Travelling south through Shandong and Jiangsu provinces. China in Winter: barren, polluted, dusty and dry. Went to Jinan first, in the west, before turning south to head to Nanjing. Highlights: some conversation with the guy next to me, who later politely corrected a few things; also listening to The Vines + Cut Copy as I travel through China.
The super fast Z93 express train that took me from Shandong to Nanjing in 8 hours. I'd heard horror stories about the discomfort of Chinese trains before I left Korea but wanted to try them nevertheless. I ended up making 3 long-distance railway journeys while in China as well as a couple of shorter ones around the Yangtze delta. The verdict? Chinese trains are fast, efficient, clean and punctual. The overnight sleepers I took also put paid to any stories I'd heard about the Chinese being unbearable travelling partners. True, purchasing the tickets can be a time-consuming and stressful experience, but once you are in your seat and watching the landscape zip by at up to 330 km/h, you'll inevitably ask yourself the question "why can't my country do this?"
At Qingdao Railway Station, I was tense. "Take a spare padlock," people had said. "Lock the zips of your backpack together." I sat in the soviet-inspired waiting room no. 4, complete with chandeliers, and flipped through my Mandarin phrasebook while waiting for the boarding call for the 10:30am Z93 bound for Shanghai. "Don't stick out too much," I told myself. "Don't look like a traveller. Don't stand up. Also, that black beanie ain't fooling anyone."
A group of boys in their early 20s constantly looked over and made comments to each other, then one of them looked as if he were selected and would advance toward me before losing his nerve and returning to the group. "Here it is; watch your things," I told myself. My paranoia toward these young chaps was mounting so much that I'd discounted friendly interaction with anyone else. So when a different young bloke approached me from the other side, just wanting to chew the fat before we boarded the train, I met his friendly "Hello, do you mind if I sit here?" with "Who are they?" gesturing at the first group. He shrugged and commenced his repertoire of questions for foreign travellers:
1 Where you from?
2 How old are you?
3 You married?
4 Why not?
5 Why you travel alone?
6 You no get lonely?
How can I? People interrupt me from my Lonely Planet Mandarin Phrasebook everywhere in order to ask these questions. I'm thinking of getting my responses laminated on a card and hanging it around my neck:
1 A small town near Sydn... oh, never mind - Australia, the kangaroo place
2 30
3 No
4 Women don't like me very much
5 We're in Asia champ, there is no such thing as "alone"
6 Yes but your women are quite affordable
He was a nice young bloke with decent English. Still, he got nothing from me but the prickliness of a paranoid Australian traveller who'd finally gotten around to reading his copy of the government's smarttraveller brochure. I was suitably humbled when, shortly before boarding the train, he moved away and sat alone with his suitcases.
On the train I'd loosened up and was chatting with the young engineer from Wuhan beside me. "How old are you? Where are you from? Are you married?" I asked him. Perfectly normal questions for someone wanting to know a little more about someone.
"Do you want some bread?" Please say yes. I'd been curious about this stuff called mantou, a flavourless, cheap but very filling Chinese bread often found at street markets, and so had bought some on the way to the station. Despite purchasing the smallest bag I could find, it was clear I'd need a family to help me finish the stuff. Two huge domes of scarcely-baked dough stared out at me from the clear plastic bag like a massive pair of nipple-less mammaries on one of those fetish websites that I never look at. Now that you've spilt your cup noodles all over the carriage you must take some, surely. He didn't. Saving face? Maybe I wasn't insistent enough. I'm not very good at that. If someone says "no," I usually assume they mean "no," but that's the way I was raised. Not all cultures have the same behavioural protocol. We reached Nanjing and he took me to the subway. More random kindness. The Chinese were growing on me.
Finding the hostel would have been so simple if I'd just followed the directions that I'd copied down from the hostel website. Instead, at Sanshanjie St exit 4, the uncertainty set in. "Maybe that's the big streetsign? I'd better check what's up at the intersection. Oh there's a canal down there. That might be the canal that the directions referred to. Lemme just check the map. Yeah, that's where I am now, so if I follow this street I'll be there in 10 minutes." Of course, I was walking in the opposite direction. I then walked in the right direction for a half an hour and even peered in the window of the hostel as the ground floor was a bookshop/cafe before moving on and asking for directions from the rival hostel, which I'd found first. I then left that hostel, thankyou thankyou, and, in an unnecessary anxious hurry, plowed into a young Chinese girl. More apologies. I feel stupid and I hate Nanjing. I checked in and Michelle walked past my dormitory door. We went sight-seeing and I forgot everything.
The Fuzi Temple area of Nanjing at night is much neon, waterway, and tourists saying things like "can you take a picture of me in front of the neon dragon and waterway?"
The next day, a comfortable and very fast train whizzed us through the Yangtze delta area from Nanjing to the canal city of Suzhou. This city is popular with Chinese tourists for having preserved the ancient waterways which once would have (how's that for alliteration?) transported goods and important people back and forth. Suzhou is known for its beauty and in the softly falling snow of mid January it was indeed a beautiful sight. The Chinese have a saying that goes something like "in the sky there is heaven, on earth there is Suzhou" as a paean to the wonders of this "town" (population 6 million).
The canals of Suzhou by day and by night. The street our hostel was on was mercifully closed to anything but pedestrian and bicycle traffic. As a result, our part of town was characterised by a kind of atmosphere which I imagine had persisted for centuries.
We set no agenda in Suzhou and so easily slipped into this atmosphere by wandering the streets and going in and out of museums as we liked. The Kunqu Opera Museum was a find, particularly as we had the place to ourselves and enjoyed the company of an unusually jovial guard, but for me the highlight was the Art and Craft Museum of Suzhou. Photography was forbidden, but I'd taken a few snaps before I learnt of this, including a few of the Buddhist images which had been painstakingly carved into the elephant tusks below. The tusks themselves stood at the entry to the museum, facing each other, making for a very impressive entrance. Each room was filled with some of the most exquisite and precious objects I've ever seen. Chinese tourism is mostly about things on the scale of the Great Wall and the Terracotta Army - granted, they do "big" things very well - but discovering the small Suzhou Art and Craft museum was all the more rewarding given that we just happened to stumble upon it as we walked into town.
I'll pick up the story next time upon my arrival in Shanghai, after I lose my bloody train ticket and therefore have to go back into Suzhou at night in order to buy another one. The start of the second half - and best part of the trip - is still at least one week away, when I head out to Xian and things become a little more rewarding. In the meantime there are some terrific pictures of Shanghai and some jaw dropping prices to pay, as well as an encounter with some acrobats that leaves me vowing to never drink or abuse my body in any way again.
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