As soon as we got off the train we booked out next train, to leave at 7pm the next day, giving us around thirty hours in a very grey dreary-looking Novosibirsk. The ground was covered in a layer of mud and melting snow, which made for pretty slow progress. We had no accommodation lined up so we found the accommodation agency and in the station and eventually settled on a room near the station. Fabio’s Lonely Planet said many people spoke English at the station but in fact nobody spoke a word, not so much as a single “hello”.
Our room was in a nearby apartment ran by a sweet old lady who showed us where everything was, from the shower to the spoons. I had no plan other than to call Maki as today was her birthday but I never thought it would take a total of four hours to be able to make the call. As I bounced from railway station to kiosk to post office to phone exchange, I got more and more frustrated. It seemed impossible to make an international phone call. I was constantly given wrong information and when I eventually got the right 100 roubles card, it gave me a measly eight minutes to call Tokyo. Novosibirsk was a little better than Irkustk although once again everybody still seemed to be walking around with a bottle. After a good meal in a good restaurant, I called Maki and chatted for ninety minutes since she called me back.
The next day brought a different landlady who, like most Russians I saw, couldn’t smile and would only complain. She made noises that suggested we should have checked out by 10am, even though every other place I had ever stayed at was 12pm. When I picked up my bags, having asked her if it was OK to leave them, she told me I was terrible (I recognised the Russian, which sounds something like “blockka”) and asked for a hundred roubles I fled to the station to meet Fabio there, not particularly bothered that my name in Novosibirsk was now forever muddied, just like the streets. Fabio and I developed a mantra to express our understanding of Russia so far:
“In Russia the land is hard, the weather is hard so the people are hard” and it really was true. From day one in Russia we didn’t come across any real warmth in people, just cold moody faces, bitter indifference (if there is such a thing) and icy reluctance to do anything to help us. In terms of providing any kind of service, Russia is similar to China: things will only get done if you beg people to do them, regardless of the fact that you may have paid a lot of money for them to provide the service in the first place. And so my soul sank further as I was met on the platform by an icy pissed-off middle aged woman who seemed to immediately despise me for no apparent reason.
But lo and behold we struck lucky. In our compartment was a beautiful cute English talking young woman who was warm and friendly with a keen sense of humour. She made the journey go much quicker and reassured me that there are some nice people in the ice-hell that is Siberia. Like Japan, Russia is a nation where the men seem to be very different from the women.
Wednesday, 31 January 2007
FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: Russia: On the train
We got a cab to the station as Fabio was understandably concerned we’d get set-upon. We were in separate carriages: 1 and 17, so we said goodnight and boarded. My bed was in a four-bed compartment with one other young lady who didn’t speak any English at all. Russians are unsmiling and serious upon first meeting and she was no exception. Since it was late I just wanted to sleep but these scary skin headed young tattooed guys kept coming in to chat to her while drinking beer, slamming doors and allowing their mobile phones to ring. At 3am I eventually worked up the courage to point at the main light just above me (I was in a top bunk) and asked that she use her reading light instead. I didn’t understand her response and when I turned the main light off she blew-up and turned it back on again. What a bitch. There was simply no reason to keep this light on other than to stop me from sleeping. As she was sat on the bottom bunk, speaking to a person opposite her, it made no sense to have the main light on for her. Truly scared that some soldier might stab me or similar, I stayed quiet until 4.30am when she decided she didn’t need the main light but continued animated chatter with these rough guys until around 6am where she slept for three hours. I know this because I laid awake counting the passing hours, occasionally muttering “what a bitch”.
That day was spent entirely on the train and things got better and better as the day progressed. In the morning I walked to Fabio’s carriage which took about fifteen minutes and involved fighting through the sweaty smelly third class, jumping between carriages and ducking under the hard stares of the female carriage conductors for whom we have to be entirely submissive too. Later that morning, two big Russian men settled in my compartment which I was pleased about as they would prevent the super-bitch from doing another light-on/chatting all-nighter. In the afternoon I met Fabio for lunch in the restaurant carriage and decided to opt for the ‘can’t beat them join them’ mentality and got chatting with the soldiers. Well, I say chatting but it was just guessing mixed with animated gestures. They were interested in me but only in a novelty kind of way, like I was a freak show. One guy kept pestering me to see my mp3 player and I let him handle it. Then I think he said words to the effect of ‘I’ll borrow this until you get off the train ok?’ and off he went.
The two big Russian men, stubbly and gruff, about fifty years old, were strange in their response to me: every time they’d see me, one of them would explode into real fits of hearty laughter and the other would chuckle in that kind of ‘I’m only laughing because you are’ way. Perhaps he was a tad retarded. Mid-evening they got off and two beautiful thirty-something women took their place. One of them was keen to talk and although she only knew a tiny amount of English (and French), we communicated pretty well. I discovered they were both single mothers who worked in the same business together and were going home to Novosibirsk, my destination. We had a good laugh together and I felt wonderfully reassured when I told them about super-bitch woman and the more talkative one responded with “I’m big boss” with super-woman style gestures. I could feel the passing soldier’s eyes on me and could guess their conversation:
“how does a weird foreigner like that get to talk to women like that?”. Indeed, super-bitch woman made a brief appearance and seemed a little intimidated as she took some of her stuff and retreated, probably to a soldier’s compartment. These pretty ladies, Ann and Katarina, completely changed the mood of the journey for me and Ann in particular was so helpful. She even found the soldier with my mp3 player and demanded he gave it back to me now as I hadn’t known he wanted to borrow it.
That day was spent entirely on the train and things got better and better as the day progressed. In the morning I walked to Fabio’s carriage which took about fifteen minutes and involved fighting through the sweaty smelly third class, jumping between carriages and ducking under the hard stares of the female carriage conductors for whom we have to be entirely submissive too. Later that morning, two big Russian men settled in my compartment which I was pleased about as they would prevent the super-bitch from doing another light-on/chatting all-nighter. In the afternoon I met Fabio for lunch in the restaurant carriage and decided to opt for the ‘can’t beat them join them’ mentality and got chatting with the soldiers. Well, I say chatting but it was just guessing mixed with animated gestures. They were interested in me but only in a novelty kind of way, like I was a freak show. One guy kept pestering me to see my mp3 player and I let him handle it. Then I think he said words to the effect of ‘I’ll borrow this until you get off the train ok?’ and off he went.
The two big Russian men, stubbly and gruff, about fifty years old, were strange in their response to me: every time they’d see me, one of them would explode into real fits of hearty laughter and the other would chuckle in that kind of ‘I’m only laughing because you are’ way. Perhaps he was a tad retarded. Mid-evening they got off and two beautiful thirty-something women took their place. One of them was keen to talk and although she only knew a tiny amount of English (and French), we communicated pretty well. I discovered they were both single mothers who worked in the same business together and were going home to Novosibirsk, my destination. We had a good laugh together and I felt wonderfully reassured when I told them about super-bitch woman and the more talkative one responded with “I’m big boss” with super-woman style gestures. I could feel the passing soldier’s eyes on me and could guess their conversation:
“how does a weird foreigner like that get to talk to women like that?”. Indeed, super-bitch woman made a brief appearance and seemed a little intimidated as she took some of her stuff and retreated, probably to a soldier’s compartment. These pretty ladies, Ann and Katarina, completely changed the mood of the journey for me and Ann in particular was so helpful. She even found the soldier with my mp3 player and demanded he gave it back to me now as I hadn’t known he wanted to borrow it.
Tuesday, 30 January 2007
FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: Russia: Thinking of Aki and Maki
We got the 10.30am bus back to Irkustk main town and just lazed around until our train that evening which would leave at 1.20am. I posed a letter I’d written to Maki. Aki was ending me emails that just made me feel bad, sad, guilty but also a little angry. It was clear she wanted to make me feel bad and that had been a continuing theme for the last half of our relationship. I remember how she would express that I always wanted to be with friends, female friends, and never had time for her, and never gave her enough attention. Aki wanted to visit me in July, which seemed strange to me. It was always known that when I leave we’ll always be in touch but we couldn’t continue romantically. We both knew it but Aki wouldn’t accept it and hated my acceptance of it. Regardless of the time bomb nature of our relationship, we never fitted right. We survived mostly of a need not to be lonely. Her loneliness came from being single with no marriage prospects aged twenty-eight and a father who died in a car crash when she was nineteen, an age at which she was just starting to get to know her father. My loneliness came from being in a completely foreign country and not being entirely happy about it. I had no true close friends when I met Aki and I lived in a small apartment with two other guys with whom I had nothing in common. There was Jon, a twenty-two year old Canadian who had just graduated and spent all his time on his laptop, chatting to his Canadian friends on MSN, downloading Canadian basketball games and watching movies. He hardly went out and his tap-tap-tapping from his room next to me drove me crazy and would only cease at around 3 or 4am. The other guy was Kelly, a twenty-six year old Aussie who had moved into our place having already been in Japan for a year. He had a small squeaky Japanese girlfriend who would come round two or three evenings a week and generally get in the way. The place wasn’t big enough for three, let alone four people. It was in these conditions I met Aki and I was absolutely determined to make it work with her. In that determination I turned a blind eye to our suitability to each other and just fed off the non-lonely buzz the relationship gave me; gave us. Her single apartment was a sanctuary from my cluttered flat but it all happened to quickly. After our first night in the same bed a panic hit me and wouldn’t go away for three or four weeks. I still can’t quite explain it but I think it was a snowball effect: the first sign of my panic made me think “oh no! I’m going to ruin this relationship. She’s going to leave me because I’m just a ball of stress” which made me panic more. My base fear was that she’d leave me and I’d be on my own again and would have to return to England as the guy who couldn’t deal with being in Japan. Simple put, as soon as we got together, I fell quickly in love and became terrified that she might leave me. She never did. Over time, things became inverted: I was more confident and more integrated into Japan, and ironically Aki helped that to happen. Aki became scared that I’d leave her and increasingly jealous of all my other friends, especially my female friends.
I met Aki at Nova, the private English conversation school I worked at. She was a student and it was a big no-no to even socialise with the ‘clients’, let alone date them. So that added to my fear: would someone find out? If she left me would and thought I was a bastard would she tell Nova? Would I get sacked? It was a secret I desperately wanted to tell everyone but I simply couldn’t, it drove me nuts and certainly added to my loneliness.
I met Maki about a year into the relationship. She was one of the reception staff at my branch of Nova and the immediate intensity of our genuine friendship was a feeling I hadn’t had for a long time. We saw each other lots but nothing happened. She actually lived with me for the last five months of my time in Japan along with Scott, a fellow teacher who needed a place to stay. Jon and Kelly had long since moved out, as had Anthony and Sam, their replacements with whom I did have a lot in common and life in my apartment was great.
Everyone at Nova thought me and Maki were a couple but we were both confused as to the true nature of our friendship. As my departure date grew nearer, I grew nearer to Maki and further from Aki, but not in that order. In the last few weeks before I left, me and Maki couldn’t see enough of each other. She had lived in London for two years as a student in the London College of Fashion and was planning to return in the summer to continue her studies, having taken a few years work in Japan to save up some money. We made a plan to live together in London. I would return to the UK in early May, find a flat, find a job and have things ready for her return. My letter to Maki confirmed how much I wanted to do this and above all, to be with her.
Aki is classically beautiful, slender, with a slightly wide face with gives her a very cute look, as well as beautiful. Her wavy shoulder-length dark brown hair compliments her face perfectly. She smiles easily and I was immediately attracted to the ease at which she spoke to people, whether it was in her first language or not. On out first date she described herself as a moody person and a faithful person. She lived up to her self-analysis but was also incredibly in need of affection, unlike anyone else I’d met. Many times I was reminded of how fiercely ‘Japanese’ she was: unable to express deep-rooted emotions, practical, organised, unable to just let go, and very domesticated.
Maki is eight years younger, shorter, less concerned about her weight, cute, with a round face and sexy over-one-eye thick black hair, long at the front and shorter around her head. She allowed her time in the UK to compliment her characteristics and embraced the chance to break out of her Japanese culture. Her ability to look at Japan from an outsider’s point of view allows her to understand my view of Japan. Aki and Maki are both incredibly kind, as many Japanese people are.
I met Aki at Nova, the private English conversation school I worked at. She was a student and it was a big no-no to even socialise with the ‘clients’, let alone date them. So that added to my fear: would someone find out? If she left me would and thought I was a bastard would she tell Nova? Would I get sacked? It was a secret I desperately wanted to tell everyone but I simply couldn’t, it drove me nuts and certainly added to my loneliness.
I met Maki about a year into the relationship. She was one of the reception staff at my branch of Nova and the immediate intensity of our genuine friendship was a feeling I hadn’t had for a long time. We saw each other lots but nothing happened. She actually lived with me for the last five months of my time in Japan along with Scott, a fellow teacher who needed a place to stay. Jon and Kelly had long since moved out, as had Anthony and Sam, their replacements with whom I did have a lot in common and life in my apartment was great.
Everyone at Nova thought me and Maki were a couple but we were both confused as to the true nature of our friendship. As my departure date grew nearer, I grew nearer to Maki and further from Aki, but not in that order. In the last few weeks before I left, me and Maki couldn’t see enough of each other. She had lived in London for two years as a student in the London College of Fashion and was planning to return in the summer to continue her studies, having taken a few years work in Japan to save up some money. We made a plan to live together in London. I would return to the UK in early May, find a flat, find a job and have things ready for her return. My letter to Maki confirmed how much I wanted to do this and above all, to be with her.
Aki is classically beautiful, slender, with a slightly wide face with gives her a very cute look, as well as beautiful. Her wavy shoulder-length dark brown hair compliments her face perfectly. She smiles easily and I was immediately attracted to the ease at which she spoke to people, whether it was in her first language or not. On out first date she described herself as a moody person and a faithful person. She lived up to her self-analysis but was also incredibly in need of affection, unlike anyone else I’d met. Many times I was reminded of how fiercely ‘Japanese’ she was: unable to express deep-rooted emotions, practical, organised, unable to just let go, and very domesticated.
Maki is eight years younger, shorter, less concerned about her weight, cute, with a round face and sexy over-one-eye thick black hair, long at the front and shorter around her head. She allowed her time in the UK to compliment her characteristics and embraced the chance to break out of her Japanese culture. Her ability to look at Japan from an outsider’s point of view allows her to understand my view of Japan. Aki and Maki are both incredibly kind, as many Japanese people are.
FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: Russia: Lake Baikal
I woke at 11.30am and me and Fabio got our stuff ready to go into town to catch a bus for Lake Baikal, a huger frozen late which took the train thirty minutes to pass the previous morning.
In town we shopped in a supermarket in which we had to put our bags in a locker before entering and collect on the way out. Fabio was asked to empty his pockets. I was slowly coming to the conclusion that I look a little Russian, having received no strange looks since entering Russia.
The bus arrived in a small village which seemed to be a tourist spot for the locals. Families had packed and were drinking beer and eating incredibly fresh smoked fish by the lake. I tried some myself. It was the lightest flakiest fish I had ever had, probably no more than four hours fresh and it was delicious. I just ate everything, leaving a cartoon-style head and bones which I’d never actually seen in real life.
We walked onto the lake, an amazing sensation, and I immediately fell over. It was covered with a few inches of snow but when I brushed it aside and looked into the ice I couldn’t help but think how thin it looked. A puddle formed in the area where I was standing. In fact there were many puddles of melting ice on the lake which discouraged me from venturing far.
We went back to our incredibly simple hostel which was by the lake to relax before dinner. Our room was panelled entirely in chipboard and had a large and extremely out of place light fixing on the roof which upon closer inspection had a small pile of dead flies in each of the three lamp-shades.
The sun was still well up when we headed out for dinner at around 8pm. We passed a group of young guys drinking on the street who may or may not have called out to us, I couldn’t tell. Once inside I looked at the Russian menu and the two unimpressed old women by the counter and asked Fabio if he’d go back to get his Italian Lonely Planet to help us with the menu items. Our hostel was barely a few minute’s walk away but Fabio had been gone for ten minutes. Our table was by the window and as I looked around, an ugly feeling grew inside me. Men were wandering around, drinking, not smiling, aimless. I started to worry for Fabio. It seems the bloody Lonely Planet had got me in trouble again. He thirty-five I reminded myself. He’s not stupid. But then I saw some people gather near a car. One swung a punch at another, full in the face, who in turn punched back and they started kicking each other. A man got between and separated them but seconds later they were doing it again. My stomach leapt: was one of these people Fabio? I looked carefully from where I sat, wanting to press myself against the window to get a good view but not wanting to draw to much attention to myself. He wasn’t there. So where the hell was he? He’d been gone thirty minutes now. The fighting continued down the street and I noticed small groups of people, some young girls, watching with no intention of stopping the brutality that was going on. It hit me: this is Siberia. The land here is hard. The weather is hard. The people are hard. I was very nervous as I finally struck up the courage to leave the restaurant and rushed back to the hostel, hoping Fabio had just fallen asleep or something. A very nervous Fabio was sat on the bed looking like he’d just seen a ghost.
“Fabio, are you OK? What happened?” He looked stunned.
“Oh is terrible! When I walk back, I walk past some girls, I say hello and suddenly this man runs up to me. He says something in Russian but when I reply he punch me in the face. There were two of them. And one of them try to break my nose with his head. Then he try to force my head down on his legs, like a wrestler. Is crazy. Like animals. And their eyes. Their cold blue eyes. Oh. Is terrible.” He’d been set upon by drunken young guys, obviously bored and looking for a fight. I tried to calm him down. What a hell-hole this village was. Suddenly we felt so alone. No police. Nobody who cares about us. He told me how he ran to the hostel and was shouting for help. When he got to the hostel, the owner just looked at him and laughed.
“I think this is not the first time it happen” he said. So we stayed in our chipboard room, prisoners in our hostel, very afraid to go out.
In town we shopped in a supermarket in which we had to put our bags in a locker before entering and collect on the way out. Fabio was asked to empty his pockets. I was slowly coming to the conclusion that I look a little Russian, having received no strange looks since entering Russia.
The bus arrived in a small village which seemed to be a tourist spot for the locals. Families had packed and were drinking beer and eating incredibly fresh smoked fish by the lake. I tried some myself. It was the lightest flakiest fish I had ever had, probably no more than four hours fresh and it was delicious. I just ate everything, leaving a cartoon-style head and bones which I’d never actually seen in real life.
We walked onto the lake, an amazing sensation, and I immediately fell over. It was covered with a few inches of snow but when I brushed it aside and looked into the ice I couldn’t help but think how thin it looked. A puddle formed in the area where I was standing. In fact there were many puddles of melting ice on the lake which discouraged me from venturing far.
We went back to our incredibly simple hostel which was by the lake to relax before dinner. Our room was panelled entirely in chipboard and had a large and extremely out of place light fixing on the roof which upon closer inspection had a small pile of dead flies in each of the three lamp-shades.
The sun was still well up when we headed out for dinner at around 8pm. We passed a group of young guys drinking on the street who may or may not have called out to us, I couldn’t tell. Once inside I looked at the Russian menu and the two unimpressed old women by the counter and asked Fabio if he’d go back to get his Italian Lonely Planet to help us with the menu items. Our hostel was barely a few minute’s walk away but Fabio had been gone for ten minutes. Our table was by the window and as I looked around, an ugly feeling grew inside me. Men were wandering around, drinking, not smiling, aimless. I started to worry for Fabio. It seems the bloody Lonely Planet had got me in trouble again. He thirty-five I reminded myself. He’s not stupid. But then I saw some people gather near a car. One swung a punch at another, full in the face, who in turn punched back and they started kicking each other. A man got between and separated them but seconds later they were doing it again. My stomach leapt: was one of these people Fabio? I looked carefully from where I sat, wanting to press myself against the window to get a good view but not wanting to draw to much attention to myself. He wasn’t there. So where the hell was he? He’d been gone thirty minutes now. The fighting continued down the street and I noticed small groups of people, some young girls, watching with no intention of stopping the brutality that was going on. It hit me: this is Siberia. The land here is hard. The weather is hard. The people are hard. I was very nervous as I finally struck up the courage to leave the restaurant and rushed back to the hostel, hoping Fabio had just fallen asleep or something. A very nervous Fabio was sat on the bed looking like he’d just seen a ghost.
“Fabio, are you OK? What happened?” He looked stunned.
“Oh is terrible! When I walk back, I walk past some girls, I say hello and suddenly this man runs up to me. He says something in Russian but when I reply he punch me in the face. There were two of them. And one of them try to break my nose with his head. Then he try to force my head down on his legs, like a wrestler. Is crazy. Like animals. And their eyes. Their cold blue eyes. Oh. Is terrible.” He’d been set upon by drunken young guys, obviously bored and looking for a fight. I tried to calm him down. What a hell-hole this village was. Suddenly we felt so alone. No police. Nobody who cares about us. He told me how he ran to the hostel and was shouting for help. When he got to the hostel, the owner just looked at him and laughed.
“I think this is not the first time it happen” he said. So we stayed in our chipboard room, prisoners in our hostel, very afraid to go out.
Monday, 29 January 2007
FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: Russia: Irkustk
After another good night’s sleep on a train, I woke up and realised I was by far the last to rise. Fabio told me how the shady Kazakhstan guy lived up to his first impression and had been snooping around our bags before getting off. The Mongolian guy confirmed, saying he had been poking around all of our bags. I wasn’t worried. I always sleep with my passport and money under my pillow.
We got off at 2.30pm and were met by a very Russian looking Russian whose hotel we had booked when we were in Mongolia. It was slightly euphoric to be in another new country again, now surrounded by Russians, and how Russian everybody looked: the noses pointing up at the ends, the deep-set ice-blue eyes and sturdy builds. He explained that his hostel was inspired by a time he stayed in the UB guesthouse in Ulan Bator, the hostel me and Fabio stayed at. He wanted to recreate such a place in Russia and sure enough he had done.
After a few hours, we set off to find a place to eat which was remarkably difficult. Fabio was determined to have local food, a sentiment I first shared during the first hour of searching but faded which faded away as the hours passed and my hunger increased. We stopped a group of young people for help, a few spoke a little English and helped, recommending a place that on arrival, had cheesy modernised folk music blaring and a group of five people dancing. We went away and came back an hour later when we couldn’t find anything better. A pretty young woman with unnecessarily thick eye liner guided us through the rustic-looking menu. It still amazed me how you can always find people speaking English in the most obscure places. Fabio pressed the issue in this Italian English.
“We want local food… good food… what is this?” as he pointed at the menu.
“This is soup” she replied. “Is it local soup? Good soup? I want good soup.” Slightly perplexed, she answered simply and slowly “yes.”
“OK” concluded Fabio with his thick rhythmic Italian accent, “I want this good soup.” She turned to me. I just pointed randomly and asked what it was.
“This is umm… salad… with meat… with chicken.” Fabio did the culture check for me: “is it local food?” to which she once again replied “yes”. We sat back and relaxed while we waited for our wholesome local cuisine. Fabio got tomato soup and I got a Cesar salad.
We ate as a group of six people partied to karaoke versions of Russian folk songs sung by two resident singers who didn’t ever smile. I couldn’t stop smirking as I watched these thirty and forty somethings get on down to what sounded like the demo of a cheap Casio keyboard.
Fabio had been going on about a nightclub that was recommended to him, called “Stratosphere” which was in our current town, Irkustk. Having killed a few hours in the restaurant (the club didn’t open until midnight), we went to the club, paid the huge 300 roubles entry fee and went in. Reassuringly, we had to walk through an airport-style metal detector. The signs read “no dogs, no alcohol from outside the club, no trainers, no guns, no explosives” and the bouncers wore authentic-looking combat attire. Well thank god I’m not a casually-dressed dog-loving alcoholic psychopath. And then I looked around me. I simply cannot describe the sight. If someone had taken man’s most sexy and seductive image of the perfect looking woman and created 400 variations on that theme, it would be equal to the inhabitants of this club. Their dress (mostly short skirts, high boots and outrageous tops), their attitude (icy-confident) and their bodies made for an extremely frustrating three hours. I couldn’t talk to anybody. We didn’t share a common language. And the men! These beautiful girls were with ugly old men or just-past-puberty lanky young guys. They just looked so confident and sexy. As I sat down, one again needed a breather, I’d watch girls walk past huge mirrors on the wall, dancing as they walked, pointing to themselves in a manner which spoke “you go girl!” I’d simply never seen so many beautiful girls all under one roof. Every hour or so, the lights would focus on a runway in the middle and nine models would show themselves off, the crowd would cheer and then everything would go back to how it was. An hour into the night I walked up to the bar and having no clue how to order any other drink, simply said “vodka”. I drunk it down in two big gulps and then danced for the rest of my time in the club. Unable to take it anymore, I walked home at 3.30am to light snow, still gawping at Russia’s best kept secret.
We got off at 2.30pm and were met by a very Russian looking Russian whose hotel we had booked when we were in Mongolia. It was slightly euphoric to be in another new country again, now surrounded by Russians, and how Russian everybody looked: the noses pointing up at the ends, the deep-set ice-blue eyes and sturdy builds. He explained that his hostel was inspired by a time he stayed in the UB guesthouse in Ulan Bator, the hostel me and Fabio stayed at. He wanted to recreate such a place in Russia and sure enough he had done.
After a few hours, we set off to find a place to eat which was remarkably difficult. Fabio was determined to have local food, a sentiment I first shared during the first hour of searching but faded which faded away as the hours passed and my hunger increased. We stopped a group of young people for help, a few spoke a little English and helped, recommending a place that on arrival, had cheesy modernised folk music blaring and a group of five people dancing. We went away and came back an hour later when we couldn’t find anything better. A pretty young woman with unnecessarily thick eye liner guided us through the rustic-looking menu. It still amazed me how you can always find people speaking English in the most obscure places. Fabio pressed the issue in this Italian English.
“We want local food… good food… what is this?” as he pointed at the menu.
“This is soup” she replied. “Is it local soup? Good soup? I want good soup.” Slightly perplexed, she answered simply and slowly “yes.”
“OK” concluded Fabio with his thick rhythmic Italian accent, “I want this good soup.” She turned to me. I just pointed randomly and asked what it was.
“This is umm… salad… with meat… with chicken.” Fabio did the culture check for me: “is it local food?” to which she once again replied “yes”. We sat back and relaxed while we waited for our wholesome local cuisine. Fabio got tomato soup and I got a Cesar salad.
We ate as a group of six people partied to karaoke versions of Russian folk songs sung by two resident singers who didn’t ever smile. I couldn’t stop smirking as I watched these thirty and forty somethings get on down to what sounded like the demo of a cheap Casio keyboard.
Fabio had been going on about a nightclub that was recommended to him, called “Stratosphere” which was in our current town, Irkustk. Having killed a few hours in the restaurant (the club didn’t open until midnight), we went to the club, paid the huge 300 roubles entry fee and went in. Reassuringly, we had to walk through an airport-style metal detector. The signs read “no dogs, no alcohol from outside the club, no trainers, no guns, no explosives” and the bouncers wore authentic-looking combat attire. Well thank god I’m not a casually-dressed dog-loving alcoholic psychopath. And then I looked around me. I simply cannot describe the sight. If someone had taken man’s most sexy and seductive image of the perfect looking woman and created 400 variations on that theme, it would be equal to the inhabitants of this club. Their dress (mostly short skirts, high boots and outrageous tops), their attitude (icy-confident) and their bodies made for an extremely frustrating three hours. I couldn’t talk to anybody. We didn’t share a common language. And the men! These beautiful girls were with ugly old men or just-past-puberty lanky young guys. They just looked so confident and sexy. As I sat down, one again needed a breather, I’d watch girls walk past huge mirrors on the wall, dancing as they walked, pointing to themselves in a manner which spoke “you go girl!” I’d simply never seen so many beautiful girls all under one roof. Every hour or so, the lights would focus on a runway in the middle and nine models would show themselves off, the crowd would cheer and then everything would go back to how it was. An hour into the night I walked up to the bar and having no clue how to order any other drink, simply said “vodka”. I drunk it down in two big gulps and then danced for the rest of my time in the club. Unable to take it anymore, I walked home at 3.30am to light snow, still gawping at Russia’s best kept secret.
Thursday, 28 December 2006
FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: Mongolia
Finally at 1.30am, we started moving again and after a surprisingly good nights sleep, woke at 8.30am to exactly the same landscape: nothing as far as you could see part from a low battered fence running by the track. The three other people in my compartment didn’t speak a word of English and Chris was with an Italian guy called Fabio and two Chinese people who could say hello enthusiastically. Fabio was a nice guy, typically Italian in his laidback approach to life and his passion for football, coffee, music and women. He was a governor lawyer assistant who had five months holiday every year and would travel the world in this time. Right now he was slowly coming home from Asia, not looking forward to starting work again in May.
Having sent an email to the “UB (Ulan Bator) Guesthouse”, a representative had Chris’ name displayed at the platform and drove us, Fabio, an Aussie, a Korean and two Irish guys to the obscurely located guesthouse. It was set in a small square with a half rotted children’s play area in the middle and strangely random patches of dust outlined with low metal bars. It seemed to be the type of thing you imagine Russia to be by watching TV. Although a capital city, everything had a derelict feel to it; a bit of a no-man’s land but this part of the city was a little bustling with banks and currency exchange places on every corner, bars, cheap restaurants and odd shops such as one place that only sold flowers and pottery.
Back at the hostel Chris had changed his mind again and said he wanted a five day tour. I hate tours and told him that I only wanted to see a little of the countryside and then move on. Sure it was interesting to visit such an obscure place but our plan was never to spend a week in Mongolia. Over lunch with Fabio I told him my situation and after twenty minutes of consideration, told him that I’d move on with him in a few days time. I thought about how nice and safe it felt to be with Chris who did all the worrying about everything all the time but realised that his style of travelling allowed much less room for fun. That evening I told him my plan and said I’d meet him in Moscow. He didn’t seem surprised and shared a can of Mongolian beer with me. We were going to let each other go and I’m sure it was going to be for the better of us.
After chatting to a nice Aussie guy who was going to go to London to try to make it as a stand-up comedian, I told Fabio I’d go on the next day’s two day tour with him and went to bed feeling oddly liberated.
The two day tour was very simple. We’d be driven to the middle of nowhere and would stay win a small circular tent/house with a stove fire in the middle and a big metal chimney poking through a hole in the roof. We were to stay with a Nomadic family. It surprised me to hear that half of Mongolia’s 2.3 million population are Nomads although most of them don’t own a TV as this family did, which also surprised me. I was with Fabio and two girls, an Aussie and a Brit, who were nice and coincidently had been working in the same English teaching company I had in Japan.
After a lunch of rice, shredded vegetables and beef, we were dressed by the husband of the family in preparation for two hours horse riding. His name was Odka, easy to remember as it rhymed with one of Mongolia’s favourite drinks, and he dressed me and Fabio in three jackets, but didn’t give the girls so much as a hat. I could only guess men take priority in a land where farming is the only thing a populace can do. The horses were small and looked more like donkeys although they were well trained and well tamed. We were given a twenty second lesson as to how to ride one and then off we went on a two hour journey that I’ll always remember as being the coldest two hours of my life. It was already well below freezing but the harsh sharp wind made it doubly cold and after twenty minutes, everything started to hurt, to really hurt. My toes, my hands, and my face in particular. The dry barren rolling landscape, dotted with huge rock formations was amazing but I was simply too cold to appreciate it. My hands and feet started swelling after an hour and I literally couldn’t move any digits on my hands or feet. Neither could I turn my head or walk without limping once I had got off the horse. Our guide shouted “chu!” to get the horses moving and didn’t speak any English at all. He was entirely without sympathy for our cold states of being and out light trots on the way back (our resting point was a frozen lake) ensured sore arses for everyone as well. We all had the same heavenly vision in mind: the warm circular tent and hot tea. When we got back we were immediately served a beef pasta dinner with hot fruity tea. I slowly warmed up but my hands would continue to hurt for the next few days.
With nothing else to do other than sit around and chat, we did just that. Odka came back to explain his sister was having a baby that very night so he had to leave us, communicated mostly with dynamic gestures, like a game of charades. Later out horse-riding guide showed up with a bucket of coal, making gestures to explain we should put it in the fire for the night. We did so and went to bed in a very warm tent.
I woke up at around 5am, freezing. The fore had long gone so I collected as many blankets as I could find and buried myself. I woke again at around 9am and thought we really should get up so I grabbed some toilet paper and broke a few pieces to stuff under some kindling. It went up beautifully and the place warmed up quickly, making getting out of bed for the others much easier than it had been for me. Fabio and I had a train to Russia leaving at 1.50pm so we had to get moving. When we returned to the hostel we quickly changed our remaining Mongolian money into Russian roubles (nowhere in Russia would change them apparently), had a shower and bought some food for the train. The kind manager of the hostel put us into a cab and said farewell. It was truly a great hostel, as all hostels should be but rarely are: warmly welcoming, genuinely helpful and friendly.
Our compartment on the Mongolian train contained me, Fabio, a Mongolian small-business man who was a little overly keen to speak English and a shady looking guy from Kazakhstan who showed no interest in us. The Mongolian guy was a cheery character with a family and a successful business, operating a tour agency. He opened out a load of food and said that we must just help ourselves: what is him is ours, in true communist spirit. One bag contained huge hacks of beef and fat, another sweet bread rolls, another sausage, another dark malty bread and other bits and pieces.
Soon into the journey, someone dumped six large rolled-up felt blankets in our compartment and the Mongolian guy explained that one of the train attendants needed “help” to pass all these blankets through Russian customs and asked us to each claim two blankets on the customs declaration form. Though nervous at the thought of Russian officials asking why I asked two large Mongolian blankets along with everyone else in the carriage, I cast aside scenes from “Midnight Express” and agreed to it.
After eating a packed lunch included in my ticket and chatting to some other Westerners who were on the train for the full five day stretch to Moscow, we stopped just before the boarder. Our passports were checked and an hour later we rode over the boarder and stopped again for scary Russian officials to board to routinely intimidate us all. One of them came to out compartment and greeted us in Russian. I nervously repeated some Russian I had learnt years ago and he seemed to understand. He explained the boarder crossing rules to us in a manner that suggested we were all prisoners of war. He looked at Fabio’s Italian passport and said something to him in Italian.
“Oh your Italian is good” said a nervous Fabio.
“No!” said the official, “No! I do not speak Italian.” He had shouted as if someone had just asked him to stick his head in a toilet. Fabio recoiled and the tense examination of passports continued. The Mongolian guy was almost visibly sweating as his wife had accidentally washed his passport with his clothes only a few days previous and his passport looked consistent with such information. The official took our passport, explaining that he needed ninety to a hundred minutes to examine them. They all returned ninety minutes later stamped and approved. Our Mongolian friend audibly thanked God for passing through with his frazzled documents. The whole process took about four hours and finished around 2am.
Having sent an email to the “UB (Ulan Bator) Guesthouse”, a representative had Chris’ name displayed at the platform and drove us, Fabio, an Aussie, a Korean and two Irish guys to the obscurely located guesthouse. It was set in a small square with a half rotted children’s play area in the middle and strangely random patches of dust outlined with low metal bars. It seemed to be the type of thing you imagine Russia to be by watching TV. Although a capital city, everything had a derelict feel to it; a bit of a no-man’s land but this part of the city was a little bustling with banks and currency exchange places on every corner, bars, cheap restaurants and odd shops such as one place that only sold flowers and pottery.
Back at the hostel Chris had changed his mind again and said he wanted a five day tour. I hate tours and told him that I only wanted to see a little of the countryside and then move on. Sure it was interesting to visit such an obscure place but our plan was never to spend a week in Mongolia. Over lunch with Fabio I told him my situation and after twenty minutes of consideration, told him that I’d move on with him in a few days time. I thought about how nice and safe it felt to be with Chris who did all the worrying about everything all the time but realised that his style of travelling allowed much less room for fun. That evening I told him my plan and said I’d meet him in Moscow. He didn’t seem surprised and shared a can of Mongolian beer with me. We were going to let each other go and I’m sure it was going to be for the better of us.
After chatting to a nice Aussie guy who was going to go to London to try to make it as a stand-up comedian, I told Fabio I’d go on the next day’s two day tour with him and went to bed feeling oddly liberated.
The two day tour was very simple. We’d be driven to the middle of nowhere and would stay win a small circular tent/house with a stove fire in the middle and a big metal chimney poking through a hole in the roof. We were to stay with a Nomadic family. It surprised me to hear that half of Mongolia’s 2.3 million population are Nomads although most of them don’t own a TV as this family did, which also surprised me. I was with Fabio and two girls, an Aussie and a Brit, who were nice and coincidently had been working in the same English teaching company I had in Japan.
After a lunch of rice, shredded vegetables and beef, we were dressed by the husband of the family in preparation for two hours horse riding. His name was Odka, easy to remember as it rhymed with one of Mongolia’s favourite drinks, and he dressed me and Fabio in three jackets, but didn’t give the girls so much as a hat. I could only guess men take priority in a land where farming is the only thing a populace can do. The horses were small and looked more like donkeys although they were well trained and well tamed. We were given a twenty second lesson as to how to ride one and then off we went on a two hour journey that I’ll always remember as being the coldest two hours of my life. It was already well below freezing but the harsh sharp wind made it doubly cold and after twenty minutes, everything started to hurt, to really hurt. My toes, my hands, and my face in particular. The dry barren rolling landscape, dotted with huge rock formations was amazing but I was simply too cold to appreciate it. My hands and feet started swelling after an hour and I literally couldn’t move any digits on my hands or feet. Neither could I turn my head or walk without limping once I had got off the horse. Our guide shouted “chu!” to get the horses moving and didn’t speak any English at all. He was entirely without sympathy for our cold states of being and out light trots on the way back (our resting point was a frozen lake) ensured sore arses for everyone as well. We all had the same heavenly vision in mind: the warm circular tent and hot tea. When we got back we were immediately served a beef pasta dinner with hot fruity tea. I slowly warmed up but my hands would continue to hurt for the next few days.
With nothing else to do other than sit around and chat, we did just that. Odka came back to explain his sister was having a baby that very night so he had to leave us, communicated mostly with dynamic gestures, like a game of charades. Later out horse-riding guide showed up with a bucket of coal, making gestures to explain we should put it in the fire for the night. We did so and went to bed in a very warm tent.
I woke up at around 5am, freezing. The fore had long gone so I collected as many blankets as I could find and buried myself. I woke again at around 9am and thought we really should get up so I grabbed some toilet paper and broke a few pieces to stuff under some kindling. It went up beautifully and the place warmed up quickly, making getting out of bed for the others much easier than it had been for me. Fabio and I had a train to Russia leaving at 1.50pm so we had to get moving. When we returned to the hostel we quickly changed our remaining Mongolian money into Russian roubles (nowhere in Russia would change them apparently), had a shower and bought some food for the train. The kind manager of the hostel put us into a cab and said farewell. It was truly a great hostel, as all hostels should be but rarely are: warmly welcoming, genuinely helpful and friendly.
Our compartment on the Mongolian train contained me, Fabio, a Mongolian small-business man who was a little overly keen to speak English and a shady looking guy from Kazakhstan who showed no interest in us. The Mongolian guy was a cheery character with a family and a successful business, operating a tour agency. He opened out a load of food and said that we must just help ourselves: what is him is ours, in true communist spirit. One bag contained huge hacks of beef and fat, another sweet bread rolls, another sausage, another dark malty bread and other bits and pieces.
Soon into the journey, someone dumped six large rolled-up felt blankets in our compartment and the Mongolian guy explained that one of the train attendants needed “help” to pass all these blankets through Russian customs and asked us to each claim two blankets on the customs declaration form. Though nervous at the thought of Russian officials asking why I asked two large Mongolian blankets along with everyone else in the carriage, I cast aside scenes from “Midnight Express” and agreed to it.
After eating a packed lunch included in my ticket and chatting to some other Westerners who were on the train for the full five day stretch to Moscow, we stopped just before the boarder. Our passports were checked and an hour later we rode over the boarder and stopped again for scary Russian officials to board to routinely intimidate us all. One of them came to out compartment and greeted us in Russian. I nervously repeated some Russian I had learnt years ago and he seemed to understand. He explained the boarder crossing rules to us in a manner that suggested we were all prisoners of war. He looked at Fabio’s Italian passport and said something to him in Italian.
“Oh your Italian is good” said a nervous Fabio.
“No!” said the official, “No! I do not speak Italian.” He had shouted as if someone had just asked him to stick his head in a toilet. Fabio recoiled and the tense examination of passports continued. The Mongolian guy was almost visibly sweating as his wife had accidentally washed his passport with his clothes only a few days previous and his passport looked consistent with such information. The official took our passport, explaining that he needed ninety to a hundred minutes to examine them. They all returned ninety minutes later stamped and approved. Our Mongolian friend audibly thanked God for passing through with his frazzled documents. The whole process took about four hours and finished around 2am.
FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: China: Beijing
At 6am, Beijing was cold, and with hardly any sleep, all we wanted was a bed. Some of the locals from the train showed us where we needed to go in a kind of we’d-be-better-off-without-them style but I appreciated the sentiment anyway. Eventually I said “ok, we’ll be fine from here thank-you so much” and after a short ride on Beijing’s half finished metro, we found the youth hostel and slept for about four hours.
The first thing we needed to do was to locate a large foreign bookstore in the city centre to buy a never copy of Lonely Planet’s “Tran Siberian Railway” guide. It wasn’t there and according to a couple of British travellers we met in the travel guide section, it couldn’t be found anywhere in Beijing, even though Beijing is either the start of end of one of the main routes, being the Trans Mongolian, which we planned to take. We’d have to make do with our four year old copy.
After a more-satisfying-than-it-should-have-been lunch at McDonalds, we wandered around a big glitzy mall and commented on the incredibly high prices. We had been told that Beijing and Shanghai were very different cities but capitalism seemed to have taken even firmer root in Beijing, with it’s trendy business areas, shopping malls and endless banks.
We passed a food market which sold silk worm on a stick, snake skin on a stick, lambs testicles (again on a stick) and other various animals that belonged in horror movies only. I had a contact number for a guy from globalfreeloaders.com who couldn’t put us up but was happy to take us out, so I went to one of the many public phones in a small kiosk to call him. In China, these kiosks always have a phone for public use which display the cost of a call and it is never more than ¥1. Having called him once, I paid the ¥0.6 I owed to one of the two guys behind the desk and realised I needed to call him again. The cost was ¥0.6 again so I went to pay this but the guy said I owed ¥1.2 for the two calls. Since we were the only customers, there’s no way they could have forgotten my first payment of ¥0.6 but one of the guys got really angry, throwing the phones across the kiosk and shouting at us. The extent that the Chinese will go to to squeeze a few extra pennies from foreigners made me want to puke.
We needed to buy a ticket for our next train: Beijing to Ulan Bator (Mongolia’s capital) so naturally we went to the main ticket office in the train station, but couldn’t find an English speaking desk. A few people told us to go to the “international hotel”. What did this mean? A hotel was the only way to get this ticket? So we walked in the vague direction of someone’s pointing until we saw a huge slab of a building, concave in shape and very grand-looking. Sure enough there was a travel agency on the second floor and although it was closed, a woman gave us a price list. It would cost us ¥600 (about £45) and the journey would take 32 hours.
The guy from globalfreeloaders met us at 8pm with some friends, a nice group of creative people: graphic designers and photographers, and took us to quite a posh restaurant for our first taste of true Peking/Beijing duck, which was nice but very gristly. Chris was feeling sick so we returned home early.
Our first full day in Beijing was a bit of a non-event as Chris stayed in bed all the time, occasionally leaving to bless the squat-style toilet with a large dose of poo-moose. So it was up to me to get things done: namely buy the train tickets and organise some free accommodation by meeting with a Chinese guy who called himself “George” who I found on globalfreeloaders. He kindly picked me up from the hostel and we drove to a café that he owned where we sat and discussed the next few days over some Coca-colas. He was an older guy, about forty-something, and had a family. He ran a small air-conditioning company and had invested in the café, buying the land outright when he was particularly successful some years ago. Now the café just acts as a meeting place more than anything, mainly for his friends, to discuss travelling. He seemed to have been to every country in the world and had brought back various artefacts from each one, all of which were on display in the café: African masks, Turkish pottery, Australian road signs, French football scarves, Italian opera masks, Indian tea pots, Russian plates to name a few. I told him we’d move in the next day for three nights as Chris was currently ill, and that was it sorted.
So I then went back to the ominous international hotel, brought the tickets and went to the toilet in a toilet with an attendant who I didn’t know needed tipping or not. He didn’t do anything apart from watch me so what should I have tipped him for? Maybe he didn’t even work there.
That evening the hostel was very restful and peaceful for me. I got dinner in a small restaurant attached to the hostel and met a young American girl who sat across from me on the same table even though there was plenty of space. Sensing that she wanted to talk to someone, I struck up a conversation and she burst into a breathless speech about her two weeks travelling in China. Then I spoke to an older Korean lady who had been travelling for seven months and would go back home the next day. Seven months? How can you return to normal life after that? But then again, she didn’t seem like she had a normal life. Then I just wandered around and settled in the café area, writing in my diary and chatting to the new guy in our room.
Chris was still sick the next day but well enough to move to the cafe4, under the kindness of George. After settling, I set out into town to visit the infamous Tiananmen Square. Within minutes of getting off the bus, two not-so-young girls came up to me, asking where I was from and all the other usual questions.
“Would you like to come and have some tea with us?” they said with a little too much urgency, too early on in our acquaintance. I asked what their jobs were,
“oh, we’re students”. I replied that I just wanted to walk around and that they were very welcome to join me. After a suspicious pause one of them said “sure, we want to talk English with you.” I asked their names: Tina and Susan. I laughed a little and explained that I didn’t trust anyone who approached me in China.
“That’s terrible” and Susan, who did most of the talking and had ridiculously thick bright turquoise eye makeup, “why don’t you trust anybody?” I explained how almost everybody just wanted my money “included you I suspect” I added. Susan stopped dead in her tracks and looked at me with a little disgust, “how did you lose your trust in other people? That’s sad.”
After some more semi-tense chatting, during which she frequently commented how handsome I looked, I asked how old they were.
“That’s a terrible question” replied Susan.
“No it’s not” I said, knowing full well that to ask a woman’s age in China doesn’t have the same taboo as back home. They both looked over thirty and I’d already had many women come up to me claiming to be students to go with them and be enticed into spending outrageous amounts of money.
“OK then” I said to Tina who looked the oldest, “what did you do before university?” This clearly had her stumped.
“Er… high school” she muttered unconvincingly.
“Really?” I said, “but you’re too old! You’re telling me you were in high school three years ago?”
“Yes” she replied. Then Susan spoke in fast Chinese to Tina, turned to me and said “do you want to have some tea with us?”
“Sure” I answered, “if it’s cheap, maybe about ¥10.”
“No” she said firmly, “we like expensive tea, cost you ¥200.” I just stared at them, “so you are just trying to get my money?” and they walked away. Within minutes of walking away, still chuckling to myself, another pair of girls said hello but much more passively than the previous couple. They asked the same old questions, I gave the same old answers but they didn’t say they wanted me to do anything. Upon my questioning they explained that they were English students. It fitted: they looked young and seemed eager to learn new words from me.
“Why are you in such a touristy area if you live here?” I asked, my suspicions dissolving away.
“Because it’s the weekend and we’re out shopping” said the girl with a yellow Addidas tracksuit and a dark Thai-style complexion. So I just followed them around for an hour or so, enjoying the company of people who weren’t after anything. After a quick photo, within minutes of departing, another two girls came to me and said hello. They asked the same questions but in a much more ‘just passing’ style and I soon rejoined my own company to wander through the surprisingly large square. There were many kits being sold and flown of all types and heights, some impossibly high like distant planes. Salesmen were everywhere, selling more cheap junk, and connect to chairman Mao in some way.
That evening George took Chris to the local hospital during which he waited five minutes to be seen, had an immediate blood and poo test, got the results within ten minutes and was prescribed and given drugs ten minutes after that. In a country where the maimed and starving bed for anything in all the cities, the health service still beats England’s by miles. This hospital was very simple. Things were just getting done without fuss or complaint. However, it looked much more basic, less well facilitated, and the Chinese spat on the floor which is surely a bad thing to do anywhere let alone in a hospital. In fact, the Chinese seem to hold no ground exempt from spitting. As we walked down a carpeted hallway in an office building, a dirty-jacket man spat on the floor, looking strangely pleased with himself afterwards.
“The Summer Palace”, one of Beijing’s major sights, was to be the next day’s plan for me. About 2.5 km square, it acted as leisure ground for one of China’s old Emperors when it was summer time and too hot to be indoors. It was beautiful. Willow lined paths between two lakes, rock garden patches, archaic decorative bridges and many traditional old Chinese buildings. Included in the entrance fee was admission to many small museums within the park, some ridiculously boring (as the young daughter of a British couple put it: “it’s just a bunch of chairs”) and some fascinating, if for no reason but the age of some of the relics which surpassed 3000 years. But Beijing’s eternal haze hung over the park, making it hard to see objects across the lake (although the lake was large) and at around 4pm, I could stare straight at the sun which then looked more like the moon: pale and misty.
Beijing is the place to see the Great Wall of China, well, at least where you need to catch a bus from. After a seventy minute journey we excitedly past patches of the wall itself before pulling up into tourist hell: “T-shirt one dollar, one dollar, postcards, book, T-shirt one dollar” was the local mantra yet again but our faces showed we had already experienced almost three weeks of this and were sick of it, although Chris still had to stop to look!
We first went to the Great Wall cinema which showed a film about the history of the wall in 360˚, using eight projectors, technology and film alike being about thirty years out of date. And it was only in Chinese with no subtitles. Crazy for such an international tourist attraction.
We wandered around for thirty minutes trying to find the way onto the wall and eventually found an absurdly tiny sign. Although the wall covers some 6000 km, you’d never guess it because of the bloody Beijing mist. The tower sections at every 200 metres or so consisted of a series of tiny tunnels you had to squeeze through although some Chinese considered these areas fit to have a piss. I noticed one woman doing herself back up, a puddle just below her.
It was extremely steep in places and the height of the coarse steps varied from around 10 cm to 50 cm. It was so busy that at one point people were crushing each other by one of the thin steep stairwells, seemingly unable to simply let one go at a time. 90% of the crowds were Chinese. The relative expense of China’s tourist attractions make it harder to enjoy them. You certainly get a sense that it’s just all about the money and this must surely be China’s biggest threat to a dwindling tourist industry. Surely no one who leaves China could forget the constant money grabbing, can’t-get-enough, tourist preying mentality and prevents me from recommended China to anybody. Whether you’re on a big budget or not, the persistence of the Chinese to trick, con and mislead foreigners is simply too much to create a fulfilling experience. Bottles of water were on sale on the wall for ¥10. A bottle of water in a shop was about ¥1.
So we got on the wall, walked about a mile, took our pictures and came off. There were no signs to tell you where to go, no information about the wall, no guides, no maps and no organisation. Things didn’t improve when we went to a restaurant in the city centre, as reviewed by the now utterly useless Lonely Planet, in which prices had risen by 50%. A half of a duck ¥100. We ordered a half between us and out came a serious looking chef with a meaty-looking half duck. He asked us how we’d like it cup up and proceeded to cut small slithers of meat and skin and serve it up on a small plate. Although the meat on this duck looked barely touched, he served up the small plate and left. This was it. Our ¥100 half duck. It barely enough for a sandwich. Sure it was tasty especially the oily skin, I’d never tasted anything like it but we couldn’t forget about the bill. It turns out that ¥30 is a fairly standard price in Beijing for a whole duck. Sure enough, our restaurant was full of fat Americans and glitzy foreigner business people.
Onwards into Mongolia the next day, leaving at 7.40 am, the longest railway journey I’d ever taken. It was a Chinese train and each compartment had four beds, two bunks on each side with a small table in the middle against the window. Me and Chris were in separate carriages as there weren’t many beds left which was a good thing in my mind. After a few hours of relaxing, listening to Eddie Izzard comedy CDs I ventured tot the restaurant carriage where I sat on an empty table. Within seconds the miserable Chinese “waitress” ushered me over to a table already occupied by a middle aged Scottish couple. I gave my order from a choice of the two items that were actually still available on the English menu (or so she said: I saw Chinese people eating fried rice and prawns which didn’t even feature on the absurdly concise menu) and happily chatted to the couple. I don’t know if the Chinese waitress was merely trying to save tables or had been administered the job of social ambassador, but I was pleased for the blunt introduction.
At the China/Mongolia boarder the wheels of the train were physically changed to ride the differing Mongolian tracks. The whole boarder process took about four hours, during which I decided to get off and couldn’t come back on until the process was finished. I had no idea what country I was in when I got off, a fairly unique feeling, until I saw everything priced in Chinese yuan in a small supermarket that most of the travelling Aussies and English were over-stocking on beer in. Having had our passports carefully checked by the Chinese for two hours, the train ran for ten minutes and the whole process was repeated by Mongolian. A young Mongolian woman official in ridiculously large oval hat scrutinised my passport and called some other officials over just to add to the drama of what would otherwise be an incredibly dull job. Having spent five minutes inspecting my battered passport like it was a nuclear bomb, she returned it with an air of contempt that said “just this time I’m not going to send you to a Siberian slave labour camp.”
The first thing we needed to do was to locate a large foreign bookstore in the city centre to buy a never copy of Lonely Planet’s “Tran Siberian Railway” guide. It wasn’t there and according to a couple of British travellers we met in the travel guide section, it couldn’t be found anywhere in Beijing, even though Beijing is either the start of end of one of the main routes, being the Trans Mongolian, which we planned to take. We’d have to make do with our four year old copy.
After a more-satisfying-than-it-should-have-been lunch at McDonalds, we wandered around a big glitzy mall and commented on the incredibly high prices. We had been told that Beijing and Shanghai were very different cities but capitalism seemed to have taken even firmer root in Beijing, with it’s trendy business areas, shopping malls and endless banks.
We passed a food market which sold silk worm on a stick, snake skin on a stick, lambs testicles (again on a stick) and other various animals that belonged in horror movies only. I had a contact number for a guy from globalfreeloaders.com who couldn’t put us up but was happy to take us out, so I went to one of the many public phones in a small kiosk to call him. In China, these kiosks always have a phone for public use which display the cost of a call and it is never more than ¥1. Having called him once, I paid the ¥0.6 I owed to one of the two guys behind the desk and realised I needed to call him again. The cost was ¥0.6 again so I went to pay this but the guy said I owed ¥1.2 for the two calls. Since we were the only customers, there’s no way they could have forgotten my first payment of ¥0.6 but one of the guys got really angry, throwing the phones across the kiosk and shouting at us. The extent that the Chinese will go to to squeeze a few extra pennies from foreigners made me want to puke.
We needed to buy a ticket for our next train: Beijing to Ulan Bator (Mongolia’s capital) so naturally we went to the main ticket office in the train station, but couldn’t find an English speaking desk. A few people told us to go to the “international hotel”. What did this mean? A hotel was the only way to get this ticket? So we walked in the vague direction of someone’s pointing until we saw a huge slab of a building, concave in shape and very grand-looking. Sure enough there was a travel agency on the second floor and although it was closed, a woman gave us a price list. It would cost us ¥600 (about £45) and the journey would take 32 hours.
The guy from globalfreeloaders met us at 8pm with some friends, a nice group of creative people: graphic designers and photographers, and took us to quite a posh restaurant for our first taste of true Peking/Beijing duck, which was nice but very gristly. Chris was feeling sick so we returned home early.
Our first full day in Beijing was a bit of a non-event as Chris stayed in bed all the time, occasionally leaving to bless the squat-style toilet with a large dose of poo-moose. So it was up to me to get things done: namely buy the train tickets and organise some free accommodation by meeting with a Chinese guy who called himself “George” who I found on globalfreeloaders. He kindly picked me up from the hostel and we drove to a café that he owned where we sat and discussed the next few days over some Coca-colas. He was an older guy, about forty-something, and had a family. He ran a small air-conditioning company and had invested in the café, buying the land outright when he was particularly successful some years ago. Now the café just acts as a meeting place more than anything, mainly for his friends, to discuss travelling. He seemed to have been to every country in the world and had brought back various artefacts from each one, all of which were on display in the café: African masks, Turkish pottery, Australian road signs, French football scarves, Italian opera masks, Indian tea pots, Russian plates to name a few. I told him we’d move in the next day for three nights as Chris was currently ill, and that was it sorted.
So I then went back to the ominous international hotel, brought the tickets and went to the toilet in a toilet with an attendant who I didn’t know needed tipping or not. He didn’t do anything apart from watch me so what should I have tipped him for? Maybe he didn’t even work there.
That evening the hostel was very restful and peaceful for me. I got dinner in a small restaurant attached to the hostel and met a young American girl who sat across from me on the same table even though there was plenty of space. Sensing that she wanted to talk to someone, I struck up a conversation and she burst into a breathless speech about her two weeks travelling in China. Then I spoke to an older Korean lady who had been travelling for seven months and would go back home the next day. Seven months? How can you return to normal life after that? But then again, she didn’t seem like she had a normal life. Then I just wandered around and settled in the café area, writing in my diary and chatting to the new guy in our room.
Chris was still sick the next day but well enough to move to the cafe4, under the kindness of George. After settling, I set out into town to visit the infamous Tiananmen Square. Within minutes of getting off the bus, two not-so-young girls came up to me, asking where I was from and all the other usual questions.
“Would you like to come and have some tea with us?” they said with a little too much urgency, too early on in our acquaintance. I asked what their jobs were,
“oh, we’re students”. I replied that I just wanted to walk around and that they were very welcome to join me. After a suspicious pause one of them said “sure, we want to talk English with you.” I asked their names: Tina and Susan. I laughed a little and explained that I didn’t trust anyone who approached me in China.
“That’s terrible” and Susan, who did most of the talking and had ridiculously thick bright turquoise eye makeup, “why don’t you trust anybody?” I explained how almost everybody just wanted my money “included you I suspect” I added. Susan stopped dead in her tracks and looked at me with a little disgust, “how did you lose your trust in other people? That’s sad.”
After some more semi-tense chatting, during which she frequently commented how handsome I looked, I asked how old they were.
“That’s a terrible question” replied Susan.
“No it’s not” I said, knowing full well that to ask a woman’s age in China doesn’t have the same taboo as back home. They both looked over thirty and I’d already had many women come up to me claiming to be students to go with them and be enticed into spending outrageous amounts of money.
“OK then” I said to Tina who looked the oldest, “what did you do before university?” This clearly had her stumped.
“Er… high school” she muttered unconvincingly.
“Really?” I said, “but you’re too old! You’re telling me you were in high school three years ago?”
“Yes” she replied. Then Susan spoke in fast Chinese to Tina, turned to me and said “do you want to have some tea with us?”
“Sure” I answered, “if it’s cheap, maybe about ¥10.”
“No” she said firmly, “we like expensive tea, cost you ¥200.” I just stared at them, “so you are just trying to get my money?” and they walked away. Within minutes of walking away, still chuckling to myself, another pair of girls said hello but much more passively than the previous couple. They asked the same old questions, I gave the same old answers but they didn’t say they wanted me to do anything. Upon my questioning they explained that they were English students. It fitted: they looked young and seemed eager to learn new words from me.
“Why are you in such a touristy area if you live here?” I asked, my suspicions dissolving away.
“Because it’s the weekend and we’re out shopping” said the girl with a yellow Addidas tracksuit and a dark Thai-style complexion. So I just followed them around for an hour or so, enjoying the company of people who weren’t after anything. After a quick photo, within minutes of departing, another two girls came to me and said hello. They asked the same questions but in a much more ‘just passing’ style and I soon rejoined my own company to wander through the surprisingly large square. There were many kits being sold and flown of all types and heights, some impossibly high like distant planes. Salesmen were everywhere, selling more cheap junk, and connect to chairman Mao in some way.
That evening George took Chris to the local hospital during which he waited five minutes to be seen, had an immediate blood and poo test, got the results within ten minutes and was prescribed and given drugs ten minutes after that. In a country where the maimed and starving bed for anything in all the cities, the health service still beats England’s by miles. This hospital was very simple. Things were just getting done without fuss or complaint. However, it looked much more basic, less well facilitated, and the Chinese spat on the floor which is surely a bad thing to do anywhere let alone in a hospital. In fact, the Chinese seem to hold no ground exempt from spitting. As we walked down a carpeted hallway in an office building, a dirty-jacket man spat on the floor, looking strangely pleased with himself afterwards.
“The Summer Palace”, one of Beijing’s major sights, was to be the next day’s plan for me. About 2.5 km square, it acted as leisure ground for one of China’s old Emperors when it was summer time and too hot to be indoors. It was beautiful. Willow lined paths between two lakes, rock garden patches, archaic decorative bridges and many traditional old Chinese buildings. Included in the entrance fee was admission to many small museums within the park, some ridiculously boring (as the young daughter of a British couple put it: “it’s just a bunch of chairs”) and some fascinating, if for no reason but the age of some of the relics which surpassed 3000 years. But Beijing’s eternal haze hung over the park, making it hard to see objects across the lake (although the lake was large) and at around 4pm, I could stare straight at the sun which then looked more like the moon: pale and misty.
Beijing is the place to see the Great Wall of China, well, at least where you need to catch a bus from. After a seventy minute journey we excitedly past patches of the wall itself before pulling up into tourist hell: “T-shirt one dollar, one dollar, postcards, book, T-shirt one dollar” was the local mantra yet again but our faces showed we had already experienced almost three weeks of this and were sick of it, although Chris still had to stop to look!
We first went to the Great Wall cinema which showed a film about the history of the wall in 360˚, using eight projectors, technology and film alike being about thirty years out of date. And it was only in Chinese with no subtitles. Crazy for such an international tourist attraction.
We wandered around for thirty minutes trying to find the way onto the wall and eventually found an absurdly tiny sign. Although the wall covers some 6000 km, you’d never guess it because of the bloody Beijing mist. The tower sections at every 200 metres or so consisted of a series of tiny tunnels you had to squeeze through although some Chinese considered these areas fit to have a piss. I noticed one woman doing herself back up, a puddle just below her.
It was extremely steep in places and the height of the coarse steps varied from around 10 cm to 50 cm. It was so busy that at one point people were crushing each other by one of the thin steep stairwells, seemingly unable to simply let one go at a time. 90% of the crowds were Chinese. The relative expense of China’s tourist attractions make it harder to enjoy them. You certainly get a sense that it’s just all about the money and this must surely be China’s biggest threat to a dwindling tourist industry. Surely no one who leaves China could forget the constant money grabbing, can’t-get-enough, tourist preying mentality and prevents me from recommended China to anybody. Whether you’re on a big budget or not, the persistence of the Chinese to trick, con and mislead foreigners is simply too much to create a fulfilling experience. Bottles of water were on sale on the wall for ¥10. A bottle of water in a shop was about ¥1.
So we got on the wall, walked about a mile, took our pictures and came off. There were no signs to tell you where to go, no information about the wall, no guides, no maps and no organisation. Things didn’t improve when we went to a restaurant in the city centre, as reviewed by the now utterly useless Lonely Planet, in which prices had risen by 50%. A half of a duck ¥100. We ordered a half between us and out came a serious looking chef with a meaty-looking half duck. He asked us how we’d like it cup up and proceeded to cut small slithers of meat and skin and serve it up on a small plate. Although the meat on this duck looked barely touched, he served up the small plate and left. This was it. Our ¥100 half duck. It barely enough for a sandwich. Sure it was tasty especially the oily skin, I’d never tasted anything like it but we couldn’t forget about the bill. It turns out that ¥30 is a fairly standard price in Beijing for a whole duck. Sure enough, our restaurant was full of fat Americans and glitzy foreigner business people.
Onwards into Mongolia the next day, leaving at 7.40 am, the longest railway journey I’d ever taken. It was a Chinese train and each compartment had four beds, two bunks on each side with a small table in the middle against the window. Me and Chris were in separate carriages as there weren’t many beds left which was a good thing in my mind. After a few hours of relaxing, listening to Eddie Izzard comedy CDs I ventured tot the restaurant carriage where I sat on an empty table. Within seconds the miserable Chinese “waitress” ushered me over to a table already occupied by a middle aged Scottish couple. I gave my order from a choice of the two items that were actually still available on the English menu (or so she said: I saw Chinese people eating fried rice and prawns which didn’t even feature on the absurdly concise menu) and happily chatted to the couple. I don’t know if the Chinese waitress was merely trying to save tables or had been administered the job of social ambassador, but I was pleased for the blunt introduction.
At the China/Mongolia boarder the wheels of the train were physically changed to ride the differing Mongolian tracks. The whole boarder process took about four hours, during which I decided to get off and couldn’t come back on until the process was finished. I had no idea what country I was in when I got off, a fairly unique feeling, until I saw everything priced in Chinese yuan in a small supermarket that most of the travelling Aussies and English were over-stocking on beer in. Having had our passports carefully checked by the Chinese for two hours, the train ran for ten minutes and the whole process was repeated by Mongolian. A young Mongolian woman official in ridiculously large oval hat scrutinised my passport and called some other officials over just to add to the drama of what would otherwise be an incredibly dull job. Having spent five minutes inspecting my battered passport like it was a nuclear bomb, she returned it with an air of contempt that said “just this time I’m not going to send you to a Siberian slave labour camp.”
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