Business unusual (part 1)

As the last week has seen me do little of interest except poring over Mothercare catalogues, I thought for a change I would invite a guest correspondent (Peter) to regale you with his tale of a conference he attended a couple of weekends ago. Here in Shanghai it's easy to kid oneself that China is quite westernised really. The following account shows just how wrong such an assumption is. Enjoy.


We have recently taken on an agent who will sell our products to farmers in the Shanghai and Nanjing areas. The company was founded and is run by Jason. Jason is a rotund, jolly Chinese man who possesses considerably more acumen than is evident at first sight, like one or two publicans I have come across in the past. I was supposed to have addressed two seminars – one in each city – that he organised several weeks ago but these were postponed at the last minute due to an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the area. The ministry got on with the job of wholesale slaughter without feeling the need to let the general public know about it or anything. Anyway they appear to have contained the disease because Jason got the go ahead last week to arrange farmer meetings again.

This time, rather than hold separate meetings, he decided on a different tack. He got us and two other companies whose products he sells to split the cost with him of a conference in the mountain resort of Lang Ya Shan, ‘a four hour drive’ away in neighbouring Anhui province. We were all to travel there by coach (via a factory belonging to one of the participating companies) on Friday, have a full day’s conference on Saturday with presentations by all the suppliers; then half a day sightseeing on Sunday morning before returning home. The opportunities for enormous banquets with much drink, good humour and guanxi would then clearly be maximised. Basically it would more or less be me versus 80 Chinese farmers. I could hardly wait.

Jason (Mine Host) picked us up in the driving rain early on Friday morning – me, our sales director Dr Ssu, and Kevin, who still couldn’t believe his luck that I had let him come along. The poor lad never gets to leave the Harbin office very often and, because he works for Boss and me who already speak English, he missed out entirely on a recent UK trip that all the other company interpreters enjoyed.

Mine Host took us to his office, an hour’s wet drive away on the northern suburbs of Shanghai, outside which an empty coach stood waiting. We were first ushered upstairs into a smoke-filled boardroom where, dimly through the fug, I got my first idea of what 80 Chinese farmers looked (and sounded!) like. Over breakfast of fruit, bread rolls (the sugary Chinese ones) and bottled water, MH did a formal welcome presentation giving the history and success record of his (several) companies before we were allowed to board the bus.

As we groaned through the pouring rain it became apparent that the coach had seen better days. Like in an aircraft, each seat had four switches above it for light, air control etc. none of which worked. No seatbelts. Obviously. Looking about, several seats had been crudely welded together. I’d prefer not to think about how they got damaged in the first place. I’m also not sure if the driver knew when to change gear, as it juddered up every hill and he almost stalled it a couple of times before we got to the motorway.

At least no-one was smoking though, which was a huge relief. Possibly worse than smoke though was the muzak blaring from a speaker just above my head. It alternated between trashy rock numbers with razor guitar riffs to big-voiced slow ballads. Having a headache to start with I eventually had to send Kevin to ask the driver to turn it down, which he did for approximately eleven minutes before it was back to full volume again.

We had a wee and fag stop about 11.30 at the M-way services. Kevin said the farmers couldn’t believe it when they were ushered back onto the coach – they wanted to know where lunch was; 11.30 being the usual lunchtime in China. Even the ‘box of strangeness’ that we have for lunch every day in the Harbin office usually arrives before 11.15. Luckily I had brought sandwiches just in case so I was alright, Jack. It was at this point that I noticed Mine Host wasn’t with us - up at the front of the bus as I had thought. It seems he had an important meeting and would join us by car later.

Soon afterwards we went through an M-way toll gate and were immediately pulled over to a waiting area by the side of the road for a routine police check. Twenty minutes later the driver was still talking heatedly to the policeman, surrounded by smoking farmers, so I sent Kevin to find out what was going on. It seems the driver had a fake driving licence.

Needing to stretch my legs now I wandered around the checkpoint area. All across the hoarding the length of the area were 20 or so giant posters showing horrific traffic accidents, most with close ups of mangled people or bits of people. On one of them the picture was blurred, but the inset photo of Princess Di sporting a dreadful 80s perm gave away the reason for its inclusion. I didn’t realise she was recognised here but I suppose the world’s best known road accident victim is an icon the world over.

An hour later and I was extremely glad of my sandwiches and reading book. They let us go eventually. The story now was that it wasn’t a fake driving licence but a wrong, or possibly out of date, licence for the coach itself. Apparently the bus company would get a few days to put the matter right. By now it was around 2.00 and we pulled off the M-way into a village where there was a nice little restaurant for a quick lunch. I was a bit hungry again by now so the farmers must have been suffering. There were even traditional costumes and folk musicians to meet us.

After that it was still an hour and a half to the factory. In true Chinese style, the entire bus save for me and the driver slept soundly all the way there. I could probably have done so if it hadn’t been for the omnipresent muzak, by now at lower volume but at that irritating boom-chack boom-chack level that reminded me of toothache.

Now, our company has five factories in China and this one was one of our major worldwide competitors so I felt a bit strange, not to mention exposed, when we all donned white coats and silly mop-caps for the tour. Dr Ssu’s cunning plan to give his camera to Kevin (who was dressed and looked generally more like the farmers), and pretend to be my interpreter himself whilst Kevin indulged in some amateur industrial espionage, backfired when they said we couldn’t take cameras inside the plant.

We FINALLY reached the resort destination at just after 7.00 (the ‘four hour drive’ thus having taking approximately eleven hours from when I was picked up at home) and dinner was meant to have been at 6.00 so it was dump the stuff and dash.

The place was a lot bigger than I expected – an entire resort hotel sort of thing set in a steep wooded gorge (my window was just feet from a sheer rock-face) with lots of open covered walkways passing by carp ponds linking different buildings. Whilst clearly being a holiday resort, there were no concessions for westerners; none of the staff spoke English, though most of the signs were bilingual – well Chinglish, anyway; we ate for example in the Anquet Hall. The hotel brochure was a spectacularly bad approximation of my native language. It’s as though they had given it to the manager’s primary school age child to translate, without bothering to get it checked by a real English speaker. I got the feeling that I was the first non-Chinese person ever to visit there.

Most impressive of all was the list of products on sale in the guest rooms. You’ll get the idea if you refer to an earlier post describing my experiences at a hotel in Yi’an, but this one, being a flashier place entirely, had more variety on offer. For some reason, Chinese hotels seem to imagine that their guests will have neglected to pack any underwear and so often have men’s briefs on sale in the rooms. This one offered a range, however, including ‘Women knickets’ and ‘Fatmen’s underwear’. Where the ordinary men’s briefs packet was illustrated with the standard posing western male model type, the Fatmen’s alternative showed a portly Indian gent.

You could also purchase, among other things, various teas, vermicelli, playing cards, ‘compressed towel’, and, for the ladies, ‘Women lotion – an adult-only pudenda washing lotion’. This delightful product, it seemed, could ‘clean the adult pudenda quickly and effectively, forming a protective barrier at the using part to protect human body from filth.’ It could also ‘relieve pruritus and get rid of peculiar smell’. Now you can’t say these Chinese hotel proprietors don’t think of everything. The whole (extensive) list of products ended with the promise – or warning, it was hard to tell which – ‘In the event of shortages of goods or adjustement period, whitout prior notice, locations!’

Dinner was the by now familiar banquet, with courses arriving all the time, much individual and collective toasting with baijo (52% alcohol Chinese hooch), m???jo (a wine-strength disgusting liquid) and beer flowing freely. By some accident or design the Chinese expression ‘gan bei’ means both ‘cheers’ and ‘bottoms up’ so mealtimes can be quite a challenge for some. As has been noted before, the Chinese don’t drink very much, if at all, but at least half the farmers had at least some beer. One large farmer across the table took a shine to me when he saw me ‘gan bei’ with the real stuff so he kept up a steady flow of banter, then later presented me his business card in a formal, if somewhat unsteady, manner. It seems I'd made a friend.


To be continued.....

Tokyo Girl

First of all, apologies. We’ve been home from Japan a week, but in between doctor’s appointments, a flood under our sink, and doing all our holiday laundry before the washing machine broke down again (which it did, last night) I don’t seem to have got around to blogging. I did manage to upload our holiday photos though, which hopefully many of you have seen by now – if not, I’ve put a link at the end of this post.

Anyway, we’re back. Peter is slowly getting used to Two-Home Syndrome – otherwise known as ‘Oh no, all my trousers appear to be in the wrong city’ – and I’m mostly sitting around knitting while waiting for men to come and fix things, and occasionally going out and getting incredibly frustrated with taxi drivers who have no idea where to go. I’m now refusing to leave the house until we can get a piece of paper which actually tells them where to get off the elevated road so that they don’t take me a mile past the house every time.

So, as it’s all quiet on the Shanghai front, here are ten facts you didn’t know about Japan.

1. They drive on the left. This was a surprise. I thought it was only the former British colonies who retained this (to the rest of the world) oddity. I can only assume they chose the left at random – as we must have done – at the time when such things came to be decided and formalised. When was that anyway? We just take it for granted, but it occurred to me that I have no idea how it came about. Who decided, and how? I imagine that it happened relatively late in the history of motoring, so if there’s anyone out there who can enlighten me, I’d be fascinated to know. Yes, I know, I’m a bit of a saddo.

2. The Japanese really are unbelievably polite. And they really do bow. A lot. In fact hotel staff don’t so much bow as scrape. Taxi drivers bow. Shop staff bow as you enter and again as you leave, all the while thanking you profusely even if all you’ve done is walk around, realise everything is ridiculously expensive, and walk out again (which was mostly what we did). Drivers bow to you from behind the wheel if you let them go. But more often than not they stop to let you cross. Together with the driving on the left it takes all the fun out of crossing the road.

3. And don’t even get me started on the queueing. Nobody pushes or shoves. They queue for the toilet. On subway platforms they queue in orderly lines at marked points to enter specific carriages. We got ordered to the back of a bus queue for pushing in – Chinese-style - with our luggage when we first arrived at the airport. I never thought I’d find a nation more anal about queues than the Brits, but there we are. It exists.

4. Everyone wears a suit and tie to work. Dark suits with almost exclusively plain white shirts for the guys, and often for the girls too, complete with clumpy black or navy court shoes of the kind favoured by the late Queen Mother. One or two of the younger guys had made a daring foray into subtly striped shirts, but I bet they were the trouble-makers who got passed over for promotion. Even taxi drivers (unless they’re in a chauffeur’s uniform) wear suits. Kids wear western-style school uniform, often with kilts. By contrast, the studenty, arty types could be seen sporting the most bizarre of attire, ranging as far as a pink crinoline with pink bobby-socks and a straw hat (I kid you not). And every girl under 30 – and most of the boys too – had dyed hair cut into a hyper-trendy style. Hairdressers abounded, seemingly on every corner, to cater for this necessity.

Contrast this, if you will, with Chinese fashion style, which goes something like this. Business attire for men: a black jumper with a zip at the neck, probably with jeans or maybe tracksuit bottoms. For the more senior/modern businessman, possibly a suit, but never a tie. For women of all ages: anything goes. Denim or leather shorts are popular, often with thigh-high boots. School uniforms are generally turquoise shellsuits. Hair is stuck in an 80s timewarp, with the bouffant and the poodle perm being the hairstyles de choix for males and females respectively. What a difference a few hundred miles and half a century of open government makes.

I must say a final word about the dogs. Like the Chinese, they like 'em small, but where the Chinese dog of choice is the chihuahua - the tinier the better - for the Japanese it’s the long-haired dachsund. Preferably dressed up in a silly outfit. Who knows why.

5. Nobody says ‘Konnichiwa’ or ‘Sayonara’, any more than people in Britain say ‘Good afternoon; how do you do?’, to the confusion of EFL students the world over. I didn’t catch what they were saying in greeting, but for Goodbye they generally either just thank you (if they’re in the service industry and you’re a customer), or amongst themselves they often say ‘Bye-bye’ in English. The Chinese do this too. I can only guess it’s acquired some kind of sophisticated cachet, like the British saying ‘Ciao’ to each other. I should like to point out, by the way, that I have never said ‘Ciao’. But I did get to use one of the two phrases I know in Japanese – ‘Arigato gozaimasu’, which means ‘Thank you very much’, a great deal. Strangely, I didn’t get to use the other. It’s ‘Niwa de e o kaite iru hito wa ripa na ekaki desu’, which means ‘The man painting a picture in the garden is a splendid artist’. Don’t ask.

6. Japan is a great place to be pregnant. All the subway trains had seats specially designated for those with bad legs or bumps, and everyone is so well trained in excessive politeness that even teenagers leapt back to allow me to sit down the minute they saw me. In China, nobody gives a sh**. It did get us into the ‘Special Lane’ at immigration at Shanghai airport – thus bypassing a queue of several hundred other foreigners last Sunday – but only after I asked and they’d just let someone less pregnant than me go through, and so could hardly refuse.

7. It’s also a great place to have diarrhoea. Yes, once again my constitution – ox-like in the face of Chinese supermarkets of dubious cleanliness and occasionally unidentifiable items served in Chinese restaurants – failed me on arrival in a supposedly ‘westernised’ country where you can actually drink the tap water, and I got a case of Delhi Belly. Or let’s call it Tokyo Tum. Anyway, if I had to pick a country to have the trots, I’d pick Japan on account of the toilets, nearly all of which have a built-in bidet with adjustable spray. Some even have a ‘back or front wash’ option. They also have heated seats, doors that lock, and somewhere to put your handbag – and even, in many cases, your baby, in a special ‘baby rest’ on the wall.

The one unfortunate exception was the public toilet in a park which was the scene of one of my more dramatic diarrhoea episodes. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice to say this was NOT one of the modern, all-dancing, all-spraying Japanese toilets, but was a Chinese-style one.

Now this is where I have to confess, dear readers, that I’ve been protecting you a bit up until now from the unpalatable reality that is Chinese public toilets. But I think you’re ready. Not that I wish to deter any of our potential visitors, but the Chinese have squat toilets. That’s holes in the ground, with a sort of horizontal urinal built into the tiles. For women. You find these everywhere except in private homes, 5-star hotels aimed at westerners, and some – but by no means all – restaurants. Even offices, mega-posh shopping malls, and the western fast-food chains can’t be relied upon to provide proper toilets. You’re generally ok in Starbucks and Pizza Hut, but not Macdonald’s or KFC (er, not that we frequent these places much, honest!).

I’ve yet to fathom out exactly how one’s supposed to use them without getting wee all over your clothes and shoes – and that’s even without a baby bump. Also there’s nowhere to put your bag except in a puddle, the doors don’t lock (or are deliberately left unlocked by people using the toilet so that it’s easy to walk in on a lady in a compromising position), and there’s generally no paper, at least not in the individual cubicles. If you do use paper, you’re not supposed to flush it down the toilet but to put it into a bin instead, along with everyone else’s. As you can imagine, it gets a bit stinky. They tell you the reason is because of poor plumbing, but really it’s because they spread human excrement on the fields as fertiliser and don’t want paper mixed in with it. Which probably also explains why they discourage the use of tampons.

Ok, I’ll stop now. Forget I spoke. Go to Japan and get your bum washed instead.

8. Kyoto has a large expat community. We discovered this when we went to an Irish bar and on the first night were one of three English couples there (the only customers apart from an Irish chap), and on the second night accidentally found ourselves at a wake attended by a large number of middle-aged, bohemian Americans who had all clearly lived there for years. Kyoto is also overrun with tourists of all nationalities, at least during sakura (cherry blossom) season. What’s more, it’s very hilly and April is surprisingly hot. If you’re going, I’d recommend an out of season visit. And not being 6 months pregnant if you actually want to see anything, as all the pretty temples etc are up large flights of steps at the top of steep hills. I lost count of the number of times I sat on a wall to recover while Peter went off and took photos of the thing we were meant to be looking at, so that I could see it later.

9. Despite the above, outside of the tourist industry it’s rarer to find English speakers in Japan than it is in China, where they’ve obviously been teaching English in primary schools for 20 years so that many young people can speak at least some, even if most won’t admit it out of shyness. In Japan, it’s more common to find English speakers among the older generation, but even those are few and far between. Most restaurants – including those purporting to serve western food – have monolingual Japanese menus. Chinese menus (in Shanghai and Harbin anyway) often have English and nearly always have pictures. So eating out in Japan can be a challenge. Restaurant staff, however, seemed mystified as to why we kept walking away.

10. In spite of the down sides, Japan is quite simply fab – and not just when compared to China. It’s super-clean, super-fast and yet remarkably laid back. We found a brilliant quarter of Tokyo awash with vintage clothes shops, which was seventh heaven for me as they don’t have such things in China – well, I suppose there’s not much of a market for vintage Mao suits – yet! The bullet train is great, as is the view of Mount Fuji which you get when travelling on it from Tokyo to Kyoto. And the cherry blossom is truly spectacular. Take a look.

Arigato gozaimasu. Sayonara and Bye-bye for now!

Knowledge, and the lack thereof

“TAXI !!”

How often have you shouted that word, or even silently raised your arm on a busy street, secure in the belief that once ensconced in that vehicle you need have no further worries and will be able to switch off for a short while, as you are conveyed efficiently to your destination? You won’t get lost. You won’t be asked any difficult questions regarding the location of or route to wherever you’re going. After all, taxi drivers know everything, right?

Edinburgh taxi drivers do. In fifteen years there I was only ever taken to the wrong place once, and that was forgivable as a lot of the streets do have very similar names. Minicab drivers in York and Southampton seem to have a pretty good grasp of things too, despite having those cities’ tortuous one-way systems to contend with. And in London, of course, all cabbies have The Knowledge.

For my non-British readers, this is a test - allegedly requiring years of study - which anyone wishing to become a black-cab driver in London must pass, and which basically involves learning the name and location of every street and landmark in the UK capital. It’s a BIG place, so the taxi drivers rightly pride themselves on this achievement – particularly as I imagine they must have to keep their ‘Knowledge’ continually updated to keep pace with changes, which is no mean feat these days.

If you’ll permit me an indulgent aside for a moment, anyone who doubts that such an encyclopedic knowledge of a giant mega-city is possible should have met my late father. He wasn’t a cab driver, but I’m sure The Knowledge would have been a breeze for him. He was born and raised in south-east London, and later worked for one of the major publishing houses as their Central London rep for many years between the 1950s and 1970s. He was extremely good at it, and as a result was on first name terms with every bookshop owner, manager or chief buyer in London, which was a great many.

A bi-product of this was that he knew the place like the proverbial back of his hand. When my friends and I started going up to London on our own as teenagers, if any of us wanted to find a specific address, no matter what the area, I had only to ask my Dad and after a minute or two’s consideration he would not only able to advise the traveller as to the quickest route by Tube, but would also draw – freehand and without recourse to reference books – a detailed and amazingly accurate pictorial map of the route on foot from station to destination, showing every turning and landmark - sometimes down to the last tree or lamp-post - with estimated distances or walking times between each.

As a result I was able to travel freely alone around London from the age of about 14 with no fear of getting lost. I’d never heard of an A to Z – my Dad’s maps were all I ever needed. I wish I’d kept some of them as they were works of art, of which he was justly proud. On one’s return home he would enquire with just a hint of a smug smile, ‘So did you find it all right?’, to which one was required to respond with glory heaped upon The Map.

The only time they were ever wrong was when some new development had occurred without his knowledge - something which, it has to be said, he always took very badly. He seemed to expect to be kept informed of all changes, however minor, to the London landscape; indeed, it’s quite possible he half expected them to be run past him first. Any alteration to his beloved native city was truly a monstrous carbuncle. During my student years he occasionally came to collect me by car from King’s Cross when I came home for the holidays, and the installation of any new roundabout or one-way system not only confused and perturbed him but also, you could tell, wounded him deeply. If I or my mother had gone to London armed with one of his maps and dared to remark casually on our return, ‘Yes, thanks, I found the place no problem, the map was great, but incidentally did you know that place you said was a bank is actually now a McDonald’s? And where you said there’d be a big tree on the corner it looked as though they’d chopped it down recently,’ all hell would break loose.

First would come a detailed interrogation to make sure that we weren’t mistaken, or making it up just to annoy him, and that we really had followed his instructions to the letter and hadn’t accidentally – or perhaps wilfully – taken a wrong turning. When at length he was satisfied that we were not either lying or congenitally stupid, the grieving process would begin.

‘McDonald’s?!’ he’d cry, in anguish. ‘What is the world coming to? Been there for years, that bank had. McDonald’s? Christ Almighty,’ and so on in this vein for some time. Or, ‘What, that lovely old tree? Gone? I can’t believe it. Lovely, it was, that tree. Chopped it down? Dear oh dear oh dear. Christ Almighty,’ and at this point would become too choked to continue and wouldn’t speak for the rest of the evening. In the end I gave up telling him. It was less painful for everyone that way.

Knowledge, you see. A powerful tool. Unless, that is, you’re a Chinese taxi driver.

Boss was heard to remark the other week that the only qualification for becoming a cab driver in Shanghai seems to be the ability to drive. To be frank, I would question even that one, but one criterion that certainly isn’t deemed necessary is knowing where anything is.

None of the taxi drivers speak English, so if you don’t speak Chinese the only way to get anywhere is to have your destination written down in Chinese characters and show this to the driver on entering the vehicle. The drill is always the same. They take your piece of paper, peer at it, slowly turn it over and read whatever’s on the back (whether this is the same thing, a different address entirely, or simply your shopping list in English), then with some encouragement from you turn it back to the correct side and read it carefully again, generally while shaking their head and muttering. They may turn to you and ask you a question. When you respond with a shrug, or a wave in the general direction in which you need to go, they mutter some more, throw your piece of paper onto the dashboard and set off, still muttering, which is disconcerting when you can recognise the word for ‘where?’ cropping up repeatedly.

One driver this week did the whole pantomime with my little address note and then turned to me and asked in Chinese which I understood perfectly, ‘Where’s that then?’. And this wasn’t some obscure side-street; our new apartment’s address is on one of Shanghai’s major thoroughfares. It’s like a London cabbie asking you where, say, Charing Cross Road is, or an Edinburgh one struggling to find Leith Walk. What did he want me to say – ‘It’s in Shanghai’, perhaps?

Once mobile, they may start off by going in completely the opposite direction, or take a wildly wrong turning anywhere en route, so you need to have your wits about you and be prepared to shout ‘No, no!’ and gesture frantically – assuming, of course, you know where the place is yourself, because if you don’t, you’re frankly buggered. The only recourse in that instance is to phone someone at your destination, explain your plight, hand the phone to the driver and get them to dictate directions in Chinese. Thank goodness for modern technology.

When they eventually get near – or what they think might be near – to where you want to go, they will slow down and proceed in a very irritating stop-start manner for a mile or so while consulting your paper every few yards. They do this even if you know you’re not there yet and keep shouting at them to go on. Just as they approach the correct place, they will put their foot down and you have to scream at them again to stop, which they will then do, even if this means screeching to a halt in the middle of a dual carriageway and doing a U-turn across several lanes of oncoming traffic.

It’s not just in Shanghai that this goes on. In Harbin, our taxi usage is mostly confined to bringing the shopping home from the supermarket, which is less than a mile away. We have our address, in Chinese, in a text message which we show to the drivers. But not one of them knows where the street is, so Peter always has to sit in the passenger seat and point left and right. In Beijing the other week, Peter was on his way to a meeting and had his cabbie actually lean out of the window while driving along and shout across to a fellow taxi driver driving alongside for directions. Ever heard of sat-nav, guys??

Maybe the trouble is that finding out where places are would involve getting a straight answer out of people, something which you’ll have gathered by now is next to impossible here. The lost taxi-driver in Beijing was only part of Peter’s woes in his attempts to get to this meeting. First of all he had tried to get the hotel reception to give him a phone number for a taxi company so that he could call a taxi to get back after the meeting, as it was out of town. The girl he asked looked a bit perplexed and went into the back office to consult with her colleagues. After a while she reappeared.

‘We will call you taxi,’ she said.

Peter explained that yes, that was fine for getting there, but how would he get back? After several repetitions of this cycle, the duty manager got on the case and offered to find a driver and negotiate with him to wait while Peter had his meeting. Clearly the concept of phoning in advance for a taxi was unheard of – indeed, as the taxis have no radios it’s hard to see how this could work. They sent a lad from the hotel into the street to flag down a taxi. Two stopped at once, only avoiding crashing into each other by one of them knocking down a cyclist, who got up and started shouting at the driver and kicking his bumper, thereby allowing the other driver to win Peter’s fare.

It was this man - who apparently resembled a hippopotamus with exceptionally large, hairy, warty ears - who had to ask other drivers for assistance en route, until Peter eventually phoned the person he was going to meet and did the hand-the-phone-to-driver thing – which in view of the warty ears was pretty brave.

On arrival at his destination, Peter disembarked and retrieving (and wiping) his phone, said to his associate, ‘Right, I’m here now. I’m at the main entrance. Where’s your office?’

‘Ah’, says associate. ‘Go out of the main door and we are round the back.’

‘Left or right?’ asks Peter.

‘We are in a building that is not yellow.’

‘Yes but do I go left or right?’

‘It is a low building.’

Giving up, he picked a direction at random, walked for a little while and then phoned again. ‘Ok, I’m standing looking at a big tower thing.’

‘Ah, you have gone too far. Go back.’

He returns to the main entrance. ‘Now I’ve gone back to where I was before.’

‘I did not see you! Look for the building that is not yellow.’

And so, having asked the guy please to come out and find him, he tried again, and on the second attempt discovered that in actual fact when he got to the tower he hadn’t gone far enough.

People say the Chinese will one day rule the world. If knowledge really is power, I don’t think we’ve got too much to worry about. Rule the world? They’d have to find it first.

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.

Remember the Green Cross Code?

Yeah, well, if you come to China you may as well forget it. I tell you, if Dave Prowse hadn’t got that George Lucas gig he’d have had plenty of work here to see him into ripe old age.

Forget Look Right, Look Left etc. Here it’s more a case of, Look Left, Look Right, Look Left Again, Look Around Wildly in All Directions, Panic, Start to Cross, Realise That Cars Are Still Coming Even Though Green Man is Showing, Run Back to Pavement, Repeat Process Several Times, Give Up If Want to Stay Alive, Wait For An Eternity, See a Chinese Person Crossing and Stick Very Close Behind Them While Being Prepared to Dodge Rapidly Moving Taxis Which Will Stop For No Man. Doesn’t really trip off the tongue, does it?

Actually, they have a very sensible system for traffic lights which show how many seconds there are to count down until they change to green and the red man comes on. There’s no way for pedestrians to control the red & green men, but the lights change with sufficient frequency to make this not a problem. Except that the green man doesn’t actually mean ‘It’s safe to cross now’. It means, as far as I can deduce, ‘You probably have about a 50% less chance of being killed if you go now than if you wait until the lights change again’. This is because a red traffic light DOESN’T apply to traffic turning right OR left (!), or to bikes & scooters, which have their own lane in Harbin (a minor improvement on Shanghai where the bike & scooter lane doubles as, er, the pavement). And as the roads here are nearly all huge, wide, four-lane boulevards which have to be crossed in stages, it can be challenging to say the least.

The other thing is the car horns. They are incessant, and seem to indicate, ‘I have no intention of stopping, so if you [be you a pedestrian, cyclist or other driver] don’t want to die, get out of my way’. There’s no lane discipline as we understand it; they use the American system where undertaking (never has a word been more apt!) is allowed as well as overtaking, and at roundabouts everyone just sort of pushes forward optimistically, blasting their horns until someone lets them through. It’s kind of traffic Darwinism.

Getting in a car or taxi is a white-knuckle ride, compounded by the fact that many don’t have functioning seatbelts except for the driver, who never wears his anyway. But then the Chinese attitude towards protective clothing and safety gear seems ambiguous. In Shanghai, anyone who has to work, cycle, or even walk in close proximity to traffic wears a surgical mask to protect them from exhaust fumes. Pedestrians carry umbrellas to shield them from the sun. Scooter-riders and cyclists wear sun visors, and weird detachable cotton sleeves, elasticated at the top & bottom, to cover their arms if they’re wearing a short-sleeved shirt. The thing absolutely no-one wears is a helmet. But at least if they get knocked down and mangled to pieces by the relentless, high-speed, multi-directional traffic, they’ll have nice clean lungs and their arms won’t be sunburnt. So that’s ok.

If you want to read further thoughts on Chinese driving, as well as many other aspects of what it’s like to be a British woman living in China, do check out my fellow blogger at http://livingthehailife.blogspot.com/.
What she has to say about culture shock, Chinese food, Chinese sleeping habits, Chinglish, shopping, Tampax and the unavailability thereof in China – to name but a few – I simply cannot improve upon or add to. It’s exactly as she describes it. Her recent description of the visa medical which I mentioned last week is accurate too, though I was fortunate enough not to have had any intimate surgery to have to explain to Chinese doctors.

Incidentally, you may like to know that according to my medical results I ‘Be in basically normal health status’, but that a UK size 14 is considered ‘Obese’ here. I’m still fuming every time I think about it.