Just like the Huns of so long ago, busting through the great wall and running amok in the lands of the Han seemed like the logical next step from Mongolia. Busting through the great wall these days only requires an overnight train, but not still without some protective measures against those crazy northern nomads; when the train gets to the border the tracks are different size between Mongolia and China, which means a complete change of the train wheels is in order. This is done by lifting the entire damn train in the air while they swap the wheels! It’s pretty epic and even more exciting when they ram the train carriages back together afterwards at 30km an hour… *feint boom* .... *louder boom* .... *REALLY LOUD BOOM* coupled with luggage all over the ground.
Ultimately though what is more difficult than busting through the great wall is busting through the great FIREWALL of China which only allows websites the government can control. It blocks many useful things, but most critically this digital prophylactic does not allow the hallowed Vegemite Ambassador Blog to be accessed (along with other serious threats to national security such as Facebook). It is therefore with some subterfuge I fight to bring you this blog, it’s still made in China (isn’t everything?), but it’s successfully bypassed the great firewall in a manner that would make Genghis proud.
The first thing you notice upon stepping through the wardrobe into China is the sheer quantity of people. One and a half billion people yields a crowd at every public space that rock concerts would envy. The very moment you are thrown off the train you plunge into the social rapids, in which you are carried on a voracious current through a vast, noisy, 5ft deep ocean as far as the eye can see, being spun and surged to and fro until you can clamber to the safety of a small section of the shore.
The next sensation that hits you is an overwhelming fear for your personal hygiene whilst amongst the masses. I estimate that if you take a crowd of twenty Chinese folk, one of them will be hocking up and spitting on the ground as if they are exorcising some phlegm demon at any given time. That means in China right now I estimate there are probably over half a million people spitting on the ground as you read these. That’s over 20,000 litres of spit and an uncomfortable statistic to calculate. Add to this that the vast majority of Chinese babies don’t come equipped with diapers/nappies. Instead they just have pants with no crotch so the baby can just let it all out over the sidewalk whenever or wherever. It’s possibly the most eye opening thing you will ever see in your life coming from the west. That and the spit.
The next sensation is the lack of foreigners here, even in Beijing. Ok, there are a few foreigners, but there are just so many locals that it is extremely rare to see others of the tourist ilk, so much so that as a white westerner you are repeatedly stopped by people who want to have their photo taken with you. Even if they don’t ask, they take photos of you anyway, sometimes brazenly, sometimes in a pathetically and embarrassingly clandestine manner. I usually get a photo too, making for quite a collection so far of random Chinese people.
Even when you are not caught in a Chinese person’s sights, you will be certainly captured on the governments. China has the largest standing army in the world, and when they say “standing” they mean it; they are on every corner and at every building. If the guards staring at you isn’t uncomfortable enough, big brother is near … they have the world’s biggest collection of CCTV cameras, each acts as an eye of Sauron; looking for “free Tibet” shirts in range and automatically deploying a myriad of police in kitted out golf buggies and Segways. I can almost imagine at some point they may have considered making the eyes in portraits of Chairmen Mao follow you too like a clichéd horror house, becoming red at a glimpse of dissent.
Shop attendants also watch you like a hawk. In their normal state they are asleep in their own arms or on their products, but via some sort of extra sensory organ, they will detect a passing tourist instantly and arise from their post like a selling juggernaut. They will proceed to describe as many of their strategically un-price tagged products to you as they can in fifteen seconds followed by a peppering of “hello” as you are walking away; as if the only reason you could be turning down their epic sales pitch is because you are deaf. One woman standing over a hundred metres away picked up a megaphone and yelled “HELLO, WATER!". It’s never too late to make a sale.
China is designed for one and a half billion little people too, not 6ft giants. This means each day is a constant challenge; you don’t fit on a single bus seat, you’re too tall to stand in the aisle, you’re too long for a bed, you’re knees are angled too high to fit under a table, your head is on par with door frames, your feet are too big to buy shoes, your hands are too large for a cup, your skull is too wide for a hat … basically, your something is too much for everything. Tall folk must become very adept at rolling / folding / tucking / squeezing and exhaling.
Tall folk are not the only ones contorting bodies here though; every morning, every person seemingly gets out of bed and stumbles to the nearest piece of grass (regardless of how much concrete surrounds it) and starts stretching, patting, shaking, jiggling and rolling their bodies in every which way as a start to the day. It’s quite funny to watch the weird and wonderful ways people prepare their bodies for the long day ahead of waiting in queues.
Actually I take that back, nobody waits in queues here. People just swarm around the point in question and then do whatever it takes to be next in line, even if that means standing on top of small children, the elderly or a corpse of someone who was in the queue some weeks ago and died there. It’s of such intensity, and so foreign, that you just stand there in disbelief and laugh while being jostled about in the flurry of people and miasma of body odour.
Speaking of odours, China is full of them. It’s a constant olfactory onslaught of people, undefinable food, stagnant water, petrochemicals, smoke, humidity and backpackers … hmm, no wait, that’s me.
All this craziness aside, it's easy to like like Chinese! Those who speak some English have been so excited and happy to talk, so keen to learn about the west and teach about their own lives and so willing to walk hopelessly lost travelers around the streets.. It’s been an honour and a real stroke of luck to be able to share time with them
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But that’s all for now, it’s time for you to build up visual and gastrointestinal strength for the next post where you can enjoy some stories of the food (and many other weird things).
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