Posted 10:52 PM by Gobbler
Motorbike ride ha ha ha

Coming onto the street by the bus station in Changzhou, where all the porn shops are, objective one was not to prchase a blow up sheep but to get a taxi to the party. As aways there were about a score of taximen loitering by the station hoping to pick up a ride. Most of the time they seem to just giggle and jape amongst themselves, but as soon as a lao wai turns up the attention switches to them, and into whose taxi they can be coaxed. as i was on my own, it was possible and economical to take a bike taxi and there were plenty of willing offers. I took the offer of one likely fellow who sad ha ha and broom broom a lot. oh the hilarity. "Hahaha!" "Ha ha!" "Lao wai on motorbike!" "Ha ha." "Look! lao wai is putting on helmet!" "Isnt it jolly!" "Doesnt laowai look funny!" "Ha ha ha!" "Happy time!" I put the helmet on backwards. "Ha ha ha!" "Silly laowai, ha ha!" We taxid away, and all the unsuccessful taximen waved goodbye, another celebrity sendoff for another strange laowai.

Thats about all there is to that one, not quite what it was built up to be. oh well.

ITs a mini-adventure

The Background

And so Im off again. My teaching finally finished on wednesday with two last middle school classes, remaining exams rushed through, haphazard goodbyes. I'll be back in three weeks or so for the 'Teacher Training' so long speculated about. I found out on tuesday the exact format that the 'Teacher Training' will take. Unsurprisingly enough (having experienced numerous examples of the schools lies and tricks with regard to teaching) the ten days teacher training involves no teachers and no training. Three days teaching 6 year olds and 6 days teaching 12 year olds. 6 year olds. what the hell am i supposed to be able to teach six year olds, huh? its part of a summer camp thing that our college has set up so that it can make more money. they told us it would be teacher training because they knew that we wouldnt be all that keen on teaching 6 years olds and so in effect openly lied to us. there never was any teacher training and there always was summer camp. this kind of unacceptable treatment is one of the main reasons that i will be glad to get out of teaching and away from chinese employers. Plus, i was told on tuesday that i had to be back three days earlier than i had been told before. this may not sound like much but as it happens i am on a particularly tight schedule for this round of travels and may not even be able to make it back. Let me explain.

The Plan

From Yangzhou City of Dreams (my appellation) through Nanjing (where apparently your dreams become a reality, according to the sign) to Xi'an, the City of Ancient Dreams, (so another sign says) former chinese capital and home to lots of clay soldiers that would be useless in a fight unless you proposed to throw them at people or use them as a decoy. Xian is 14 hours by fast train from Nanjing, two hours from yangzhou. (As yangzhou is now the proud owner of what is known in the trade as a 'Train Station' it is possiblle to travel by train direct from yangzhou, which is 2what bill suggested. however, as this goes via beijing and takes 22 hours i thought it was a rubbish train.)

The from, Xian its through to denhuan or some name similar. This place apparently features one of the top ten highlights of china in the form of some splendid paintings in some caves that some buddists painted there some time ago. It is 26 hours away to the north west from xian on a normal speed train. There is an express train from Beijing which does stop at both Xian and Denhuan and does the journey in about 16 hours but you cant get on it. this is because the people in charge of the train will not allow this tciket to be sold. Why this is deserves a litte excerpt all of its own.

A little excerpt all of its own to explain the train in a plain but not inane vain

Why, oh why, is it not possible to get a sleeper ticket on the express train when there are beds available? The express train in question i believe goes from Beijing to Urumqi, a distance most easily described as a sodding long way, and Xian to denhuang is about half that distance. If you take a bed on a sleeper train from xian to denhuang then it means that nobody could take that bed from say beijing to urumqi, and the bed would most probably be unoccupied for the rest of the journey, which would mean that they would make half as much money on that bed, so they simply refuse to sell you a ticket, hoping that they will be able to sell it for the complete journey. which leaves us with the normal train.

To return to the main vain again

Denhuang does not simply feature some nice cave paintings, oh no. There is also the crescent moon lake which is supposed to be quite a treat, and some top drawer sand dunes that you can sand board or toboggan down. From there we go about ten hours north to Turpan, the hottest place in china i hear, and as such pretty hot. For some reasons best known to other poeople there is a strange depression in the ground there which puts the land below sea level and the seconds lowest bit of dry land behind the dead sea. Apparently there3 are a few other things to do there as well, but i dont care really, i just want to go. its another of those places that i have wanted to go to for a long time. You know how it is. YOu see a picture of somewhere or you hear a story or suchlike, and immediately think "I'd really like to go there." For most people it seems, they keep talking about going the whole time aand never go. In china this is because it is impossible for most people. its actually illegal to leave to country unless youve passed a rather tricky language test, easy for tyhe rich, next to impossible for the other 1.2 billion. For most people in the west its becasue they frankly dont have that much incentive to go. For me, The Turpan depression was never top of the list. I saw it on a map one day. In the arse end of nowhere of the desert, a bit of land below sea level. It just looked grim and unpleasant, but at the same time, strangely alluring. And now that i have the chance it would be a shame not to go. Not that i plan to set up shop there permamnently you understand, i reckon an hour or two will be sufficient. Its a bit like death valley in the usa. basically a very hot place where many people have had to put in an unexpectedly early application for Club Heaven over the last few hundred years that has now turned into a tourist attraction. A bit like, if it were possible, people in heaven would take holidays to hell to see what it was like and say "Good Lord, its hellishly hot and daemonically terrible here isnt it?" "Yes Mark, it surely is. Rather reminds one of the satanic doesnt it?" "Yes Matthew, I believe you are right. Definitely something of that ilk in the air." "Hmm, lets leave shall we." "Yes, and quick about it. Still, jolly glad i came."

From Turpan it is only a couple of hours to urumqi. The principal highlight of urumqi appears to be the name and so we will be leaving quickly, getting the 1-2 day (depending on the sandstorms) bus or one day train to Kashgar, City of Carpets. A principal (Sorry dad if im still getting it confused with principle) highlight of Kashgar is the name, but theyve also got some quality carpets there, and its a blooming long way away. Glancing across at the map it seems to be the same distance from Beijing as it is from Cairo in Egypt and its certainly a fair bit closer to Baghdad than beijing.

From Kashgar we travel to Lhasa in Tibet, an overland journey which may take about 5 days. Then its a few days in Lhasa before arriving back in Yangzhou (four day bus/train or three hour flight) by the 7th of July to teach six year olds how to sing do ray me and how to play the Fruit Game. Which seems to put it all into quite a polarised perspective.

Posted 8:24 PM by Gobbler
'Ree-e-wind, when the crowds say bo, selecta' - A really irritating punkoid

As i am now in xian where they have losts of soldiers made of terracotta and other army related terracotta paraphernalia, one might expect me to begin to t\relate the tales of hilarity that have recently come about. And, because i am travelling with a bunch of uber-punks, these tales of hilarity have been many. Not so however...

'Q: "Why is it better to shag a sheep at the edge of a cliff?" A: "They push back harder."' - Evil Uncle, a specialist

I have already related the fascinating fact that China is the biggest exporter of Sex Dolls in the world. To illustrate the numbers we are talking about here in a striking way, we will use a seedy statistic, again, quoted before. China last year exported 40,000 blow-up sheep to the USA. 40,000 sex dolls in the shape of a sheep. blimey. Awesome! Like, totally awesome, dude.

As with everytrhing in china, any product that is made in china for export inevitably finds its way onto the National market whether it is above or below board. Even given this one might imagine that sex toys, expecially dolls, would curry little favour in chinas conservative society. At least, one might think, if such items are sold, they are kept fairly low key.

Not a bit of it. Sex shops are there in all their glory, with doors wide open for all to see the assorted apparatus purveyed therein. And there is another peculiarity, perfected by but not unique to China: where when one shop of a certain sort springs up, several more spring up next to it offerering exactly the same product. So you get a row of hairdressers exactly the same, (many of which incidentally double up as brothels in the evening; you can tell apparently by the the pink light that they switch on when it gets drark. someone told me about ti and now i see them everywhere after dark, and every once in a while i have seen men slipping in or out of one which I suppose lends weght to the claim.) a row of little shops at the station selling the same thing (In Yangzhou they are numbered 1,2,3,4,5,6,18,19,20, sensibly) and, in turn, a row of sex shops. And where do you think they might be found, these sex shops? Is it: A) In a Soho-esque part of town? B) Down a dirty alley? or C) At the Bus Station? Of course, C) at the busa station. Not in yangzhou as a matter of fact, as it is a big modern station with no little shops nearby, but at many cities; Xuzhou and Changzhou to name just two. At Changzhou station I have counted 7 such shops nearby, interspersed with cigarette shops and metalware workshops, all selling the same thing, all wide open for all to see. Bizarre.

This little anecdote was really, in fact, intended to do do no more than set the scene for the motorbike experience story, which inturn will be followed by the 'road to xian', 'the terracotta rotter', and other tales, which will herenow be delayed by luncheon.

Posted 1:24 PM by Gobbler
One for the Road

Last weekend was the last big one before the big off, in Changzhou a couple of hours on the other side of the river. At the gathering were a large number of CIEE people who I had last seen at Shanghai and wont now ever see again. I went down on the friday night, day one of two days of overall naughtiness.

I had a class just before i jumped in a taxi where i would fail to direct the driver in chinese... The punk couldnt understand a perfectly clear ji chi zhan order, so in the end i had to show him the map. it turns out that i myself had it wrong. Of course! it wasnt ji chi zhan but qi chi zhan, replacing the j sounds with the ch sound. stupid me. it didnt help that the locals dont know what the heck zhan is, becasue they say zan, a notable difference if youre a fecking local. as usual my chinky didnt work very well.

to deviate if i may from what i was saying vis a vis this past weekend (oh but hang on. a decidedly bizarre but absolutely bloggable event occured on saturday. it was the last night of the main party and the last people up included me and two russian ladies and a russian gentleman. they had been invited along by a girl named Melinda, at least that is the phonetic spelling. shes a particularly fascinating creature four a number of reasons which i reallany shouldnt put down on screen because they are probably personal and certainly offensive. which is probably why so many people resort to fiction because they can pretend that it was all fiction and get away with it and people that secretly suspect that what has been written/said about can pretend that what has been written/said actually wasnt. on the whole it suits everybody very well. even the slightest semblence of unreality is enough to entirely disassociate themselves from the truth that is otherwise staring themselves in the face. for what good, lets face it, would the true truth do most of us? far easier, far better to live half truths.

And i, for my part, will not tell the whole truth here. Not that you would have ever known if i had not told you so, or could ever guess. everybody tells their own story, and my truth is my own. how else do public speakers (by which i mean not just politicians but actors and singers and writers and the like) remain fresh? There is something of each of them in whatever they are and do, to a greater or lesser extent, and for those that there is a greater part of them in what they are it is usually more obvious that they are existent in what they do. For all that, what i have to say just now mainly involves breasts. For it came to pass at the end of the party that the two russian girls began dancing together, whilst everyone else had gone to bed, while the russian bloke stood around with his camera. Then, incomprehensibly, both lifted up their tops and the shorter of the two, a stubby mongolian brunette, began fondling and kissing the breasts of the taller, slimmer, Scandinavian looking other, and all the while the guy circled with his camera. I had been planning to get soime deserved rest. But bugger me, I thought, probably time to forget the sack, get a beer and take a pew; but i had been on my way to bed and did not stop. Undoubtedly because i am such a nice boy and dont approve of these foreign frolics.

And what else can i tell you? Another beer related topic, which ties in with what i said in my last post. We foreigners here are far removed from the world of the chinese. It seems that chinese society is in many ways (and by this i am talking of the society of middle class china (which i teach), so far as it can be labeled, which is far removed from the rich upper class and the peasant lower class) like western society about 40+ years ago, in that it is normal for people not to have sex before marriage. Talking with a chinese girl on the subject tonight this seems largely to be the case, but not esclusively so. This is illustrated for example by the fact that the corner shop by my campus, which is largely, i believe, frequented by college students, sells condoms. On the whole however, chastity until marriage is still very much the accepted norm. It seems that this current state of affairs is changing concurrently with the drive to modernise and, therefore, effectively westernise society. Which is the reason, perhaps, why teenage pregnancy, for example, has rocketed of late in areas of greater western influence such as beijing and shanghai.

The rise of sexual liberalism is by and large concurrent with increased consumption of alcohol. After all, the slogan of the popular poster reads: "Beer! Helping ugly men have sex since 1863!" And numerous similar products proclaim similar popular truths. In my exam last wednesday i had one student excitedly tell me about how she had drunk some beer a couple of weeks before. She said that her parents had warned her against drinking beer and said that it was not the sort of thing for women to do because of the things it might lead to and that a lot of her t\friends had said the same and her teachers were negative about the idea too but that she wanted to try despite all that. (It seemed from the wat she said it that it was less a direct and purposeful act of rebellion as seems often to be the case in England and more of a case where she was curious.) And so a friend and her bought some beer and went out onto the sports field to drink it. apparently, after a couple of beers she and her friend began to feel quite funny and she concluded that, after the ordeal and despite certain unpleasant feelings afterwards, she was rather fond of beer because it made her feel certain strange but nevertheless alluring feelings that made her want to drink again. And we all know what certain alluring drunken feelings can lead people to do or want to do. And so, ladies and gentlemen, we are witnessing in china (just as perhaps we could never see it in the west) the death of innocence through the introductory indoctrination of western thought. And with it will presumably come a ghastly rise in abortion, drug (inc. alcohol) abuse, civil disobedience, depression, crime, suicide and social collapse. Just be thankful that we dont live in such a ghastly totalitarian regime as these powerless pawns do as and instead exist in our libertarian progressive liberal democratic society.