Hello again! I forgot to mention in my last blog that social networking sites like Facebook and blogsites such as this one are verboten in China. I popped down to an Internet café during my first 24 hours in Shanghai, paid 3.5 yuan for an hour, and sat down among all the young dudes playing games on computers, only to discover this.So my blog is being cut and pasted and then posted on my behalf. Welcome to China!
My newsagent back home said she fled the crowds, the pollution and the “lack of freedom”. I guess it’s this kind of stuff that she’s talking about.
We’ve certainly experienced the crowds for ourselves and they’re legendary, but weirdly manageable; a pall of polluted grey sky is almost omnipresent and yet my sinus problems, thankfully, have almost totally disappeared; while the lack of freedom doesn’t affect foreigners overly, except for the excessive tracking of our movements with passport photocopying wherever we go.
But hey, at least I can read the Sydney Morning Herald on-line. I did briefly in my first 24 hours, but have been relentlessly busy since then sightseeing and what-have-you. Like all holidaymakers the world over, the world you leave behind becomes increasingly irrelevant as the days pass.
Here I am, in a fairly grotty so-called three-star hotel in Nanjing, where Japanese massacred 300,000 Chinese in the early 20th century, and cousin Jennifer and I are having a laugh a minute. We strolled in light rain to the supermarket last night to get our yoghurt (“swan-eye”), wasabe biscuits, bottled water and white rabbit lollies and then bought a whole lot of DVDs for dirt-cheap. I’m rather excited about watching Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor again now that I am in the land of dynasties… these are Qing, Hung, Sang Guo, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, Qing, in that order, spanning a modest 4,500 years. Sometimes as our car weaves through villages, I feel like I’m in Italy, traversing countryside that has seen so much joy, tragedy, hardship, pageantry, harvesting, toil….China, whatever you feel about it, is steeped in centuries of history and that gives voyagers a sense of something Buddhist… you cannot help but sense the insignificance of individual considerations in the broader context of nations fighting ideologies, pestilence, famine, neighbouring warlords
I love the sayings in China and the constant allusions to legends. After Shanghai, we visited a very beautiful city, Hangzhou, (pronounced “Hung-jo”) and visited this magnificent lake about the size of two Centennial Parks. Bordered on three sides by lush greenery and on the fourth by the city skyline, the lake is dotted with islands, pagodas and bridges built hundreds of years ago.
“A lake viewed in sunny weather is beautiful,” our guide informed us. “But a lake viewed in the rain is even more beautiful. And a lake in the snow is the most beautiful of all.” We looked at the lake in soft brilliant sunshine (temperature 26 deg C, humidity about 65) and tried to imagine it, frozen in time, like a delicate watercolour painting, at its most picturesque.
Our guide went on to recount the legend of the golden dragon and jade phoenix who allegedly gave birth to the lake and gifted it to the people of this rich rice-bowl valley west on Shanghai. Chinese citizens often describe things romantically; poets, for example, are revered, and the ability to describe things poetically much admired.
Our two-day visit to Hangzhou was an exquisite contrast to the steroid-infused pace of Shanghai. Here, about two hours west of Shanghai, is a city renowned for its beauty. We took a wooden junk ride on the lake itself and weaved our way around willow-fringed islets, before visiting a disused Buddhist temple, Lingyin, exquisitely restored by the Chinese. In China everything is enormous in scale and this was no different – four giant ‘guardians’, two fierce, two benign, shielded a giant golden Buddha in a temple surrounded by smaller outbuildings. One contained 500 giant bronze statues of various sagi!
The following day we visited a tea plantation in picture-perfect countryside dotted with rows of tea bushes, and learnt about the antioxidant effects of green tea. After a demonstration showing what quality green tea does to rice inside one’s stomach, I’m a convert and funnily enough, since drinking loads of it daily, my stomach has settled. (I was stupid enough, momentarily, to drink a little local H20 and swiftly learned my lesson). I also purchased a canister of Dragon Well green tea, which is reputedly China’s best, enjoyed by emperors, Queen Elizabeth (who visited here) and all the top brass in Beijing.
After Buddhist temples and pagodas and verdant, natural views, we headed for Nanjing down breezy, well-built highways. All the cities have corridors of high-rise apartment blocks for kilometres… the traditional farmer houses are rarer and infinitely more picturesque than the acres of concrete, even if they do occasionally have twirly-wirly Chinese touches.
Shopping? I spent a small fortune in Shanghai, but have now calmed down. Last night I was more interested in plasters at the local chemist for all my aches and pains. Unable to understand each other, I walked away with a box of plasters that I put on my aching left shoulder/neck area (go figure) and the plaster tingled away all night. I am becoming increasingly interested, it must be said, in Chinese medicine – they talk incessantly about the importance of “balance” and “good health”.
To YOUR good health, dear friends and family, until the next time!
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