Business unusual (part 2)

Peter continues his account of his weekend trip to Lang Ya Shan...

Saturday was conference day. After an impenetrable breakfast of spicy noodles and various strange pickled vegetables, the real business began. First on was young Earnest Vet, who worked for one of the international drug companies. Although all in Chinese, most of his slides told the story quite well, plus I wasn’t much interested anyway, so I didn’t bother to get Kevin to translate for me. We were well provided with Chinese tea – large green tea leaves in a cup that is often topped up by a waitress with hot water from a flask. You kind of have to strain it through your teeth.

Next up was Dr Boffin. He was unbelievably boring. I have seen some awful presentations in my time but this was definitely prizeworthy. His subject matter was quite important to me – several of his slides overlapped what I was going to say – but he had lost the audience within five minutes. An interesting slide would be followed by five or six slides full of mathematical formulae involving logarithms to base e.

Now, in the west, if a speaker is a bit boring we try our best – don’t we – to be polite? We might stare into space and find ourselves thinking about what’s for dinner; what our partner might be doing back home; what was on the telly last night. In China they talk loudly to the people beside them. They turn completely around so their back is to the speaker and conduct group conversations with those behind them. They get out their mobile phones and call friends with a poor signal so that they have to shout. In short; it was like what happens in a primary school class when the teacher nips out for a ciggy. (Does that still happen? It certainly did in my day). Having a microphone didn’t help Dr Boffin at all – he still couldn’t be heard at all over the din. On one occasion he asked the audience whether that point was clear – there was a sudden few seconds of silence that spread like a wave around the room. People even turned around towards the front to see whether anything interesting had finally happened, some clearly put out that their conversation had been interrupted. Then someone near the front answered ‘no, not really’ so he was off again, with ever more detailed explanations whilst the audience returned to their own little worlds.

When he had finally finished, Dr Smooth took the mike. Dr Smooth was an independent technical adviser to Mine Host’s company and was due to speak later in the afternoon, but had obviously decided to try to save the day for Dr Boffin. He had Charisma. Buckets of. And a swept back leonine mane, just greying enough to add an air of refinement. It seems he lives in California, which probably explains a lot. In less than ten minutes he summed up Dr Boffin’s entire hour-and-a-half presentation in a very engaging and memorable manner. He cooed into the microphone. He whispered and they hung on to every word. He raised his voice to make the point and they all nodded emphatically (except the two wifies who chatted incessantly throughout the entire day, obviously). I was impressed.

Next was lunch in the lakeside restaurant, and then I was on. I had been a little concerned about having the post-lunch graveyard slot but, as the only westerner in the village, I was enough of a novelty to keep them engaged. I got a rousing cheer for introducing myself in Chinese and after that they were very good to me. Dr Ssu translated – he is quite a good speaker anyway - so I decided on the tactic of soundbite bullet points, each of which was instantly translated, and it seemed to work. I watched one old guy at the back gradually fall asleep but, apart from the two chatting wifies (who even listened for a few minutes at the beginning before resuming their conversation) they listened quite well.

After me it was Dr Smooth’s allotted slot so he began to smooth them some more. This time he didn’t have it so easy and got quite a bit of heckling. Chatting wifies chatted throughout and I think it was when he stopped talking and stared at them with a smoothie smile that things began to go wrong for him. This was taking liberties. It’s as though they can only take so much smooth at one go. Either that or they were just exhausted at being so quiet for my presentation. Whatever the reason, they were simply not going to believe some of the things he told them, and that was that.

Then came question time. All the speakers sat in front of microphones at the top table and the audience was invited to supply written questions. Some small gift was given to those whose questions were answered as a wee incentive.

We were flooded. The questions were quite good too, and demonstrated that at least some people had been listening throughout. They just kept on coming and coming. After an hour and a quarter and with more of the audience still waving the girls over to collect questions, Mine Host Jason had to call a halt whilst we answered the final eight. It was after 5.30 by now, we had been at it all day and wanted a rest before the onslaught that is dinner.

The audience really perked up then because it was prize time. Each speaker had been asked to give two questions to MH, the answers to which would appear in the presentation. These questions must have been distributed at some stage because the slips were all collected at the end and put into a raffle box. Most of the prizes were fairly small things donated by the companies involved. We supplied pens, mugs and backpacks all bearing our logo. Someone else supplied fleece jackets. The two top prizes were quite presentable though; a nice camera and a laptop. The whole affair was a bit drawn out with many looks of palpable disappointment as the crappy presents were distributed first, raising the excitement level for the final two. As the top table speakers took it in turns to pull the question slips out of the box I noticed that no attempt had been made to mark the papers. My questions were mostly answered correctly – I had made them pretty easy – but I didn’t see one single attempt to answer Dr Boffin’s questions. Some hadn’t answered any questions at all.

I finally got about seven minutes’ break before dinner. Mine Host was delighted with the day and sat me at his right hand, dismissing Kevin to a different table to make more room for the important guests. MH assured me that he would interpret, and his English being quite good, I concurred.

This was not a good idea as it turned out. He spent about 15 minutes at my table then set off on a tour of all the other tables delivering amiable good charm and lashings of baijo. When he returned to our table an hour later he was definitely not in a good way. His shirt was completely untucked and he began to mop his brow and complain of the heat.

Everyone then adjourned en masse to the KTV (karaoke) bar. The Chinese simply adore karaoke and will deny any suggestion that it’s a Japanese invention (but then they claim to have invented everything, including football). Indeed in Harbin we are often reduced to sleeping with ear-plugs in to block out the, ahem, dulcet strains of over-amplified ‘singing’ coming from the KTV bar next to our flat there – which sometimes goes on until 5am.

Anyway the farmers were well up for it that night. Going to join in the fun, I discovered however that the only drink on offer in the so-called ‘bar’ was tea. With what I thought was extreme presence of mind, I quickly slipped back into the dining hall and grabbed a mostly full bottle of something from the nearest table before it was cleared away. Sadly it turned out to be the revolting ‘dark baijo’, which I proceeded to struggle through. As my grandad would have said, I was glad when I’d finished it. I also – confession-time now – lost my karaoke virginity. With ‘Yesterday’. It was good for me. I was also the only singer to get a round of applause, probably because unlike all the others I was obviously able to sing the original words.

After that, I must confess the evening becomes a little hazy. MH was last seen slumped in a corner somewhere. Kevin had made an early exit and was nowhere to be seen. I finally retired to bed, silently thanking my parents for endowing me with a sturdy Irish constitution and wondering what state the Chinese would be in for the following morning’s sightseeing trip.

At this point my correspondent, pleading lack of time, concludes his account, so I'll just fill you in quickly with what I know of the following day's activities. The entire party - apparently looking remarkably healthy despite the previous evening's festivities - were taken to visit an old villa and a living monastery with integral Buddhist temple in the hills beneath which the hotel was built. Dr Ssu and Kevin both came over a bit religious. Peter did his best to enjoy the sightseeing - a process hampered by the fact that they were accompanied by approximately 9000 Chinese tourists aged 4 to 104, including about 70 school parties being escorted around the sites by students talking loudly into megaphones.

It quickly became apparent that Peter was probably the first westerner most of them had ever seen, as around forty 11-year-old schoolgirls queued up to have their picture taken with him. One actually trembled with excitement - or it could have been terror - when he put his arm around her for the photo. Nearly all wore t-shirts bearing text in 'English'. As usual though they didn’t believe in spell-checkers or proof reading so a good percentage had typos. A selection included 'Aple blossm', 'Memory make happy always' … and Peter's favourite: 'Harvard Univirsity'.

Then it was back on the bus for the long journey home - only 6 hours this time if you don't count the two hours required for Jason to get someone to come and unlock his office where he had left his car keys, so that he could drive Peter home.

Finally just a few more photos just to give you the general idea.

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.....

And now, the moment you've all been waiting for...

Yes, it's Harbin's only claim to world fame - the incredible Ice and Snow Festival!

As an early Chinese New Year celebration, we were taken yesterday on an office jolly - a grand day out, marred only slightly by the intervening meal which was somewhat strange (sliced pig's intestines or duck's tongues, anyone?) and conducted in near silence except for endless boring toasts in which everyone thanked everyone else and looked forward to prosperous business relationships, before it descended into the kind of corporate bonding games which I rate somewhere below root canal treatment in my list of preferred activities.

But the ice and snow sculptures were just FABULOUS. And as it was 'only' minus 13°C, I didn't even feel that cold - but then again I was wearing three thermal vests, two scarves and an indeterminate number of dead sheep. Not to mention the WMEMs, of course.

Simply uploading a few pictures to this blog wouldn't do the thing justice, so if you click below you can see the whole album - just hit 'Slideshow' for the full effect once you're there. I say 'full effect' but you'll have to imagine the (loudly) piped classical music which accompanied it all. Peter and I got some funny looks when they got to 'Bolero' and we started Torvill & Deaning-it on the ice.

Anyway, it's the Snow Festival first (which had a Finnish theme, hence the strong Father Christmas and Moomin motifs), then the Ice Festival - they take place in adjoining parks next to the (frozen) Songhua River, some views of which you can also see. Hard to comprehend, I know, but all the structures which look like the Blackpool Illuminations on acid are made entirely from ice blocks, hewn from that river.

Why? Who knows. Apparently it grew out of a local tradition for making ice lanterns by hollowing out blocks of ice and putting a candle inside. I suppose someone thought, 'Ooh, it might be pretty if we joined a few of these together and put coloured lightbulbs in them', and from there - in just ten years - Harbin's Ice Festival became one of the 'big four' ice sculpture festivals worldwide (the other three being Montreal, Sapporo in northern Japan, and somewhere in Finland). Mainly due to the proximity of the Songhua and its endless supply of ice, Harbin now boasts the biggest annual ice festival in the world.

I am now more convinced than ever that it's the most bonkers place on Earth.

Enjoy our pictures.

So much to blog, so little time

With our festive jaunt home to Blighty hurtling rapidly towards us, there seem to be a million things – well, at least three – each of which I could have written a whole article about but simply don’t have time. There follows, therefore, a smorgasbord of observations about this crazy world in which we find ourselves, which if I don’t get them down now are in danger of falling into the vast black hole that I once laughingly called my memory, never to be seen again.

So. Last week we had to call Building Management out again, when another dodgy bulb tripped all our fuses for the second time. It seems that they’d been trying to get in to see us for several weeks to check our water meter, but every time they came to the door we didn’t understand what they wanted so they hadn’t been able to gain access. We don’t like to call poor Kevin too often.

Anyway it appears that our water meter is low on money. The landlord says he will come ‘sometime’ and put some more money on it. He is unable to tell us when ‘sometime’ will be, despite the fact that we’re going away tomorrow for three weeks, but until then we are ‘not to worry’. This is typical of the Chinese total inability to plan anything in advance. They simply do not, will not, or cannot do it. On the day before our party, at about 4.30pm, Kevin sidled up to Peter looking a bit embarrassed and said sheepishly that ‘the girls’ had asked him to find out if we would have the party that night instead, as it suited them better! Attempting to order diaries and calendars as New Year gifts for his customers, Peter has been frustrated by the lack of any with space to write down appointments. When Kevin saw Peter’s own (British) diary he was baffled. ‘But why would you want to write down what you’re doing in the future?’, he enquired. ‘Chinese people do not do that. Sometimes they think about tomorrow. Or maybe, sometimes, the next day.’

Often Peter arrives at work in the morning to be told he has a meeting with an important client in half an hour’s time, which has just been arranged. They arrive to find about 10 local dignatories, bureau heads, factory bosses and the like who have all assembled at what appears to be a moment’s notice. After the meeting, they progress to an apparently equally impromptu but sumptuous lunch of unidentifiable but delicious dishes, be it at the most expensive restaurant in Harbin or a transport caff in a dodgy rural town (where all conversation stops and all heads turn as Peter walks in). Much ‘Gan bei!’ and general hilarity ensues, even when the interpreter has to leave early, leaving him alone with a group of monolingual Chinese bigwigs. Business here is strongly based on the principle of ‘guan xi’ which translates as ‘business relationship’ but basically seems to mean ‘getting people to trust you by getting drunk with them outside work before anyone signs anything’. No wonder he’s enjoying his job!

Some of the places he’s visited on these jaunts have been eye-openers. Parts of Harbin itself are quite poor, but outside the city it’s another world. Last week he went to Acheng, which he described as ‘like Castleford or Pontefract in the 1970s’ (not, I gather, a recommendation) but which still boasted huge wide streets, impressive amounts of public artworks, and the entrance to the town was guarded by a huge arch, fabulously decorated in vibrant colours. In another place, they had to drive through a market, squeezing between stalls where people were selling frozen meat and fish - frozen by the air temperature, that is; no need for freezers here! They had almost reached the end when a vehicle appeared, blocking their way. With no way to turn round, Mr Li, our ultra-resourceful and ever-smiling driver, reversed the entire length of the market, back between the stalls down the narrow, winding lane, with frozen fish being flung back and forth and a guy on a tricycle behind him, who would only reverse a few yards at a time until Mr Li got out and remonstrated firmly with him. The whole process took about an hour.

Needless to say, the weather fazes the locals not one jot. Peter’s first farm visit took place on the first day that the temperature dropped to minus 11°. Everyone happily tramped about in the snow and ice looking at maize pellets or whatever. In the UK such an event would have been cancelled on the spot. (Though of course this does presuppose that it would have been planned in advance!). But then they were all no doubt wearing the ubiquitous, the redoubtable, the indispensible - Harbin Thermals.

Thermals. God how they love them. Especially longjohns. You could almost hear the collective sigh of relief after they were able to get them on when it got vaguely cold at the start of November. Of course some people hedge their bets and never take them off all year round. We even saw brides wearing them under their wedding dresses on a hot day in May (truly). There are shops selling nothing but. I’m not saying you don’t need them of course – the wind doesn’t half bite through your trousers when you go out otherwise – but the problem is that if you go out, generally you’re going TO somewhere, like the shops, or a restaurant. And the shops and restaurants are BOILING, which makes the wearing of thermals quite unbearable indoors.

At Harbin airport they have countered this problem by supplying little changing booths near the baggage reclaim (with signs in Chinese, English and Russian), for the purposes of changing into your longjohns after arriving from somewhere hot. How brilliant an idea is that? Now if the shopping centres and supermarkets did that, it would be ok. But as it is, you have to put your thermals on immediately before leaving the house and then make a run for it (seeing as it’s constantly 27°C in our flat – and I mean constantly). Then by the time you’ve arrived at your destination and are just about feeling a bit chilly and glad you put them on, you’re back indoors into a super-heated place with huge padded curtains over the doors for insulation, and pouring sweat while carrying your coat around. Something’s not right there. No wonder the locals acclimatise so well to their thermals that they’re terrified to take them off.

But otherwise they’re remarkably well-adapted to the weather. When it snows – which is disappointingly not that often, actually – an army of men with broomsticks materialises from nowhere, and with rapid efficiency they clear the snow from the roads and pavements within what seems like minutes. There’s none of the head-scratching and wondering what this white stuff can be that’s falling out of the sky, which accompanies the UK’s every annual snowfall. Once that’s done, being a very dry climate, there’s no slush to contend with, just icy patches here and there. Still, we do find it quite funny that people are sending us Christmas cards with snow-scenes on and writing things like ‘Bet your weather’s very different to this!!’ inside. Er, no, it’s not. It might be 27°C in our flat, but in the unheated utility room/balcony, a 3-litre bottle of water turned to a solid block of ice overnight.

And talking of solid blocks of ice, preparations for the famous Harbin ice festival would appear to be underway! Yes it seems this is one thing they CAN plan in advance for! So by way of Christmas greetings to you all, here are some pics of the embryonic ice sculptures – or more like ice constructions – which are shooting up around Peter’s office and our flat.

Tomorrow we’re off to Shanghai for the company expats’ Christmas lunch - at the Hilton, no less, where we get to behave like old colonials for a day – and then home for the festive season. So I’ll say Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all, and see you in three weeks.

Fun, part 2

I haven’t said much so far about eating in restaurants in China, although it’s something we’ve done a fair bit of, so here goes. Prepare to forget everything you thought you knew from your nights down at the Sunrise Take-Away.

If you go to a restaurant in a large group, you’ll likely be shown into a private room. The tables are big and round, with a giant lazy susan in the middle so that dishes can be spun round and shared. The concept of ordering one meal per person is unknown here, and there’s no such thing as starters and main courses. You just order a number of dishes, each one of which will be either meat, or veg, or rice, etc, kind of like tapas, and then share them, with each person taking a small portion from the main plate and transferring it to their own plate, or even eating it direct from the main plate. If you’re worried about catching other people’s germs from them dipping their chopsticks into your food, tough. I gather that eating out CAN get raucous (especially if there’s a lot of ‘Ganbei!’ which the dictionary translates as ‘Cheers!’ but is really a challenge to down a drink in one) but this usually only happens in all-male company. Typical.

The whole business can be somewhat disconcerting if you’re not used to it. As is the fact that the waiters expect to discuss your food requirements with you at length, suggesting dishes which will complement those you’ve already ordered so as to achieve a ‘ying-yang’ type balance, and they therefore bring you the menu and continue to stand by you while you look at it, pen at the ready, and get very confused if you ask them to go away. The menu is usually all in Chinese but has photos – do not be fooled by these, however, as the food when it comes generally bears no resemblance to them, and anyway you could be eating duck’s head or bull’s penis for all you know, so it’s best to have an interpreter on standby! They just bring out the food in the order it’s ready, so the thing which takes longest to cook could well arrive after you’ve finished everything else. So quite how this achieves a balance is slightly beyond me.

Mostly the food is actually very tasty. Northern Chinese cuisine is quite different from the Cantonese food we’re used to in Britain – spicier, less sweet, more noodle and dumpling-based than rice, but beyond that I find it hard to summarise except to say that if you’re after Sweet & Sour Pork, Prawn Crackers or Chicken Chow Mein with Special Fried Rice you won’t find any such thing. My rule of thumb is I don’t eat it if it looks slimy. Peter is prepared to try anything except chicken’s feet. And beyond that, it’s all a voyage of discovery!

The strangest meal we’ve had was in a restaurant called ‘Triplepot’ which we went into because it had an English name. Sadly it turned out they spoke no English whatsoever and had to find a student who was eating upstairs to come and translate for us. He could not, however, prepare us for the eating experience. The table had a circular hole in it, in the base of which was a hotplate. They brought over a large pan divided into three sections, one containing water, one ordinary oil and one chilli oil, and lit the thing until all three boiled. They then brought out the food – raw – and we had to cook it ourselves by dipping it into the compartments, instructed by actions from the bemused staff.

Our favourite so far, though, is the highly entertaining ‘western style’ restaurant near our flat. They have a bizarre menu with dishes apparently plucked at random from the various cuisines of Europe, called things like ‘German-style fried potatoes’ and ‘French-style chicken with mushroom juice’. (‘This is chicken with a mushroom juice’, the menu explains in the small print, in case you weren’t clear). The food’s very nice, but everything is served in the Chinese way as described above, with the sharing and the random serving order. If you ask for water, they may bring you hot water – for what purpose I’m not sure. Oh, and you get free bread, butter and jam for pudding. The atmosphere is also curious; it’s never very busy but like everywhere in China they have hundreds of staff. The first time we went there we were the first customers of the night, and ate our dinner observed by twelve waiters and a girl pianist in thigh-high denim boots, who tinkles away at lift-music standards like ‘Love Story’ in a somewhat minimalist style while you eat and attempt to ignore the stares. It gives a whole new meaning to ‘going out for an English’!

But they try their best, bless them. They even have a feedback questionnaire which as an ex market researcher I think is so brilliant I shall quote it for you in full.

The Investigation Answer Sheet of Victoria Western Restaurant

Thank you for spending your time in filling in this answer sheet. We will according to it ameliorate our service and make you a much more happiness at Victoria.

1. Excuse me, do you usually come to a western restaurant?
· Occasionally
· Usually
· Once a month or above
2. Please tell us whether you are satisfied with the atmosphere of this western restaurant.
3. Excuse me, are you satisfied with the food of the restaurant?
4. Excuse me, are you satisfied with the price of the food?
5. Excuse me, are you satisfied with the service quality of the workers?
6. Excuse me, are you satisfied with the circumstances of the sanitation?
7. How do you know the Victoria Western Restaurant?
· The friend’s introduction
· Saw it by chance while driving
· Advertisement
· Others
8. The advice that you’d like to tell us is…..

Thank you again for the support to Victoria Western Restaurant. Wisher to have a meal pleased! Happy your life!

This feedback sheet was being done by YUMMY&LIFE magazine jointly.

I would love to fill it in, but words do occasionally fail me.

Fun

Last night we had our first social engagement since we came to China a month ago (if you don’t count a token-gesture meal out with the Big Boss in Shanghai the week we arrived, which you shouldn’t).

This was a ‘party’ given by the Less Big Boss here in Harbin, ostensibly as a belated flat-warming but really a Meet the Girlfriend event, as she’s visiting for the week. This is, annoyingly for those of us stalled in the middle of visa processing, a holiday week here. Today, 1st October, is China’s National Day – the anniversary of the founding of the PRC in 1949 – and they get a whole week off for it. All of them. Well, shops are open, builders are still building (drilling above my head as I type), but nobody else is doing a stitch of work all week.

Up until last year they had three of these ‘Golden Weeks’ as they’re called: this one, one in February for Chinese New Year, and one in May for Labour Day. The purpose of these is to boost the economy through increased domestic tourism and binge shopping and NOT, as you might imagine, to give the poor overworked Chinese a few days’ paid holiday, which they actually don’t get otherwise unless they’re lucky enough to work for a western company. But as of this year the government decided people weren’t spending enough and the detrimental impact on the economy from everything shutting down was outweighing the advantages, so they cut one of the Golden Weeks (the May one) and replaced it with a few extra one-day holidays instead. Now everyone is up in arms about it because a three-day weekend isn’t much use for visiting long-distance family in a country the size of China, and as a result this week was predicted to be the busiest October week for travel ever.

Apart from that, I don’t think much goes on really. There are quite a few red lanterns up around the place (see pic), which is pretty. I was hoping to see some kind of spectacular parade, but it seems that unless it’s a special anniversary that kind of thing went out with Mao. There might be a firework display but I’m not hopeful.

So, to return to the subject of Fun, Chinese style. Now those of you who know me know I like a party. Drinking, dancing, chatting, loud music, more dancing, more drinking, etc. That’s a party, right? Wrong, it seems, in China. Perhaps it was just that particular group of people, who were all Chinese apart from us, Boss and Boss’s girlfriend, or perhaps we’re getting old (heaven forbid!), but this so-called party consisted of nine people sitting around a coffee table picking at nibbles – rather self-consciously as the Chinese weren’t touching them – talking mainly about the weather and the best methods of cleaning hard-wood floors (I kid you not), and then having to go out for a meal because Boss didn’t have enough plates to serve us all food. We got to the restaurant about 9pm, which is considered extremely late for eating here, and everyone picked at their food again and at 10.30 all went home.

Just wait until we have our flat-warming party; we’ll show them how it should be done.