Dusting myself off from a surprisingly pleasant time-warp experience which was the Bhutanese airline, I arrived in Calcutta, or Kolcutta, as it is now known, to spend a couple of days exploring what is often known as a very British India.
Back in the good ol' days where us Brits ruled the world (slight exaggeration, but not by much!) Calcutta was our capital in India. It shows. Everywhere is full of colonial architecture and everyone spoke surprisingly good English. Here I enjoyed my time visiting the many markets, resting and generally taking things easy. It was uneventful, but a welcome rest from over 2.5 months of hard travel.
The only item of note, was a rather random Muslim festival which seemed to involve everyone carrying a stick and having mock fights in the street. How strange...
Upon arriving in Hong Kong, a very different atmosphere greeted me, one which was very familiar. Hong Kong is like any other large city, it has a “buzz” about it which is very appealing. I felt it the last time I was in London, and I like it every time it happens. On a sliding scale of civilisation, London is a step away from Singapore, Hong Kong a step away from London. It reminded me of the Chinatown region, everything was in Chinese, but English was common enough for those who didn't speak Chinese. On the same scale, even the most civilised Indian city was towards the back of the book. You can blame their terrible driving and filthy streets for that.
From the second I arrived, I was in no doubt, I could work here. It was a very fascinating place to be, one I wished to know more about.
It had interesting markets selling Chinese Medicine, and with the close proximity of the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year for you and I), many red lanterns and other traditional fare for sale. Like many large cities where I would like to work however, it didn't have that many tourist sights to see. It had even less which were worth a photo.
During my time there, I managed to meet someone from the UK. She too echoed my sentiment that Hong Kong would be a great place to live... who knows, perhaps I may see her if I move out there!
During our time together, we would regularly walk past many little restaurants which looked really nice; packed full of locals, I would peer in only to be greeted with an almost incomprehensible menu. When I was alone, I even tried eating in such a venue with the hope that I would be able to bodge my way though. With the menu containing no pictures and certainly no English, I played the “pin the tail on the donkey” game with the menu, finally resting on a dish which cost little over two pounds (food is really cheap, despite coffee being the same price as London!) Whilst ordering, the waitress looked really confused and said something in Chinese, which I should have interpreted as “Foreigners don't usually eat this, are you sure you want this one?”
When the dish arrived, I was a little disheartened when it was a bowl of boiled rice with some veg, sounds okay right? That is, until you realised that there were two raw eggs cracked over the top of it. Very kindly, as they served it, they gestured that I should stir the egg “sauce” in. Down the hatch.
After spending a couple of days together doing some rather touristy things including a rather impressive view of the Hong Kong Skyline, we parted company as I had to get to mainland China...
I decided it was then time to head off into China, Shanghai to be precise. Before I ventured deeper however, I would need some kind of Mandarin skills – playing charades each time I wanted some food or drink was getting tiresome, and the Chinese eat far worse than raw egg. Here fido!
Deciding that the overnight train would be the perfect way to enter the country, with time to view the scenery and and expense which would keep costs down, I opted for the lowest class – worryingly called “hard sleeper”. Despite comments in my guidebook that “No foreigners would be seen dead in this class” I decided that it was worth a laugh and booked my place on the top bed, which the guidebook also said was very cramped (but also cheaper!)
With the words from the guidebook almost ringing in my ears, I jumped onto the train, rather worried as to what I would find....
Much to my delight, the Chinese train system, despite only having about 4 classes, unlike the seven for Indian trains, is actually very modern when departing from Hong Kong. The worst seat, on the lowest class, is roughly the same, and a million times cleaner, than the second highest class of the Indian system, even on their best train. It did come at a price though, being almost twice as expensive (a whole 30 pounds for a 22 hour journey) than the highest Indian class.
After a few amusing chats with locals and expats alike (I found someone who sails almost the same class of boat I do – wow!) I arrived in Shanghai and took a taxi to a hotel I had booked on-line the previous day.
Comparing Shanghai to the scale I mentioned earlier, it is another couple of rungs down from Hong Kong – perhaps akin to Hong Kong a decade ago – but catching up fast. It is said that the most cranes in the world are in Dubai, well that may be true, but the most concrete dust in the world is currently being poured into buildings being erected in Shanghai, with a large majority swirling around in the air making a heavy cloud of smog sit over the city for days.
It was now time to sort out a decent language course, so I went off to visit a few language schools, eventually picking a private tuition course conducted by a school primarily aimed at business travellers. I would have loved to undertake a group course, but with the proximity of the Spring Festival, none were starting to absolute beginners.
Starting the course, I quickly began to realise that there is a very good reason why people say that Mandarin is the hardest language in the world to learn. Darn. Let's get things straight, I'm a fast learner, and certainly no slouch when I put my mind to something, but using this video as a demonstration, this language is hard, very hard.
In the video you can see one of my three teachers going through the different ways to say certain letter combinations. Couple this with the fact that in Mandarin the tones are very important, means that each of these almost identical sounds could have up to five meanings each, depending on if you have a rising, lowering, raising and then lower, flat, or raised tone. Arse.
I especially like the fact that I had three separate teachers – in true wrestling style, one would come in the morning and teach me for a couple of hours, before “tagging” the other teacher to continue to suffering for the afternoon. By the end of the first couple of days, I was thinking in sounds which made me think of steam trains!
I must admit that some of my time during my Mandarin classes wasn't entirely focused on the contents of the Mandarin book. For example, one day I took a photo of my air conditioning remote control and got the teacher to decipher for me what it actually meant. As my host family had only broken English, I had somehow managed to activate a function whereby it only worked for 10 minutes at a time before shutting itself off. Even when it was “working” it was like an asthmatic breathing through a straw!!
One item which amused my teachers was the rather original way by which I would tell taxi drivers to take me to various locations. Instead of trying to pronounce the words in Chinese (which always got a blank response for the first week that I was there) I simply took a photo of either the guidebook, or of the street sign and then pointed to it, saying in Chinese “I want this one please”. This worked surprisingly well!
In the evenings I had decided that sitting in a hotel room, however good, was rather dull. Resultantly, I had decided to leave my hotel accommodation and move in with a local family for a couple of weeks in what is termed a “home-stay”.
My adopted family were a family of three, father, mother and a daughter of about 13 years old. Here I was to have my social adaptability stretched a little.
At this time of year, Shanghai is rather cold, actually no, it's freezing. Due to the speed by which the city has developed, all walls are solid concrete, and no house has any kind of central heating. Our whole house had only two air conditioning units, which could just about keep up with the amount of heat being lost out of the single glazed windows and through the uninsulated concrete walls. Consequently, we all wore our outside coats indoors. This also meant that when I woke up, I could see the condensation in my breath. This wasn't my host family's fault, but it didn't make it any more pleasant when I had just come from Calcutta where temperatures were in the 30's Celsius.
Morning food consisted of a rather strange mix of a slightly alcoholic rice wine, mixed with some overcooked rice and a poached egg. Due to the social non-acceptance in western society of drinking alcohol before midday, I found it rather hard to stomach and must admit to it being an acquired taste.
Evening meals would often consist of the same mixture of perhaps eight different dishes: Fried pig skin, fish head soup, rice, spinach, a portion of chicken including bone which had been chopped into small segments and perhaps some nuts and other random vegetables or fruit. More than likely all but one dish would be cold, or slightly warm, with many being re-heated in the microwave from the day before.
As there were lots of bones or other pieces of debris, it was common for my host family to simply spit the contents of their meal which they didn't like directly onto the table cloth. This took some getting used to, but after the second day I was more than happy to do the same – although I never really got the hang of de-shelling a prawn by inserting the whole thing into my mouth, chomping and then spitting out the shell. I think I'll stick to the boring Western way thanks!
With the Spring Festival drawing closer, my Mandarin skills were improving thanks, in part, to the very patient nature of my teachers, combined with random luck. Nowhere was this more evident than in my daily morning coffee run.
Each day I would frequent the local coffee shop to purchase a latte (yes, they do have them in China, and no, I wasn't buying from Starbucks, although it was something similar!) On day one, I simply went in and asked in English, probably hashing up the Chinese pronunciation of “Hello” as I arrived. By the fifth day I was at least saying “Hello, I want a large latte please” [In Chinese]. By the last day, they were actually understanding me, and I even managed to get across that I wanted two paper cups, one inside the other to keep it warm. Although that sounds very impressive, it was actually achieved by my ordering my latte, then saying “two cups please” then saying “hot good” then gesturing to put one inside the other. It worked, so I didn't care!
Next time there will be stories of great daring as I brave the Chinese equivalent of the Gaza strip during the fabled Spring Festival. Although a slight exaggeration, the Chinese certainly like their rockets during this time of year!
The year of the Ox is coming....
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