ahgfal
There’s one word in this rant that got my imagination running a little wild:
for the sake of energy to power the electric ass wipers of an illusory empire. Sigh.
My emphasis.
Alright, swap the donkey for an arse, and you have what in standard English seems to sum up the ridiculous extremes of decadence much of the Western world seems to be sinking to.
“No sir, I will not wipe my own arse, not when I have a nice, shiny electric machine to do it for me. All I have to do is get off my gold-plated, all-electric, fully automated toilet, bend down and grab my ankles, and…
….ooh, that feels good.”
Uh, yeah, I think lzh and I will stick with the good, old-fashioned rolls of paper that her danwei hands out in its three-monthly care packages- ahh, the benefits of a Chinese government job.
Uh oh
Well, the article does say nobody was hurt (there’s something magic in the water in New Zealand), but still, that’s a pretty big quake, and it hit my father’s hometown, and my grandparents still live there.
No, wait, this article says one dead, twenty injured. Nothing about any of my relatives, though, so far as I can see.
Here’s the official Geonet report.
This one’s entitled “Latest updates“, so maybe I’ll keep that one open and refresh it periodically.
Anyway, from what I’ve seen online so far, I probably don’t need to worry about my grandparents. I imagine they have quite a mess to clean up, though.
l’impromptu de BeiGongDa
Posted by wangbo in life in Beijing on December 20, 2007
Today was drama tests for my first year students. It’s simple: They get into groups of their own choosing, write or adapt or copy a drama of their choice, then act it. I give the group a grade. That’s it.
Well, one stuck out in particular, one that I’ll call L’Impromptu de BeiGongDa, a drama that had me remembering stuff from all those French literature courses all those years ago.
All right, have to make this quick, running out of time, we’re supposed to be meeting the other foreign teachers on my programme for a Christmas party (very well planned, the other foreign teachers, those not on our programme, are having a party of their own, to which we were invited… oh well):
So these three lads got up, one sitting by the classroom computer pretending to play WoW or CS or whatever, one sitting slumped over a desk on the other side of the “stage” sleeping, one standing in between looking all agitated. The one in the middle did his best to get his mates to drag themselves away from their favourite leisure activities and help him write the drama. And they did it brilliantly. Not up to professional standards, not by any means, of course, but really very, very good. Brilliant.
oh dear
Posted by wangbo in tilting at windmills on December 20, 2007
infuriating
For some reason when I installed AVG on this computer (the university-supplied one, not my laptop) AVG decided it would do a virus scan whenever the computer was turned on the first time each day. My schedule and habits mean that the computer can be turned on two or three times each day, and if it doesn’t finish the virus scan during the first session, it’ll start from scratch the next time I turn the computer on.
For some bizarre reason I just can’t figure out, the virus scan has the hard drive making a phenomenal amount of noise and slows the computer down big time. It takes about an hour to complete. I’ve never seen this on any other computer ever. The new office computer, the one I set up so that we had something useable to work on, has AVG run quietly in the background and finish its scan in ten to fifteen minutes, and my laptop does the same. Not this piece of shit.
Now, normally this is tolerable- but only just. Everything goes slowly, but it’s still useable. Apart from Monday and Thursday mornings when I start at 8 am, and therefore don’t get online until later in the day, I usually turn the computer on as soon as I get up. That way I can get myself showered and cleaned up and dressed and get breakfast ready while AVG does its thing, and I only have to put up with minimal hassle as it finishes the virus scan. But normally even when I get online or otherwise try to use the computer right from the start of the virus scan, it’s useable but slow.
Not today. I don’t feel good about it, because I could be compromising my security, but to do anything more than sit here frustrated staring at the screen of an utterly useless computer, I had to stop the virus scan. I couldn’t do a bloody thing. I had to crash Firefox so I could open AVG to stop the scan, it was that utterly useless.
Thing is, I’ve already done everything I know to get this computer into better shape, and nothing makes even the slightest bit of difference. I’ve defragged, I’ve scanned for viruses and spyware, I’ve deleted the masses of junk left by previous occupants, I’ve uninstalled all the useless software they left behind, but nothing brings even the slightest improvement.
I think I should just teach my laptop to recognise the university network and just use that.
a solution
We just saw Peter Garrett, Australia’s environment minister and greatest rock star, on CCTV 1’s Network News in some item about Aus’s response to Japanese whaling. lzh’s response to the item:
Let’s hunt the Japanese. Kill the bastards, chop them up and do research. And when we’re done researching them, we’ll feed them to the whales.
Well, I paraphrase quite liberally, I mean, she said all of that in Chinese and it was part of a conversation in which I was explaining who the bald guy on the screen was and why I like hime, but that was her meaning.
Badaling
Posted by wangbo in life in Beijing on December 19, 2007
For years now I’ve been hearing about the Badaling section of the Great Wall. Before I came to China it was probably the only section of the Wall I could name. In my first year in Beijing two colleagues, one of whom had a more recent edition of Lonely Planet than I did, invited me to visit the Wall at Huanghuacheng, and so I visited the wall for the first time, happy that I’d managed to see the Wall without selling my soul to the tourist demon Badaling. And for years lzh and I have been riding the 919 out to Yanqing, passing Juyongguan, Shuiguan and Badaling. For years, just before the bus has entered the tunnel under Badaling, I’ve looked up and to the right and I’ve marvelled at the sheer mass of humanity swarming over the Wall at Badaling and sworn I’d never go there.
For starters, I don’t see the sense in going to a place where you can’t actually see your destination so much as see a mass of people covering it. Secondly, I’ve been to too many tourist destinations in China to know that a trip to Badaling will mean constantly fending off hawkers and hustlers and other undesireables who prey on tourists- and who somehow don’t seem to have the intelligence to sort out genuine, fresh-off-the-boat tourists from grizzled long termers out for a break from their regular Chinese city life. And I guess I should admit that even after eight years in China, I do tend to get tired, run down, frazzled and grumpy in crowded areas. Not always, but often enough.
Anyway, Mum and Dad wanted to climb the Wall so they could say they’d actually seen this Wonder of the World in the flesh, actually stood on it and touched it and breathed in its age and history and marvelled at it… and whatever. If you’re going to be crossing the Wall four times on what is quite likely your only chance to see it, then you’d be insane not to stop and take a closer look, right? Right. This ain’t the Forbidden City we’re talking about. Imperial and royal palaces are a dime a dozen on this planet. This is a once in a lifetime in only this place kind of thing.
And the most logical time for us to take Mum and Dad to the Wall was the afternoon of Sunday, 2 December, 2007, as a stop on the trip back in to Beijing. Sure, if circumstances conspired to make the trip to the Wall inconvenient on that particular day, they had time to head back out to it in the three days before they left, but why go running round in circles unnecessarily? There’s no obvious reason why a stop at Badaling should be inconvenient: It is, after all, on the southern boundary of Yanqing. It has regular public buses in to Beijing. If you can’t get a ride from Yanqing county town down to Badaling, you should be sent back to kindergarten.
So lzh arranged for a former classmate of hers who earns extra cash as a “taxi” driver in Yanqing County to pick us up in the village, take us to Badaling and wait while we did the needful, then take us home for a flat, and what I thought quite reasonable, fee.
So step one was lunch. That proved to be quite a mission, following barely sensical directions through a labyrinth of a hotel, eventually sitting at a collossal banquet table in a restaurant room full of equally collossal but empty banquet tables, having just walked through a restaurant room full of equally collossal banquet tables, about half of which were occupied, having just walked through….. Heck, I can’t remember any more. “Badaling Hotel” I think was the name of this labyrinthine establishment, and not much that happened there seemed to make any sense at all, but there the four of us sat at a huge table in an empty room and we got lunch. Fortunately the food was reasonable, but certainly not worth the extra cost, justified as always with the weakest of all justifications: It’s a tourist area. Anyway, we managed to find our way out of the hotel and up the hill to the Wall itself, got tickets, and got on the wall.
Well, we had choices, and I decided we should climb in the direction that had the least tourists. As it turned out, most of the people on the Wall in that direction were hawkers and hustlers and other similar undesirables. As in only about a third [rough guesstimate] of the people we met on the Wall were other tourists. Funnily enough, by the time we got off the Wall I was having to bite my tongue really hard to stop the nasty, sarcastic rebukes that were building up… Oh, the pressure…
“Hello! Hello! Cafe! Cafe!”
“I can see that, I’m not blind, and I have my glasses on.”
That kind of thing. Well, that example is one from climbing off the wall, rapidly surveying what was around the base, and deciding it wasn’t worth even glancing at.
But the good news is that the hawkers got the message. I expressed my views of their merchandise and informed them just how great my desire was to purchase anything from them, and they left me alone. Nor did they bug my parents. Of course, they ignored my wife. She’s Chinese, you see. No, I don’t see the logic, either, but all too often, that’s how it works at these tourist destinations. I would like to say New Zealand is innocent of such unreasoning, but I can’t: I have, after all, seen people seriously suggesting in respected newspapers that foreigners should be charged more than Kiwis at New Zealand’s tourist destinations simply because they’re foreign, and I would not be surprised if some in New Zealand’s tourist industry do put that illogic into practice.
Anyway, we climbed up on to the Wall. The first plan was to climb to the first watch tower then head back. It was cold, you see, and a bitter northerly wind was blowing straight down from the Gobi. If you’ve spent a winter in north China, you know what I mean. It was frigid and cutting, and in the photos Mum looks like she’s walking through Antarctica dressed for a Hong Kong summer. It took us ages to defrost her when we got back to Beijing. But the first watch tower was awfully close to where we started from, and so I suddenly turned all sadistic and decided we’d climb to the next watch tower. This involved us:
- Climbing higher
- Climbing further up in to the wind
- Climbing a really steep section
- Mum getting even colder
- Us getting a better view of both the pass and the Wall
And so my wife and my parents followed me up to the next watch tower. I suspect they were too frozen to object. Not me, though, I was loving it. Nothing like a bitterly cold northerly blowing straight off the Gobi to clear the cobwebs.
Anyway, Wall viewed and photos taken, we went back down to the carpark and got ourselves back to warmth and civilisation.
But what needs to be discussed, of course, is:
Is Badaling worth visiting?
Well, maybe. It depends on your needs/desires. It is definitely the easiest section of the Wall to get to from Beijing, but there’s more to this rather complex equation than mere ease of access. Avoid peak tourism seasons and summer weekends, if at all possible, unless you want to spend your trip to the Great Wall fighting your way through a seething mass of humanity. Remember that Badaling is reconstructed, and so you’ll see the Wall in something approaching the state it was in before 1644 (minus the soldiers and weaponry, of course), so if you want to see the Wall in it’s current natural state, you will need to go elsewhere. Remember that being the most famous, most popular, most visited section of the Wall, it has the most hawkers, hustlers, con artists, scammers….. And cafes with pushy waitresses who dislike hearing “no, thanks”, and souvenir postcards of Lijiang and the Terrocotta Warriors and the other nonsensical, way-out-of-context rubbish that defines so much of China’s current tourist industry. Basically, if you’re going to visit the Wall at Badaling, you will need to plan your trip so that you visit on a relatively light traffic day at a relatively light traffic time, and be prepared to fend off hordes of people who see you as little more than a walking ATM. But if you can arrange such a time, then it is well worth it.
Well, the word my father used most to describe the scenery he was seeing was “desolate”. Yes, in the winter it is desolate. And cold, too.
But Badaling is beautiful. Well, of course, it’s in Yanqing. How could it not be beautiful? If you visit Badaling, ignore all the tourism around you and focus on the Wall and its setting. It’s amazing. A stunning, beautiful landscape. And it doesn’t matter how you look at it, the Wall itself is incredible. And Badaling is where Genghis Khan broke through the wall, only to smash up against Juyongguan to the south- how awesome is that? I have walked in the footsteps of Genghis Khan. I have stood where Jin Dynasty soldiers stood and looked where they looked as the Mongol army roared up to the pass lusting for blood and victory.
So I would say that if you want a section of the Wall that is easily accessible from Beijing and you can arrange to visit at a time when tourist traffic is relatively light, go for it.
the aftermath
Posted by wangbo in Uncategorized on December 19, 2007
Early in the afternoon of Friday, 30 November, 2007, lzh and I and all those involved in the planning and running of our wedding sat down, utterly exhausted, at a few empty tables and finally got some lunch.
Looking back, I can’t see what it was that I had to do that left me so shattered. All I did was follow orders- go here, get in this car, go that way, do this, do that, say this, say that… pretty easy, really. But I was utterly exhausted. I don’t think I want to imagine how those who had real jobs to do were feeling. Lunch eaten, everything was packed up and we all went our separate ways.
There’s something very sad, almost tragic, about the sight of a restaurant after a wedding. It looks something like a battlefield the day after, silent, deserted. Yeah, anyway, we left. lzh and I, my parents and Roubaozi walked back across the square to our hotel.
There’s something slightly awkward about using a hotel room as the wedding chamber (新房), but our only other option was heading straight back to Beijing, and considering how exhausted we both were, I’m glad we didn’t. And of course, my parents, being tourists, needed looking after. And we wanted my parents to go out to the village and spend some proper time with lzh’s family.
That was perhaps the scariest part of the whole trip. I mean, rural Beijing is still mostly poor and underdeveloped. I mean, Yanqing county town is quite nice and really very well appointed, but the villages, even the fringes of the county town, are, well, basic. And cold, in the winter. But then I got to thinking of the stories of growing up in small town New Zealand in the 50s and 60s that my parents had told me, and I thought, well, they’ll probably cope just fine. Apart from the temperature, they’ve dealt with all of this kind of thing before. Well, apart from the temperature and squat toilets. And talking to my parents, they seemed pretty keen to go out and spend a night in the village. And lzh’s parents, her mum in particular, seemed very keen to have my parents come out and visit.
So, late on Friday afternoon, having gotten ourselves rested and as recuperated as possible, we wandered off to the supermarket. We didn’t want to repeat the breakfast disaster of that morning, so we made sure we had edible food.
And then on that Saturday morning, 1 December, 2007, we got up and gathered in Mum and Dad’s room for breakfast, then got our stuff together, moved it down to the lobby, and checked out while lzh went off looking for a miandi to take us out to the village.
The drivers waiting by the hotel quoted the utterly absurd price of fifty kuai, so lzh told them precisely where they could put their fifty kuai and their crappy little miandi and went off to where the village drivers normally gather up by the old Central Market (since torn down to make way for some commercial development that is currently under construction)- I guess one thing should be made clear: The miandi and other not-strictly-legal but tolerated taxi drivers working different parts of Yanqing gather in different parts of the county town. It’s always possible to get a miandi going your direction, but if, for example, you ask one of the Kangzhuang drivers who gather on the north side of the Dongguan square, outside the KFC, to go out to Xiangying, he’s going to quote you a higher price than a regular Xiangying driver waiting whereever it is the Xiangying drivers wait. So having mentioned the Central Market, those who know Yanqing can probably guess which township lzh’s village is in…. But anyway, she went up there and found a driver willing to come back to the hotel, pick us up, and take us to the village for the regular fare.
So we piled in and off we went, taking the back roads along the river bank to avoid the trucks on the highway. And we arrived. And we piled out of the miandi and into the house. And then lzh and I got a day and a night and a morning of hard core, intense, non-stop translation practice. Actually, that wasn’t as tiring as I expected. And both sets of parents seemed to like each other and would probably have gotten along much better if they weren’t so totally reliant on translators. And Mum and Dad seemed to actually enjoy their brief stay in the Chinese countryside. Well, I think they would’ve preferred warmer weather, but otherwise they seemed to enjoy it.
So Saturday was spent around the house. On Sunday morning we had to put Roubaozi on a miandi for the county bus station fairly early- he had a plane to catch to get back to his job in the wilds of Jiangsu. Then we took Mum and Dad on a walk through the fields and up to the new carpark and lookout at the base of the mountains, from where they got a reasonable view out across the village.
But, like Roubaozi, we, too, had to get back to Beijing that Sunday. Well, we didn’t have to rush, having no plane to catch, but I needed to be in class at eight the next morning. So lzh arranged for a classmate of hers who earns a bit of extra income as a “taxi” driver to pick us up at midday. And Mum and Dad wanted to be able to say that they had not merely seen ad they drove through and under the Great Wall. They wanted to be able to say they’d climbed it, too, gotten up close and personal with the wall. Well, there we were in Yanqing, heading back to Beijing, and so we did the obvious….
So yes, I finally succumbed. I had to. Force of circumstance. It’s not so easy to stop at Shuiguan or Juyongguan when you’re heading south from Yanqing, not unless you want to take the back roads or too huge backtracks, and that just didn’t make any sense. Fortunately, a Sunday afternoon outside peak season isn’t too bad a time to visit the tourist hell that is Badaling.
And then we got back to Beijing, and for the next three days I worked while my wife and my parents went shopping.
And so ended the long weekend of the wedding. Intense, and awesome, and a huge amount of fun.
cosmodaology
Posted by wangbo in tilting at windmills on December 19, 2007
Lunchtime blogging must necessarily be brief, especially when lunchbreak is approaching an end, and so I’ll simply say that this piece is well worth reading if you’re in need of something to get the brain working.
oil spill
Posted by wangbo in life in Beijing on December 18, 2007
Capital Punishment, huh? Well, he certainly seems to be enjoying it.
Last night’s dinner was at a fast-food-style Xinjiang restaurant. It was good, really good. Good quality, tasty food. The only drawback was that by the end of it we had consumed enough grease to run an Audi A6 for a week, and there was enough grease on our faces, hands, and the table to keep that Audi going for a month. Now, if only I could afford an Audi… But that Xinjiang fast food was good.