Journey to Vietnam

I have just returned from a week long visit to Vietnam. The main reason behind the visit was that my Vietnamese roommate from Beijing is still home for the summer holidays, and he was terribly keen for me to visit him in Vietnam, inviting me several times to go down and see him. I thought it would be a good opportunity to see the country, and it would also be interesting to see my quiet roommate in his own environment, so I took the chance.

I decided to go to Hanoi from Beijing by train to save money, even though the ride takes almost two days. Getting hold of the tickets was extraordinarily difficult. In Beijing, it is very easy to buy a train ticket to any destination within China, but buying train tickets to foreign destinations like Vietnam or Mongolia is another matter entirely. I went to the gigantic West train station of Beijing, which the train itself leaves from, and I was told by the lady at the information desk that I could buy the ticket in the Central train station, which is quite a distance from where I was. I trekked to the Central station and found the special ticket booth for foreigners, where the staff can speak English. I was told that I should go to the West station, which I had just come from. After I protested, the woman went and checked with her colleague, after which she advised me to go to a travel agent in a nearby hotel. Exhausted after a day of going around Beijing in the sun, I got to the hotel to find the travel agent had already closed for the day.

The next day I went back to the travel agent, and they told me that I should go to another travel agent near the West train station. Getting increasingly frustrated and wondering if anyone really knew where to buy the ticket, I went to the other agency, this time by taxi. Having got there, I was told that they do indeed sell the tickets, but however the person responsible had already left for the day, so I should come back tomorrow (it was already the afternoon). The next day I came back and finally I bought the ticket, conducting the negotiations entirely in Chinese. Unfortunately there turned out to only be tickets available for "soft beds", in other words for the fanciest class, so a plane would not have cost much less. Between buying the tickets and getting a visa, I spent a good five days rushing up and down this huge city in the boiling heat.

After recovering for a day, I set off for Vietnam on sunday afternoon. I shared my berth in the train with three Chinese men, who were very keen to chat with me. Unfortunately my Chinese still isn't really good enough to hold proper conversations, although I managed to tell them a bit about myself. There were quite a few foreigners, since the train was headed to Vietnam, and it only leaves twice a week. In the booth next to mine there was a couple of middle aged English chaps who turned out to be going by train from Britain to Singapore (!). One of them was filming out of the window, hoping to turn it into a documentary. There was apparenly a story behind it about how one of these men had been born in Singapore and brought up by adoptive British parents, but he had recently been contacted for the first time by his real mother in New Zealand, and he was going back to the place where he was born, and then on to New Zealand to meet her. He works as a television documentary producer and hopes to be able to make a decent documentary out of it.

All the Chinese passengers in the train got off before Vietnam, and by the time we reached the border the next night, it was only me and about eight other foreigners left in the train. We had to wait on the border for ages, and then take another train to Hanoi, which arrived in the Vietnamese capital at 8 in the morning. In all the journey took about 40 hours.

Snow in Beijing

In the last two days there have been some heavy snowfalls in Beijing, the first real snow to grace China's capital this year. My Vietnamese roommate finds this quite exciting, since he has never seen snow before.

In Beijing it usually snows more often in the winter, but this winter has been particularly dry, and the peasants have been suffering because of draught in large areas of Northern China. I have read that the recent snow in Beijing was at least partly artificially induced by the authorities through iodide sticks which were fired into the sky, so as to ease the draught. The Chinese authorities sometimes resort to such methods to prevent or encourage rain and snow, even though their effectiveness has not been conclusively demonstrated

Anyway, here are some photos of Beijing unders the snow.

(my campus)

Happy 牛 year!

The title of this post is a pun which has become extremely popular in China over the last Spring festival (the holidays for the Chinese new year). The chinese character 牛 is pronounced "niu", like the English word "new", and it means "ox", and the year which has just started is indeed the year of the ox. Thus happy 牛 year!

New year's eve was on the 25th of january this year. I spent it in a tiny little village in Guangxi province, in the South-West of China, near Vietnam. I have a friend in my university who comes from there originally, and she invited me to spend the new year at her family's home.

The experience was very interesting. The village was extremely small and remote. The only shop in the village belonged to the parents of this girl, and it was placed in the entrance to their house. All it had on sale was a few basic items. The people of the area are not Han but Zhuang, the biggest ethnic group in Guangxi, and they speak a language which is completely unrelated to Chinese, although almost all of them are also able to speak fluent Mandarin Chinese.

The local people were very friendly and gave the impression of being happy and relaxed most of the time. The weather was relatively warm during the day even though it was the middle of the winter, since I was deep in the south of China.

On new year's eve I experienced some of the local traditions related to the new year. All the houses in Chinese villages usually have red scrools pasted around the door, with phrases wishing fortune and prosperity written on them. On new year's eve, the old scrolls are scraped off and new ones are stuck up, at least in the village where I was staying. I encountered my Chinese name "Jixiang" on quite a few of these scrolls, since it is a traditional expression meaning "auspicious". The Chinese seem to attach an awful lot of importance to symbols of good omen and good luck, and traditions pertaining to this. It is also common to find a drawing of a fish on the scrolls, since the word for fish is pronounced the same as the word for wealth. A Chinese character which one sees almost everywhere during the new year period is 福, pronounced "fu", which means good luck. You can often see it on posters stuck onto doors, sometimes written upside down, as this is also meant to bring good luck.

(two examples of the red scrolls pasted around the doors of Chinese houses)

Next to the village there was a little temple for the ancestors, where the local people brought offerings to the deceased on new year's eve. One of the most common offerings was a chicken. People also offered bills of fake money with huge numbers written on them, which were then burnt. Some of the houses in the village also had an altar for the ancestors inside.

In the evening everyone in the village set fire works off again and again, creating a huge racket. The children seemed to be having an especially good time. Of course, the family I was staying with had a huge meal in the afternoon to mark the New Year.

(The village where I stayed)

(Fireworks set off on New Year's eve)

Chongqing and Qijiang

During my New Year holidays I took the chance to return to the place where I taught English for a few months four years ago. The little town where I taught is called Qijiang, and it is an hour's drive away from the big city of Chongqing, which is well known throughout China.

(Central Chongqing)

Coming back to Chongqing after four years, I had a chance to witness the pace of China's development first hand. I had the feeling that the city has changed a lot since the last time I was there, even though four years is not such a long period of time. There are noticeably a lot of new high-rises and less old, run-down buildings. Although the city still has some shabby areas, everything somehow looks newer and smarter, especially in the center. It is hard to know how much of it is just down to my perception, but I saw some things which were definitely not there four years ago: there is an ultra-modern monorail which crosses the center of the city, and I also visited a new multi-storey building on the Yangtze river (shown in the photo) built in a traditional style, full of fancy shops and restaurants. Of course, for many ordinary people life has not changed a great deal: the local Esperantist who found me the teaching job four years ago still lives in a cramped flat in an old and run down apartment block on the city's outskirts.

I had the same feeling when I visited Qijiang, the town where I actually taught English: even though it is hard to put my finger on why, I had the definite feeling that the place had changed and developed considerably in just four years. There was a brand new modern supermarket, which didn't exist when I lived there, and the road outside the school where I taught now has cement on it, while four years ago it didn't. When I went out in the evening, I came across a huge new night club which didn't exist the last time I was there. Of course, living conditions are still quite simple for many of the people, as I witnessed when I visited the home of a retired school teacher who used to know Esperanto many decades ago, although he appeared to have forgotten it completely.

I have read that Chongqing has been showered with money by the central government in the last years, and it has developed faster than most other places, becoming the richest city in Western China. The pace of development is probably not as fast in other regions. Also, it must be remembered that life in the villages and the rural areas remains extremely simple.

The one thing development has not brought these places is a big influx of foreigners. Even in such a big city as Chongqing, foreigners remain quite rare, although I did see a few in the center.

Taking a train in China over the new year.

I have just got back from three weeks of travelling for the holidays for the Chinese new year. The new year is the most important holiday in the Chinese calendar, a bit like christmas in the west. This year new year's eve fell on the 25th of january. My university gives its students around a month's holiday for the new year.

During this period, every single Chinese person who can goes back home to celebrate with their family. It is the one moment in the year when every Chinese family expects to be together. All the migrant workers in the big cities like Beijing also go back to their homes in the countryside, often travelling for days. The transport system, and especially the train system, is put under huge strain during this period, as dozens of millions of people return home.

I had the brilliant idea to start my travels by taking the train from Beijing to Chengdu on the 13th of january, just as the holiday season was getting started. Chengdu is the capital of Sichuan, the province which was hit by the earthquake last year, and it's almost on the other side of China from Beijing. Me and the Chinese girl I was travelling with only started looking for a ticket seriously a few days ahead, even though it is advisable to buy your ticket weeks ahead if you want to travel during this season. It turned out to be impossible to find a ticket for a bed. All we could get was two tickets for hard seats on a train which would stop at every station and take 31 hours to get to Chengdu.

Most of the Chinese people who I told about this were horrified. Everyone warned me that travelling with just hard seats over the new year period is horrible, that the trains are unbelievably crowded, that people sleep on the floor and that sometimes you can't even go to the bathroom because there are people there too. A girl who comes from that part of China tried to push me to take a plane instead, even though it would have cost ten times more (my train ticket only cost about 100 yuan). I was so put off I almost decided not to go, but in the end I thought it might be an interesting experience and I went all the same.

The train ride was indeed quite uncomfortable, although not as bad as some people had predicted. The train left at 10 in the evening and arrived at 5 in the morning two days later, so I effectively had to sleep on the seat for two nights. The train was indeed compeltely packed, with people who just had "standing tickets" sleeping on the floor. Climbing over people to get to the bathroom really was quite an effort. In the morning I had to wait in a queue for a full hour to go the bathroom. However, the train became less packed towards the end. Me and my travel companion brought our own food and drink, just like everyone else, although they did sell food on the train. Washing my hands was also next to impossible, and my legs got quite bad cramps from spending such a long time sitting down. The girl I was travelling with comes from a little village next to Beijing, and so she had never needed to travel by train over this period, and she also found it quite uncomfortable. However, in the end we survived and we reached Chengdu, where we went to our hostel by taxi and collapsed into bed.

Visit to a village

Last weekend I visited the family of one of my new Chinese friends, a girl who studies English at the Beijing language University. This girl comes from a tiny little village outside Beijing, in Shunyi district. The village is actually very close to Beijing in geographical terms, but of course it feels a million miles removed from China's capital. All I had to do to get there was take a bus for an hour to a town called Yangzhen, where I was met by the girl herself, and then another local bus for about ten minutes. In the bus, which was unbelievably crowded, I attracted the curiosity of the driver, who asked my friend where I was from, what I was doing in his hometown, and why he had never seen me around there before (!)
When I got off at the tiny hamlet the girl comes from, which is called 荣各庄 (Rong Ge Zhuang) the first thing which struck me was the fair amount of snow on the ground. The countryside around Beijing gets considerably colder then the city itself, where there had only been a very slight snowfall a few days earlier, but there was no snow to be seen on the ground. The village itself must only have contained a few hundred people, a thousand at best. Foreigners are obviously unheard of in such places, so I attracted a fair amount of stares. The girl's family was very nice, although of course proper communication could only occur through her translation, since my Chinese is still pretty dreadful. Her parents are basically farmers, and there was a large number of small pigs living in sheds in their front yard. Her sister works in a shop in the nearby town. The house itself was quite large, but the conditions inside were very simple. There was no private bathroom, but just a comunal bathroom in the field outside shared by quite a few families, which consisted of nothing more than a hole in the ground. There were no taps with running water inside the house, but there was an outside tap which apparently works for 12 hours a day, and the family always keeps water stored in the kitchen. What struck me most was how freezing the house was inside. Although there were some radiators, the heating was completely inadequate, and I kept my coat on pretty much the whole time I was there. The only really warm place in the house were a couple of beds of the kind which are often used in the countryside in northern China, which are made of bricks and have hot water running through them to keep them warm. I slept on one, while the whole of the girl's family slept together on the other one in a different room, even though there would have been single beds available for my friend and her sister, both in their twenties, but I suppose that it was too cold to sleep on any of the other beds. Luckily I never needed to get up to go the bathroom in the middle of the night, since putting my coat on and going outside in the freezing cold wouldn't have been too pleasant. The house had an internet connection for my friend and her sister to use, although it was rather unreliable.
The supper was very tasty, and it consisted of meat and vegetables which had to be cooked on the spot in a large pot of boiling water in the middle of the table, in the Chinese style. The parents seemed quite happy to have a foreign guest, certainly the first one they'd ever had. After supper, I was introduced to a neighbour, a young woman who works in Beijing but comes back in the weekends, who spoke a little bit of an English and wanted to practice.

The next morning I went for a walk around the village and took some photos, which you can see here. I was told that the villages in the municipality of Beijing, such as this one, tend to be better off then villages in other provinces, because they benefit from the capital's proximity. For instance, this village had cement roads, which you would not find in rural areas in many other parts of China. The extremely flat landscape and the snow reminded me a bit of Russia.

Mao's mausoleum

Today I visited the mausoleum of 毛主席 (Mao zhuxi or "chairman Mao"), as Mao Zedong is often known in China. The mausoleum is in the middle of Tian An Men square, and still attracts scores of visitors from all over China. Entrance is free, although you have to surrender your bag outside for security reasons, and pass through a metal detector. I had to wait in a queue with scores of Chinese visitors to get into the building itself, on a freezing cold november day. In the ante-chamber, the atmosphere becomes extremely solemn and quiet. Quite a lot of visitors leave bunches of flowers in the room, as a homage to Mao's memory. Some of them even bow in respect before leaving the flowers, as if they were making a religious offering. After slowly passing through the hall, you get to the smaller room which actually contains Mao's remains. You only get to spend about half a minute in the room before you are ushered out to make way for the other visitors. Mao's corpse is kept in a hearse with a hammer and sickle on the front, just a reminder that in China the government still officially professes to be communist, even though in Beijing communist symbols are not that visible anymore. From the brief glimpse I got of the chairman's remains, I could hardly even tell if the body was real or just a wax statue.

After leaving, I asked my Chinese friend who had accompanied me to the mausoleum how she feels about Mao Zedong. "I think he is a very romantic figure" she replied, "he wrote some very romantic poems".