The Russians made Lada cars, universally renowned as piles of crap. The Czechs have a Lada too in the form of artist Josef Lada who painted lyrical pastoral scenes that catch a specific Czech mood. He also created the cartoons for Jaroslav Hasek's book The Good Soldier Svejk. There was an exhibition at Kampa Muzeum so off I went. The Magnificent Journey That Not Many People Know About has variations on a theme. Case in point being last Friday when I landed in Amsterdam at the appointed hour (6am) and duly took the Magnificent Journey That Not Many People Know About before branching off on an extended limb.; a majestic detour; and here we go! Back in the mid 90s I spent two years living and working in China, in the same house, in the same street, in smallsville Duyun (with a population of 200,000 it is almost a village in China). Man, that was a wild experience and consequently I became known as one of the wild men of VSO, a very straight, British, middle-class organization that places western professionals (cough cough) in developing countries to aid their growth. Hehe! President John F Kennedy was so impressed by the initiative that he copied it to found the American Peace Corps. One of those wild experiences involved an extensive variety of restaurants where an endless array of fascinating and more often than not delicious food came my way. Among the more unusual treats were bull’s dick, dog, yak, donkey, pig’s ear, 1000 year old eggs, fried bee larva, river moss and snake and chicken soup, which always comes at the end of a meal to wash all that sustenance down. It has to be said though, that none of these delicacies appear to have exported too well in China’s currently booming economy. Egg fu yung, prawn balls and chicken chop suey remain the staples in the conservative outside world. The Chinese restaurant is a truly zoological extravaganza and to this day I miss popping down to my favourite local shack for a plate of bao zhi (steamed dumpling), perched precariously on a ten inch high stool, mice scurrying across the floorboards. Nb. Bao zhi is also Chinese slang for boobs. Delicious! Which brings to mind the sexiest girl in the college where I taught plucking a fish head out of a hotpot served up on the floor of my living room and asking in all seriousness if I liked head too? I replied in the affirmative as she began sucking the brains out of the specimen clamped between her chopsticks. Once done, she concluded, “My grandmother says I should have lots of head, because it’s healthy.” These days pretty much every town on the planet has a Bamboo Garden or Great Wall eatery. Those business-savvy oriental entrepreneurs then branch out into shops selling plastic kitchen and bathroom crap and we buy it. Before you know it there’s a Chinatown in place and fire crackers going off, accompanied by a band bashing cymbals and a colourful long dragon dancing menacingly up the road, scaring children. The reds aren’t under the bed, they’re in it. Back in my day the People’s Republic was still entrenched in an era of hardcore communism and this was the very reason I chose to go there: to live under a totalitarian regime. During those few years however, the communist state was clearly beginning to change tack, and by the millennium it was commercially more gung-ho than Wall Street, despite edicts out of Beijing referring to the USA as the ‘enemy’ and/or ‘capitalist running dogs’. Nationalistic fervor was rampant and encouraged. “China will be number one,” the slogan went, and they weren’t talking about any musical hit parade. When I returned to the UK in 1996 I told anyone who would listen that, economically, China was going to take over the world. How they laughed. These jokers included an economics graduate now writing business articles for a well-known media outlet, “Hahaha! No way. The Yanks control the world economy” and a former stockbroker, “Hahaha! I spent 15 years on the stock exchange. The Chinese will never get their act together.” Now every politician, businessman and wide boy the world over is queuing up to kiss the Chinese ass. How the Middle Kingdom is laughing now. Hen gao xiao (very funny), as they say today, from the bull-markets of Shanghai to the watermelon stalls of Kashgar, where, incidentally, one particular tradesman did a sideline in great quality hashish and from whom, for $20, I purchased a lump the size of a tennis ball. Tai hao de! Excellent! Despite how much the Americans will downplay it, the Chinese government pretty much bailed them out in 2008, prop them up and, like a cat with a ball of string, they are playing and beating them in their own back yard. A recycling magnate has even made an audacious bid for the New York Times newspaper. Hen gao xiao! He’s taking the piss, surely? Hahaha! Henry T Ford will be rolling in his grave, as will Chairman Mao, while Deng Xiao Ping will be giving it the thumbs up as it was his infamous ‘To be rich is glorious’ statement that kicked off the entire communist/capitalist China ball game in the first place. In my Duyun days there were already whisperings of future global domination even out there in the boonies, and one guy, his father a big-shot in the navy, was adamant that Mandarin would soon replace English as the world’s key language. Somehow, I can’t see too many teenagers in Basingstoke, Boston or Brisbane twatting out messages in Chinese script anytime soon. Put that one on the back burner Macduff: All Chinese students of English demand their teacher give them a real macoy English name. So when Jeff and Pete and Fred had been taken I had to get more imaginative. Macduff was also a pretty decent right back on the football pitch. Due to those wild experiences - Mr. Fang whacking an unruly customer over the head with his abacus in Duyun’s OK Bar springs immediately to mind; as do countless bus and train journeys through lyrical backwater landscapes and sooty ancient cities; waiting for friends outside a cinema and a man offering me his wife for $100 of passion; a policeman pausing while he handcuffed a felon to shout a cheery hello at me; a colleague launching a fertilizer business and asking for the names and addresses of all my friends, because they are bound to want to buy some; cramming 67 Christmas Day visitors into my small apartment just to see if it was possible, etc - my affinity for the Chinese and their colossal nation remains strong. China is now the biggest recipient of Saudi oil to make all that plastic crap as well as every technological innovation that humankind comes up with. Where the hell have all those chunky outdated desktop PCs ended up anyway? Recycled by the wannabe New York Times owner? I hope so; the Chinese can be very pragmatic. And to this end, there is now a big bunch of Chinese guys living in my street in the sand. By the looks of it they all live in one house (maybe they’d heard about my apartment filling experiment) and go to work in some factory or other in a minibus. So I lean out of the car window in the morning and shout out “ni hao!” and they puff manically away on cigarettes, laugh and shout it back. There are of course downsides to this Chinese takeover, such as 80% smog to 20% oxygen in every town and city, kind of like winning the lottery and then getting slowly run over by a bus, but let’s stick to the Buddhist side of life and be positive. Chi fan, mei you? Had your rice yet? Every home needs one! There's even a website so you can read all about it: http://www.made-in-china.com/products-search/hot-china-products/Plastic.html The winter months in these parts – December to February - are beautiful, weather-wise. Daytime temperatures drop to around 20 centigrade with blue skies and a sun that doesn’t burn your face off. Things get so cool in the evening that I have to wear tracksuit bottoms and socks and a t-shirt. Almost Arctic! Sometimes I even have to turn the oven on full blast to heat up the flat and this year I’ve dug out a fleece from the depths of my meager wardrobe. I wear a jumper and scarf to work. Sadly, during this season to be jolly, I have to report the demise of my bike. Its rear axle finally went tits up last week and is therefore permanently disabled, like a horse put out to grass. However, in a show of festive spirit, I took it over to a gang of Bangladeshi road diggers and said, “Do you want this?” They replied with blank stares, so I leaned it up against a building and said, “It’s all yours, lads. Happy Christmas!” and walked off, but they were still baffled, kind of afraid, and today I saw that it is still standing there untouched. Before long the neighborhood brats will get their clammy mitts on it, climb on board and quickly fall off. So now it’s walking weather and this morning, with the locals securely in the land of nod, few vehicles on the road, I strolled along the pleasantly landscaped corniche (read: boardwalk/promenade) with the sun kissing my face, nobody around other than the Asian labourers building ever more shopping malls and the garbage men picking up last night’s leftover picnic crap. Crossing a lawn next to the sea I watched a screeching flock of gulls swooping with intent and fighting over scraps, so, ever eager to find interesting events in the sand, I went to investigate and there on the surface were hundreds of fish, each no more than four inches long, skirmishing for pieces of bobbing bread that had the seagulls all feisty. It was a mass attack, so wild that they were even taking bites out of a piece of cardboard. My scientific reasoning puts that down to the petro-chemical effluent that they spend all their time swimming about in. I’m sure there are fish in there with two heads and it was long ago that I stopped taking a dip in those slimy waters. Continuing my walk, somewhat disconcerted, as if by magic, every manner of American fast food outlet suddenly came into view, also the source of a daily feeding frenzy, not by fish but by Saudis, many of whom refer to the USA as the Great Satan, in between mouthfuls of Big Mac, Fords and Chevrolets parked out front, i-phones next to the Cokes. Happy New Year and Bon Appetit (see below)! |
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‘I don’t understand why when we destroy something created by man we call it vandalism, but when we destroy something created by nature we call it progress.’ Ed Begley Jr. * "The more I see of Humans the more I like my dog." Mark Twain * Only when the Last Tree Is Cut Down, The Last Fish Eaten, And the Last Stream Poisoned, Will Man Realize That Money Cannot be Eaten Cree Indian proverb Nb. Doesn't work in Google Chrome, no idea why not...
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