2010-10-10

Catch-up

So where were we?

The 1st full day in Suzhou was spent in pursuit of a wedding dress for Ruth. We skipped off to the train station first to get tickets for Becka and I to Shanghai later in the week. There were ticket machines and these were negotiated safely before heading back and choosing the "bus perminal" over the "taxi stano". We were aiming for 虎丘, huqiu, Tiger Hill which is famed for its dresses but all the buses seemed to go all around the city before going there. In the end we found one which seemed to be only a couple of stops away. 40 minutes later, and a ride back past our hotel, we arrived...

First impressions of Tiger Hill were that it looked a bit shit really. The pavement slabs were all broken, the road was dusty and the shops all were shabby. However we pressed on, undaunted.

Let me say now, there are a lot of wedding dresses on Tiger Hill. A lot. However we did not find one for Ruth in the end as it soon became apparent that Chinese tastes differ from the English. They like big, and white, and fluffy, and sequined, and glittery and FABULOUS. Ruth, a typical English Rose, was after something simple and elegant and that ain't happening in China... I tried one on in the end. It was so big I could barely lift it and I needed an old-fashioned hoop skirt :D It had a massive train as well.

I found a wedding dress made of camounflage material. Who would wear that?

We quit for lunch and I happily had one of my mince burger thingies and the other two ordered noodles. This was when we encountered a small but crucial difference between standard Mandarin and the local accent used here. They pronounce sh- like s- so when Becka asked how much her noodles were they said what sounded like "si" which means 4. But what they meant was "shi" which means 10. So the bill was larger than expected lol.

I wanted a 旗袍, qipao- Chinese style dress, so we had a little hunt. I tried a few on and quite liked them. An annoying trait of Chinese customer service is that the assistants come in the changing room with you. I don't particularly like having a total stranger ogling me while I'm getting changed. I found a couple that I liked but did not buy in the end as figured would try more later. Then Ruth felt ill so we decided to head back. This was easier said then done :P We had the idea of hailing a taxi but as there was a park at the top of the hill as well as all the shops, there were a lot of people wanting only a few taxis. We spent a long while trailing up and down continually being beaten to the precious cars whilst being followed by men waving keys parroting "hello" and "taxi" at us. This is annoying. The buses were stupidly full and none of us felt like squishing on to one. In the end we walked down the hill and back towards the centre. We walked like a mile or two until I managed to catch a taxi and we could travel back in comfort.

When we arrived back Kit, a graduate from Edinburgh last year in Chinese and who is working in Nanjing, arrived to meet us. We were being very naughty and he was staying in our room as he couldn't afford to get one all to himself. We went to an Italian for dinner and I had one of the nicest spag bogs I've ever eaten plus a rather tasty banana split. That night I slept on the floor of our room in my sleeping bag and Kit had the bed- I didn't mind as mattresses here are so hard there isn't really a difference plus it meant I wouldn't pay very much for the room.

However the next day I woke up Ill. I got as far as Starbucks with the guys for breakfast and then limped home with a fever. I got back and the key didn't work. This was because they block your room unless you have paid for the day but they don't ask for your money in advance so you get back and you can't get in... After a zombie trip to pay up and back the cleaner appeared and showed me how to work the curtains and wear the slippers. It was very nice of her but I was just wishing her to leave... Then she did and I passed out face first in a pillow for the entire day. The others hired bikes and cycled all around Suzhou :(

Suzhou is very interesting as it feels a lot more like a town than a city. The buildings are brick and small and in a chinese style. The roads are small and there are lots of little alleyways. Suzhou is on the delta of the Yangtze River so there are hundreds of little waterways and pools all over the town. As Ruth said, "it's the Venice of China. Except it's not Venice".  All of this makes the town feel like a nice place to be in. All the little alleways with tiny shops selling jade contributed a lovely Chinese feel that is lacking from the bigger Hangzhou and Qingdao. I was very annoyed to miss exploring it for shivering in bed.

In the evening the others went to the cinema to see some "truly awful" Hong Kong film which, interestingly, the guy sat near me in Starbucks is now watching on his laptop. It's a small world...

The next day Becka and I said farewell and headed off to Shanghai. One thing they do better here is trains. It was clean, comfy and fast. Very fast. They kept showing the speed and although I didn't notice it until we were slowing down, we were still going at over 200kph. A lot faster than anything goes, or will go for about 20 years, in the UK.

We arrived in Shanghai. Becka felt shit and I felt shit but we staggered through the subway system and ended up at our hotel in 豫园, Yu Gardens. Yu Gardens is an area of traditional style buildings full of shops, shops and more shops. They sell everything. We didn't do much that day but the next we headed out with our cash to see what we could get. I finally found size 42 shoes and bought these monstrosities which I would never wear in the UK- they are covered in embroidery and decorations. Great for China though :P. I tried on some more qipao but wasn't feeling in the mood so didn't get one. By this point I had also completely lost my voice so was relying on Becka to translate my mouthed english. I think the assistants thought I was special...

I also bought some jade earrings ("normally these are 400, I give them to you for 350"me:"i'll give you 200") and deliberated over some chopsticks for dad's birthday but then decided they were too boring. We looked at some traditional chinese instruments as well as endless statues of jade. There were a lot of laowai in Yu Gardens and I hadn't seen any for so long I was staring at them like a Chinese person :P

We bought some haagen-daaz ice cream to sooth my throat. It was very expensive but soooo good. Although Becka got very cross when the server couldn't understand our order (confusion over how many scoops we wanted).

Then we asked a policeman where to get credit for Becka's phone and he took us to a complex underground. This was virtually deserted, in contrast to up above, and intriguingly was stuffed with shops full of what looked like basically loot. Some of it did look pilfered from some ancient tomb. The stuff down here wasn't shiny but bizarrely authentic. There was a shop selling things from the 50s such as old posters and pamphlets. Another was full of artefacts from the Miao minority, a people in southern China. Becka bought some hairpins here. I ended up buying a bronze statue of a horse. Mostly because it was originally 600 and when I was actually saying no I don't want it what would I do with a bronze statue of a horse the shop owner eventually said I could have it for 250 and, well, I did. I like it.

This is the point I racistly moan about Americans. With other Laowai I pass in the street they could be French, English, Swedish or even South African for all I know. If they are speaking, it will be too quiet for me to understand. I have spent the past hour trying to eavesdrop some laowai 4m away at a table and have only just decided they are speaking French. But with Americans... They will be walking down the middle of whatever street they are on, no matter how big/small. They will be speaking very loudly saying how it's all probably just junk and way overpriced and to just offer "like, 10 bucks or something". They will be wearing shorts, sandals and a hat. They will be clutching a rucksack to their belly very tightly so that a dastardly native won't pull it off them. And they will be around twice as big as the rest of us. Seriously, being here throws into perspective quite how huge some Westerners are. It's gross that a 40yr old American who should be in their prime is just a bag of lard. The whole effect is just embarrassing. Why can't they just be normal? Why do they dress like they are hiking in the Wild West when they are in a cosmopolitan city?

It annoys me.

As we both felt ill Becka and I retreated back to the room for a lie down. In the evening we scraped ourselves together and went to the Bund. The Bund is basically the riverfront here. Becka wasn't overly impressed as it is "just like Liverpool". All the buildings are indeed in a neo-classical style. I liked the Bund. The river either had very brightly lit pleasure boats (the Chinese like neon) or eerily dark freight boats slipping through. On one side were these fantasticly futuristic buildings and on the other a reminder of the colonial past.

We headed down it in search of the "food court" but this proved elusive so we crossed a bridge and headed into the nearest restaurant in search, basically, of mash potato. This one was the restaurant of a hotel which turned out to have quite a history. It was called the Astor Hotel and had been the first western-owned hotel in Shanghai. Einstein and Ulysses S. Grant and stayed here, as had Chiang Kai-Shek when he was on the run. It was all in the art-deco style and suddenly I got a taste of what it must have been like in Shanghai in the 1920s. This was when the city was very glamorous and the rich would be dressed up with fancy hairstyles while the men in sharp suits smoked cigarettes. You realise that China actually had style at this point and that it did once have a fragile opportunity to be somewhere...refined. Then it was all destroyed as China tore itself apart in the following decades. It made me sad to think that whilst China is modernising now, it is all money, money, money. Noone cares about culture or aesthetics.

I had leg of lamb. It came with mash and gravy. I nearly cried.

We walked back but encountered the intriguing phenomenon that if you walk in a line from A to B and then walk back along that line from B, you will not find A. In the end we gave up and got a taxi.

The next day we got the subway to the airport. We went in the wrong direction at first but soon ended up where we wanted. We had a little bit of excitement when checking in as they spotted Becka's new metal, relic sword in my large rucksack. On the x-ray it was pretty obvious it was a sword but they had me get it out so they could check the metal pointy thing was indeed a metal pointy thing. Then we went through security and they were a bit bemused by all Becka's hairpins as they looked pretty deadly. However they were allowed through and we caught the plane back. I was a bit worried going up as the plane made an odd noise and had a fairly bumpy ascent but I realised I was being arrogant for not trusting a Chinese plane and pilot. The pilot in the end, performed one of the smoothest landings I've ever had so that proves me wrong.

And home!! Lovely, lovely Qingdao :D Although annoyingly the month's worth of internet I bought had run out so when I was dying to skype people I could only poke the "diagnose problem" button dejectedly. Boo.

My bamboo plant must have been feeling depressed as it had jumped out of its pot onto the floor. I rescued it and half-drowned it in water but we shall see if it pulls through.

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