This morning I crawled out of bed determined to spend my Sunday morning doing something healthy. I at last decided to climb 浮山,Fushan, which may or may not mean Floating Mountain... It's the high ridge of peaks behind my campus that is not quite as large or impressive as Laoshan but still still quite wild considering it is in the middle of a city. James, Becka's boyfriend who arrived yesterday, has brought me a camera and I was happily snapping away. To get there I walked up 青大一路, Qingdao University 1 Road, where we normally eat lunch. There are some workmen enthusiastically digging it up so I had to negociate my way past a massive gash in the road, with fairly heavy duty piping at the bottom. It still amazes me how fast they can work here in China- in the UK digging a hole as large as that would take days. Here they can do it overnight. I'm willing to bet it will all be back to normal by tomorrow! I carried on past the house where I want to live, basically a tiny concrete hut with a lake and some ducks, and picked a random path and started climbing. The one I chose was a tiny track winding off into the wood that grew increasingly overgrown as I walked. I noticed that part of the hill was terraced although the stone embankments were starting to fall down and the surfaces were long buried in undergrowth. I passed what was clearly the outline of a house underneath the tangly bushes as well. The woodland here was mostly thin, dry conifers and deciduous trees with largely open ground between them- just dry grasses and reeds.
Although there had been a lot of Chinese walkers at the beginning, once I left the main road and started on my track I was completely alone, just me and several butterflies.
At this point I wondered if there were any big scary things still wandering around in China these days.
I think it is the natural instinct of a human, when walking alone, to start to get the heeby-jeebies- however ridiculous that is! It's interesting how I have never needed to watch out for predators my entire life and yet something in the back of mind is ready, just in case, with a pricked ear. And coming across a mound of feathers didn't reassure me... My track led down a gully and then turned up a ridge and I was back on slightly more open ground, with human shoeprints in the dust and I stopped twitching at every rustle.
I just carried on along picking random paths which varied from dust to scrambling over rocks until I eventually arrived at the ridge at the top. My arrival caused an immediate hush in the Chinese at the top, before they started talking again. Except two who started whispering instead. I still find it odd how eternally surprised the Chinese are to see a white person.
Although it was, as ever, smoggy I could now see Qingdao both sides of the mountain and a teeny smudge of the sea. The sea-side part is much the nicer with the old town and the more fancily designed skyscrapers. The other side is just row after row of slightly decaying high-rise blocks. And a random giant, golden-domed mosque. This when I saw how Qingdao, which has a relatively small surface area, could contain such a mass as 7 million people. The numbers are so big in China it's impossible to comprehend what it must be like to be one person in so so many. You must feel like such a small fish in such a large pond! The entire population of the UK could move to China and it would barely cause a ripple. They abort the equivalent of two times the population of Scotland in foetuses here per year alone.
After a while I headed back down, slipping and sliding much to the amusement of some Chinese who told me to be careful, proudly in English. Eventually I reached the bottom, past a reservoir with a sign saying "washing clothes is not permitted" and several Chinese women doing just that, past a farmhouse with chickens and a vegetable patch-I want to live there so badly- and home.
In the afternoon, Becka, Nick, James and I headed off to see a man about appearing in their commercial for the Guangzhou games. White people make these things look better. Kenton, the scout who found us, said that the agency would also ask us to other bits and bobs of work which is welcome as you can earn quite a bit for not much. This commercial pays us 600元- 1000元 if I wear a bikini apparently...
This article irritated me so much:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/23/china-west-expansionist-influence
In it the author shows every classic Western misapprehension and misunderstanding about China. I bet the author's never been near China in his life. And it shows the classic depiction of the protest of Tiananmen Square in 1989 as pro-democracy innocent students Good People Fighting the Machine when it was nothing of the sort. Awful piece of journalism.
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