Hong Kong to Moscow transit.

Up early, dressed, breakfasted, packed, checked out and off to the airport all before 8am to race to the Hong Kong International terminal because all the information on the Aeroflot literature insisted that check-in for flights CLOSES 2 hours before scheduled departure time… only to get to the airport and be faced with completely empty counters, devoid of signage or staff.  So we waited, and waited…  Check-in eventually OPENED a little over 2 hours before scheduled departure times – le sigh, so much for that!  We did the thing, got rid of the luggage and then had a bit of time in what should be Duty Free Shopping Mecca. It should be, but each time I’ve been through here, it invariably disappoints.  Loads of expensive cosmetics, clothing and watches – Burberry, Fendi, Rolex, Chanel, Coach, Tiffany & Co, and other hoity toity fancy shit for sale, as well as all the alcohol in Christendom – but nothing is actually any cheaper than what you can buy for retail if you are prepared to shop around a little.  Even the electronics are ‘airport prices’ rather than duty free prices… what’s with that?

Meh.  Found a cafe and had a smoothie while waiting for our flight instead of shopping the hallowed concourse of Hong Kong International Airport.  Our flight was scheduled to board just before 11am and we made it to the right gate with heaps of time.  We had a very strange flight… strange, and yet also familiar.  We had booked seats in what Aeroflot calls their ‘Comfort Class’, which looks like premium economy, but given there is this or First Class, I guess it is what passes for Business Class too.  We were severely outnumbered on the plane (and this is where the familiarity came in)… 90% of the plane was probably Chinese folk?  And judging by their queuing and personal space behaviours – I’d warrant not many of them were from Hong Kong.  It was like being on China Eastern Airlines all over again… children running in the aisles, people speaking really loudly in their seats, personal devices with the sound turned on.  :/  Needless to say, this is not my happy place.

Thankfully the ‘Comfort Class’ (I hate that term… maybe something to do with reading a book recently on the Korean ‘comfort women’ of WWII), was half empty so it was mostly quiet – except for those two kids that kept running up from the back of the plane so they could start thumping on the floor for no discernable reason.  Immediate impressions of Aeroflot premium economy seating – nice, large comfy chairs, with a lot of extra legroom, nice cosy pods, foot rests, food served on china, real cutlery and all good things.  Later impressions of Aeroflot premium economy – chairs have no lumbar support, the extra legroom meant I couldn’t actually reach the footrest for it to be useful to me without seriously slumping in my seat, the food was lovely, but they ran out of the main choices (and I know not how – there were only about 15 of us in that cabin), drinks came luke warm, and ice was a long time coming… shan’t complain, I could have been back there in that tide of Chinese humanity all hacking up lugies as loudly as possible.

Our flight was uneventful – just the way we like ’em – but, at 9hrs, was another fairly long haul.  I managed to watch a pile of stuff on the in-flight entertainment system (in spite of having a headphone jack that only provided input to one output… would madam like the sound in her right or left ear, today?)…  Table 19, Passengers, Collateral Beauty and some episodes of Billions kept me from boredom.  Mr K spent most of the flight reading ALL the academic papers associated with the Thredbo conference that we are attending – which I thought was particularly diligent of him, and excellent news for me because I got the TL;DR once he was done.

As is customary in these situations we eventually arrived at our destination where upon we made our way off the plane on a rather shabby and filthy air bridge (well compared to Hong Kong, you know), along a corridor, and down two flights of stairs – no escalators, just one of those chair staircase lifts down the side that your elderly Aunty Mabel might install so doesn’t have to move house – that spilled into a space about the size of a large McDonalds restaurant for the EIGHT HUNDRED people that had just teemed off two flights from Asia.  Straight away, an immigration official tried to direct us (in Russian) into the ‘Returning Citizens’ line, then recognised his mistake as soon as I said, ‘Um, sorry, I don’t speak Russian’.

You know, I’ve always railed against the Disneyland-esque rope lines that direct you in places like airports and busy events – but seriously Moscow airport… you need them!  We were in among hundreds of Chinese for whom queues simply do. not. exist.  I swear the one guy who was trying to tell people to go to the back of the queue was my hero this afternoon… he was vociferously trying to stop these people from jumping the line and cutting in everywhere, and I swear it nearly came to fisticuffs at one point, but eventually people got the idea and waited in the lines that had sort of formed which meant half of them were on the flights of stairs with standing room only.  Thankfully, those Comfort Class seats paid off, and we had disembarked at the front of our flight, which happily landed us about 12 deep in the queue. You’d think that would be a cored advantage, but it still took us over an hour to be processed out – an hour stood standing about with Chinese people staring and pointing at me, some weird cat toy noise going off constantly (which after about 45 mins we discovered was an actual, seriously distressed, cat in an animal carrier in the middle of this mess), a French family in front of us who were standing there for 30 mins before realising they were transiting to France and should have gone left for ‘International Transits’ instead of walking into this wall to wall loud Asian clusterfuck, and the weirdest immigration official I have ever seen!  This lady had clearly – clearly! – had enough for one day.  She was processing in tour groups of Chinese people, and each person is supposed to sign an immigration form that

This immigration lady had clearly – clearly! – had enough for one day.  She was processing in the tour groups of Chinese people, and each person is supposed to sign an immigration form that they keep on them and hand over when they leave the country… but she was obviously sick and tired of trying to tell these non-Russian, non-English speaking people where to sign, so she was giving them a pen, waving the paper in front of them, scribbling on the paper in the two spots HERSELF and whisking it away from them straight away.  No shit, she was physically forcing them to grab the pen, hold it near the paper (for the benefit of cameras), and then ‘signed’ the official Russian immigration papers for about ten people while we stood there watching… mind you, it did make her queue move quicker, that and the frequent stepping out of her booth to yell at the tour operator to tell the people to just stand up and hold the damn pen, don’t do anything else.

Thankfully the lady processing our queue was not so riled up, and she let us sign our papers ourselves (we are supposed to carry them everywhere and while it is unlikely that we could be stopped and asked for our papers, I don’t want to be explaining to a Russian cop that that wasn’t my signature…) and we were eventually deposited out in the baggage claim area.  All up from alighting the plane to picking up baggage – about 1hr 15 mins – and we were barely 12 deep in the queue with hundreds behind us.  Baggage collection was a little interesting.  There were four carousels and none of them working.  Guys came in pushing massive trolleys with the bags and unloaded the luggage all over the not-moving carousels.  Just scattered the bags all over the place for people to come find.

I had a sneaking suspicion that dealing with a decided lack of language skills, various public transport options in a post-long haul flight fatigue was not going to make for a comfortable or easy transit into the city, so I took the path of least resistance (which I rarely do) and ordered a transfer through our hotel.  Some guy in a suit, (who failed to introduce himself, but who I was calling Ivan in my head anyway), was happily standing outside the airport gates waiting for us and led us to a smart shiny black Mercedes for what I hoped would be a speedy ‘where’s my seat belt?’ ride into the city.  It is supposed to be 43 mins from the Sheremetyevo Airport into town, but alas, Muscovites can’t fucking merge, and even though there were no traffic hold ups, it took exactly 1 hr and 58 minutes to get there.  Three hours early to the airport, ten hours sitting on the plane, two hours stuck in a traffic jam, a five hour time difference from Hong Kong, so roughly 1 am for us by the time we arrived at the hotel. Dead tired.

Pringles in the fridge? Who does that?

Checked in, did the thing, found the room, sorted the power for everything (when did that become such an overwhelmingly important part of travel – keeping your laptop, ipad, phones, camera, power banks and shit all charged?!), put shoes back on, went out for supplies and something cheap, cheerful and forgettable for dinner.

Now – to bed.  Be back tomorrow night with hopefully something interesting to report of Moscow!

 

 

Hong Kong in a Hurry!

Success!  I had the worst, dreadfully awful, long haul flight home from Barcelona last July, and promptly decided I had to do something (anything!) about my weight/size… most of us do not fit comfortably in an airline seat for 20+ hours at a time, and I certainly didn’t enjoy doing it seated all squashed in beside a wall of solid muscle in the form of a very nice, but very large, member of the Kuwaiti military!  I unfolded myself from that flight and decided it was time to get fitter, stronger, and very importantly – smaller!  I am happy to report that after 12 months of making better food choices and hard work (three months of that spent on a luxury cruise ship avoiding food!) I am just over 25kgs smaller than last July and now I fit much more politely in those uncomfortable airline seats!  So, yeah. Huge win to get off the flight to Hong Kong feeling moderately human for a change.

We arrived late Monday, worked our way through the airport, immigration, collected the luggage, did the customs bit and were then spat out unceremoniously into the taxi ranks… whereupon we were slapped upside the head with the 33C heat and what must have been over 90% humidity.  Being Queenslanders, this isn’t normally much of a problem – but having a sturdy dose of man flu, being overtired from the long boring flight, and being dressed for Brisbane winter, (jeans and a jumper) this wasn’t making for an even remotely comfortable proposition.  We eventually transferred into an air conditioned taxi and thence to a seriously (too cold), air conditioned hotel.  We swiftly changed into more suitable attire and head out for a walk in the hopes of eventually finding some dinner.

We chose to stay at the Nathan Hotel in Kowloon this trip, having stayed on Hong Kong Island last time we were here.  It is very centrally located, moderately priced and is quite a nice hotel – lovely modern rooms, comfy beds, well-appointed facilities, lots of universal power points, great buffet breakfast included and wonderfully helpful staff.  My only reservation, if I had to find one, is that the walls between us and the neighbours/corridors seem a little on the thin side.  Where was I going with this before it turned into a hotel review…? Oh yeah, that’s right.  We are right in Kowloon off Nathan Road and that means we are a stone’s throw from the famous Fidget Spinner Street Markets – the Temple Street Markets, as was.  I remember last time we were here, shopping for jade and silk scarves, but now – the place is swamped in fidget spinners as far as the eye can see!  So we wandered off in a that-erly direction looking for Farfetch’d, and food… in that order.   😀

We wandered around the Temple Street Markets, marvelling at all the bright coloured ‘stuff’ for sale; rather unexpectedly found Farfetch’d quite smartly, and then head towards a little dumpling house, the Canton Kitchen’s Dimsum Expert, for dinner that was right next to our hotel.  BEST GODDAMN BBQ PORK BUNS EVER… no seriously – add it to your list.  Never have we had such delicious BBQ pork buns before.  Had a lovely meal all around and then came back up to the room to crash, after what was quite a long transit day.  I’m quite fond of this breaking up the trip thing…

Next morning saw us up and out and about, bright eyed and bushy tailed… and if you believe that – you’ve obviously never met me.   We had a few work related things to cover off today, but other than that, the day was predominantly free.  I’m not going to post stuff about work in this blog – I’ll leave that to Mr K on his FB account.  So – breakfast at the hotel, work sorted, and then we went for a walk down to Harbour City – an enormous, and I mean, enormous, high-end shopping centre that must cover about six city blocks.  On the way we went past a park with the ‘Avenue of Comics’.

Every single designer brand known to man was in there.  And we bought exactly nothing. Lots of overpriced clothes, handbags, shoes and shit like that.  I had another one of those ‘you don’t belong here’ moments in the ladies room at the mall, when three (obviously mainland, and possibly rural), Chinese ladies all stopped what they were doing when I walked in – they stared at me, elbowed one another, pointed at me and talked excitedly among themselves.  You know, I get this all the time… it’s because of my uncanny resemblance to Michelle Pfieffer and I should be used to it by now!  Though seriously – I was mostly just glad none of them pulled out a camera and started taking my photo or taking selfies with me in the background. I know I’m extraordinarily ‘white’, but being treated like a circus freak is not my idea of fun.

Anyway we pottered through the shops for a while, enjoying the long walk through the air conditioning, and found a nice sushi place for a quick lunch, before taking the ferry over to the Island to spend about an hour and a half doing bus transport stuff (yes, I know, exciting lives we lead!) before making our way slowly around the island and back to Kowloon via said buses.

Lots of building and traffic construction happening everywhere on the Island at the moment – I am both enamoured and a little freaked out by the use of bamboo scaffolding for highrise buildings in many Asian countries.  Once back in Kowloon, we head straight out of the heat, back to the hotel for a siesta to catch up on GoT and an afternoon kip.

After it cooled down a bit, we were off looking for Zapados (another saga entirely that doesn’t need to be included here) before heading for another wander through the local stores and markets.  After last night’s successful pork bun adventure, we were on a mission to find the best dumplings in the area… and I think we totally nailed it at Nanjing Jinling Dumpling.  We had a fantastic meal comprising entirely of entree dumplings, gyoza, spring onion cake, and steamed buns, and the most amazing long bao dumplings ever – so good, I plan on spending the ten minutes necessary to find/reset my Trip Advisor password so I can leave them a review!  I have screen grabbed the map so we can find them again for next time.  Just delicious.  🙂

After dinner we took a bit of a wander, took some photos, did a little shopping, bought a little nothing, and then back to the hotel for an early night. Because… tomorrow another long haul flight to Moscow, baby yeah!  Am anticipating exciting Russian adventures punctuated by moments of ‘holy fark! the what now ?’ because unfortunately, we speak none of the Russians!  :/

Nice driveway!  😉

Hong Kong – The Peak and Temple Street Markets

Mr K’s birthday! So all his favourite things in one day – which means, escalators, cable cars, taxis, subway trains and NO FUCKING BUSES! 😛 
Nah, just kidding. We had planned to take the long line of escalators that go from Wellington Street to Conduit Court, then go up Victoria Peak via the historic tramway. The escalators are very cool, they go for nearly a kilometre and mostly straight up… a very clever way to move people around. In the peak hours, they reverse directions, so in the morning when everyone is coming down the mountain to go to work, they take people down instead.

   

  

  

  

 About half way down the long trip, there was an Octopus Card refund point, where you can wave your Octopus Travel Card, and get a $2 refund onto your car as an incentive for walking to work rather than taking a bus or a train – many of which are over crowded. Mr K thought it was a great idea.

  After our ride up all the escalators, we went over to The Peak Tramway, which is one of the world’s oldest and most famous funicular railways. It rises about 1300 feet above sea level in just a few minutes. It is so steel that the buildings and trees that you pass by, look like they are leaning over – it varies from a 4-27% incline. It’s a well known visual illusion that exaggerates just how much the lean appears to be… due to alteration in the subjective vertical. (You can Google that shit if you want.) 

 
   

  

The Peak has been an important point in Hong Kong since it’s earliest days when it was used as a signalling point for for incoming cargo ships that would use signal flags. Whenever a mailboat came in a gun would boom across the island to let everyone know the mail had arrived. Many prominent residents and various British governors used to travers up and down the Peak by sedan chair carried by uniformed bearers, but this is hardly a comfortable mode of transport. By 1880, there were as many as 30-40 families spending their summers in the cooler area of the Peak and in May 1881, a clever Scotsman named Alexander Findlay Smith devised a plan to build a funicular railway. The tramway came into operation by 1888 and has been running ever since. It is now one of those ‘must do’ things when you come to Hong Kong.

The views from the top were nothing short of spectacular, and we just happened to choose such a lovely day to be up there.

   

  

  

  

 The afternoon saw us heading back to Mannings Tailor for suit fittings. Mr K seems very happy with his wash so far – bespoke suits, how very fancy.

   

 After that we went in search of the Temple Street night markets, which were full of all the knock-off crap known to man! Or woman! 😉 Knock off handbags, watches, shoes, electronics… oh and there was plenty of pashmina, scarves, jade (doubtful authenticity), souvenirs, plastic stuff galore (figurines and luggage tags mostly). Just stuff! We wandered through and I bought only one small HKD$29 scarf. 🙂 Mr K, who loves to haggle, didn’t even bother to bargain with the guy. Who could complain at AU$5? It was a lovely relaxed evening of wandering through the markets before taking the subway back to the hotel.  

   

  

  

  

 One more sleep and then we have an epic packing extravaganza to deal with in the morning and will be off to the airport, headed home!  

Hong Kong – Harbour Cruise and City Lights

We have a couple of days in Hong Kong now for Mr K’s big Norty Forty birthday. It feels good. It feels… like China, but not like China – in a good way.

  First things first, recover from the last of our Chinese airlines experiences. Then, go hunting for dinner, and found a quaint little Italian place that did the most delicious mushroom and seafood risotto. Followed by a good night sleep with no need to get up and transfer the next day.

Woke up feeling not at all refreshed, and thanks to my now screaming bad back, still waking around 5am even though I have no where I need to be until about 10am. 

This morning, we went off to a tailor to get Mr K fit for some new work suits. Now, I hate shopping, and this probably would have been particularly tedious were it not for the loads and loads of fabrics swatches to look through. 🙂 

   
  A couple of hours later and a measurements taken for a few suits and plenty of shirts, and it was off to find lunch. As fortune would have it, Gaylords, a Michelin starred Indian restaurant was just up the street, and we thought a curry would make a great change from all the Chinese food we’ve been consuming. They do a fantastic buffet lunch for barely AU$20 each, and the curries were awesome

  After lunch it was on to Sneaker Street. Mr K when he decides to shop, really decides to shop – it’s rather alarming actually. Sneaker Street, much as the name suggests is an entire street comprised on nothing but sports shoe stores with the occasional other shoe store in between. Adidas, Nike, New Balance, Converse, Asic, Reebok, Sketchers, blah blah blah – you name it they are all here in spades. We were expecting some good outlet sort of prices, to to be honest, prices were roughly what we pay at the DFO at home. I thought I’d take on the challenge of trying to find yaleman some Asic or New Balance size 15 shoes – odds were if there was a pair floating around somewhere they would be hard for them to get rid of and might be on the cheap. But no such luck. The FIVE stores I asked for size 15 shoes actually had the store clerks laughing at me, and saying they only stock up to 11. Not so surprising in a country of short people. Sorry yale, I tried.

  After wandering around Sneaker Street, we had a bit of a wander around the Ladies Market, so named for being the women’s clothing district, but mostly what we saw was souvenirs, electronics and what we like to call ShitForSale markets. Picked up a few knick knacks for the kids, but that’s about it really.

Came back to the hotel for a bit of an afternoon siesta before heading out again in the evening for a cruise on the Aqualuna. The Aqualuna is a replica of a Chinese junk and spends its evenings sailing around Victoria Harbour ferrying tourists about to enjoy the view. The trip was bout 45 mins (we chose to go at sunset) and costs about $33pp, and there is a complimentary wine or beer when you get on. It was lovely to see Hong Kong Island and Kowloon from the water actually, and such a lovely time of day to capture it. We had a relaxing little jaunt and got off on the Kowloon side to watch the Symphony of Light thing that Hong Kong puts on every night.

   

  

  

  

 The sailing trip was lots of fun, bobbing around on the choppy Victoria Harbour (mostly so choppy due to the sheer volume of boats and ships passing each other in every different direction), but the Symphony of Light show was somewhat underwhelming. Not sure what we were expecting, but with a Disneyland just around the corner and a world renown landscape like the Hong Kong skyline to work with, I think they could do much better. Just need a decent designer/choreographer and some better buy in from the all buildings on the Island’s waterfront.

  After that, a quick ferry ride back to the hotel and our ‘quiet day of pottering around Hong Kong’ (scoff!) came to an end.

China Weirdnesses

As you’d expect, things are a lot different in a country like China than they are at home in Australia, or even when compared to travelling in other Western Countries.
There are so many things, it’s hard to know where to start so if this seems a bit choppy and all over the place it’s because I was making little notes for myself over the last two weeks that are sometimes just snippets…

Let’s start with driving shall we? The first few forays out onto the road for us were in small vans or tour buses. There are road rules in China, I am certain of it, though no one seems to obey them and we never saw a single cop the whole time we travelled through so many different cities (until we reached Shanghai, and then they seemed to be everywhere). They drive on the right, but have a tendency to just go where ever they want. We saw our tour bus driver do a very impressive u-turn across 8 lanes of two way traffic, by sheer will, and by virtue of 1) being bigger than every other vehicle in the vicinity and 2) generous use of his horn. No bus drive in Aust would even consider such a thing. Horns are a necessity, being used at every single moment to let people know they are about to run into you, or that you are about to run into them if they don’t get out of the way. There is no waiting for people to move, you just honk them until they do.  

Red lights don’t really apply to motorcycles and mopeds – they seem to be more of a suggestion than anything else. Also, pedestrian don’t have right of way. If you want to cross the road, you have to simply stand your ground, walk into the street and hope that people will slow down (they won’t stop) enough for you to cross – even where pedestrian crossings are painted on the road… I don’t know why they bother with those, it’s like they’ve seen pedestrian crossings in the movies or something and believe they belong on the streetscape, but have no idea what they are for.  

Mobile phones while driving seem to be totally allowed – bus drivers, taxi drivers, MOPED riders all on mobile phones all the time. This is a recipe for disaster, but somehow the only accident we saw was when a taxi swerved out of his lane a bit and side swiped our bus. We later found out the reason for this is that the fine for using your mobile phone while driving is 50RMB – about $10. The driver was horrified when I told him the penalty for using your phone while driving in Australia was about 1500RMB.  

The vehicles themselves are an oddity. We saw many three wheeled taxis that seem to be just a moped with a double back seat – a modern day rickshaw. We saw enormous luxury vehicles covered in scrapes and bangs from the way people drive, we saw overloaded motorcycles, and my favourite weirdness on a highway near Xian – a small produce truck driving along stacked high with watermelons that were held together with two inch sticky tape.

Then there is the high speed train. They look the same as Japan’s bullet trains, but they couldn’t be more different. In Japan, you knew which platform you were going from, and even where to stand to wait for the correct carriage for your allocated seat and you could arrive ready for your trip and await your departure in your own time. In Beijing, you are not allowed on the platform until 15 minutes before you train is to depart, and there is one solitary ingress point for everyone to move down tot he platform. That means that approximately 1275 people (most toting luggage) were all crushing the one single ticket inspector across a 15 minute period to get to their platform. Fucking ridiculous.

Once on the train you notice it is not as clean as the Japanese counterparts, in spite of the fact that there are two ladies on every carriage whose jobs appear to go about sweeping and cleaning the bathroom facilities. If you have the misfortune to require the bathroom during the 5 hour journey, you will end up holding your breath, cursing that you didn’t bring more tissue with you so you could wipe down the seat, and then try hard not to touch any surfaces after washing your hands to exit the bathroom. Ewww… Additionally, your fellow passengers will be: playing video games out loud. Playing music on speaker. Playing movies aloud… and eating foul smelling dried out meats or extremely pungent pickled mystery goods. Just no consideration for other train passengers.

Smoking! Everyone still smokes. It’s like they haven’t got the memo yet that well, the damn things actually kill you. And smoking is still legal in most public places – including restaurants. Nothing worse than being asked if you want a non-smoking table, knowing full well that right beside you somewhere in the same room, someone is going to light up. You see people smoking on their mopeds, smoking in fast food places, while walking through shopping malls, hotel lobbies (right under the ‘no smoking’ signs), in public parks, on ferries and boats, in taxis… just about anywhere – even if it is suppose to be a non-smoking area. They just don’t are. It’s really horrible to find yourself a nice spot to look at something and then someone comes along and lights up right beside you. I think I have consumed more second hand smoke in two weeks in China than I would have in the last ten years in Australia.

Which I personally think is a bit weird really, considering the Chinese have a very particular, and frequently discussed, obsession with longevity. They have Happy Buddha, you can rub his tummy for ‘luck and long life’, they have turtles everywhere – in ponds, in statuary, in tokens and charms, for ‘longevity’. Rivers stand for longevity, twisting walkways, long covered corridors, knotted tokens, certain foods – every time you went to a shrine or a temple, you would be encouraged to make wishes and prayers for a long life. Make a donation here, tie a string there, hang a token over there, write you name over here and always, always, make a wish for long life. It is just a ‘thing’… and a long standing thing at that. Wishing someone a long life is the traditional way of offering well wishes to someone, anyone. Which I find odd… because so many of the Chinese have endured god awful suffering over the millennia. It’s not like many of them have had easy or pleasant lives at all. And I am not just talking about rural peasants eking out a living, working on farmlands for rich landlords, I am talking about privileged families too who were persecuted through the Cultural Revolution, the Taipings, the Great Leap Forward, famines and so many wars. No one quite does suffering, like the Chinese do. I am not quite sure why, historically, you would wish longevity on someone who lives a miserable downtrodden and oppressed life. Obviously things in modern China are improving – ‘We have partial freedom in China now. Can do what we want so long as government say it okay, not like before.’ (direct quote from our first tour guide) – but they have such a long way to go. Still, the obsession with longevity seems prevalent everywhere you go.

Their only other true obsession that runs as deep, is the obsession with wealth. The Chinese people, who have suffered so much deprivation in their history, seem obsessed with the protection that being wealthy can offer. They have several tokens that represent wealth – the fat toad with three legs and money in mouth, he is constipated so that the money comes in and never goes out – we saw the fat toad a lot in Northern China, in the Southern areas, it was a dog set high on a families roof that ‘has no anus’ who is also ‘constipated’ who brings in wealth to the household and it never lets the money out.


 In the North – Beijing and Xian, we discovered that foreigners were known as ‘big nose’. Given that many in the north have Mongolian ethnicity in their genealogy somewhere, it is quite common for them to have broad, flatter features, so they are quite frequently fascinated with the ‘big noses’, and would want to stop and take photos with members of our group who had narrower features and larger more protruding noses. In the South, Guilin, Yangshou, Yi Chang, foreigners are known mostly as ‘hellos’… so when you go to the ‘Hello Market’ you are going to the tourist market for foreigners. It comes from the hawkers saying ‘Hello, fan?’… ‘Hello, jade?’… ‘Hello, bag?’ … ‘Hello, watch?’ etc. Yes, as places like this, foreigners are pretty much viewed as walking wallets, which you get in tourist destinations the world over.  

We discovered that the Northern Chinese have a none too high opinion of the Souther Chinese and vice versa. The Northern Chinese say they are all wheat eaters and they are strong and they speak all gruff and ‘herrr-harr!’. While the Southern Chinese are rice eaters and are weak and they speak all squeaky, ‘mi-mi-mi-mi ‘. The Southern Chinese believe the Northerners to be course and uncultured, while there in the South they are more refined and delicate.  

North or South however, all of them are equally fascinated with people like me – pale skin, blonde hair. There are some areas that rarely see a tourist, and when those people are playing domestic tourist themselves (and I’m told about 90 million Chinese travel to the major tourist sites in China each year and that foreign tourism makes up only about 10% of tourism income), many of them have never seen a Westerner in real life – only in the movies. The fascination with fair skin runs in their own history too – beauty ideals have tended towards the fairer for centuries. In much the way Georgian Britain valued a woman’s ‘indoorsy’, peaches and cream complexion, the Chinese too value a fairer complexion when judging beauty – no small commodity when marriages were traditionally arranged and bride prices were negotiated the highest for those of fairer ‘indoors’ skin and tiny Golden Lily feet. Traditionally, Chinese women would wear talismans of white jade around their necks or against their belly, while pregnant so as to bring their unborn children the fairest of complexions. So someone like me – who is of Scandinavian and British descent and who has spent the better part of the last two decades fastidiously avoiding the sun – well, I’m quite the oddity. 

So much of an oddity, that I was frequently having people stop and wanting to take my photo, only they weren’t so prepared to approach me as the brunettes in our group – perhaps I looked so ‘indoors’ as to be high in station as well! So people didn’t approach me so much as attempt to surreptitiously take my photo… point a camera in my direction and look a different way while clicking away. Stand and face away from me and take a selfie with me in the background. I couldn’t even escape this sort of thing over breakfast in the Grand Mercure Hotel in Xian, a major city. I had people constantly just stopping dead in their tracks and staring at me, poking their friends and pointing at me to make sure their friends didn’t miss the sight, one guy nearly twisted his own kids head off to try and turn him in my direction. This I didn’t mind so much, if only they had wanted to keep their distance. But I had many, mostly men, wanting to touch my hair. The guides gave me no clue as to why this was so – they just said it was because maybe they had never seen blonde women before, Mr K kindly suggested they had probably seen plenty of blonde women – in porn. I did not like it at all, and when someone in the jostling crowd at the Terracotta Warriors on day three, yanked on my plaited pony tail so hard as to jerk my head back – that was it. For the rest of the trip, my hair was in a bun and under my floppy hat. I’ve been stared at for being blonde in Greece and in Italy in the 90s, in Dubai, in Istanbul and Pakistan in the ’00s, but people always kept their distance. Not in China. In China there is no sense of personal space. It was so bad and so pervasive that I have come to love China and it’s amazing natural beauty, culture and incredibly rich heritage, but I came to seriously dislike the Chinese people themselves. The only ones who were nice or respectful in anyway, were the ones we were paying. Which is kinda sad… I eventually learned to say “Bee pung wua.” = “Don’t touch me.” and it seemed to help. :/

Anyway… Food! The favoured way for us to eat as travellers wary of the water and food preparation was in nice restaurants, which we could well and truly afford as food is cheap in China. There is a saying in China: “The Chinese eat everything flying except aeroplanes; everything with four legs except tables and chairs, and everything in the water except submarines”, and it appears be true. In Beijing, we saw scorpions on a stick at the night markets, in Shanghai we were offered bullfrog soup in a nice restaurant, they eat donkey, snake, turtle (for longevity of course), we were told quite openly in Chongqing that people eat cats and dogs, ‘no problem’ – but apparently not ones that come from pet stores, just specially bred dingos. People also have a different attitude towards food, probably from years of deprivation still being in living memory… get in, eat and get out. No one lingers or savours their meal, and they hoe into their food like they will miss out. We were at a banquet meal on the Yangtze cruise, and the Chinese sat down and started eating through the welcoming speeches while the Westerners were politely listening, clapping appropriately and only ate after the formalities. The Chinese were all: sit, eat, run out the door. Done in 15 minutes or less. We also noticed that after four weeks of eating sushi and Japanese prepared vegetables, noodles, soups etc, that Chinese meals are extremely oily. Even a dish of eggplant or something will be drowning in oil. And probably loads of MSG too.

  Some more random thoughts…

Harking and spitting up globs of phlegm is quite acceptable, whether you are on the street or in a hotel lobby. Spitting on the pavement or into a polished brass rubbish bin is fine. The very sound of it makes you want to hurl sometimes.  

People seem to be fine with having their conversations on speaker as they walk along the street – no bluetooth headsets, no microphone headphone cords, just talking with the phone in front of their face, but also kinda yelling at the person as though they are across a busy street. Again, it feels like people don’t understand or don’t value privacy at all. 

In Xian, a coffee at the airport was 56RMB, that is over AU$10, and I thought our airport coffee shops want to rip us off – that is the same as the price of a lovely meal at a nice restaurant. Talk about taking advantage of a captive audience.

Airport announcements are usually nonsense – they seem to be recordings on loops that start with a ‘ding, ding, ding’… and they WILL be ear-splittingly loud for no apparent reason. Like, occ health and safety hazard, LOUD. Actually, I think it is fair to say that the Chinese are louder than Americans. They do not possess inside voices at all and they do not speak to each other in a way that might keep any conversation private. I was actually quite glad most of the time that I could not understand what people were saying around me – they often sounded very aggressive when all they were doing was setting a table or maybe asking someone to move things around in a shop.

Tour guides – they are everywhere given the number of rural Chinese in the big city. When Australians travel their own country, they rarely take an organised tour, we just strike out on the open road and do our own thing – not so the Chinese it would seem. The bulk of tourists we saw – about 90% or more – were domestic tourists from rural areas, and they use large tour companies that deal with logistics for them. Tour guides should probably note, there is not much point carrying a tour guide flag for your group to follow, if you are carrying the same colour flag with the same company logo on it, as the other guides from your company. It was nothing to see ten of the same yellow flag marching in front of us and Chinese people confusedly trying to figure out which yellow flag belonged to their guide.

We discovered that the Chinese like desserts for breakfast but not after dinner. Every buffet breakfast we encountered in the various four and five star hotels we stayed in, always offered trays of cakes, slices and even puddings at breakfast. Especially in the South, apparently the further south you go, the sweeter the tooth… by the time you get to Shanghai, even a peppered beef and onion dish will have sugar added to it. What else? We were in China for a full week before we saw ANY blue sky, and that was in Guilin. We had weather forecasts that suggested that the weather would be between 34-38C, clear and sunny, hot and very humid – but there was so much smog and air pollution hanging about that literally it felt like you were walking around on an overcast day and some days it was so bad, city visibility was down to barely a kilometre or two. 

  Many of our fancy hotels have Western inspired revolving doors… you know, the sort of large round revolving doors that you see in big swish hotels in New York or Las Vegas or London or Sydney… well, they had the big round shape of the door bit correct, but rather than revolving doors that keep the weather in or out, that patrons use to walk around to get into the hotel – these ones just had the big round shape, but with a regular automatic opening sliding door in the round space and a wee garden just taking up the leftover unused area…? They don’t revolve. No idea. Don’t ask. 

  We saw many what they locals call, ‘three generation t-shirts in the marketplaces. They are so called because you buy them for yourself, then wash them once and they shrink to fit your eldest kid, they you wash them and they shrink again and fit your youngest. Three generations shirts.

We found out there are only 400 golf courses in whole of China, and that the nouveau riche Chinese love their golf. But this country of 1.3billion people are not allowed to build any more golf course because it uses too much arable land. To put that in perspective, South East Queensland has about 150 golf courses with a population in the area of about 3 million tops. 

We discovered that the numbers, 3 – 6 and 9 are all lucky numbers for special dates and that people will still go to diviners to check the best days for them to marry or to have a baby – now medical science allows elective c-section births, many women choose to have their children born on the most auspicious date available according to the local diviner. Some country markets only occur on the 3rd, the 6th, the 9th, the 13, the 16th, the 19th etc of the month, as to use other days would be unlucky.

I always though Chinese opera was more akin to cats wailing, but have come to realise it is music with people shouting at each other rather than actually singing. Not pleasant, even our local Chinese guides would screw up their faces at the suggestion off sitting through traditional Chinese opera.

We tried to learn some basic Chinese while we were here, but failed miserably, particularly after having spent four weeks trying to nail down some Japanese. All I managed to absorb was (and this is probably all spelled incorrectly):

  • Xie xie – thank you
  • Duo show tien – how much 
  • Ma ma hu hu – it’s so so 
  • Ni how ma – how are you 
  • Ding ding how – I’m very very good
  • Xiong Mao – panda
  • Bee pung wua – don’t touch me! 

… and now I am going to have to reset my phone dictionary because it is going to accept these non-English words after typing so many place names etc.

What else? Many years ago people only married in the same district and nationality as the one they were born into. This has kept the ethnic minority groups quite strong in China. Now of course, people marry where they please and the government is trying to preserve the cultures of the ethnic minorities. In the past, you would ‘marry your daughters out’ to some other village, not many marriages would be arranged between people who knew each other and if a girl was lucky, her natal village would be relatively close to her in-laws home, as she was required many times a year to travel back to her family for festivals and holidays. And of course this being the case, your sons ‘married in’, which means their wives came to live in their family home primarily under the control of their new mothers in law. Can you imagine that? Getting married and going to live indefinitely with your mother in law and be at her beck and call and follow all her instruction until she croaked and (if you were lucky enough to be married to the elder son), you would then become the matriarch and torment your own daughters in-law?  Sounds like hell on earth to me.  

Another tid-bit: pomegranates are considered very lucky and of course is a powerful symbol of fertility (that one seems to translate to Western cultures too…The Chinese character for ‘many seeds’ is the same character as the word for ‘children’, so it is considered especially auspicious to give brides pomegranates or decorate her dowry gifts with pomegranate motifs.. 

Speaking of children, many of us would be well aware of the seemingly bizarre, One Child Policy that was instituted in 1978 to try to stem the tide of over population. At first, many families rebelled against the directives, having children and keeping them in secret (raising their own less preferred children as household servants). Also a tragic systematic disposing of girl babies started to occur as it was too important to have a son to carry on the family name – interestingly this has now swung the other way… after the initial generations all desired sons, they have finally figured out that their sons have no daughters to marry, and there is a little discussed problem with girls being kidnapped from country areas by wealthy family to be raised in their families to be wives for their prized sons. O.o This is happening now according to our most informative guide Sue in Guilin.

In the last couple years, the One Child Policy has been relaxed a bit and some families are allowed to have two children. To be eligible, both parents must come from single child families themselves OR come from one of the many ethnic minorities I mentioned earlier. If you meet this criteria, and you already have one child, when that first child reaches five years old, you may apply to the government for permission to have a second child. So, if a farmer from an ethnic minority background has a first child that is a daughter, then five years later, he is allowed to apply to have a second child. In spite of this relaxation of laws, apparently most eligible people have not taken up the offer to have a second child – child birthing and rearing is very expensive business in China. It cost over AU$2000 to have a baby in a hospital, and education can run to thousands of dollars a year, even at the most basic kindergartens and schools. 

 And of course no discussion of Chinese weirdnesses would be complete without a run down on toilets. All travellers will tell you of the vital importance of finding clean, free toilets when you’re out and about all day every day. China has some of the best and some of the worst ‘Happy Rooms’ I’ve ever seen. They also have some of the best worst ones too… Our first guide Kelly in Beijing set us off on a star rating system so we could report back to the group what to expect before venturing forth to test the facilities: 

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Happy Room:  Western toilet. Clean. Paper available. Soap available. Automatic taps. Hand dryers available. View optional. 

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Happy Room:  Western toilet. Cleanish. BYO paper. Water available. Sometime soap, but BYO hand sanitizer in case. 

⭐️⭐️⭐️.5  Happy Room:  Western toilet. People may have been standing on the seat. Need to clean first. Floor… questionable. Hand washing water available, definitely no soap. BYO paper and sanitizer. 

⭐️⭐️⭐️ Happy Room:  Asian squat toilet. Clean. Paper available. Soap available. Hand dryer available. Somewhere to put/hang your things while you balance to use the loo.

⭐️⭐️ Happy Room:  Asian squat toilet. Cleanish. BYO paper. Water, but no soap. BYO hand sanitizer. 

⭐️ Happy Room:  Asian squat toilet. You will smell it before you see it. Urine visible on the soaked floors. BYO paper – sewerage system doesn’t cope with flushing paper and used paper is placed in a waste bin. Many will refuses to flush at all. Sometimes no doors. No sink. No way! Oh, and someone might be smoking in the stall next to you.

It was not unusual to go into a lovely hotel for lunch, with marble floors, beautiful chandeliers, granite vanity tops, and lovely well appointed western style bathrooms, only to find there is no fucking toilet paper… I mean, not an empty dispenser, just no toilet paper roll holder even. The weirdest toilet experience I had was at Guilin airport, where the cleaner, ever dilligent, didn’t even wait for me to exit the stall to mop the area and literally pushed the mop under the door and yelled at me to lift my feet WHILE I WAS USING THE TOILET! Bloody hell.  

And last, but not least, in my list of China weirdnesses – which I found both weird and annoying… but which probably won’t even hit anyone else’s radar.  Souvenir lapel pins.  I collect them from all over the world. In fact, I’ve been collecting them since my first major overseas trip in 1995, when I bought pins from all over Europe (except Romania, but they were only a few years independent and hadn’t got the hang of the whole tourism thing yet). But no…. Chinese souvenir stores don’t seem to have them at all. Which is just fucking weird!  Because the world over, whenever I pick up a souvenir pin in Alaska or New Zealand, or Japan, or Turkey or wherever – it will invariably, and inevitably, be in packaging that says that the damn thing was made in fucking China!