October 12, 2014
Fuzhou to Nanchang.
The high-speed train system in China is a surprising efficiency in an otherwise bumbling and once-ancient society. Now they make things cheaper and faster than anyone, they get the last seat at a capitalist game of duck-duck-goose. Rapid transit with holes for loos. Condo development beside rice patties. Every man woman and child with a cellphone and a cigarette in each hand.
Reaching speeds of 300km/hour in a matter of minutes, the train is incredibly quiet, the views spectacular and rural, and the modest amount of air conditioning (that seems to only increase when the train makes its many stops along each route), is keeping us cool. There is a restaurant caboose that send out carts on the half-hour with indistinguishable tv trays with small compartments of unidentifiables, but also serves beer and ice cream. Everyone seems to have purchased ramen bowls at the station All the way to China for goddamned pot-noodles. Want hot water? There’s a dispensary outside of the toilet on the train.
Passengers here are not skilled in the art of personal space and quiet. As we pull out from the station, handfuls of laptops and tablets emerge from designer bags and backpacks, blaring kids-shows, dramas and various other gameshow madness that all seem to commence at the same time. All of these shows seem to incorporate the slide whistle on a regular basis. I now believe the slide whistle was forged in hell. Satanic fife.
I am still in the throes of jetlag. A woman, a “country woman” I am later told by my Chinese bandmates, spends an hour yelling at the top of her lungs into her mobile. It is the afternoon. I am drunk on time-travel and one light beer. My seat is being kicked.
As we pull into Nanchang, the crush of people clamouring to get off comes as no surprise but irritates me all the same. The queue is for suckers here. It is the beginning of my public displays of annoyance.
We are in town now. I get a sim card for my phone, and for a mere 24 dollars, have unlimited data and calling, China-wide. I pull out my iPhone 6, which is an ironic novelty here in China. It is both made here (mine delivered to Ottawa from Shanghai) advertised China-wide but is virtually out of reach for most Chinese pocketbooks. It does give me a thin street cred to these tech junkies.
Noodles. Beer. Hotel. Sleep.
October 13
Flight from Nanchang to Nanning, Drive to Liuzhou
The south of China is a new frontier. Nanning, once the rural playground and vacation spot for Hong Kongers has exploded into a massive place, and like all other cities in China, into smoggy skylines with a hundred cranes in every direction. We board our own bus for the first time. If you are 5’2 and 100 pounds you will be in pure comfort. Luckily we are but ten in a bus for fifty. I slowly fade into the cheap leather.
I see lights. Blurry lights becoming clearer. We are speeding uncontrollably and about to careen into the back of a transport trailer. I’m yelling, panicking, “Whoa, whoa, whoa!!” Noone is listening to me. The driver looks annoyed in the rear view mirror. In the backseat of our 20 seater coach bus, whether due to its poor suspension that has jostled me for hours, wrenching my neck, and in my still dreaming state, i am coming to, believing that we are about to crash. My bandmates shake me into reality. Everyone on board is a little disturbed, me most of all. This is to be the first of many intense stress dreams from which I wake groggy at four in the morning, sit on the edge of the bed, looking out over the jungle of concrete from my hotel window and begin to miss home.
Liuzhou is full flash. The downtown core is postered with billboards, videos, all neatly placed around the high-rise modern condos. Everything is here. The streets are heaving with nightlife. Somehow we end up at our hotel restaurant and eat a meal made with the least amount of love I’ve had thusfar. Enroute back to my room, a drunken party of people exit the elevator in a thick cloud of tobacco, laugh and stare. It is only as the doors close do I realize they’ve pushed the button for every floor. I’m in room 2603. This will be a long tour.
October 20
SHANGHAI
There’s a reason the drains in Chinese hotel rooms are closed everyday. This is a practice I’ve witnessed all over this country. It annoyed me at first, stepping into two inches of water in a shower, but one soon begins to appreciate these small eccentricities. Each sad little domicile has it’s own way let the water out (all of which are completely unintuitive), but the closing of the the drain keeps out the bugs. Bugs that have to survive in China are bugs I don’t want exploring while I mouthbreathe at 3am. I’m guessing these insects are probably the only things in China that do not end up in cellophane as snack food. Ok, low blow. But I digress. More than the bugs, the stoppage keeps out the smell. It should come as no surprise that a walk down the finest Shanghai street will remind you of that close-talking co-worker, his hot sick rot breath buttonholing you at every intersection. This is a primordial smell of sewage that has no rival.
Our show today started at 11:30. It was outdoors. It was a free public city lunch hour concert. I have come to China to perform in a sideshow review, following community centre dance-troupes in shiny silver pants. We were presented an award made of glass, (overly polite speeches and dry applause) and we placed it at the front of the stage. George, in a fit of bouzouki Jim Morrison incarnation accidentally kicks it over and it smashes to pieces. Everyone looks in disbelief and tries to pretend it hasn’t happened.
After our gig, we take a taxi ride to a microphone factory, (a decision I instantly regret once squeezed into the passenger seat with no seatbelt). Microphones, while a part of my daily life, are surprisingly less interesting than I could have ever imagined. I will never get those hours back, but I did get to see twenty-somethings soldering parts they will undoubtedly be seeing daily- long into their life-expectancy.
The driving here is, well, too easy to pick apart. Traffic laws are created by the bean-counters and are largely ignored. Here, anything goes and does. Lights, lines, parking spaces are mere suggestions. Tens of thousands of electric scooters (replete with two or three family members and groceries aboard) buzz about in their own dedicated lane, often veering out into the larger hive-lanes of insanity.
I believe only a few bruised kneecaps and clipped elbows (or worse) would probably educate me quickly.
Unlike other cities in China there is a big-city attitude in Shanghai and rightly so. This makes me inwardly cackle at the gumption and bravado of your average New Yorker. If Shanghai were to be suddenly uprooted and placed in New Jersey…..well then, by comparison, New York City would be a pale, sickly child that was bullied at school and ignored at home. New York is no longer the centre of the world. Shanghai, much like Beijing and Chong Qin, is so big, that it’s delegated as it’s own state. The United States should be afraid and not just because the Chinese own their debt. There are beehives being strategically assembled here, the likes the world has never seen. While the quality of many things might be lacking, the size and volume are incomparable.
More noodles for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
October 25
Nantong. Nanchang? No, Nantong. We are in Nantong. It’s all getting a little confusing, as my give-a-shit meter dives past the “bout had it” mark.
Let me tell you a little something about truck-stop washrooms in China. If ever there was a time to turn your brain and your senses off, it would be here. If ever there was a place where hepatitis could reign supreme, it would be in these fetid shit-prisons. If there ever was a time for longing, say for some clean white porcelain in an empty house in the mid-afternoon, it would be now.
The college-try on a road trip is probably my greatest travel tip. The opaque plastic drapes that serve as washroom entrances are undoubtedly catching bacteria like fly-tape. So, you enter as a child might, arms extended in a superman-like pose, holding breath, wincing, only to appear into a room full of urinating men smoking and eyeing you curiously. Walk up to a urinal with the strut of an out-of-town cowboy. In this piss-saloon there is only one rule. Don’t slip.
Thankfully, there is usually one disabled persons stall where, if you should find yourself in the cold-sweating pangs of intestinal distress you can find a western toilet (seat not a guarantee) and curl penitently to the gods of street-food (at whom the night before you so boldly shook a defiant fist). Oh, and there aren’t many disabled folk to be seen, especially not at truck stops, so toilet-coup-guilt is assuaged.
I have only once experienced the unfortunate situation where I was left with no other choice but to attempt the infamous squat. It was today. I will spare the reader the details of this harrowing occurrence where, having neither the balance or depth perception for the task at hand, my miserable failure resulted in a copper bracelet slipping off of my wrist onto the floor. No problem, I thought. I can wash it, bleach it, disinfect by fire. As I mused about how not to ever mention where my bracelet had been, and sweating from my previous acrobatic debaucle, I accidentally tapped it into the hole. Problem solved.
Back on the bus, I take a deep breath and healthy dram of rice whiskey.
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