Chinese oddities/2 - Guangdong and Yunnan, China

- One yuan coins are often given as change in Eastern China but are hard to spot in the west - e.g. Yunnan province - where only one yuan banknotes are used instead.

- At Kunming airport a girl hangs on to the hand and the laptop case of a guy, kneeling and sliding on the floor as if she was holding a skilift, yelling "I won't let you go...I woooooon't let you gooooooo!", while the guy - visibly upset and embarrassed - walks from counter to counter with that unusual, wiggling and noisy luggage on tow, alternating polite conversations with the airlines' employees - who try to pretend nothing is going on and often stare blankly at something else - and wild screams toward the girl. Now and then they stop arguing and start to hit each other for a few seconds, then they argue again and finally the man will head to another counter, always dragging the girl whose rubber soles slide on the smooth airport lounge floor. A friend of hers talks on the phone while people are watching the scene in silence, until a cop arrives and takes them to the local station.

She's her lover? He owes her money? She wants that laptop? She's blackmailing him? I'll never know what that was about...but it was a fun way to kill time before the check-in counters opened.

- After she has checked me into the Kunming-Bangkok flight, the airline employee says: "Please sit down there and wait for the immigration counters to open"

"...ah, and when will they open?"

"When the officers are on duty"

"...no, I mean..." What do i mean? How do I explain it? "Well...alright...yeah sure, thanks..."

- The Chinese city of Guangzhou has its own version of the fake Buddhist monks: they hang around the square in front of Guangxiao temple, they hand people some cardboard charms and ask them to donate ridiculously huge sums of money (read about the Kuala Lumpur phonies here).

- The local authorities in Kunming (which is not even a major Chinese city) have decided to create a new town out of the city center. Government buildings and university campuses (many times as big as the old ones) are being moved there.

- Supermarkets, shops and some restaurants run out of iodized salt for a few days due to the panic induced by the Fukushima nuclear plants radiation threat.

- The rubbish bins at the Green Lake in Kunming automatically open their doors and wish you good luck after you dispose of your litter.

Read "Chinese oddities/1" here

Welcome to China: in just 24 hours - Guandong, China

The closed pedestrian bridge in Guangzhou

Chinese oddities. They can amuse even one that used to live in China, he just needs to come back after having being away for a few years.

- My luggage is x-rayed at the Hong Kong-China border check point. It's just the first step of a long sequence of scans: Chinese authorities really love those x-rays machines.

- People are shoving about and jumping the queue at the immigration desk...some Chinese can love this even better than x-rays.
- The immigration officer asks people to remove their hair from the foreheads and then nervously, suspiciously, repetitively and perplexedly scrutinizes their passport photos.
- A long queue and an application form to fill in order to exchange HKD 1000 into RMB, which I could have done in Hong Kong in one minute hadn't I underestimated the dark side of the Chinese bureaucracy.
- I am ripped off when I buy a local SIM card, not a big deal though, as the girl who served me was very nice indeed. Niceness can also have a price here.
- More luggage x-rays at the Shenzhen train station entrance. We already know that they love x-rays.
- On the train a committee is formed to assign the seat numbers. The fact that the numbers were already written on the tickets doesn't seem to be very important at this stage.
- Even though everyone has already been assigned their seats (at the ticket counter first and by the train passengers committee later on) people keep standing, moving about and yelling for the whole length of the trip.
- A maze of fences has been built at Guangzhou station square: you need to walk for about one kilometer to reach a hotel that is two hundred meters away.
- The staff at the hotel reception is very grumpy: even though I'm paying cash for my room I feel like I am being done a favor.
- The nearest metro entrance to the hotel is closed, and the ticket vending machines are out of service.
- The hotel was recently renovated (and the prices are four times as high as last time I was here) but here and there you can still spot a few messy leftovers from the old structure: the wood of the toilet door is rotten, there is an old stain on the wall near a piece of furniture, some aged scratches on the mopboard...
- Social networks and blogs are censored (that's why I'm publishing this post so late).
- The grumpy hotel employees manage to get even grumpier when I ask if they have a map of the city. Of course besides being treated like a beggar I don't manage to get one.
- Out of the metro and into the night, I'm suddenly overwhelmed by a terrible whiff...it could be rubbish, maybe sewage or even excrements, but after few seconds I remember that smell: it's stinking tofu, surprisingly edible food!
- The hotel employees raise the magnitude of their grumpiness to level three when I ask the whereabouts of the nearest ATM machines...the answer is: "at the square!" Unfortunately Guangzhou railway station square is one of the most complex examples of urban architecture in the world...it's as if they had answered: "Somewhere out there, not too far and not too near..."
- Those ATM machines can really help you with a lot of interesting functions and services, except giving money of course.
- A group of girls are waiting for the metro standing on the area reserved for the alighting passengers. They have a point though, as they manage to board the train before the passenger who were waiting on the designated boarding area.
- Near Guangzhou East railway station a pedestrian bridge is closed. Unfortunately you find that out only when you're already on top, after having climbed a few dozens steps.
- Some rich guy with a fancy foreign car accesses a pedestrian area and honks at people so that they get out of the way. The bigger the mightier: everybody knows that...in China, that is.

Pastime thoughts/12

Photo by Kevin Eddy (CC)

- The cowl doesn't make the monk, it's true...but it can disguise a fake one very well indeed.

- After much thinking I finally got it: you're in an open relationship when your bedroom door has come off its hinges.

- Being ordinary is not a fault...provided that one doesn't make a fool of himself by trying his best to appear an outstanding person.

- Fortunately I'm continuously reminded by others of how sad my condition as a single is: in fact when I am alone I never think about it.

- Some people must think that having fun is an evil act. They always seem to need some kind of excuse to get involved: charity events, theme concerts, demonstrations, web based initiatives, pseudo-political activities. I might be immature, vain, a careless selfish, but I don't need a pretext to have some fun without sense of guilt.

Read more thoughts here

Semi-nomad - Bangkok, Thailand

Tibetan nomad, by falsalama (CC)

After renting it for two years I've left my apartment and got back to the semi-nomadic kind of life that I had embarked on ten years ago. I left the few home appliances that I possess at a friend's place, I packed my books, records and some objects I am fond of and shipped them to Italy, I sorted a few cloths, underwear and accessories that would fill two backpacks - a large one and a small one - I got rid of the remainder and went back to my old, rather random sequence of rooms in hotels, guest houses, places of friends', acquaintances' or almost unknown hosts and accommodation provided by some client - when I have a training course to teach, of course. I keep the clothes that I use for work in a separate bag, which I store in a private checkroom in between job contracts.
Once again I'm released, unsteady element, perpetually migrating bird, creeper without grip, pre-agricultural humanoid, uncoupled wagon, drifting lifeboat.
After having handed back the key and received my deposit I felt like when, two times in the past - actually two and a half (*) - I resigned from a permanent job, holding in my hand not a contract with another company but a ticket for a long trip instead. As if I had finally exhaled after having held my breath for a while, my chest finally relaxed and my heart floating into it, delicate and light, in complete freedom. Without knowing what to think when people were telling me that I had to be crazy and I was not feeling a thing about it.
Of course the fact that I don't have a family counts a lot. If I had it I wouldn't be able to perform this kind of stage tricks, or pricks. But the world is full of other singles like me, choked by the concern of being left without a job, without stability, without prospects, frightened by the specter of precariousness, without even a wife or kids as a pretext. On the other hand it looks like I am after all this, rather unconsciously, without plans or strategies, not so much out of fun as of necessity. I haven't had a long term job for a long time, I often don't have a job at all, and the one I manage to make a living with might slip out of my hands at any time.
I don't know what the prospect of a pension is. On top of that now I don't even have an address.
Anyway the ones I've listed are my only symptoms, other than that I'm feeling good. What ailment do I suffer from?

(*) The half time refers to when I was in Singapore and was offered the extension of a contract that I had expressly asked to be a fixed-term one. I politely thanked and declined.

A piece of soul - Singapore

Old Singapore

What do we feel when we look at the pictures of a place that we know, when the images date back to when we were not yet born? I can still remember what I felt the first time I saw some old pictures of Singapore. I looked at them, changed angle and read the caption: a comment, a date and the name of a place that I knew but couldn't recognize. My curiosity aroused, I returned to those places, convinced that I had missed something, because of carelessness or bad choice of the point of view. Roads, quarters, squares, bridges, wharves: the names had remained the same, anything else was unrecognizable. I could place myself behind a column, stare at the view for minutes trying to get hold of some half-hidden detail, but there was no way to bringing back to life the foreshortened image of the photo, sometimes not even in part.

It's true that the same thing would happen pretty much everywhere if one looked at a sixty-year-old picture, but in Singapore the concept of restyling has been pushed to a level that might have never been reached anywhere else. Demolitions, renovation and restoration works, planning, experimentations, regulations, standardization, all this with only one goal in mind: the realization of a vision. The one of a hyper-modern, hi-tech, functional, organized, controlled, clean, safe, ordered city. And as none of these qualities has something to do with the past (actually they are all its children, but they don't need it anymore...ungrateful offspring), the heritage of that past has been ignored. Therefore anything that was not an obstacle has been molded and reshaped to meet the new requirements, whereas what was seen as a hindrance was removed outright. As a consequence the city-state has inevitably lost its character, got rid of a piece of soul, thinking perhaps that it could live off the body alone. The aseptic veil and the sophistication are things that you can see not only on buildings, restaurants and streets: you inhale them with the air you breathe, they brush against your face when you turn at a corner or cross a threshold. Singapore could have been a rich and advanced version of Rangoon, Malacca, Goa, Luang Prabang, Phuket town, Penang, Hoian. It decided to become the copy of some city fancied by a science-fiction writer instead. An imperfect copy, as they all are. And it did so without many scruples.

Perhaps the zealous authorities do feel some remorse though, if they love to retrieve these photos and show them in public, or if they organize some nostalgic old postcards exhibitions.

That's why I advise those foreign visitors who arrive to Singapore and are amazed by its organization, cleanliness and order, but most of all by its offer of cutting edge technology, to search for those images, watch them carefully, then turn around and look out, and ask themselves whether it was worth wiping off history in order to offer the tourists this life size scale model and lots of shop-windows filled with electronic trinkets that will arrive to their cities only a couple of months later. 
As for myself, this is one of those moments when I would like one of my favorite dreams to come true: getting hold of a time machine and travel back...years...back...back...decades, to when the photographer took those shots. Even a black and white, vaguely milky world would be fine.

Catalan irony

Conversation held in Thailand between a friend of mine from Barcelona (F.) and an American backpacker (A.B.).

A.B.: Where are you from?

F.: I'm from Spain, Barcelona, and you?

A.B.: I'm from the West Coast...

F.: ahhh...the West Coast! (then, to himself): West Coast...que coño es West Coast...Portugal??? (West Coast...what the fuck is this West Coast? Portugal?!)

Worse than a widower

Photo by jcoterhals (CC)

There it is, another one who asks me whether I'm married. Well, as it often happens in Asia, he asks the question but actually means a statement: of course you are, tell me a little about your family then...And there it is: that face that he makes when he hears my answer. I keep meeting people like this, who are surprised when they find out that I don't have a wife. Worst than that actually: surprised to find out that I have never had a wife...as if been a divorcé or a widower, sad as it may be, were still a lot better than the highest form of damnation: being single.

To be honest in fact, the very institution of marriage does not completely convince me. Not in itself, of course, as it has proven to be a fundamental instrument in building solid societies and good growing environments for children. It's the mechanism as it is made available today that I find faulty, especially in the western world, even though the differences between East and West are getting narrower and narrower.

People seem to be anxious to get married because they are told that they have to, and actually it has always been like that. In the past though, besides being taught that they should marry, young people were also told that marriage would last forever. No matter how serious the problems they would have to face, no matter how close to hell life within the new family could turn, the couple had to find a way through it. Or put up with it, until death would part them. 

Nowadays newlyweds are given options to get out of it, and on top of that they are brought to think that it's not even such a bad drama, or that it is their fault for that matter...shit happens - seems to be the message - don't think too much about it, just move on. 

While I have spent a large part of my adult life as a single and I've never really got close to planning my wedding, I've seen so many friends celebrating their marriages and a few years later mourning for their failures. That's why I think that if the paradigm has changed and there is not a fairly high probability that marriage will last forever, it's better to teach young people that they shouldn't feel so anxious about it. 

Convincing them to get married just to sell more insurance policies and washing machines, knowing that many of them will split up - or even counting on selling more products after a second or a third wedding - might seem an effective way to boost consumption economy: actually it's nothing more than a moral crime. Either you promise them a stable future or you don't promise anything at all, otherwise you're not guiding them: you're only deceiving them.