Friday 24 February 2017

The Importance of Being Sincere




















Chengdu is a human city much like any other. All the city constants are here - fashion is here, just as in London or Paris. There are leather trousers everywhere, sexy boots and 'distressed' jeans, lensless glasses and bouffant barnets. Pretty, hip youngsters parade in garish patterns and wear expensive jackets with lurid docketing (like Superdry for the Chinese - examples include MY EX DIED and DON'T WORRY, WE ALL DIE ALONE), there are old, haggard street-people hocking loogies onto the pavement; there are juniors gobbing incongruously between glances at their phones. Phones are everything. They watch you just as they listen to each other. Kids lollop about glued to luminescence, parents trailing them along by a thumb.


People are active. They are also everywhere. Street food vendors line narrow roads and churn out all hustle and bustle. Everyone is different - noisy, quiet, boisterous, timid, grotesque, refined - all nestled among architectural & societal & cultural contradictions. The city is oxymoronic. Stalls sell frogs' legs and chilli squid alongside dried kiwis and skinned pineapples, bulbous wooden instruments and chariots made of sugar. 

WeChat is god. It is social media profiling, instant messaging, filesharing, video chat, timeline, group conversations, it is scanning for a bike ride, paying for your taxi, it is your credit card, your face, your identity, your geo-mapped position and your way of communicating with everybody - friends, family, students, bosses, companies, yourself



The Metro is a recent addition to the city and is gorgeous. It is more navigable than the London Underground for an English speaker. Metro TV, bag searches, glowing arrows on the ground, flashing lights and screens and the future. Meanwhile, the busses wheeze like bloated locusts through the streets pumping dust and fumes into car windows. 

Rabbit head, duck head, chicken feet, pig trotters & snouts, lambs' ears, squid and frogs' legs are all available at a dime a dozen, shimmering with oil and flecked with chilli. At a hot-pot restaurant everything is available - intestines, brains, fish innards, offal of all shapes and sizes, some peachy pink, others maroon red. Personally I have seen very few selfie-sticks for sale (weird) though possibly a million in action. 

People are largely unabashed by social etiquette details which grind Englanders' gears: proximity, being watched, spitting, eating with gusto (and I mean muchos pep), etc. Everything is honest, as it comes; you know where you stand. There are very few thank yous and, as far as I know, there is no way of saying please in Mandarin. Does language sculpt a national character or vice versa? What came first, the chicken feet or the steamed egg? Who the flip knows. Noam, LAD - I choose you!



Eerily, the folk await -
the music sucks you in;
and if you choose to take the train,
it's madness that you'll win.

Tuesday 21 February 2017

Wǒ zài zhōngguó!

China is a murky and mysterious place. Everywhere you turn, you feel like you are looking at the world in a different angle. It's hard to see past the horizon because of all the innocent rain clouds.


Mist lends the world an uncompromising aspect. Apparently China's rivers are cleaner than anyone else's - maybe that's why they say you can't drink the water. It's because it's too clean. 

So clean, in fact, that if you were to gulp it down like you would 'western' water, or W.W., you would have superpowers. You would be able to harness all the latent energy of the surrounding hills and roll out skyscrapers at the same rate as the Communist Party. No such party wants anyone doing that...



As far as I can tell, they've nicked a lot of their ideas from other places. It's a hodge-podge land of pointillist pastiche. If only Calvino could see it, he'd run blades down the walls of his leafy house and piss himself silly.

They put temples on bridges and bridges on temples. My glasses reach from my temples to the bridge of my nose, but what's that got to do with anything. Let's take a closer look at that bridge, shall we? 



Perfect.



Incongruity doesn't stop at the riverside, but pervades all parts of the city. Dinosaurs leap from scribbled homes and gnash their hideous molars at passers-by, in search of stray noodles and a comfortable place to sit.



In their defence, the locals hide all their armchairs under stripes - the one pattern carnivorous dinos can't abide. Give them houndstooth over stripes ANY DAY of the gosh darn week.



This is where all the washed up double-deckers get recycled into Young Persons' institutes. These centres, operated predominantly by young persons, churn out balloons and robots (that's traffic lights) like nobody's business. 



Contrasts abound in the city of Chengdu.



Look here, they even stole bloody Shangri-La! And no one's doing anything about it! This building may look rather staid from the outside, but I assure you, on the inside it's a bonanza, with cantankerous veins carrying only fun to its heart. Glass equals mayhem, chaps.




This is the actual lake from A Midsummer Night's Dream, a play by a group of writers who went by one name. It is alleged that the algae which live in this lake subsist largely on the delicious proverbs tossed languorously into its waters by morning strollers. If nothing else, the proverbs here are abundant. 

"Lower branches will be cut off"
"Do not defecate indiscriminately"

They eke profundity through every pore.



There is so much water hanging in the sky (those innocent clouds) that people collect it with giant nets and squeeze it into buckets, whence they retrieve it with slithery brushes and paint shapes onto the ground. Here are some shapes.



And a shape-drawer, for your perusal.



Odd red fruits grow on the trees. They are as inedible as their juice is indelible, so you'd better watch out. The locals hang them from the sky in order to ensure good fortune (and to prank fools who walk under them by unleashing a world of slime onto their unsuspecting heads). I will never fall foul of such trickery - I know wassup.



Here is a mongoose who was dripped on by a red fruit. She or he longs to end his burnt-orange captivity. Maybe I can wield this stick and thwack those who look upon me, he or she thinks. 



Those bastards got two of us. Hang on, Derek, I think I've got a plan. Do that magic trick which turns us both bigger and more cuddly. I love that one.



Whoa, Derek! Here we go!



Pandas really do just lie around. They are the captains of chill. Bamboo makes them lazy - bamboo is all they'll eat (except American pandas, which eat biscuits???) - therefore, they are super lazy. 



Do you ever see a hench panda? Or a fidgety panda? If you were to remark on their posture, what would you say? THEY HUNCH. 



They get stuck, and it's no one's business but theirs. Honestly, they are totally ridiculous beasts with nothing going for them but their style and pizzazz which, fortunately for them, they have in abundance. Therefore they get my vote.   




Just a couple more pictures of them because I took some and didn't know how to decide which ones to show to the internet, because at the end of the day if you want to look at pandas then you can use a search engine (please, for the love of the earth, do not use Bing) and conjure all kinds of cuddly panda treats. 



There was a lantern festival which was as absurd as everything else. Giant glowing animals and nothing in moderation. 



Shortly after taking this picture, the dinosaur with the hat mauled a small boy, rendering him unable to walk. The crowd just gawked. They just gawked.



Enough stupid words, just imagine yourself walking down this glowing corridor and FEEL LIKE US. Welcome to China.



So, on a serious note, a traditional Sichuanese artform is that of the changing faces. Legend has it that one in every 4000 Sichuanese children are born with the innate ability to shift their entire visage in the blink of an eye. These children attend special preparatory schools which train them in the strange art. By the time they are 18, they are expected to have developed a routine involving no fewer than eight faces. If they cannot live up to the standard, they are culled and replaced with younger, fresher boys and girls. 



Hot-pot, or huǒ guō, is a dish best served hot, unlike revenge, and turkey, and ICE KREM.


Thus far, I have gone for hot-pot only with this group of people, and isn't it funny to realise that all the boys have beards and none of the girls do? EXCEPT ON THE CUSHIONS. Take note.

Here we have, in order from left to right, me (with the t-shirt and thin-rimmed spectacles), Dan who likes eggs, Toni whose knees resemble her toes, Sam who wants to be a fireman, Flora who fawns, and Bella who does awesome tricks with her gilet. We are not known collectively by any name, so if you have any suggestions, please leave them in my pigeonhole.




This is a picture of my room for the next few months, for anyone who came here to actually get an idea of what I'm up to and how I'm doing and feels at all put out by the silly gubbins above. 

France family, maybe you will recognise the throw which adorns my bed? Yes, you do!



I live next door to Sophie, who is also from Torquay! We occupy adjacent rooms in the International Exchange Hotel, so if you'd like to send either of us a care package, letter of love or any other item then I'd be happy to share our address with you personally. 

Our rooms are just a stone's throw from a big alley. I ate a squid there two days ago and have a picture to prove it! The picture is on Sophie's phone camera, my word is my bond.





This post was a while in the making. Why? Ask China.

Ask the great firewall of China.



G'night! / Zài jiàn!
Much love to yall x