living in a land with no fridges

For a while now, I have been providing flashbacks to my visit to China in 1999, but I also visited in 1992. Back then China was just emerging from the years of communist rule and the economy was starting to develop into a market economy. But it still had a long way to go.

In Australia we always take note of the live fish in the windows of Chinese restaurants, and some snobby Australians turn their noses up at this tradition. They think it is distasteful. But I found in China very quickly that in fact it is a good sensible way of knowing that you are not going to die of food poisoning. In a country where there is no refrigeration and food is food fresh, rather than pickled or salted, it is vital to know that your food is fresh. There can be no fresher food than that has been recently slaughtered. So any enterprising restaurant owner will go a long way to prove that their food is fresh.

For seafood proving that the food is fresh means showing that it is still alive and looking healthy. For meat, it meant having the meat proudly on display on a counter and letting the patron see the food taken away to be cooked.

Now that there are fridges and more importantly the electricity to run them, this presentation method is much less common.

北京

I speak occasionally with Australians who think that the Communist government changed the name from Pei King to Bei Jing when these are both different romanization of the same name. They think that the Communist Chinese government changed the name for the same propaganda reasons as the Vietnamese changing the name of Saigon to Ho Chi Minh city or The Soviets the name St Petersburg to Stalingrad. This shows little understanding for Chinese History. Here is a little excerpt from Wikipedia:

Peking is the name of the city according to Chinese Postal Map Romanization, and the traditional customary name for Beijing in English. The term originated with French missionaries four hundred years ago and corresponds to an older pronunciation predating a subsequent sound change in Mandarin from [kʲ] to [tɕ]^{[citation needed]}. ([tɕ] is represented in pinyin as j, as in Beijing), and is still used in some languages (as in Dutch, German, Hungarian, Polish and Spanish).

In China, the city has had many names. Between 1368 and 1405, and again from 1928 [1] and 1949, it was known as Beiping (北平; Pinyin: Beiping; Wade-Giles: Pei-p'ing), literally "Northern Peace". On both occasions, the name changed — with the removal of the element meaning "capital" (jing or king, 京) — to reflect the fact the national capital had changed to Nanjing, the first time under the Hongwu Emperor of the Ming Dynasty, and the second time with the Kuomintang (KMT) government of the Republic of China, so that Peking was no longer the capital of China.

The Communist Party of China reverted the name to Beijing (Peking) in 1949 again in part to emphasize that Beijing had returned to its role as China's capital. The government of the Republic of China on Taiwan has never formally recognized the name change, and during the 1950s and 1960s it was common in Taiwan for Beijing to be called Beiping to imply the illegitimacy of the PRC. Today, almost all of Taiwan, including the ROC government, uses Beijing, although some maps of China from Taiwan still use the old name along with pre-1949 political boundaries.

Back to BeiJing

Back in Bei Jing, I met up with the tour group the first evening in the city. It was our first day together as a tour group. Several people had been in BeiJing for a few days. I will introduce the people over the next few posts. The tour I was on was organized by my friend from Melbourne, Ewen Bell and run by Grasshopper Tours. The tour nominally includes 8 people, Ewen and out guide.

I had spent the day wandering south through the city with Elliot, one of my co-travelers and room mate for the first few days. We had lunch south of the BeiJing railway station. I ordered hot and sour soup, but while good, it was not the real thing. Instead is was egg flower soup, with chicken and pepper. I also had a bit of difficulty with the difference when ordering between two bowls of soup and one bowl of soup with two bowls. Ah well, that's what happens when your Chinese is not so good.

In the hutongs south of the station we came across a octagonal church. The man there could not explain in English what type of church it was. He wanted 100 元, but at first I did not understand what he wanted 100 of and then decided that was a bit ridiculous. We moved on.

"church" by yewenyi [?]


Next we came to the southern wall. The tower here was the one attacked in the Allied invasion during the boxer revolt. The Chinese are still furious with the amount of damage caused to national artifacts at this time by the invading British. Anyway I am guessing that the tower was rebuilt after the war. Further along the wall is the hole in the city wall made to let the railway line through when the British built a railway line from here to the north.

"tower" by yewenyi [?]


We wandered back to the city and met up with the others. We met in the foyer. Everyone was relaxed and it was a nice group of people. First things were about getting to know each other and to understand the organization. We went out for our first dinner, PeiKing duck in a hutong restaurant.

"restaurant" by yewenyi [?]

taxis in China

Like everything else Chinese taxis have come a long way and have a long way to go. I have a natural aversion to taxis, which I will not go into here. But, one of the problems with taxis in China always was that they ran cartels. So in 1992, the taxis at a train station would suddenly beef up the prices when a train arrived, even the buses would to this. When I left GuangZhou airport, in 1992, I baulked at being charged a flat 50 元. They would not use the meter. At the time the average wage in China was 600 元. So I walked out of the airport to the main highway. Here, at the bus stop I met with a group of Chinese university students. They took me under their wing and when the intercity bus illegally stopped to pick us up to earn a little more money that made the conductor only charge me 1 元.

In 1999 in Beijing the situation had changed a lot and generally the drivers would use their meters. However, on leaving the Summer Palace, we found that again there was a cartel going and they wanted to charge 50 元 for the trip back to 天安門. The others went in their cab, and after the cab left the car park the driver agreed to use the meter. He said that he could not do this while the others were watching. We went a block away onto the main highway and flagged down a cab. The passing cab driver used the meter.

Then in 2006, we used cabs a lot as I was traveling in a group. The cabs always used their meters. Now all they need to do is actually learn where things in the city are located. We spent ages in cabs with the driver on the mobile talking to someone else trying to work out how to get to where we wanted to go.

北京大學

Back in 1999 the first time I visited Beijing, I stayed at the 北京大學 on the recommendation of a man from Taiwan in Xian. I walked there from the underground station. However, it was about 500 meters further than I thought. When at what I though was the right spot I came across some men with submachine guns at a gate in a place I was not allowed. I walked up to ask if this was the 北京大學. It turns out that they were soldiers. There is a sad law that says that soldiers cannot talk to foreigners. At first they tried to wave me away. Then they pointed in the direction I needed to go. I went on my way.

Aparently it is my fault

I am diverging here. Back to my first trip to Beijing in 1999. Just before I arrived in China, the Americans bombed the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia. All through China I had been asked my nationality. (你是渼國人嗎) Every day on the TV were pictures of the dead being brought home with patriotic music. The only thing I have seen like it is what was on Australian TV when Stuart Diver was saved from the rubble of Threadbo. In fact it was so identical that they probably were in breech of copyright. But back to my story. This woman came up to me crying, beseeching me as to why I had committed such a crime. I was glad it was the only time the happened.

Beijing and terrorists

It has been a while. I have been uploading photos, but not writing my blog. This is because I have much to say, but need time to consider how to say it. So I will break it down into bits that are more manageable.

On the day I arrived in Beijing, I headed off to the hotel from my train. I was sharing a room with this fellow called Eliot. (and I appologise now for all the times I have misspelled it.) Eliot turned out to be a terrific fellow. We spent a few hours talking as he has the problem that people such as myself who travel on their own for a while in a country where they do not speak the language have. There is no one with whom you can hold a conversation.

I will digress for a moment for a story of a previous trip. When I traveled in Taiwan, I spent about 10 days wandering in a clockwise direction around the island. I think I was in Tai-Jung or Tai-Dung, I cannot remember which. I had visited a local Buddhist temple and had quite an interesting, but short conversation with one of the worshipers. The worshiper wanted to know if I thought it was OK for there to be multiple religions. I was stunned, and of course said yes. After that I was welcome in their temple. Later I discovered the reason for their wariness. I was approached by an American and some Taiwanese who were very friendly. They introduced themselves and invited me along to have lunch with them. It turned out to be at McDonald's. I gladly accepted the offer as I was desperate to be able to have a conversation. They turned out to be Mormons. They were very helpful, but I could only think that they must be the cause of the Buddhist's concern. Is it not sad that religions refuse to be able to get along.

Back to Eliot, He was a very patriotic American. He felt that America was misunderstood and that it was his role in life to help fix misconceptions that people like George Bush were creating about his country. He lived close to New York and then the events of 911 were quite close to his heart, and rightly so.

I have always had a problem with the statements that the Americans make, like, never happened before and everything has changed, and so on. To me it is just more of the same stupidity, people, often but not always, religious ones who want to change the world by killing everyone or making them follow their religion. You see, when I was little I lived in Singapore. We had many relatives who lived (and still do) in Malaysia. In Malaysia there were race riots. People would walk into places like cinemas and chop people up with machetes. People (in Singapore) would say that you should not go to Malaysia as it was a dangerous place, in the same was as we are advised these days not to visit dangerous places by our government.

I would suggest that some of these people committing violent acts, were from similar if not the same groups who preach violence that resulted in 911. However, I have not researched this, hence I cannot say this for certain. For all of my life I have been afraid of such actions. Up until recently I could not talk about such things without crying. I was very put out when the Americans (and Australians for that matter) reacted in such a was as to say that this was new. They have lived fortunately violence free lives, and this is something I would wish on all people (that is: to live a violence free life). But these things are not new and some of us have suffered with such violent behavior for a long time. And what I have been through is only mild and insignificant compared to what others suffered. What I think is that this is a new phase of violence. The techniques for the violence have certainly changed, and the targets are new, but the underlying causes are the same.

I am certain that my words are not as well crafted as they could be. I have never been good at the English language. I will probably come back and edit it to improve the wording and structure. I hope there are no glaring errors that will lead to misunderstanding or misinterpretation, but I needed to write it down.

Anyway, I think most of my holiday had a lighter note to it, and was not concerned to such an extent to man's inhumanity.