Grim up north

In the course of his work, Peter sometimes has to travel to see customers. Last week he made his second trip to Yi’an, which is about 180 miles north of Harbin and thus about 180 miles colder and grimmer. People in the villages nearby drive little three-wheelers and live in huts, each with its own pigsty attached. To give you an idea – and to satisfy those blog fans who crave pictures of the grittier aspects of modern China – here are a couple of photos. The temperature gauge one shows the temperature outside the car at about 10pm one night a few weeks ago, I hasten to point out, but I felt you needed to see it for the record!

The trip takes 4 hours by car on a good day, seven on a bad one when roads are closed by snow or suchlike. Potholes, and other hazards such as the occasional very large pig in the road, abound. Luckily we are blessed with Mr Li who is so besotted with his people-carrier with its fur-lined seats that you can see him physically wince every time he drives over the slightest bump. I swear if it weren’t for Mr Li I would be a nervous wreck by now. He is without doubt or exception the best driver in China, by about a million miles.

Of course on occasion we do have to endure less comfortable modes of transport such as the infamous Shanghai Van (or the Sciatica-Mobile, as I’ve decided to christen it) which not only lacks seatbelts or suspension but also reeks of farm produce. This is the vehicle which they sent to pick us up from Shanghai airport the very first time we visited China to see if we wanted to live here, and so were presumably attempting to impress us! Lovely. But after having my bones rattled one time too many, I think I’ve managed to put a stop to that one by saying if it ever shows up there to collect us again I’ll let its tyres down and wait at the airport until they send something else. Big Boss now says if we phone his secretary she’ll make sure they send a nice car for us. Job done.

But anyway, to return to the singing farmers of Heilongjiang. By a grave oversight I omitted to tell you about these in my account of the CCTV New Year’s Eve Gala the other week. I’ve no idea how they can have slipped my mind as, being our local boys, they were definitely the highlight of the show for us – so much so that we considered voting for them as our favourite act, as we were continually exhorted to do by the presenters. We could even have won a golden statuette of an ox, I think it was – but in the end we decided this prize should go to someone more deserving.

The Singing Farmers of Heilongjiang appeared courtesy of the Chinese equivalent of Pop Idol or those Graham Norton ‘Let’s-find-a-nobody-who’s-never-been-to-drama-school-or-anything-and-make-them-the-star-of-an-outdated-West-End-musical-thereby-really-pissing-off-proper-hardworking-actors-who’ve-been-desperate-for-a-break-like-that-for-years’ shows. (Sorry, had to get my gripe in there; working in the theatre I have serious issues with this type of programme!).

However I don’t think China’s professional singers need worry too much about the Singing Farmers. One, a chap with a large bouffant and the ubiquitous gold jacket, did a reasonable Pavarotti (when helped out by a proper singer), but then he did train, we were told, by lying with a giant rock on his stomach and repeatedly lifting it using only his diaphragm muscles. The other guy, who had a craggy face and appeared to be still wearing his original Mao suit – and who had actually pulled out of the final of the talent show due to an unexpectedly good harvest - really shouldn’t give up the day job, but he got a good cheer anyway.

So when Peter made his foray into the wilder parts of northern Heilongjiang to meet farmers, I was hopeful that he might run into at least one of these celebs. I told him to listen out for the strains of ‘Nessun Dorma’ rising from the cowsheds and get the autograph of anyone in a Mao suit and/or with a rock balanced on their stomach, just to be on the safe side. But sadly it wasn’t to be.

Instead, he met a man who had a bedroom and en-suite bathroom attached to his office, both decorated from floor to ceiling in baby pink with lace frills all over everything, including the toilet seat. Something tells me if this guy does any singing it’s likely to be less ‘Nessun Dorma’ and more lip-synching to ‘I am what I am’ – but you didn’t hear that from me.

But it’s the food and accommodation on these trips that’s the high point - if measured on an oddness or a ‘let’s experience the real China’ scale, anyway. At one ‘motorway services’ café, on each table there was a dish of whole, raw garlic cloves. Peter (a garlic lover) asked his colleague what these were for. ‘Am I meant to just eat one?’, he said. ‘Oh yes,’ came the reply. ‘If the food is bad, they will help to fight off infection’. Ah. So it’s like that.

The hotel he had to stay in is apparently the best in Yi’an, but would barely merit one star by our standards. Its price list read:

Suite: 260 RMB [approx £26]
Room rate: 100 RMB
O’clock rate: 50 RMB

‘What’s “o’clock rate”?’ Peter asked another colleague, innocently.

‘Ah’, said colleague. ‘This is for when people want to have sex in the afternoons so they get room for an hour.’ Peter must have looked shocked because his pal added, with a twinkle in his eye, ‘Or perhaps they are just sleepy.’

Fortunately - unlike the 5-star hotels of Harbin - they didn’t actually attempt to provide Peter with an, erm, companion. Instead he was given a room which appeared to have no light-switch. Even the landlady didn’t seem to know where it was and spent ten minutes looking for it in the pitch blackness until Mr Li found it, concealed under a shelf. On seeing what the room was actually like, Peter asked to move. The second one wasn’t much of an improvement (only one working light and a quilt of dubious cleanliness), but did come with a fascinating range of freebies. I thought the things which normal hotels habitually give away were weird enough but these take some beating.

Guests were provided with the following [all sic, naturally!]:

- Tissues
- Ashtray
- Two cups and a teabag, but no means of heating water
- Wrigley’s gum and a ‘compressed towel’, displayed together on a little presentation stand
- A packet labelled ‘Men’s underwear’ on one side, and on the other ‘Panties – Comfortable Consideration New Vogue and New Character’
- And best of all: a sachet of ‘Uncomplimentary’ Yibashi High-Grade Bathing Lotion (‘Exclusive sale in high standard hotes’). The instructions suggested that if you ‘pour the liquid into the location where water pours’ and then ‘drench the inside bathtub wet and spread the plastics on it’, then ‘The degrakable plastics inside can be used to prevent your ksin from being direstly contacted bathtub’. Now it’s not often you can say that!! ‘Original Lotion Is Imported From Holland!’ the packaging proudly proclaimed, as if this would inspire you to use it.

And all this for a tenner.

This week he has a meeting with a man called Dr Dung Pan Boo (“but you can call me Dung Pan”). The mind can only boggle.

A one-horse space race

In August, the entire Chinese population got very very excited about the Olympics. At the beginning of September they got pretty damned excited about the Paralympics. And now, just when you thought no further demonstrations of national excitement were possible without mass spontaneous combustion occurring, they’re getting excited all over again about China’s third-ever manned space mission, the Shengzhou 7, and first-ever spacewalk. You wait 50 years and then three come along at once.

Of course, it’s probably no coincidence that they’ve launched the spaceship this year, or indeed at this particular juncture when – Tibet and melamine-flavoured milk aside – China’s image in the world is perceived as being a positive one on which they can build. There’s been a lot of talk about ‘confidence’ and ‘transparency’ – the idea being, it seems, to justify the vast amounts of money spent on such projects (each space suit alone cost $4.5 million US) on the grounds that it will attract more foreign investment to China by showing how far they’ve come as a modern nation. One commentator summed it up by saying that the reason why it has taken until now – more than forty years after the first space walk was conducted by the Soviet Union in 1965 – for China to reach this level of technological achievement was that, unlike the former USSR and America, China has not been competing with anyone to show its dominance of space. China is, he said, ‘only in a race with itself’. In which, of course, as in a one-party state, there can be only one winner.

As I’ve had nothing better to do this week, and as we’ve only got one TV channel (assuming I don’t want to sit through hours of Chinese game shows, karaoke shows and badly acted costume dramas; funny how you can tell they’re badly acted even when you can’t understand a word), over the last couple of days I’ve been following live coverage of the space mission, at least for as long as I can stand it. Having been MUCH too young to watch the moon landings this was, as far as I can recall, my first experience of live space broadcasting, and bloody hell is it boring. It was also China’s first attempt at making such a programme (they were going to do a live transmission of the last manned space launch in 2005, but wimped out at the last minute in case it blew up or something), and it showed.

Apart from amusing little touches like the fact that the rocket which launched the spaceship was called ‘Long March’ (how long can they keep milking that one?), and that the rows upon rows of technicians at the Beijing mission control base were, inexplicably, dressed in jannies’ overalls, the programme – whose intro featured suitably Star Wars-type music and graphics – made excruciating watching. Mostly, nothing was happening, but as with all live broadcasts where they’re waiting for some momentous event they tried to fill the time by discussing pointless minutiae and attempting to explain the proceedings to the uninitiated viewer. To this end, they’d invited a couple of experts – a Chinese scientist and an American academic - into the studio, where a female presenter struggled valiantly to make them say something interesting enough to fill half an hour or so.

The trouble was that the Chinese guy had clearly learnt his English from an aeronautics textbook and didn’t know any words of fewer than four syllables. She’d ask him a ditsy question like ‘So where are the astronauts sitting right now?’, and he’d drone on along the lines of ‘ah re-entry module velocity elliptical orbit component verification blah blah’ for about ten minutes in a robotic Chinese monotone, whereupon she’d titter ‘Oh ha ha, I’m getting a bit lost now, this is a bit technical for me, ha ha! Professor Lewis, maybe you can put it in simpler terms for us?’ Unfortunately, however, he couldn’t, being possessed of – if it’s possible – an EVEN MORE robotic and boring style of delivery than the first bloke. Obviously the director had just looked at these guys’ qualifications on paper and decided, ‘Yeah, they sound intelligent, let’s get them in’ – without troubling to audition them to see if they were remotely suitable for telly or should really have been left locked up in a deserted castle somewhere with lots of bubbling test-tubes and a servant called Igor.

On Day 2, the first Chinese scientist had been replaced by a second, whose command of English was sketchy and unintelligible. Professor Lewis was still there and starting to emerge as front runner. By Day 3, with Chinese scientists nos. 3 and 4 trying their luck, he had come to realise that he was the unlikely star of the show, and was warming to his role. ‘Their blood would BOIL !’, he exclaimed with glee - talking about the effects of failure to depressurise correctly - holding up his fingers like an Italian chef savouring a particularly flavoursome sauce. ‘It would cause excruciating PAIN, and possibly even KILL the astronauts!’, he added, a demonic glint in his eye.

Anyway, amidst all this, some facts which may have escaped you in the old west. All the astronauts are aged 42 and considered to be at their physical peak, which gives me hope that I’m not quite over the hill yet. Mind you, for the last two years they’ve been living in special training camps eating space-food, only being allowed home at weekends, and for the last couple of weeks haven’t been allowed home at all in case they caught a virus.

Two of them, Zhai Zhigang who did the spacewalk and his backup Liu Boming, are from Heilongjiang - where we are. Our boys in space; almost makes you proud. They didn’t say they’re from Harbin so I would imagine they’re from little one-horse towns – the equivalent of having two guys from Auchtermuchty and Ecclefechan up there. Zhai Zhigang in particular, it seems, came from a very poor family. His father was infirm and his mother made her living selling toasted sunflower seeds on the street. The story – romanticised possibly – is that when he passed the entrance exam for the army, she borrowed 15 Yuan (about £1.25) from a neighbour to buy him a briefcase, but all she had to put in it was toasted sunflower seeds, so that’s what he went off to army training camp with.

She didn’t live to see her son become a national hero.

Just to clear a couple of things up

Firstly, Harbin isn't technica-lly in Siberia. It nearly is, and it sounded good. Administratively it's in Heilongjiang province; regionally speaking it's in Manchuria (you know, that place that had a Candidate). But if you went about 300 miles north of here, you would be over the Russian border and in, yes, Siberia. Also, you know how when you’re going on holiday, and you suggest packing some obscure item which you might just need, or even extra toothpaste or something, and your other half argues, ‘We’ll buy it when we’re there if we need it – it’s not Outer Mongolia we’re going to!’? Well, for us it almost is. If you look at a map of China, we're in the bit on the top right which sticks up between Russia and Mongolia (Outer, the country; Inner Mongolia - yes, it exists - is the next Chinese province down. Peter has to arrange a symposium there, in the capital, Hohhot. I'm not making this up). A lot of the locals here look less Chinese and more like the Tuvan throat-singers or those Mongolian guys you see on telly, galloping about the steppes on horseback.

The city of Harbin was founded by Russians working on the construction of the Trans-Siberian railway, which actually still stops here. The Russian community is mostly long gone, but their influence remains in some of the architecture (see pics), food, and the fact that Vladivostock and one other Russian town just over the border are the only international flight destinations from Harbin airport. There's also the odd group of Russian tourists about, and one Russian TV channel on satellite in the hotel.

Which brings me to my other, unrelated point. I hate hotels. I just had to let it be said. I hate them, with a passion. The more stars they've got, the more I hate them. They cost a fortune and expect you to pay up front, even though we're here at the company's expense and would never stay anywhere as expensive as this out of choice. I've just had to pay £72 to get two weeks' washing done (well, we're not paying, but you know what I mean). They are mostly decorated in brown leatherette. You can't relax for people constantly knocking on your door offering 'turn-down service' - like I can't get into bed without someone showing me how - or bringing you stuff (never stuff you actually want; one day in Shanghai last week, someone banged furiously at the door, yelling in a way which made me think there must be a fire at the very least, and when I opened the door the maid was standing there with one of the little Kit-Kats they put on your pillow if you let them 'turn you down'. Where but a hotel could there be a Kit-Kat related emergency?). If you want a lie-in, you not only miss breakfast but don't get your room done until some incredibly inconvenient time. If you put the 'Do Not Disturb' sign on the door, it's guaranteed that will be the one occasion when they try to bring you something you actually DO want, like your clean laundry, and it's then a huge hassle to get it later. And don't even get me started on the ridiculous stuff they provide in the bathroom. Is there anyone on the planet who actually travels without a toothbrush? Or genuinely uses the hotel sewing kit, rather than just nicking it?

And another thing. Ok so I'm in China and it's my fault I don't speak Chinese, I get that, but if hotels are going to cater for westerners, have their menus in English as well and employ some 'English-speaking' staff, then why do they not at least teach them the English words relevant to the hotel trade? And familiarise them with the English translations of the menu, so that when you ask for a pillow, or toilet paper, they know what you mean, and when you order room service it doesn't take ten minutes of phone non-communication to get them to understand what you're asking for, even though it's printed in front of them? Even the in-room breakfast menu which you fill out yourself is like a game of Russian roulette. If you ask for 'Cereal and toast for two persons', you might get 4 slices of toast with butter but no knife, a big bowl of cereal and two spoons. Or you might get 8 slices of toast, two bowls of cereal and one spoon. Or no spoon. Or even a knife and fork. I suppose it all adds to the spice of life, but it does get tiresome very quickly when this is where you actually LIVE.

Hope that's clear then.