountains, whatever). True, the Dandenongs doesn't have tea plantations, which is to their disadvantage, because a tea plantation is very nice to look at - just as nice as all those ads on television whose art directors got there before me. But, the Cameron Highlands, just like the Dandenongs, does have lashings of devonshire tea. Those Devons - they just went everywhere.

Nice, isn't it.

It's also true that the Dandenongs don't have a wide range of Indian, Malayasian and Chinese food - but then, the Cameron Highlands doesn't have any overpriced hippie arts and crafts. Of course, they do have arts and crafts, and probably it was overpriced, but it did seem ridiculously cheap and some of it was really quite ... nice. We resisted the temptation to buy though, because it wasn't self carrying.

The really big attraction of the Highlands "the hills" is of course that the temperature differential between it and the coast is so great. Likewise the humidity differential. I spent 3 days going around saying "I'm so cold" - but the sucker prices were out on the jumpers rather than the gewgaws so I wasn't going to buy one. For sure I don't need it in Guangzhou. Actually, half of my jumpers in Sydney were bought in the gift shop at Tullamarine when I arrived in Melbourne from Sydney having forgotten precisely what "cold" means in Melburnian dialect. They don't get much wear because by the time I need them again I've forgotten that I own them, and have to buy another on arrival.

Be that as it may, I was quite happy to be cold - the temperature is actually around 22, so it's not actually life-threatening, but after GZ and KL, 22 and low humidity is paradise. We stayed in a gi-normous B&B/guesthouse/hotel which was very nice - a bit damp, but otherwise impeccably maintained and/or painted. We walked downhill to a tea plantation - it didn't look so far on the map, but so much for the tourist map - it was a seriously long way and it was seriously downhill. That wasn't bad in itself of course, but the walk back seemed a bit intimidating. However, we found the local electrician repairing the wiring at Ye Olde Tea Shoppe, and he was happy to give us a lift back. Keen golfer, plays off single figures - apparently the local golf course is the cheapest in Malaysia. Very nice of him - although if we'd known his shortcut, we could have reduced the distance by about 2/3! Still a steep climb though.

I bullied Liz into having Chinese food for dinner, and it was OK, but it seemed pretty clear that Indian was the go, judging from the crowds on the boardwalk & the sheer number of Indian places, so we had Indian for breakfast the next day. In Australia the most common Indian bread is naan (which you can get in Malaysia too) but in Malaysia roti is the signature Indian bread. And while you can get roti in Australia, Malaysian roti is an art-form. In Tamah Rata, the artform reaches its greatest heights - cue bad puns from the peanut gallery. It comes in cones, in strips, in pancakes, in mounds, folded, with curry, with fruit, with whatever you like pretty much. And if you have ever been amazed by a guy making pizza by tossing dough around like a Frisbee, roti is made the same way, only the dough is a millimetre thin by the time the cook puts it onto his hotplate. It is unbelievable - speaking as a moderately skilled dough-maker. We managed about 6 different kinds in the three days - but I think my favourite is the one with curry sauce. Even for breakfast, this is excellent. (My diet didn't fare too well in Malaysia)

View from look out - note imminent arrival of rain

We went for a pleasant little walk on Day 2 to a pleasant little waterfall & a rickety, rot-infested look out for a view over the whole valley which was impressive (making due allowances for the holiday accommodation) with the rain clouds sweeping in. Inspired by this we planned to do 2 walks on day 3 - the shortest one in the morning, and then a quick visit to a strawberry farm in the PM.

There is a Buddhist monastery in the hills, and it's only a kilometer off the road. Just so you know, it takes 3-4 hours to walk that kilometer. Longer if it rains - which it will, because it does every day around noon. We did eventually arrive at the monastery, wetter than I have ever been in my adult life (because being in wet clothes is muche wetter than being under a shower) where a very nice nun gave us an umbrella - for free! thus raising my estimate of Buddhist monks about 1000% because in general they are a predatory lot with the mandatory exorbitant donation - well the ones around Shanghai & Guangzhou are. In Guangzhou locals have frantically waved at me to advise me NOT to give money to a begging monk - so my view is not isolated. On the other hand we have a monk in one of our schools and I feel a bit sorry for him because in 6 months he doesn't appear to making much progress. Maybe what goes around comes around in the ripping-off business.

One reason for jungle trekking

Anyway, it was nice of the nun. It was quite an interesting monastery - it is one of 3 in Malaysia named after the Ming navigator who allegedly discovered America (Zheng He, but I can't remember his Hakka or his Cantonese name, which is the temple name). It seems to be a kind of Pirate Buddha; it was certainly a very interesting temple with a couple of artifacts I hadn't seen before. (I think the camera must have got wet, because I can't find the pictures) It must be doing pretty well financially because it was big new and shiny, while the guidebook suggests that there has been a temple there for quite a few decades.

We cancelled our plan for a second walk.

Next morning we tried to make a quick dash to a strawberry farm, but somehow we missed it and ended up taking a tour of a small Muslim community - not so visible in the Highlands as elsewhere. We ended up with a back of semi-dried strawberries for the bus trip back to KL. I have to say that I have never found dried fruits to match up to raisins and dried apricots. You'd think that dried strawberries would be fantastic, what could be better than intense strawberry flavour?, but they just don't work. The sugar overpowers the flavour.

Ipoh

2008-08-23T04:11:00.000-07:00

We could certainly have spent more time in Penang, but I had been recommended to the Cameron Highlands - cool, they said, with tea plantations, so since it was on our way back to KL, we headed off by ferry and bus.

Personally I prefer trains to buses, and train stations to bus stations. However, Liz' navigational skills and instincts for the way things work got us to the bus depot in the mainland part of Penang - the ferry between the island and the mainland was free!

According to the guidebook there were cheaper bus fare to be had, but no-one I found was in a haggling mood. Nor particularly was I & it is hard to care cantankerously about less than $1. The number of people involved in the fare was fairly large - the shill, the man who wrote out the ticket and took the money, the person who had to be spoken to to confirm the existence of vacant seats, the person who took the tickets, the bus driver, and the sleeping bus driver. 6 people, to split my 12 ringgits - to say nothing of the petrol & maintenance costs. There were maybe 20 people on the bus, which makes three rounds trips a day between Ipoh & Penang. I guess, multiplying it all out, that's 120 ringgits a day each on average (assuming no costs). Actually that's OK - they could spend about 1/3 of it on overhead and it is a reasonable business. I don't know what rents are like if you are local, but you can certainly eat for less than 10 ringgits a day, so 80 (2/3 of the aforementioned 120) is probably manageable. Not luxury, but plausible. And some of the people (the ticket selling & collecting operation) is possibly/plausibly working for more than one bus line.

The bus ride to Ipoh was unremarkable - the vegetation in Malaysia, to my eye at least, is a monochrome tropical green, certainly from a bus window travelling at speed. Ipoh, when we arrived, was a fairly unremarkable place. Except for the food: in 20 minutes walk from the hotel down one street and back we saw about 5 restaurants that looked fantastic. The one we ate in was, and it seemed no different to the others. Penang gets a big rap for food, and the food in Penang was excellent, but my feeling is that Ipoh might mount a pretty fair competition. Another thing Ipoh has in common with Penang is the terrace houses; but ultimately the lack of an ocean is hard to overlook.

The hotel we stayed in was hosting a British food exhibition, or so the advertising claimed. It was not clear how or where, although the coffee shop (the coffee was vile, so that was quite British) did have an absolutely magnificent looking apple pie. But it looked like the same untouched pie at 3 o'clock, 5 o'clock, 7 o'clock and 9 o'clock the next morning - so I'm not sure how long it had been hanging around.

Mind you, having spent a ridiculous amount of time in Starbucks in China & Malaysia (internet access guaranteed), it's wrong to ridicule British coffee. American coffee is far, far worse.
We planned to catch an early bus out of Ipoh, but when we got to the bus depot, there wasn't one, so we went to the other bus depot, where there wasn't one either, so we went to a Buddhist cave temple while we waited. There are in fact two temples, one on either side of this lump of rock - probably an interesting place of a geologist, Ipoh, I would guess it is in the crater of a very antique volcano.

It was a very quiet and peaceful place - and very damp.

I tried to buy the temple shop's stock of photographs of the statues, because they had a number I haven't seen before in other temples, and it was too dark for the camera (and my ability to use a flash without generating glare is limited).

Most of them were wadded together in solid blocks and stuck together with mould. It was not very clear how old the temple(s) are - if it was China cave temples go back to around about the BCE into the CE (CE 67 first recorded Buddhist temple in China), but this one seems rather modern. It might possibly go back 100 years, and the bulk of it looks like it goes back about 30 years.

Compared to the temples in KL and Penang, it was very pristine (a polite way of saying not very used).

But still, almost a storybook place for a temple, none the less.

Penang - Tourists

2008-08-16T21:39:00.001-07:00

This is a view of a very Fitzroy/Newtown bit of Georgetown, from the hotel window. The streets are wider, and the cooking smells are more pervasive and not at all trendy, plus the whole place is a little battered - the tropical climate is hard on buildings.

This is the entrance hall to Cheong Fatt Tze's favourite house - he sounds like Penang's answer to one of the great English colonial rogues. Born poor but respectable (family of school teachers) he ran away to Java, married a rich man's daughter while still a water-carrier (guess he had great charm) and parlayed the inheritance into a massive trading fortune and considerable influence and respectability.

This is a very traditional rich trader's house - not dissimilar to the Chen family mansion in Guangzhou, although significantly smaller. I don't really have the photographic technique to capture the features I like about these kinds of houses - internal courtyards, huge amounts of natural light, timber and paper construction (he used Scottish iron too), the constant cool breeze generated by the architecture without help from fans.

They say it's his favourite house because his favourite wives were housed here - but I gather he had a house and wives in most of the trading cities in South East Asia, and how they know his favourite was here, I don't know. He certainly wasn't their favourite - his heirs lost all the money and pretty much trashed the place before it was bought for preservation by a private trust.

It's now an upmarket B&B - about $50 AUD per night. Well worth it if you are in the neighbourhood.

That's the outside - it's very blue. I'm not sure if the wrought iron is clearly visible, but it's the same pattern you can see in any inner city in Australia. There was a film being shot there while we visited, so I couldn't get around to a lot of the front garden.

Other European features are the wooden shutters and french windows.

The old protestant cemetery is really about as picturesque as cemeteries get. Moss, dappled light on aged marble, people living in the mausoleums, syringes and old beer bottles on the paths.

But cool and pleasant, for all that. Trees, nature's answer to the lack of outside air conditioning.

These two stones tell a probably not uncommon story - Harriet Scott died on May 21, 1864 at the age of 25, two weeks after giving birth to twins, John and Harriet on May 7th.

John Jr. only survived 5 months, and his sister 16 months.

Penang - Dragon Boats

2008-08-16T20:58:00.001-07:00

Going round the corner - not an easy task for a dragon boat, they don't bend.

The team in full flight

In the marshalling yards before the last race.

Competitors between races - this is the Japanese team. The character on the back of their uniforms is very sylised version of "dragon".

Unloading and loading the boats - this is why regattas usually run late. This one was no different.

The team in our tent, getting riding instructions for the next race.

Real spectators.

Malaysia - Penang

2008-08-16T18:30:00.000-07:00

So on Tuesday we flew to Penang - Air Asia must be the world's cheapest carrier, it cost around $25 for a 1 hour flight. Certainly no frills, but who really cares if they have a reserved seat or not? The dragon boat championships were held at a dam - which in all fairness wasn't completely adequate to the task of hosting 4000+ people in comfort, especially given the temperature and humidity - on the north cost, well inland a bit & up a hill, obviously. The problem with the venue was the dust - there wasn't really any grass coverage, so the feel of the regatta wasn't that comfortable. Having said that, I don't go to a lot of regattas, but I guess most of them involve sitting around all day doing not much except waiting for the next race in 35 degree heat. So probably for the paddlers themselves it was situation normal.

Paddling is like athletics - you spend 10 hours waiting for about 5 minutes of competition.

(Me reduced to taking pictures of myself). On the left behind me is the Chinese Taipei tent; on the right the Dubai.)

Anyway, I think Liz' team did well. No spectacular results but they did manage to win one of their minor finals - after being rammed by a competitor.

Penang itself - well Georgetown in particular was where we spent most of our time - is great.

It's a little hard to put the finger on why (I hope it's not just colonial nostalgia) but it seems like a very laidback and pleasant place.

A Hindu temple...about 100 meters from,,,

....a Chinese temple.

It has the same multicultural feel as KL; possible fewer Muslims and more Buddhists, but you still wake up in the morning to the sound of the adhan.

I like the adhan, partly because it seems like a very overt symbol of a community. True, it's not my community, but what are the public symbols of my community? I wouldn't have a clue. As an expat, there is one because you look different, but back home I couldn't even define a community that I felt strongly part of. Let alone one that reminds me of its existence five times a day. Still, following through from that, I'm not sure that I would want to be reminded of something five times a day. It might come to seem like nagging. Being inside something and viewing it from outside are really unrelated knowledges.

I also like the chant - I have always liked plainsong, and it's nice to hear a different scale now and then.

Malaysia KL the first

2008-08-16T06:06:00.001-07:00

It's been a bit hectic recently, but anyway, I'm back in Guangzhou after 2 weeks in Malaysia. I like Malaysia, very interesting place. I met Liz in KL. It was possibly the least stressful arrival anywhere, ever maybe. The airline sold us bus tickets, so I avoided the taxi drivers. Not all the Malaysian taxi drivers are thieves - but none of them lack understanding of the value of information in a market economy. The bus trip is 9 ringgits, roughly $3.50. There IS an 8 ringgit bus as well, but I don't feel particularly ripped off. The bus was easy to find (another airport miracle) and drops you off at Sentral - which isn't particularly central, in a geographical sense BUT it is the hub of the entire public transport system. Which is pretty complex - there seem to be at least 5 rail operators to say nothing of innumerable public & private buses. Sentral actually deals with the taxis for you - you buy a ticket from a booth so you get a preset price. And a reasonable price, since even when you pre-pay the drivers use the meter so you can see what is happening. That isn't always good! But in the first instance it was, and that proved useful when haggling over taxi fares later.

I'm not sure if I have any pictures of the Grand Central Hotel - one of those excellent hotels that has fallen on hard times but still manages to run a good if faded service. Fabulous deco ceiling & chandelier in the lobby. Carpet probably not updated since about the same time.

There is a lot of fantastic food in KL, in fact in Malaysia in general, and there is really no need to pay more than 12 ringgits ($4) for a fantastic meal. In fact we ate plenty for around 5 or 6 ringgits and every Indian restaurant has something for about RM1.50 if you are not super hungry. The strange thing is the beer is more expensive than the food, by some margin - we had two bottles of beer the first night & they were more than half the cost of the meal (for four people). Maybe as an Islamic state, Malaysia feels taxing beer is a virtuous thing to do.

Monday was the tourist day for us before flying to Penang for the dragon boat championships. We started with a walk to the elevated railway through the early morning red light district (according to the Lonely Planet - their Asian reviewer really doesn't like Asia) which was (unsurprisingly) pretty quiet.
The elevated railway (there are two, I think) was a really good way to see a lot of stuff quickly because if runs in a semicircle from the North West to the South West. You quickly see mosque - Buddhist temple - cathedral - mosque - Hindu temple - Buddhist temple - cathedral - mosque, which give you a pretty fair idea that Malaysia might be a tricky place to govern. I suspect recalcitrance is not an optional extra for their politicians. You also see modern building, colonial buildings, building of unknown provenance and lots of terrace housing. Bits of KL could be mistaken for Newtown (more true of Georgetown in Penang). A very popular strategy for the locals is a business on the ground floor and a house on the 1st & 2nd floor. Not just in KL, we saw the same thing all over Penang & also in Ipoh and Talan Rata (of which more later).

Fortunately for me Liz is a wizard with a map, but unfortunately for us the KL roads department is a wizard at creating uncrossable roads. Fortunately for all of us (Liz and I were travelling with Sergio & Kathryn, two other paddlers) Sergio doesn't understand what uncrossable means.

The elevated railway dropped us off at Sentral, but crossing the road behind Sentral - which was essential to actually get anywhere from Sentral on foot - only takes you as far as a carpark. Eventually the carpark takes you to the lobby of a 5 start hotel which you can stride through in a "we own this place" kind of way, and that takes you to the edge of a four leaf clover 8-lane highway exit, on the other side of which you can see the national Museum - our notional destination.

I haven't mentioned the weather yet. It isn't as bad as Guangzhou is the only good thing that can be said about it. Sane people wouldn't be trying to cross a major highway system in it. Still, that didn't stop us - Sergio noticed a couple of locals wending their way across unmarked paths and down afterthought stairways so we followed them (pausing regularly to let the traffic pass) and eventually arrived at the Museum. The museum was closed, because it was Monday. Never mind, we set off for the Observatory. Closed, due to it being Monday. Undaunted, we set off for the butterfly farm. It was a lot further than it appeared on the map, but it wasn't closed on Monday. On the way we had coffee at the coffee shop at the monument to Malaysia's first PM. The coffee shop wasn't closed, because all the monument employees need somewhere to meet and chat on Mondays, since the monument is closed.

The other thing we discovered on the way to the butterfly farm was the orchid garden - this is the fountain at the top. The orchids were stunning - possibly for the first time I saw why people go slightly mad about them, but I failed dismally to wotk out the macro function on the camera and all the pictures turned out blurry. Except this one.

The butterfly farm needs someone with more patience than me - it is very had to look at butterflies because they don't really stop to be looked at - or photographed.

I can see why people who claim to be butterfly lovers kill them, because you won't ever get much of a relationship going with a live butterfly. Of course, it might be nicer to wait until they die of natural causes some time in the next 48 hours, but for some reason people don't seem to do that.

For me the highlight of the butterfly farm was the turtle pond. Not that the pond seemed to interest them much, sunbaking was all the go. It looked like the two turtles on the left were objects of interest - the other turtles made occasional, and in some cases quite serious, albeit unsuccessful, attempts to join them - but I couldn't work out what the attraction was.

When I had a turtle, my book on turtle care said they shouldn't be left out in the sun, but obviously these ones hadn't read the book. Perhaps the Malaysian are breeding a special variety of self-cooking turtle? it's a mystery.

From the butterfly farm we caught a taxi to the Central markets - the driver wanted 25 ringgits, but we beat him down to 15, which looked faintly plausible looking at the map. And it might have been if he had gone by road, but he knew a shortcut through, yes, a carpark (a different one) which made me feel 3 ringgits was fairer. Mind you, that's less than the flagfall. Anyway, we wanted lunch and what can you do? It's just economics really.

The markets were OK, in fact a lot of stuff was OK++ but at the beginning of a trip it's not sensible to buy stuff. Furthermore, Liz' luggage couldn't possible have fitted into her bag so even if we had been feeling not sensible there wasn't really room to pack it. Given that it's a tourist - probably disrespectful to say mecca - hotspot, this probably was a fine plan A.

Following an excellent lunch - although it was extremely hard to persuade the waiter we didn't want the Western Menu - chosen largely at random from the wall because I haven't studied Malaysian and that menu didn't have pictures, we caught another train and a subway to the KL thing, the twin towers of the Petronas building.

They are part of a VERY SERIOUS MALL, which had the look and feel of one the luxuriously overstuffed Chinese malls PLUS luxury good whose brand names I had heard of. We could only just afford coffee and cake; OK a bit of an exaggeration but it certainly cost more than it would at any mall in Australia. The airconditioning was also better than at any mall in Australia. Luckily, malls aren't closed on Mondays, but the elevator to the top of the towers was.

I have a word of advice - arrive in KL on Monday night.

Although our hotel was a bit shabby it formed a sort of triangle with the World Trade Centre and an upmarket hotel/mall. We had a bit of a wander through that before dinner - 4 jewellery shops with guys carrying sawn-off shotguns sitting in a chair outside. KL's biggest business is money changing (one money changer every 4 shops) and none of them feel the need for sawn-off shotguns. I guess in a part of the world where to a degree your family jewellery is a significant part of your family wealth/investment strategy it makes sense. But it's a bit disconcerting.

More ordering from menus on a wall in an Indian restaurant absolutely packed with people. Again the beer was the most expensive feature of the meal, which was very good. It was sort of next to a river - I would have called it a drain, but I did see people fishing in it. I don't know how much longer they will be able to afford the rent, as it looks like someone is planning to gentrify the area. Although, now I think about it, it took about 30 years after Melbourne built the WTC before anyone got near gentrifying that part of town, so they may have a few years left.

Take a Malaysian dictionary though - although to a degree everyone in KL speaks some English, and the Indian community probably more than anyone else, they don't use the same translations into English of Indian food as we do in Sydney.

Tuesday we flew to Penang.

Public Art

2008-07-13T00:16:00.000-07:00

Then (Russia)

Now (America)

Shamian

2008-07-12T05:29:00.000-07:00

This is a very pleasing tourist map.
I travelled down to the imaginatively named "Golden Sands" subway station and with a bit of luck navigated my way through a few highways to the place I set out to find. Not lost, for a change. Until I saw the map. You may have to take my word for it, but each of the five entrances to Shamian on this map is labelled "You are here". And not just in English. No, locals are equally catered for. I can only imagine how much joy this gives to the man in the security kiosk on the other side of the pavement. Fortunately (see blog 2 or thereabouts) the compass attached to my keyring provided the needed clues. If you are ever standing in front of this map, you are actually in the top left hand corner. The best way to go is to your right (but actually left is not a disaster in any way).

Liz and I noticed when we were in China in 1999 that whoever wrote the Lonely Planet entry for China really didn't like the place. At all. It was full of trenchant criticisms of the creme of mushroom soup in Hangzhou, and similar penetrating stuff. Not to be diverted, but we actually ate several fantastic meals in and around Hangzhou, including drinking the best coffee ever - in the world!, not just in China - despite speaking extremely primitive Chinese and having substantially less idea of how to read a menu than we do now. However, one place that that guy and I shared similarly dyspeptic views about was Guangzhou, although increasingly I'm thinking I may have been unfair. (That's another story) This afternoon I wandered along to the one bit of Guangzhou that he liked. I should note that he liked it because of its Western buildings and quiet charm. Should Lonely Planet be more accurately known as the post-colonial guide to nostalgia tripping? Hmmph. So what am I doing here?

No question, Shamian has Western buildings, all gazetted by the City Government, largely built between 1860 and 1910. They are indeed charming. It also has lots of trees, as do many of the bits of Guangzhou near the river. It is also quiet, and cool, and pleasant, and extremely full of tourist tourists. Not like me, you understand, who actually lives here, but seriously passing-through-complain-about-the-heat-and-the-humidity tourists. Today was NOT hot, nor was it particularly humid. About Sydney average for summer I would think. As well as tourists, it had lots of places for them to spend their money in. Art galleries. Craft shops. Very expensive bars.

But, lest I sound a little cynical, there is other testimony to consider.

What could be better evidence of picturequeness than a bride being photographed? This one is being man-handled by the photographer to make sure her head is at the precise angle required. The groom is obscured by the dress. I haven't included the photgraphs of all the other brides I spotted, but in an hour or so I saw at least 6. It may have been more, but I think some of them were repeats.

Where there are brides (and photographers) there is beauty. It's indisputable. And I have to say that whatever the Chinese feel about the colonial past, it isn't nostalgia. So something else is going on here as well as colonial nostalgia.

And in addition to brides, we have tourists! Not ones likely to complain about the heat or the humitidy either, 'cos they are locals (you can't hear them, but I could). The umbrellas are to keep the sun off. Pale skin is still a feature of Chinese beauty. They are photographing a group of rocks. I couldn't particularly fathom why, but coming from Australia, you can't criticise the use of rocks as markers of significance. Every Oz country town, to say nothing of every suburb, has a rock symbolising something. China is no different. It has a lot of rocks, and many of them about something. One of the great Chinese novels is called "The Story of the Stone", so it's an ancient tradition.

Anyway, these people aren't here to wallow in a glorious past either. They seemed to be very pleased with themselves in a thoroughly cheerful way. Just out for a Saturday afternoon stroll.

I also spotted a tai chi class, looking an awful lot like a Sydney Saturday-in-the-park tai chi class. Rather disorganised and down-at-heel. A couple of people who looked very expert, and a large number who looked faintly bewildered. You can see the aforementioned rock in the background., looking very brown.

From Shahmian it's about a kilometer or so to catch another subway line. It wasn't completely clear from the map, but it looked like it should be possible to walk along the river bank, and so it is.
This is a view back along the river from the bridge at the edge of Shamian, which is on the north bank at the point where the river splits in two if you are looking at a map. This is the view East, and the building are on the South side of the river, which I guess is newer, or less fashionable, or something. It doesn't get talked about much, although it looks pretty substantial. But, for instance, we have 4 schools on the North side of the river, and the fifth will be the first we open on the South side.

Oddments

2008-07-06T17:42:00.000-07:00

No photographs this week, not well organised.

Went into Hong Kong on Tuesday - for a cup of coffee! The builder from Ability/AGMate, Gary, was in Hong Kong visiting family and couldn't arrange a visa. So I dropped in to meet him. From Shenzhen it's fairly easy. At the main railway station you walk South into a building which turns ouit to be the border. 30 minutes, 2 queues and not much paperwork later, you are in Hong Kong. The border itself is a moat with razor wire fences, but you walk over it. Borders are unpleasant places, essentially a reminder of the species' continuing (and growing) inability to collaborate. This border is not so vicious now, but the memory of the past is there. In 1990 Hong Kong is where most of the population of Guangzhou - well, most of the population that I saw on the street - wanted to be. I bet there are still a lot who feel thed same way.

Anyway, once across the border I decided to try and work out how to get back - not as easy as you might think. Exit from China is on the 2nd floor & re-entry is on the 1st (ground) floor and there is no connection between them, except the railway. So I had to catch a train one station into HK, to Sheung Shui, and catch up with Gary there. There is one restaurant at Sheung Shui station with A/C and it looks like it was making a fortune out of people doing just this. One noticeable difference with HK from Guangdong is that EVERYBODY in HK speaks Cantonese, as opposed to many in GD. In Shenzhen, due to the migrant nature of the place, Mandarin is actually pretty common. Not much to say about Sheung Shui - I may be doing it a disservice but it appeared to be an old people's home and a geriatric hospital combined. Not the shiny part of Honkers, that's for sure.

***

Coming back from Shenzhen on Thursday the train was packed so I shared my table in the dining car with a mother and son (it's the school holidays). I have never, and this is despite many years working in inner-city pubs in Melbourne, seen one person with so many form guides. Halfway through the trip out came the mobile phone, a new form guide emerged from the handbag and bets were laid. Sadly, I didn't get to see or hear the result.

***

I was in a bookshop on Sunday. I previously thought I had seen a crowded bookshop during the May day public holiday, but in fact I was wrong. Stocking up on materials to keep the children entertained - although the entertainment looked suspiciously educational in many cases - during the school holidays, dedicated parents and grandparents stood in queues 20 or 30 people long. Average height of the stack of materials purchased - around 15 cms.

***

I have decided that there is definite escalator nervousness at a fairly high level in the Guangzhou community. I don't know what this means - for all I know there is an fatal escalator accident daily (thinks, must start buying the tabloids). Perhaps it just balances out the super confident queue-jumpers. I've noticed something else about escalators here as well; they move! Not just up and down. At the East Railway station (which has 5, count them, five, Starbucks) the up escalator at exit D suddenly became the down escalator. Not suddenly suddenly as in while I was on it, but between last week's visit and this week's. It is very awkward. I used to collect the newspaper from the vendor at the bottom with my free left hand & now I have to shift my bags to the left hand so I can collect it with my right hand. It's not really safe to actually stop for the paper in the morning rush hour. Still, I'm pretty sure that no other escalators that I have dealt with have suddenly changed their character in this way.

***

There are a lot of demonstratively affectionate young people - as in school uniform young - on the subways at the moment. The numbers reflect the school holidays. The demonstrativeness, I was informed today, reflects the recent and rapid Westernisation of Guangzhou. It is disconcerting for those aged 30 and above (well, that's what my 30 plus Chinese teacher told me). She said the current generation gap is about 5 years.

***

I have just realised - really - that a camera is the opposite of a mirror. That's why my head is never straight in photographs. I wonder how many other people have taken 50 years to work that out?

Library Roof

2008-06-28T02:50:00.001-07:00

I went to an art auction in the library. I might have bought something if the auction had been in Mandarin, but it was in fact in Cantonese, which I guess is not unduly surprising although does indicate that in the Cantonese art-dealing community they are not that concerned about dealing with the rest of the country. Well, on the other hand, to be reasonably fair about it, you probably only need to know about 12 words - one through 9 and 100, 1000 and 10000. After one auction I know about seven of them, and I'm sure after the next I will know them all.

The art wasn't awe inspiring - it was, almost of course, technically accomplished. Traditional style landscapes & pictures of birds did well. Pictures of naked women did not. Lucky for Rubens he was not born in China.

It's a very nice library and very busy. I haven't seen this many people in a library since ... before. A lot of people like to read; I was in a bookshop in the old part of town last week where you were at risk of tripping over people reading as you tried to navigate around. Bookshop proprietors/staff are extraordinarily tolerant of people plonking themselves down to read the merchandise.
Anyway, apropos of not much I climbed a staircase and found the roof - there aren't enough accessible rooftops in Australia. We need more. It's why we have no film culture worth speaking of, among other things. This roof has a cram school on it for children with dedicated parents. Don't be misled by the air conditioning units - they are for the library patrons. Anyone lucky enough to be studying (or teaching) physics on Sunday afternoon is doing so in 35+ degree heat. The top picture is taken across the light well in the centre of the library towards the decorative roof in the corner. The classrooms are under the green canvas covered roof.

Above is a reasonable close up of the surrounding apartment blocks - these are the oldest remnant housing that you generally see in Guangzhou, three or four stories high. They look a bit grim on the outside but that's largely the result of pollution and a general regional disdain for the idea of cleaning the outsides of things. These apartments are all small - 45 square metres would be considered luxury for 2 people by the generations who grew up with these. Now, 100 square metres is "essential" for the up and coming middle class. Despite the difficulties, gardening is a massively popular activity. Obviously, being gardeners, these must all be very nice people. I like the air conditioning unit propped a little haphazardly on the roof.

Taking a step back, there are definitely 4, and probably 5 generations of buildings visible. I think I can defend pre-war, 50's, 80's, 90's and 00's. Mind you, it would be sensible to ask someone who knows what they are talking about. I'm just guessing. (The pre-war stands confirmed, as does the 00's). I had a builder mate from Sydney planning to drop in this weekend, but he's been delayed. So I was planning a professional opinion - he's originally a local and studied architecture in Sydney.

All in all, a highly worthwhile roof.

Coming home through the sports centre, this is the view north from the north gate. On the left is the CITIC building, the thing that towers over all the other skyline shots I've taken. Next to it (there is actually a 4 lane highway between them, is the Westin Hotel. My local staff spend hours plotting how they can get into the swimming pool there, apparently it's the current luxury touchstone. Reflected in the Westin is the pink apartment building, and sandwiched between them is Concordia Building A, which is where I live. We're not quite as shiny as everyone around us. That's an 8 lane highway between me and the 4 lane highway. On a rainy day, this leaves me with quite a few rivers to cross before I get home.

Peasant Movement Institute

2008-06-22T05:19:00.000-07:00

Another week swallowed up by work; the leisurely blog on Monday AM over coffee is looking less like a staple and more like a luxury. Memo to self: must work less.

Actually summer - note blue sky - finally kicked in on Monday & Tuesday, 32 by about 10 am with humidity in the Queensland zone. On Wednesday the humidity got to 100% and it's been raining since. It's not such a bad climate if you can remember your umbrella and live near a subway station.
Although, speaking of climate, I've never seen anything quite this nasty growing on a tree in Australia. It's a very hairy growth (in fact two very hairy growths). I bet it's got something to do with perpetual humidity over 80%. I suppose it could be an orchid.

Still and all, I managed a very pleasant Sunday, kicked off with brunch with Simpson (one of the school managers) & his wife who are off for a 2 week visit to Australia soon. I couldn't persuade them not to see Canberra - they have the typical misconception that the capital of a country should be a place of significance. Then I caught up with the Peasant Movement Institute. Excellent name in my view, but for obscure reasons it causes the locals to snicker. Unfortunately, as I start to think about the possible reasons for its ludicrosity (<== copyright me) , I'm losing my intial warmth. Still, whatever it's called, it's an interesting place. It was Zhou En Lai's anniversary ( I forget which) so admission was free. I'm guessing it was a touch grimmer back in the 1920's than it is now - I doubt there were so many trees in the middle of - effectively a paramilitary - a training centre in its heyday in the 1920's. I am a sucker for revolutionary history; I'm pleased to report that I am not the only one left in the country, although it's fair to say there aren't many of us. Maybe another dozen people passed though the place in the 2 hours that I was there.

Amongst the many things I didn't know were that Mao Ze Dong was the director here at one stage. In fact I jumped about a yard in the air (at moments of stress we revert to the measures of our childhood) when I found he was still here, along with wife #1 and children. It is my firm contention that there should be a warning sign if a museum contains random waxworks.

It is in fact due to Mao that the PMI is so well preserved, rather than vice versa.

Curiously, the PMI was set up by the KMT (actually that would be GMD according to the modern romanisation) for the communists to run - somethiong to keep them out of trouble?. I diimly knew that the KMT were Marxist/Socialist in at least notional origin, but setting up a special institution for the communists to train people to incite peasant/farmer insurrections seems like a pretty desparate throw of the dice for a ruling political party. They (the KMT) must have seriously lacked confidence that they would be able to enact agricultural reform via the rule of law. Bet if they had their time again they would go with plan B, although the KMT turned out to be so rubbish anyway that it was probably not the one fatal tactical error.

It looks to have been a pretty tough place. The beds look pretty good compared to the mess hall & lecture hall. Modelled on a 19th century British boarding school, do you think?

The wall (it's quite long) of photographs of murdered/executed/shot alumni is emotion-provoking. This one is wearing a fox (the unduly artistic photograph rather obscures it) which strikes me as a faintly odd accessory for a nascent revolutionary. Still, dead at 26 is pretty serious punishment for crimes against fashion.

She was not alone, most of the them were dead before they were 27, typically within 2 or 3 years of graduating. Like Martyr's Park, it's hard to avoid wondering how I would have responded to those times in this place. Indeed, how would the university left of the 70's have responded? Would the overt reality and urgency of the possibility of revolution have attracted more or repelled? I have no idea. There doesn't seem much point speculating, the case can be made either way. Certainly China was able to produce an extraordinary number of people committed to political action - I don't think the subsequent fate of the ideology is particularly germane - and people able to sustain that commitment over a lengthy period of time. Mao, and Zhou, and many others were in Guangzhou in 1926. It wasn't until 1949 that they were proved right. I think I managed to remain pretty passionate about bridge for 15 years, but no-one was firing bullets at me to encourage me to stop.

Another episode in my continuing struggle to take a decent photograph of myself. Note improvements, not appearing strangled by camera case this time. Still coming to grips with how to wear a T-shirt. May one day remember to straighten my head

The Line to Shenzhen

2008-06-22T05:08:00.000-07:00

Another frantic week, indicated by the absence of a leisurely Sunday or Monday AM post. In fact I caught the express to Shenzhen at lunchtime on Sunday instead of breakfast time on Monday, which left me running around trying to pack on Sunday morning instead of drinking coffee in the usual ruminative way.

But I did take a few more pictures of the trip down, although I missed the one I really want to get. Having said that, it's definitely a morning shot for the right lighting, so in the absence of Photoshop I guess I am constrained to fit myself in around reality. If I get it I'll add it, anyway.

I really like this train trip. The more often I take it the more I like it. Plonked down in the dining carriage, largely undisturbed with a whole table to work on, it's the best commute. It takes less time than flying - in fact it takes less time than the combined trips to and from the respective cities' (Guangzhou & Shenzhen) airports, each of which is roughly an hour out of town. I don't know what the flying time would be, not much obviously, it's only about 130 km. But still, I can get from my apartment to my "office" in two hours (in peak hour, longer at weekends), made up of 30 minutes on subways (one at each end), 1 hour of express train and 30 minutes of pfaffing - the "p" is silent - about buying tickets & waiting for things to happen. And unlike the plane trip, I can get a solid and comfortable 60 minutes work in - try using your laptop in the back of a taxi. If I ever have to go to Shanghai for work I will have to see if I can catch the night train - my boss always looks extremely stressed by the airport commute.

Also the train attendants are far far far more courteous than flight attendants have ever been, even thinking back to the days when budget plane travel didn't really exist. One of them chased me down the platform with my forgotten umbrella on Sunday. Now that is service.

The train travels fast - the camera blur is NOT my hand shaking, it's art. There's a video too, but my computer won't show it to me so I don't think I 'll publish it yet. If ever, I can't imagine how the video function in a still camera/mobile phone works at 200 kph, which is the top speed. It's actually quite hard to believe that you are travelling anything like that fast, until you try and take pictures and realise.

I may have mentioned something about the trip before in an earlier entry, but I probably didn't do it justice. It is a factory run, there isn't much doubt about that. But it seems to be a lot more besides.

There is certainly much more farming than I initially realised, and it is much more systematic than I first thought. They will be a bit worried about the rain in the north of the province, because the water levels look a lot higher last week than they had 2 weeks previously, and I doubt the main runoff is even halfway here yet. So there may be a few submerged farms, although there looks to be a fair bit of engineering (run off channels & empty sloughs) to deal with some of it. They are farming a river delta so I guess they have a pretty fair idea of how to organise it.

I can't decide if the farmers are living on their farms or not. These buildings certainly wouldn't make comfortable dwelling places, their defects are obscured by the circumstances of the photograph. And these are not the least solid structures on the trip, although somewhat paradoxically, it's the more flimsy ones which have caused me to think again. My original thought was no, but I'm weakening. There are lean-to's that are too far away from farms, with washing hanging on sticks nearby. I think here are some, a minority probably, of subsistence workers living in the shanties along the railway and trying to make a living with a bit of farming, a bit of labouring, a bit of recycling and a bit of whatever else goes.

When I first came to Guangzhou in 1990 it was an obvious border town, the areas around the railway station full of people who wanted to be somewhere else. It seemed much obviously poorer and nastier than Shanghai or Beijing. None of that is so clear now. Shenzhen has taken over as the real border town, although it doesn't have the despairing edge that GZ had in 1990 - well, I haven't seen it, more to the point. There's a lot more gloss around to distract you, even though the heavy rain makes Shenzhen into a disaster area. It's so bad that Guangzhou & Sydney start to look well engineered by comparison.

But there are borders and borders and the one between Guangzhou and Hong Kong is just one of them. It's pretty porous for me, although I haven't crossed it yet, and for the staff we have in Shenzhen weekends in Hong Kong are pretty much the norm. Bigger borders look to be the border between farmer and middle class, and maybe the border between those who have and those who don't have English. Although, to be fair, there are plenty of people making a good living out of trading with the West who don't have a word of English. But having English gives you access to a much better paid layer of clerical job - the English speaking wage slaves are definitely better off than their Chinese speaking counterparts. Some people are crossing the border from farmer to middle class via the role of guest labourer - but I'm betting that it's pretty few compared to all of those who are trying it out. There's an education border too, because there is no guarantee of getting an education after Year 9, and no advantages in not getting one.

Just outside Guangzhou, before the train really picks up speed, is this bridge which carries 8 lanes of highway over the railway line. On the other side of the bridge is pretty much a meadow - grass, not crops, a solitary palm tree in the middle. And behind it something a bit forest-like; I suppose it might be a plantation. I like this picture because it reminds me how much a frame can do for a picture - never mind all that black concrete because it makes the landscape inside it glow gently. It's a curious effect.

Dragon Boat Festival

2008-06-10T04:40:00.000-07:00

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.

Modernity

2008-06-10T04:13:00.000-07:00

I took these photos on the Saturday of the weekend of the dragon boat festival, alas the last national holiday for quite a while. Hunker down for the endless 5-day weeks.

Just a normal summer morning in Guangzhou - these were taken around midday with the afternoon storm just starting to announce its presence.

Being a national holiday, once again everybody and their grandmother is engaged in the national pastime, to wit, shopping. Or at least, walking around shopping centres. Me too, the A/C is fantastic.

A lot of people here aren't comfortable with escalators; I've noticed it before but today the problem seemed particularly noticeable, perhaps because it causes a break in the holiday-relentless flow of people. Perhaps because a lot on Sunday escalator-users (would that be escalateurs?) are out today. People hesitate at the top waving one foot in the air trying to time their first step. Does that happen in Australia? My feeling is that it doesn't, but then, I have another feeling that one is much more observant when not at home. It's at least plausible though, that in Oz everybody has grown up with escalators and the first step problem has been relegated to a reflex by about the age of five. Perhaps there is another generation or two to go in China before escalators are not a significant obstacle. (But, really, is it so difficult? Maybe I just notice it more here because there are more people and more escalators)

Coming to the mall, I crossed the road behind a couple who had just got off their bikes, chained them to a railing, and set off across the road towards the TEEMALL emanating all the excitement and anticipation of a big day out. (Is it really possible to notice that kind of thing?) Judging from the bikes, gearless, heavy and without any sign of the original paint, which were the kind that everybody rode even five years ago – bikes have almost vanished from the roads by comparison with 2002 – and their clothes, they were not going to buy anything in the mall, except possibly lunch.

That's a little bit unfair, although it sounds more harshly than it should. Look at it this way. I would say they were roughly my age, which would put them into a generation who were and generally still are extremely frugal (they were born in the middle of a massive drought, which has left people in their parents' generation in North China still picking edible weeds out of the lawns in public parks, and while it may have been fun being a pre-teeen in the Cultural Revolution, life wasn't providing anyone with much more then the bare minimum) . They could, in fact, easily have had the money to be buying things, despite the fact that they appeared not to have spent anything on their bikes or clothes for twenty years, because their generation wouldn't bother replacing a bike that worked or could be repaired; likewise clothes. But even if their churchmouse appearance was the result of frugality rather than poor-ness – I'm deliberately avoiding the word poverty, which more properly belongs to the countryside than the cities – that same frugality would militate against their buying much in the mall, because everything in the mall can be purchased elsewhere for much less. Not, perhaps, the Mont Blanc pens, but apart from that.

They might have been meeting their children there to pay for a wedding, too, because their generation spends an extraordinary amount of money on financing their children's entry to modernity, and because the big malls will generally have four or five big wedding planner roadshows on the holiday weekends. Weddings are big business. And a western style wedding is the must have accessory for the modern couple. And that is absolutely not to mock - it's the must have accessory for the average Western couple too, if you judge by the number of wedding-related businesses in the yellow pages in Oz.

But I reckon they were having an excursion to the capitalist 21^st century from the socialist 20^th. And they were planning to enjoy it.

This is one of the things that I find repetitively seductive about China; its zest for its new world. My own life has been – I would say it was typical of a pretty solid subset of the population – imbued with a solid distrust of the mechanisms of the modern capitalist state. But I've never tried to live without the benefits of said state either, so it would be foolish to deny that my distrust doesn't have a hypocritical side; or if that is too strong, a complacent side.

I imagine that the mood here is not wholly dissimilar to the mood in the West in the 1890's, the 1920's, the 1950's, the great booms that pushed modernity into existence, baptized it and consolidated it. (Historians who actually know what they are talking about are welcome to dispute that potted summary of the last 120 years) I missed out on the optimism; but here in China it is on display everywhere. It's not an unmixed blessing, it's optimism tinged with a great awareness of the weight of the future, but it is rather infectious.

Outside the sports centre, which is the geographical focus of Tian He, there were a couple of guys with Chinese chess endgame problems, collecting 100 RMB per sucker in the crowd who thought they knew the answer. They were coining money hand over fist, at least 2000 RMB visible in one guy's hand. What makes people think they can win this kind of bet? Not one of the punters even asked how they could be certain there was a winning sequence – I didn't see any sign that there was a choice of colours involved in the bet. From what I saw, I would have had a better chance of analyzing the position than anyone actually handing over their money, and I couldn't see the remotest possibility. That doesn't mean it wasn't honest, good chess puzzles are like that, but honestly, do people think the guy with 2000 RMB in his hand is there to give money away?

Sanya

2008-06-07T01:09:00.000-07:00

I was going to call this "Rain", but I noticed I had used it twice before already. It was/is the title of one of my favourite Maugham stories (and a play too, in fact) too, so I guess that makes me a careless plagiarist. Anyway, not three times. From this you may deduce that it is raining again. Correct. I'm sheltering in the coffee shop that is exactly halfway between the subway exit and my front door.

It has been a wet week, except Tuesday. We had the annual management conference, this year at the resort "town" Sanya on Hainan. Notionally pretty similar to Guadaloupe - a small island in the tropics with tourism as the sole industry - but no French. Hence much more pleasant. In fact, while it's possible the locals were all rubbing their hands with glee at the amount they could charge tourists for ludicrous things like bathing suits, they (the bathing suits) were in the main on a par with Guangzhou department store prices. Even the hotel prices were not ridiculously ridiculous - although not entirely cheap either.

Actually, it was probably a bit more like Fiji in the early 1970's than Guadaloupe.

And while no doubt it will end up like Surfer's Paradise, it has got a few years to go to achieve that degree of awfulness.

I arrived on Monday, when the hotel was crammed full of Russians continuing a Communist holiday tradition dating back to the 1950's that appears to have survived the 21st century. They seemed to have all vanished by the end of the week - perhaps they have mysterious powers of predicting the weather. (I don't want to make unjustified generalisations, but if the American public health industry is worried about obesity they could try a quick trip to Russia to help them understand that the problem is not their's alone.)

Tuesday the weather was sufficiently pleasant to compel me to test out the swimming pool. On Wednesday it started to rain and didn't stop until 3:27 am on Saturday. I know that because at 3:27 somebody woke me up from my snooze on the airport floor to tell me that my flight was finally boarding. All over the airport people were similarly waking up with a degree of renewed optimism.

I got to the airport at about 6 the previous evening, just after the roof in the check in area had proved inadequate to the task of keeping rain out. People in gumboots were trying to sweep the water out of the terminal, but since the road was also full of water there wasn't really anywhere for it to go. Would-be passengers removed their shoes and rolled up their trousers to queue in giant puddles and check in their luggage. Then it was just a question of staking out a spot on the floor and waiting. Curiously the floor in the gate area was completely dry; particularly so as the gate area is downstairs from the check in area.

Two examples of how bad the storm was:

The Beijing-New York flight made an emergency landing at Sanya,

The thunder made the glass in the windows shake.

Somewhat extraordinarily, in the8 hours waiting I saw no instances of airport rage. Really a very calm place, Sanya, even in the middle of an emergency.

Rain

2008-06-01T17:50:00.000-07:00

And that was a quiet week, due mainly to the fact that I was preparing a paper to give at a conference next week and that my computer broke down, rendering preparation a slow & painful process. It did in fact rain all week, every day and multiple times on most, but that actually doesn't really stop anyone doing much. It's not cold rain, it's just wet and when you get out of it you gently steam dry in short order. Strange to look out the window at what could easily be an English winter mizzle (half mist, half drizzle) and then walk out into an indisputable summer.

The rain is very unseasonal, so everybody is talking about global warming.

I did get out during the week to have a look at Jinan University, which is Guangzhou's major international university (meaning it can accept international undergraduates on the basis of their domestic university entrance exams - wonder if my life would have been different if it had been open in 1976?). It has teaching space for 50,000 students, but current enrolment is somewhat less. On-campus dormitory space is the big problem. It's a very big campus, the dormitory "suburbs" are intertwined with some of the academic buildings and there is plenty of open space as well. It looks like a good place to spend 4 years or so.

Sunday I finally managed to get to the "copy markets"; these are a group of wholesale and retail markets and sweatshops where you can pretty much buy any brand of clothing, or get it made for you at what can only be described as ridiculous prices. If you paid $10 you would probably have paid too much. I bought 6 items of clothing for the same price as the first 2 items I bought in this city at what I was then told was the cheap place to buy things. A vote of thanks to David, an expat Adelaidean I met in Starbucks over a technical discussion about whther Starbucks IT, WIndows, or a malicious universe was to blame for our inability to connect to the internet. (The answer turned out to be... Windows!) He told me the upmarket locals usually avoid the copy markets becasue they (the locals) are obsessed by brands, but that in his view (and he is an importer) there is absolutely no difference in manufacturing quality, and even if there were, paying 1/6 the price makes up for the occasional failure. Since I know someone in Melbourne who used to sew Adidas, Nike, Puma and Kmart labels on exactly the same tracksuit pants and resell them accordingly, I have no trouble in believing this.

The copy markets are down near the main railway station, which is where I first stepped on mainland soil in 1990. They have a built a mid-level and a high-level expresssway through the middle of the district since then, and I can only say it has still improved it dramatically over 1990. The greening of Guangzhou that is the major difference between then and now has also taken hold there as well. I'm guessing that it's still a pretty rough and tough area though; railway station terminus + wholesale markets is not a formula for upmarket tourist destinations. The hotels here are catering for the budget business traveller - flying in to set up the next season's orders. And there were lots of them, from Europe and Africa. I heard Czech, Serb, German, Italian, French (Mozambique), at least one African language, English and none of them were tourists. I know the stuff here is cheap, but how much of it do you have to resell in Africa to make a business? Surely it can't be that expensive there? And if I understood that mystery, then I'd be in the business.

I didn't take a lot of photos this week, but take a look at this one:

It's a job advertisement for one of the restaurants in my building. Waiters, kitchen hands and dishwashers start at 900 RMB per month, roughly $150. Free board and lodging is thrown in, which makes it a substantially better deal, becasue rent in this part of town is from the stratosphere. But the free food is somewhat undercut by the "Only people with a good attitude who are prepared to work hard" section of the advertisement. The Chinese idiom for "work hard" is "eat bitterness". Free bitterness, eh? Doesn't sound quite so compelling.

Most of the quality restaurants have a permanent ad outside looking for staff. This one doesn't have height restrictions (well, shortness restrictions, really), but is otherwise typical.

The bitterness diet is obviously is not one that people acquire a taste for.

Chen Clan Academy

2008-05-25T00:08:00.000-07:00

Me failing to look composed - but I have mastered the self-portrait timer. Next on the list, personal grooming. Nice courtyard though.

Every tai chi teacher I have had - several - likes to explain why the form of tai chi they are teaching is in some way superior to all the other forms you might possibly have studied in the past and are possibly considering (heresy) studying in the future. I guess it's a kind of marketing technique. All tai chi teachers have a direct and personal link with someone who has a direct, personal and familial link with some form of the "true" Tai Chi. This may be the great great great great great grandson of the man who defeated the incumbent court instructor at the Forbidden City sometime in the 19th century (maybe we should add a few more of those "greats") or it may be the 19th direct descendant of the man who invented tai chi, back whenever people in China didn't feel the need for early morning exercises.

For a while I learned Chen-style tai chi from a very nice and seriously devoted fan of the Chen clan. Indeed, I even met the said 19th direct descendant, whose jacket alleged he was : Chen Xiao Wang - Little King Chen. He seemed a bit grumpy for a tai chi master, but there was no doubt he knew his stuff. I'm not sure if it's fair to point out that another Chen-style (it IS a nice style) teacher I had later claimed that he had learned from a completely different direct family descendant in a completely different city in China. Chen is, unfortunately, a very common surname in a country that doesn't really have enough to go around.

Anyway, the chance to visit the Chen Clan Academy was too much to pass up. Actually, over the years I've seen a lot of the traditional Chinese rich family enclave, and probably I don't need to see many more unless I can work out a way to live in one. But the Chen clan, that's personal. I've met one of them.

I didn't see any mention of tai chi, unfortunately, so either it was a very minor sidelight or a different branch of the family. It's a pity, because this place would certainly have made a very impressive tai chi school. Massive courtyards for practice. Any devotee of the classic historic kongfu movie wouldn't fail to recognise, if not the place itself, the spirit of the place. Although in reality I think it was mainly rich people swanning around being elegant and doing culture, and a very nice place for doing that it would have been as well.

One thing that never fails to impress me about the old style Chinese buildings is how cool they are, despite the lack of air conditioning. Obviously 30 foot ceilings over massive halls help, but even in narrow corridors there's a distinct temperature differential with outside. In fact, even in walkways, where inside is a debatable concept, it is significantly cooler in/on/under the walkway than not in/on/under etc.

There were some features on this building I haven't seen before, either, making it a worwhwhile trip for more than one reason. The roof decorations - which look pretty original, unlike the obviously modern replacement brickwork in the walls - are actually extremely decorative and in my experience unique. Normally a couple of slinking dragons on the diagonal poles is about all you get, plus a bunch of curly stuff & a bit of gilt. But here - see photo - there is some serious committment to decoration going on. As it happens pretty much the entire decoration is a complex series of puns on animal names and various different ways of saying "success in the imperial examinations". Puns that make me think the South has always had a very strong accent or there have been some significant pronunciation shifts over the years. Or possibly that the Chinese like a vile pun as much as say, the English.

The other highlight, which I must immediately get for home, was the screenwork with blue/white glass circles inset. I'm not sure the photo really captures how good this looked, and how good it made the rest of the room look. For a feature wall, this beats the hell out of extremely strange coloured paint.

I resisted the temptation to buy the reproduction bamboo books; partly because they were expensive and mainly because they weigh a ton. I think I will start making my own out of old bamboo blinds when I get home.

The whole academy is set in a very nice park and has its own subway station. Today it had it's own collection of baby-buying Americans too. Interesting how the world finds innovative ways to shift the econmic load from poor to rich countries. The ticket doubles as a postcard - first one to ask gets it!

Earthquakes

2008-05-20T05:51:00.000-07:00

I get a bit teary watching the earthquake news. There's a lot to think about. In Australia when there is a big natural disaster it gets a lot of coverage, sort of, but obviously not like here. Something like 45 channels are devoted to it. True a lot of them are showing the same footage, but you could watch it 24 hours a day. Some people probably are. And the really frothy entertainment channels, especially form the out of town satellite distributors, are closed down. And no karaoke - in Guangzhou, I don't know about elsewhere - for three days. That's like closing every pub in Melbourne in say, 1965, when there wasn't really an alternative social venue. The cinemas are closed too.

It's pretty grim. The Stuart Diver story isn't going to come, I don't think. The logistics of the exercise are incredible, the terrain is awesome. Moving the massive machinery through these mountains is an achievement by itself, and that's the least of repairing thousands of dams, embankments, power stations, whatever else. And imagine how horrendously frustrating it must be to have to work in slow motion for days and days in an emergency, because working quickly is even more dangerous. I'd much rather be on the rebuild/repair teams than the rescue teams.

Up to 40,000 people dead now. Tweed Heads has 45,000. Queanbeyan has 30-odd.

I wonder if it's possible to quantify the effect of this kind of even in a developing country. To be honest, compared to say Bangladesh, China is rich (I suppose. I never read any statistics). But while China might be rich, a lot of people in it aren't, which includes pretty much all of these. I bet rich people are under-represented in earthquake death statistics. Anyway, the point is that lots of people here live in massively complex networks of people. Are these resilient enough to deal with the losses, and remake themselves, or are they so fragile that the death of one person is going to overwhelm all the others in the same network? In general, families are smaller now. On the other hand, I guess more generations are alive, which might offset the smaller size of each individual generation. A lot of rural families here are relying on income from a labourer in a city. One of the workers dormitories that collapsed here probably destroyed the major income source of a few hundred families.

It's very interesting the way the cities have responded. It's part of an argument for the necessity of nationalism - historically an accident in one part of China would have very little interest for the rest of the country. Not so this time around. Half of Guangzhou appears to be handing money over to the other half who appear to be collecting it. People proudly tell you how much time they have spent on the collection tables. (They also ask you how much money you have donated, and you how much they have donated. I find that a bit intimidating really - it's obviously not at all Anglo-Saxon. Anyway, I appear to have donated enough not to get disapproving looks) During the first 3 minute silence, on Monday at 2:28, every horn, alarm, siren, klaxon, bell in the city was going off for 3 minutes (a human silence), I couldn't help thinking that this is probably happening all over the country. That's 1.3 billion people, a quarter of the world's population, mourning their dead, together. Maybe one day we can turn these natural disasters into world-stopping moments.

Quiet Sunday

2008-05-13T18:53:00.001-07:00

I can’t remember what I did on Sunday, except for nearly killing myself playing table tennis for an hour. I found a very nice opponent who was much better than me, but too polite to stop playing. Which was fun, in an exhausting, is my arm going to fall off kind of way. I seriously thought I’d wake up stiff as a board on Monday, but surprisingly, I didn’t. What did happen though was that I disturbed some of the low level tar deposits in my lungs, so I’ve had two days since waking up with smoker’s mouth.

I need to get out and play more I think. Although it’s not such a good way of speaking Mandarin, it may turn out to be a shortcut to learning Cantonese. And it is fantastic exercise.

Seven days later...

In fact this week has been so busy with work that it's back to Sunday, which I am likewise planning to be quiet, already. I do have a plan for the day, or two plans, depending on how you look at it. I need a haircut. I need to buy some thongs - flipflop type thongs, additional information required by the headlong continuing rush towards American English. It's not really shoe weather. I may even take up wearing shorts.

There is a faint possibility that China Telecom will turn up today to give me a telephone line - I had a long and enthusiastic conversation with one of their people on the phone yesterday & I think that was the gist of it. I'm a little sceptical about any state-owned enterprise employee working on a Sunday, anywhere in the world, but I'm 99% sure that's what the conversation was about. The delays to date turned out to be due to the fact that they had a wrong phone number for me & in all fairness I have to admit that could easily be my fault.

It will be good to get out of Starbucks once I have my own ADSL (although they have cheaper A/C than me as well), and go back to my preferred coffee supplier for breakfast. Actually the best coffee to date has been in a franchise operation called Bluebird, but I can only find them in Shenzhen. I can't remember if I mentioned them before. They do blisteringly expensive espresso, even by Chinese standards, but they also do an Italian-style stovetop espresso machine thing which they bring to your table and it has enough coffee for two people, which makes it good value. And the real bonus is that they can do something with the machine that I never can, which is avoid the slightly burned/bitter edge that I always get with those machines. Instead they produce close to the perfect taste, almost sweet without sugar, flavour across the whole tongue, with a real caffeine punch. Fantastic. If I can only find one in Guangzhou (they have internet too).

While on the topic of good things, I also found, courtesy of a colleague in Shenzhen who is very observant, a great restaurant selling Cantonese style soup/casserole/hotpot stuff. Not only is the food excellent, but their interior designer has done a great job, with tonnes of lattice screens partitioning off semi private dining areas but lots of light so that there is a kind of glow coming from the screens while still retaining a sense of dimness. Maybe it's the lighting engineer who should get the plaudits - anyway, a fantastic piece of ambiance-producing work. It's kind of a modern take on the kind of restaurant that always gets smashed to pieces in a massive 100 person fight in your generic historical kongfu romance.

No pictures this week.

White Wedding

2008-05-10T18:59:00.001-07:00

Andy's wedding

I admit it, not the world's greatest picture. The groom is next to the cake - the mobile phone camera is not at its best in dark rooms and over long distances when held by my shaking hands.

This was a very brisk and efficient reception really, I don't think it can really be called a wedding. In some ways the food was the star of the show although the bride did get to wear three different dresses, 2 white, one red. The red one was worn during the traditional chinese bit of the ceremony, where the bride pours tea for everyone and they all give her money. Actually there were multiple opportunites for giving money - when we arrived it was into a money giving melee in the foyer, combined with a photo-taking frenzy. Mind you, it would have take heavy handed donations from all the guests at the two opportunities to even come close to paying for the food. Unlike 99.9% of wedding receptions in Australia, here the food was the star. The roast
pork alone (there is a massive pork shortage in China at the moment, which is really impacting the small restaurants) was extraordinary. It was so extraordinary that all 20 pigs were paraded around the room 3 times before being placed on the tables. And the crackling was to die for. Later, just in case we were getting complacent, there was abalone.

And then, somewhat surprisingly, it was all ended. Just at the point where the drunken family abuse would be starting back home, everyone got up and left. It was pretty much over and done with in two hours.

torch relay & water vacuums

2008-05-08T19:42:00.000-07:00

trying the mobile blogging technology again today. OK, and encouraged by an initial success, I will continue. I saw a man vacuuming a water feature today. I realise that doesn't sound as preposterous as it looked, but it did look absurdly like a domestic vacuum cleaner.

That's not the right picture, although it is the railway station I was heading for when I saw the water vacuuming.

Thursday was torch in Guangzhou day and I'm guessing most of the population got to within 100 meters of it. I got to within 5 meters of it, but there was a massive surge backwards in the crowd and I was busy trying not to fall over and not to step on anyone if they had fallen over so I was looking at the ground when it went past. But still it was a hugely excellent experience being in the middle of an enormous crowd. I was at the Asian Cup in Beijing in 2005 and there was something of the experience in that, but the crowd here was immensely larger. The crowd management people do/did an extraordinary job. It is really a miracle that so few get hurt - I was going to say no-one, but I feel sure that somewhere someone must have been - because no-one in the crowd really is interested in the crowd management view. So the police push, everybody moves back, the police relax, the crowd surges forward, police push, and you get the idea. All of this is conducted with remarkable good humour - the crowd expect the police to push them back, and the police don't particulalrly expect the crowd to stray where it has been pushed. No-one gets angry or frustrated, well, no-one in the few thousand people I was with. No doubt it all occasionally goes wrong.

Looks to me like the Olympics will be a big success, if anyone can get to it.

University City

2008-05-03T16:59:00.000-07:00

Me in the garden of the Foreign Languages University

University City is a, if not purpose-built, at least purpose-reinforced island for the purposes of higher education. It's not such a bad idea, you have to feel there ought to be some synergies from having so many clever people in one place. Apart from world class backbiting and professional jealousy, that is.

At this stage though, no-one will be getting any inspiration from the environment, although maybe in 10 year when the trees have got to a decent size the foreshore will be rather fine. But at the moment - of course the river is nice, all rivers are nice, that's definitely a bonus - it's a bit Canberra-esque. Not everyone probably thinks that an overplanned soulless city without history or significant cultural endeavour is necessarily bad, so I won't rush to judgement. But if someone had co-opted half a dozen old city streets near the river in the old city and converted them into a university of seven, then I would have been drawing comparisons with dreaming spires and sandstone (not that downtown has either of them, but it does have a very human-friendly atmosphere).

Of course converting downtown would just have meant relocating several thousand people from a perfectly nice place to live to a swamp, hardly sensible or fair even by the standards of property developers, so turning a swamp into a university makes perfect sense. And give it time - I'm a big fan of Chinese urban design, I think they pretty generally know what they are doing. The streetscapes in Guangzhou feel less oppressive than either Sydney of Melbourne CBD's, and in general have a ton more trees, so when you consider the sheer volume of high rises, there is some magic ingredient in their planning standards, so far.

Building an island

Speaking of downtown, I had a tip that there was a fabric market complete with tailors in an area called Da Sha Tou (Great Sandy Point? - maybe the river has moved) so I headed off down there. I was completely unable to find the bus, so I caught a cab. I do not know how anybody is able to find there way around this city; it makes Sydney look like a grid. Chinese style there are highways 3 storeys tall joined by roundabouts, flyovers, on-ramps, and even occasional traffic lights. Following the journey on my compass (I'm in denial about GPS) I can state that at various times on the journey (basically south west) we were pointing at all 360 degrees, and not just because we were going round a roundabout either.

Anyway, I was unable to explain the concept of fabric market to the taxi driver, but he dropped me at the camera market, which turned out to be intermingled with the audio market. Here is where you go in China if you want to spend in excess of $10000 AUD on your stereo. Judging from the number of shops in this business, lots of people do. Lots. Also, PA equipment, mixing desks, speakers, microphones, the works. Unsurprisingly the occupants of half the shops looked like they were probably up too late the previous night testing the equipment. And the camera market, apart from cameras, had thousands of lenses, lots second hand so relatively affordable if you are a lens junkie. Lots of tourists here, but 95% of them African. I live in the European tourist precinct, there is a subcontinental tourist precinct on the other side of the East railway station, and now I've found the African tourist precinct.

Da Sha Tou is one of those nice downtown places mentioned above, lots of trees. I did find the fabric market & it was full of fabric. I was intimidated, but I ploughed on. I embarrassed myself by bargaining something UP in price - I know everyone learns the numbers in lesson two, but there is something difficult in thinking about numbers not in your native language - but very nicely no-one took advantage of me. Well, I wasn't planning to buy anything anyway, but still, they were very sweet, kept the laughter down to a restrained smirk. I spoke to a tailor, curiously he was determined to speak English and I was determined to speak Chinese, which worked surprisingly well. Anyway, I will head back at some stage, they had more stuff than I could take in in one day. it's difficult to bargain for things that already seem cheap though.

Looking back towards Guanzhou (NOT Guangzhou, an outer suburb with a property developers' name)

Went out for a farewell management dinner with Mike (the guy whose barbeque I went to on Thursday) who has been here long enough to track down an excellent northeast style restaurant. So that was a satisfactory day, all in all. A lot of walking. Surprisingly, I woke up this AM not feeling too stiff. Maybe it's the humidity, the 24 hour sauna that just keeps on steaming.

OK, better go to work. It's Sunday, but I have to pay back Friday. *sigh* The Australian work ethic hasn't caught on here. I guess, to be honest, it's losing its grip in its country of origin. I haven't run across a good old fashioned bludger for years.

Quiet Day

2008-05-02T18:32:00.000-07:00

A day where not much happened at all, except after much cursing I have the mobile phone interweb thing happening again. I don't understand in any way how or why what I have done works, so I guess that makes me a fully qualified 21st century IT technician.

I still haven't managed to post a blog entry from the mobile phone yet, which is kind of the idea. I've never really managed the discipline of keeping a diary before, but I'm going to give it a go.

I would like to get the phone working for blogging though because I'm starting to use the phone camera & it would be easier to transfer them straight up than across to the PC and then upload them. Unfortunately for reasons of technological simplicity, IT has banned Bluetooth on the company mobile, so I'm reduced to sneakernet for data transfer. Still, it is possible, so the whole thing can keep ticking over.

Added a picure to my profile, don't know if that worked. It's the classic "me at my desk in my room" photo.

Tiedied up the living room. Put away the clothes. Threw out the rubbish. Read a couple of books - bits of them.

Saturday (which is actually today) I will go out in spite of the rain. Umbrellas have been acquired. The weather is actually quite strange, I've never experienced anything quite like it. For the humidity, it seems like the temperature should be substantially hotter, but it's not quite wet enough for a drizzle - it looks misty, but only very faintly. True, I haven't spent much time in the tropics.

Martyrs' Park

2008-05-01T21:09:00.000-07:00

Not entirely sure if it is clear that this is a hand clenching a rifle. It is suggestive, though.

From the base of the gun.
Looks very Greek to me, in a BCE 5th C kind of way.

I like a good memorial and the Chinese do them well. Martyrs' Park is a very very nice place to spend time. On the 28+ degree day (with 95% humidity, that should be a given) that I was there, I reckon it was 5 degrees cooler and 10% less humid under the trees, of which there were plenty. In 20 years I'll be able to get in free (over 70, not from Guangzhou, for locals it's 65). meantime it only costs 3 RMB anyway.

Communism has tended to affect my perception of modern Chinese history, and Communism seems centred on Shanghai and Beijing, but in fact Guangzhou has a serious, if faintly overlooked political history. For a start it's the hometown of the Chinese republic in 1912. Most of the north of China was controlled by warlords at the time; one of the reasons Mandarin (a northern dialect) became the national language was as part of a deal to get political support for unity from northern power brokers. 1927 saw the triumph of the state - OK, the nationalist state, but still the state - so that China could see itself as a single political non-imperial entity.

And being a city with a significant urban proletariat, Communism was a strong political current in Guangzhou as well as Shanghai.

Unfortunately (or fortunately) the museum was closed so I can't provide more details (yet!).

Some of the martyrs were in their early 20's. What was I doing in my early 20's? Weed, mainly. Certainly not trying to found a city-state in the teeth of 5000-odd years of imperial tradition. Still, most of them were weedy looking guys with glasses, so I guess we had something in common.

Trees, etc.

Rain

2008-05-01T19:39:00.001-07:00

View of Guangzhou's tallest building - a May Day pilgrimage for many - from the GZ East railway station. I live 100 meters on the left.

The view from my living room window. Note the characteristic tufts of hair and the right ear sticking out. There are better views, but this is the way the camera was pointing.

Hmmph. I had plans today to go and explore a couple of the islands in the Pearl River. There is one, University City which houses about 7 universities. There is a lot of water around Guangzhou, but strangely to my mind it doesn't seem to play a very big part in anyone's consciousness. People don't plan to go boating. Housing developers advertise that they are near the river, but only so you can look at it. Obviously it's possible that the river is so toxic that people only feel safe looking at it from a distance, but I would be surprised really. Lots of the industry is downstream. Of course the part of the city I live and work in is north of the river, so in a way disconnected from it. Maybe it's different for the people south of the river because in a big way they are IN the river - if not quite the delta, the Pearl is making some significant detours by here - the south of the city is an island. Although, not in the minds of the occupants. Perhaps it's a little too big to be an island, relative to the width of the river.

Anyway, the plan for today was to go & look at islands. But not, I think, in the rain. So maybe a day indoors catching up on work & study.

After finally getting the mobile phone to work with China Mobile's internet service something bad happened yesterday and it is now seriously worse than it was before. I can't even connect to the wireless network in the coffee shop; well that's not good, that's the simplest of all the options. I keep toying with the idea of buying another one, but who's to say it would be better? Or more to the point, more comprehensible, becasue really what's at issue here is what the settings on the phone actually do. Or mean. And where they are. And how I can change them - obviously by accident, since I don't think it is a miracle that it suddenly stopped working, but equally obviously I can't find anything that seems likely to reverse the accident. I guess that's another good rainy day project.

Woo Hoo - It's May

2008-04-30T18:49:00.000-07:00

And today is the day when everyone in this free market economy gives thanks to Uncles Karl & Vladimir. Half of the population will take a 4 day weekend and go somewhere, which possibly makes the Chinese tourism industry the fastest growing industry in the world, while the rest of us, who have made the mistake of traveling during one of these hol;idays before, will celebrate by going shopping. Truly, the crowds in the malls today will be awesome. Chelsea vs Man U in Moscow will look like a 4th division game in midwinter somewhere on the North Sea coast. (I've just finished my weekly trawl through the Guardian)

I think that was the longest 3 day week in the history of the working world & since I'm resolutely not writing about work, there isn't a lot left over to say. Went to a farewell party at Luhu Park, in the barbeque section, last night. Guangzhou has exactly the right climate for this kind of thing, and it was a good night. Well, the crowd wasn't pleased by my Australian-style barbequing technique - they think charcoal is a fuel here, not a food - but fortunately there were a large number of people on hand to demonstrate much greater skill.

Getting home was looking to be a challenge - no taxis, well no empty taxis. About a kilometer down the road someone who had been at the barbeque in an unofficial, ie gatecrashing, capacity pulled up and offered foru of us a lift back to civilisation. Well, that was nice. I'll never say anything bad about customs auditors again. They are truly generous people.

Three days off. I think I'll visit every station on one of the metro lines. Or maybe I'll catch a bus somewhere. Or try and find a pair of shoes that fits. Or both. There's a river here somewhere, I might go and have a look at that.

And as it began, so it continued

2008-04-27T17:47:00.000-07:00

It rained all day Sunday. So much for my plans to drop in at the public table tennis tables and learn Cantonese. Instead I hit the books and I think I have finally worn out me electronic dictionary. It's confused. It can read my handwriting, but it can't find the characters in its dictionary...how can that be right? Straight from a perfectly respectable book. Grrr.

And I watched a lot of TV. I'm not sure if my listening is improving, but I can certainly read subtitles faster than I used to.

I have a new local restaurant (I bought an umbrella in the 7/11 next to my building). Curiously, I can get about 3 times as much food there for the same price as most of the other places around. Can't say it's inspiational food, but it's OK. They have a massive takeaway/delivery trade; I guess about 3 times as many orders were shipped out as there were diners while I was there. That means it would just about be possible to live exclusively in my flat, the train, and the school buildings. A paradigmatic 21st century existence. Add telecommuting (coming in May) and I could have a state of the art paradigm - never leave home. Curious in the middle of the most populated country in the world to think that it is nearly practical to live without seeing onyone at all.

Sunday Morning Coffee Shop Blues

2008-04-26T18:51:00.000-07:00

Well yesterday's entry seems to be lost, which is no great loss since it was mainly a paean to the joys of technology - it was handwritten on my mobile - and it's loss seems entirely, if ironically, communicative.

I'm starting to spend a lot of time on trains, in particular the Shenzhen-Guangzhou express. It's not a bad commute really, from my front door to the Shenzhen school is 2 hours. Yes, but it's more than 130 kilometers. And I can collapse down in the dining car, pullout my computer, do an hour's work & eat breakfast. All for around $12. It's a major part of business life in the 2 cities, in peak hour there is a train every 7 minutes and the rest of the day it's every 15 minutes. In the evening I can leave work at 7 and be home at 9 having eaten a perfectly adequate dinner. It was supposd to be once a fortnight, but it's turning into twice a week.

I'm not sure if the camera takes pictures at 200 kph, but I will try. If successful I will add them later. It's not, in general, an inspirational journey. Pretty much every item of clothing manufactured in China is manufactured in that stretch, it's the factory run. But there is still a lot of farming going on, on reclaimed land, between factory fences and the railway line, on deserted factory land. The whole area is well and truly in the delta of the Pearl River, so no shortages of water. In fact, the landscape would be rather boggy and sad, except that it isn't. Well, there is one bit that looks like slum housing, but it's a very small bit. And it may actually just be field huts for farmers who actually live elsewhere. If it isn't, then it becomes easy to understand why the dormitory occupation provided by the factories is so popular.

China has just introduced a new Labour Act, which offers vastly more protection to employees than ever before. It will inevitably push the cost of labour up - I wonder what will happen on the factory stretch then? All the factories will move to North Korea...

One of the restaurants in the same building as my flat is advertising for staff - $300 a month plus board and lodging. That would have been a fantastic deal when I was here in 2002; I wonder how it rates now? The fact that they need to advertise at the front door suggests that they're not being rushed for applicants, so I guess it's not such a good deal. Further down the street, another restaurant is advertising for staff. Waitstaff and the manager must be taller than 163 cm. Dishwashers and kitchenhands are not suject to height restrictions - big of them! That's 5 foot 4 in the old money - which means at least several of my university classmates would have been ineligible. (I wonder why I don't know (m)any short people these days? Seems a bit odd.)

If there's a picure visible anywhere, (it's not to me) then it's a souvenir of my first train journey in Guangzhou, to the second last station on Line 3, City Bridge. No sign whatsoever of a bridge. (Later in the day I visted Five Mountains. No sign of them there either. Removed, a local told me, a long time ago.) Anyway, undaunted, I was wandering around sticking my nose in and I found an alley leading to Red Mountain Village. I can never resist an alley, a mountain or a village, so obviously I set off. I learned that "mountain" includes lumps of mainly clay about 100 meters high (at a very generous estimate). But it was a bit villagesque, and as the picture shows (fingers crossed) it has a very pictureque red feature - this is just one tree of many. It also has some very old fig trees - ladelled and protected, no less. I climbed the "mountain" to a newly laid gravestone (unexpected) and brathed in the heavy eucalyptus scent; half the trees were gum trees, small leafed varieties, sorry I can't be more precise. Wonder how they got here?

I should point out that I have omitted the photos of the extremely well fed rat that seem to think he owned the gutter - at midday! - and the rather scrawny cat that looked like it was bitter about somebody stealing its food. I didn't in fact stay for lunch. Still, there's not much point being squeamish about rats. Twelve years in Sydney have taught me that.

Summer is long delayed here - not that I imagine anyone is complaining. The one climatic constant is that the humidity is never less than 95% - today it's not quite drizzle, but the temperature is around 22, so it's quite pleasant. Given that I have to wear a jacket to work, the longer the hot weather stays away the better.

Terrifying Babies

2008-04-24T00:37:00.000-07:00

Chalked up number 2 terrified baby todsy. The first time, on the metro, large numbers of helpful people moved in to obscure its view of me. Today, the baby-carrier carefully moved to the back of the platform.

I know the Chinese (like the Romans, which is kind of curious) think beards are a sign of barbarism, but really, what do they tell these children?

catching up

2008-04-23T21:36:00.000-07:00

it's pretty much 2 months to the day since I got here - a quick overview of the time is not so difficult becasue it mainly will be work, which I don't think I'm going to spend much time discussing here, becasue I'm selling an idea a day to Dilbert. If anyone knows where I can get a bulk supply of "The Peter Principle" as staff gifts, please let me know.

I'm planning my own version in 12 months.

Shanghai for the first 2 weeks was cold and dry - so dry the skin started peeling off my legs. It wasn't much colder than a Melbourne winter - I don't really believe 12 years in Sydney has weakend my consitution to that extent. Anyway, Guangzhou, with its 95+% humidity solved that problem.

The hotel in Shanghai was at the edge of a bit of Shanghai that I was kind of surprised to find still exists, an area which apart from being overshadowed by skyscrapers, appears untouched by the past 30 years. I was in Shanghai in 1990, and this bit would have looked identical then.

Introduction

2008-04-22T20:48:00.000-07:00

It took me pretty much 2 months to get around to doing this and to anyone who thinks I ma here for a long holiday I would like to say that it is purely becasue I have not had a moment to scratch myself until today. And that I know less about Google than I would have thought possible.

Now I will have to catch up, but that won't take too long. Watch this space.