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!