Hold the handrail and stand firm, be careful chothes sandwich

The last few weeks have had far too much worth writing about for me to actually get around to doing so!

Summary
Happenings of the fortnight

• Travelled to an unrestored section of the Great Wall and camped in the mountains! The area was found by my friend Chris a few years ago and he organised a trip for a group of us to go, we camped in a clearing that could only be accessed by an hours hike through farmers trails so our equipment was carried by donkey across the mountains. The wall was Ming dynasty and totally untouched, we were the only ones there as its not a tourist destination at all.
• Unfortunately I had my laptop stolen from on top of my mailbox (I am now trying to get used to using an iPad and downloading all the gadgets, still not very used to touch typing though!
• Went to Xian with my class and the Oxford group as well, all inclusive trip organised by Peking University as a treat for us, transport, food, accommodation and sights all covered for a fee of twenty pounds! Such a bargain.
• Last night was invited by our neighbours to their sons second birthday party at a karaoke bar. As the native English speakers we were invited to sing all their favourite western songs, so lots of Adele and Taylor Swift renditions!
• The road outside my flat has been dug up by lots of migrant workers for no reason as far as I can see, they've paved some of it back up in a patchy way, but in the middle they've dug shallow metre wide holes and then put cones on top. Because the traffic needed more obstacles than the cars, scooters, bikes and pedestrians offered already.
• I've tried donkey burgers, which are burgers that have donkey meat in them and not a fast food brand as I initially presumed. They are actually a Chinese traditional food and really good! There are big helpful photos of donkeys in the window to make sure you can find the restaurants that serve it, as well as the signs that say DONKEY MEAT on them.

Today I wandered through the Olympic forest park which was beautiful, the leaves are all changing and it was full of colour. Speakers down all the paths gently playing lullaby versions of songs like 'Scarborough Fair' and 'Can you feel the love tonight', facilitated the peaceful atmosphere, and we had a good time watching parents posing their children beside tress with reeds or leaves in their hands to document autumn.

Xian
Last weekend's trip to Xian initially made me a little depressed about Chinese tourism and in particular the preservation of genuine culture. I've been to Xian before, it was on my school trip where I was innocent and starry eyed about everything I saw, each stop on the package tour was fascinating and I trusted the authenticity of each exhibit. I am definitely a lot more jaded now and know a lot better than I did then, revisiting the Wild Goose Pagoda for the second time I saw that the Classical Chinese signs were screwed in by metal bars and couldn't be older than about fifteen years, and our tour guide happily told us about how there was a very famous building which got too old so they were in the process of knocking it down and rebuilding it all again. Sure enough I passed by the building full of paints and ladders inside, with newly carved wood panels. I concluded pretty fast that returning to these places would not have the magic which their novelty had brought my fifteen year old self the first time. The next day my classmate Laurence and I did the unthinkable and missed the Terracotta Warriors out of our tour to explore the city of Xian itself, and I do not regret the choice. Exploring the calligraphy streets that morning, eating the amazing local foods like biangbiang noodles (the character for the noodles is so complicated that it hasn't been computerised and has over fifty strokes!) was so nice, we actually ended up being filmed for Shanxi television as part of a documentary on ancient Steele inscriptions as we had studied them a bit and bumped into a film crew interviewing a specialist. Token westerners who can speak Chinese are clearly good fleshing out footage for documentaries.
My faith in genuine Chinese culture was restored by the Xian Muslim quarter, which was just so cool in every way, great street food, really fun shops and lots of little alleyways with cool things happening. We stumbled on a courtyard where some local Chinese Muslims had brought out a speaker system and were dancing together to traditional music. Some of them were in traditional dress, some were just in casual clothes, it was too structured to join in if you didn't know the moves but also very free, same sex or different partners were both acceptable and some just moved around alone. It was strange seeing the Chinese looking so relaxed, it's not what you'd really associate with them, and it was really mesmerising!

Naming people
One thing that I've had the honour of doing is giving Chinese people English names. Giving yourself either a Chinese name as a westerner or an English name as a Chinese person feels very odd, names are so important but not something you are used to having control over, even nicknames aren't something we get much of a say in. Now suddenly you have the right to decide how a whole ethnic group will address you in a totally new language, and I have to say that most of the time I don't think any of us are very good at it. Picking a nice and normal name in an alien language and culture mostly comes from being lucky.
I will use my two attempts at a Chinese name as an example. My first one, 李心结 or Li Xinjie, was given to me by my Chinese teacher when I began Chinese. I think, the logic was that Li (means plum tree) sounds like one of the syllables in Macleod if you mispronounce it as I expect he did, and Xinjie means pure or clean heart, a bit like the meaning for Catherine. So far, pretty normal. However, what I discovered the hard way was that it also happens to be the name of a very well known actress and singer from Taiwan. Introducing myself in Taiwan last summer provoked laughter everywhere I went, much like if a Chinese person went around in England saying their name was Britney Spears. Very unfortunate, or very cruel of my Chinese teacher. I realised after that summer that I needed a new name for my year abroad, and resumed the hunt, but it is very hard to figure out on your own and eventually went to a different teacher for help, who gave me the name 李恺婕, or Li Kaijie, Kai meaning joyful and happy, and Jie meaning beautiful or something like that. On trying this name out in China I have yet again been met with some laughter though, because apparently the characters used in my name are not used in any words, and most Chinese people don't recognise them at all. The sound of the name is fine from what I can tell, but it's virtually impossible to tell people how to spell it because each sound has at least thirty possible ways it can be written. Chinese people always use other words that the character is in to help them write it, so that makes my name a bit of an issue. Still, I can't get a third name, it just feels too picky! My course coordinator was in hysterics at both my names and suggested I get business cards with my characters and their pronunciation to help people, which is never a good sign.
Naming Chinese people so far has been harder than I expected, one that sticks out in my mind for its comic value was one of the Chinese students that comes to English corner, which is where we go for dinner with them and talk in English. He had a girlfriend back home who he didn't think had a Chinese name so a friend and I decided to help and name her, by asking questions about her hobbies and interests. Eventually based on her taste in films and love for theme parks we decided to call her Daphne, as in the one from Scooby Doo. However when he came back from October holiday he told us that she already had an English name, and she was called Blue. There are worse I've heard, one friend has taught a child called Hannibal, another called Lucifer. It's a complicated process which is humorously unsuccessful on both ends I think.
Chinese people really struggle to understand how English names don't necessarily have meanings, because the meanings are really important in their culture. I was explaining how I am named after my grandma and how that was common to one Chinese girl this evening, and she just thought the whole thing was ridiculous. It's funny how things that I take for granted as normal seem so strange to someone looking from a different perspective, why does badminton have 'bad' in it? Why would it be bad? And why do we say 'watch your head' when the doors are low? It makes no sense.Things like this are being shown to me daily by my Chinese friends and pupils.

Mushrooms quote be or not to be?

My Golden Week 

• number of  trains taken: 7 
• number of nights spent on trains: 2.5
• total number of hours on the train: 45
• distance travelled by train in total according to google: 2433 kilometres

My first proper experience travelling in China was not made alone, but with the whole of China, who decided to travel with me! I should have understood this when we had such a hard time buying tickets to any destination but it was one of those facts that didn't become true until we were living through it, such as the standing train back to Beijing at 2am when I was pushed up against a bin in the train with a sleeping chinese man on top of it, with as much personal space as my shoes took up on the floor, or waking up at 4am to queue for Changbaishan nature reserve, only to find that the queue was already stretching back 20km from the entrance to the park, and we woke up too late (we should have been wise and slept in the car from 2am apparently)!  The two most lasting impressions I think I came away with from the week which also were facts that I already knew, and have now lived through to some extent. One is just how many people there are in China, and the other is how incredibly vast China is. If you look at a map of China and see the distance between Beijing and Changbaishan nature reserve, it looks like a day trip comparative to most other places, but I assure you it is so far! I spent the whole week marveling at the fact that somewhere this huge could ever be unified, let alone when the fasted mode of transport was horse! America grew in size with the railways being built along the way, but China never had any of that. Yet somehow it has largely remained under the control of one government for thousands of years! It really makes you look down on England for failing to keep the Scotland or even Durham under control for so long to be honest. 

Tourism

The amount of travelling in the first week of October in China is totally mind blowing both as statistics and experiencing it first hand. According to the Finincial Times there were 425 million visitors to national tourist destinations during Golden Week this year, 660 million travelled by either road or sea, and in one day the Forbidden City had 148,000 visitors. To Changbaishan, China’s largest nature reserve on the North Korean boarder there were over 40,000 visitors on the Wednesday. We attempted to be six of those 40,000 and failed! When we arrived in Baihe Tuesday evening, we quickly realised that presuming we would be able to find a hotel on the night was naïvely optimistic. There was nothing in Baihe except for cheap looking little hotels, but none of them had any room, or would even let us into their lobby to ask. It felt a little like a nativity journey re-enactment with no rooms in any inns, moving down the streets rejection by rejection. At one point, I went up to hotel owner who also said she had no room and in a fit of despair asked her ‘if there is no room with you, and you say that there is no room with anyone else, then what should we do?’ She took pity on us and gave us the stable equivalent of our story, which was a room in her mother’s house about 20 minutes’ drive away from town, with a home cooked dinner and bus to take us to the park in the morning for a very reasonable price. Her mother lived out in the mountains in a tiny little bungalow with all her own vegetables and hens, there was no toilet or running water except boiled rain water, her oven was an open fire and our heating was that we were sleeping on a kang (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kang_bed-stove). The food was amazing, we were roasting warm and it was all a pretty crazy experience! We were very lucky to befriend the driver as well because not only did he take us to Changbaishan but when we failed to get tickets on the Wednesday he took us to do lots of other things we would have never found on our own, like white water rafting and beautiful walks.

The next day we got a room in the woman’s hotel and the little group of people we’d befriended mothered us for the rest of our time there in a lovely way, we found out that people had been forced to pay to sleep on the hotel lobby floors and in their cars because there were no rooms in any hotels that night. We were very close to a night on the streets and hadn’t even realised.

Changbaishan on our last day as well was not what we had imagined. After our failed attempt to get into the park on Wednesday because we arrived too late, we woke up at 330am on Friday to go and queue in the dark by the entrance along with hundreds of Chinese people. Just before it opened, lots of Chinese soldiers arrived to man the queues, the gates opened and the mass charged into the centre to buy tickets. We got our tickets, took our bus up into the park, had a long walk through hot springs and around a waterfall wearing massive red coats that we’d rented when we realised how freezing it was on the mountain and when we walked back to the main area looked at our watches to discover that it was 630am. It felt totally surreal.

The main attraction of Changbaishan is the Heaven lake right up at the top of the mountain which is reputed to have it’s own mythical sea monster and be extremely beautiful. We were taken further up the mountain in little buses which swerved around the sharp corners and hit everyone into one another, then were pushed off the buses and left at the top. The top of the mountain felt like a little Everest or something, snow covered with snow and dust pelting your face in a way that actually caused pain. You could see only a few feet ahead of you before the whole landscape disappeared into cloud, and in the distance was an eerie trail of puffer coated pilgrims one by one leading off into the whiteness. We joined the trail and braved the winds up the little steps feeling extremely vulnerable and wondering when the lake would appear. At one point, everyone seemed to stop, and we discovered that if we had any visibility at all, the lake would be below us. However us being in a cloud at this point, it just looked like more unknown. A couple of times the cloud cleared briefly and a cry would rise from the Chinese people who rushed to the edge and attempted to see the lake. I am going to say that I saw the water bank for a moment, but I can’t be a hundred per cent certain. Mentally, physically and emotionally drained we joined the queues to get back on the buses, and discovered that it was only 850am.

Losing Face

Something that we really encountered on the holiday was the importance of saving face for Chinese people, and how bad it is when they lose face. There is a lot of emphasis in Chinese culture on public appearance and blatant admission of failure. It is acceptable to get things wrong and have faults or mistakes, but it is not acceptable to have them publically acknowledged or made known outside of private situations. Sometimes this results in very annoying attempts to avoid admitting defeat.

One example of this for us on the trip were that in small talk with the woman who owned the little hotel we were staying in, we mentioned that we hadn’t tried some of the local delicacies yet, such as dog. This offhand remark was taken on as a challenge and resulted in her husband driving all around the back alleys of Baihe trying to find us a dog restaurant at ten pm on our last night, becoming more and more anxious as we drove to many that were already closed. We didn’t even want dog, we were at most considering sharing some side dish at some point to say that we’d tried it or something, it wasn’t a big deal. Instead, we ended up in a private room of a dog restaurant with about eight different types of dog dishes such as dog skin, dog sausage and boiled dog, with her anxious husband waiting to see our reaction to the famed delicacy.

All of us were thanking him repeatedly in Chinese full of smiles and murmuring words of support to one another in English that he couldn’t understand such as ‘Keep going it’s just meat, don’t think about it’ ‘Cesar could you have a couple more pieces so that it looks like we’ve eaten a reasonable amount?’, or from Will ‘I’m genuinely going to throw up’. It wasn’t helping our appetites that they had two dogs one of which was a puppy we’d been playing with all afternoon and grown quite fond of. Our offhand comment and Chinese saving face had led to a situation now completely out of our control. Then a new crisis ensued when we mentioned that at some point we needed to go to a supermarket, all of which were closed at this point yet still a wild goose chase ensued. We could only save his face and stop the mayhem by telling him we only wanted to buy some bottled water, knowing that he had these at home, and could give them to us instead.  

Definitely the worst loss of face I have brought about took place on the train from Qinhuangdao to Shenyang. I was sitting in a carriage away from the others just because of how the tickets worked out in a set of four seats with three Chinese people playing a card game together. As the younger guy reached over to put his card on the pile, he accidentally spilt the entirety of the older man’s flask of boiling water onto my legs. It was all very dramatic, everyone around us jumped up, I was in extreme pain, no one really knew what to do. I took some clothes to change into and see how bad the burn was (it was ok in the end, I’m quite accident prone and actually have done this to myself recently), and when I opened the door again I was confronted with about five different types of creams and ointments (one actually was toothpaste?) being thrust in my face by his relatives in the vicinity and entreating me to put them all on my legs at once. The girl next to me was frantically trying to dry my seat and items that got wet, the mother was instructing me on how to apply the creams and the father put his flask well away and did not refill it. The card game was definitely over. The boy who knocked the flask onto me at this point looked as though he had lost the will to live. The initial panic had resulted in rapid ‘I’m so sorry I’m so sorry I’m so sorry’ with bowing and begging hand gestures, but now the despair had set in he just sat opposite me and stared hollowly into the distance, totally inconsolable. I repeated to him that he didn’t need to worry, that my legs were a lot better, that I’d done this myself many times before, it was an accident and to continue playing, but nothing worked. The whole carriage of Chinese people had seen the incident and the loss of face, particularly because I was a foreign girl, was extreme. In the end I managed to bring them all into conversation about travelling, studying, moon cakes (I was forced to eat one that he was bringing back to his family) and so on until the atmosphere became more relaxed, but the initial tension made me realise just how seriously losing face affected Chinese people, and that it wasn’t to be underestimated.

(http://voices.yahoo.com/the-concept-face-chinese-culture-566703.html, http://www.culture-4-travel.com/losing-face.html)

Mid-Autumn Festival http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Autumn_Festival

The Mid-Autumn festival traditions seem to consist of buying loads of moon cakes and eating them with friends and family while you look at the moon. That is pretty much it. If it is possible then people will try to return to their families and be with them for the holiday, and if you come from far away you will tend to bring the specialty moon cakes from that area back with you for them to try.

We bought moon cakes and milk tea which we ate out on the roof of our hotel while watching the moon. I don’t really like moon cakes but talking to a lot of Chinese people they don’t actually either, and just do it for the sake of tradition! They are so stodgy and dry most of the time. Still- 入乡随俗(Chinese version of when in Rome)！Also, so many tacky marriages everywhere, so so many.

National Day- this is the celebration of the Communist Party formation on October 1^st 1949, flags appear all over the place and there is increased patriotism a bit like July 4^th in the US, but otherwise little impact. One street seller who we were buying breakfast off was criticised by a passer by for selling to foreigners on National day but it wasn’t very serious. The nationalism is mostly directed into anti-Japanese sentiment which we saw when we went for lunch at a Japanese restaurant that day and it was completely empty. The waitresses seemed really surprised to get any work at all that day! After that we then went to the September 18^th Museum which was pretty harrowing, very gruesome depictions of Japanese atrocities and so on. I found it most interesting watching the Chinese parents taking their children round the museum and listening to how they would explain the events to them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Day_of_the_People's_Republic_of_China

Brief Outline of the trip (still unfinished as I haven't had time to write it all!) 

Beijing-Qinhuangdao 3 ½ hours with a seated ticket

Qinhuangdao is a seaside city which China apparently decided a few years ago was going to be the Chinese Miami and started making into a tourist destination as quickly as possible. It is definitely not Miami yet, but flashy hotels are starting to increase along the beach, even if you still have oil rigs and massive trading ships about a mile away from them.

Highlights- amazing weather, swimming in the sea and riding the motorboat, awesome Chinese barbeque with all the staff from the sailing team that Will’s friend Tom works for, who looked after us so well while we were there.

Qinhuangdao- Shenyang 5 hours with a seated ticket

Shenyang- population of 8 million people but not even worth more than half a page in our Chinese guidebook because for China, that hardly qualifies it as large (Beijing has 20 million).

Highlights- Celebrating Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day, Imperial Palace, Museum about the September 18^th invasion by Japan, going around asking a grumpy shop assistant how much lots of items in a shop were worth before realising that it was a 10kuai store.

Shenyang-Tonghua overnight 10 hours train hard sleeper ticket

Tonghua- there is nothing in Tonghua. We had some dumplings for breakfast and were stared at a bit.

Highlights…

Tonghua-Baihe 9 hours seated ticket

The slowest train ever, stopping at the most insignificant stations I have ever seen. One was literally just a house, with nothing around it for miles. No one was there, but still a half an hour break was clearly necessary. The scenery was stunning as we were going through the mountains and the leaves were changing colour, but once you have been watching said scenery for about 6 hours you end up a bit jaded about it and just want to get off the train. 

Tomorrow I am off to camp on an unrestored area of the Great Wall, and I'll let you know what that's like when I get back!