Beijing

'What do you think these are?'

I looked at the plate of pale, milky-coloured slippery looking things with a thin coating of yellow, mustardy paste.

 'Some kind of mushroom?'

 I asked, hopefully.

'No. Duck's Feet!'


This was the first dish brought to the table on our first proper night in China (having arrived extremely late the night before). Everything had been ordered in Mandarin after great discussion with the waiter. It wasn't just a simple list of requests. There had been enormous (and completely unintelligible to me) to and fros between them. 'Oh Lord', I thought. 'What if the entire meal is like this and I am bound by politeness to eat it?'

Ducks feet are just as nasty as you might expect them to be, or at least presented this way they are. I think they had been boiled. However they had been cooked had rendered them chewy and slimy and the mustard sauce didn't help. The sauce wasn't even thick enough to disguise the patina of skin clearly visible farther up the foot from the webbing. Nasty. Very nasty. I make no excuses for my western palate. I may be unadventurous and missing a trick but to me ducks feet in mustard sauce are not nice.

The DFP says that this is because in China they are very aware of hierarchy and he was doing what you would do when your boss is in town, but I think it's also just because he was very nice. I find that the DFP thoroughly enjoys this deference. It makes him very cheerful.

The guidebook recommends at least a day to visit the Forbidden City (a huge palace or series of palaces right in the middle of Beijing) and suggests that even after than you may want to go back for another visit. I am ashamed to say that we did it in about and hour and a half. We just walked straight through. I think by this time we were all quite tired and while amazingly impressive it is much of the same repeated impressively and largely again and again. I did keep saying, 'it's big, wow, it's so big' with monotonous repetitiveness.

China is Big. Everything is on a massive scale from the roads and buildings to the sites of historical and architectural interest. It took five minutes to walk to the end of our road. Quite a shock after Singapore where everything is close and requires absolutely minimal walking.

But then walking in Beijing in November is extremely pleasant. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, all my dreams of cold weather have been realised. There was a delightful snap in the air. I so enjoyed walking around without immediately becoming hot and sweaty. I had forgotten how much I used to like walking around and now rather avoid it. I wore jumpers! And socks!

I walked around the Summer Palace and the Temple of Heaven, both enormous gardens with temples dotted around in them. I climbed the great wall of China and I marched through the Forbidden City with the crowds of tour parties.

You seen enormous Chinese tour groups at all the major sites. I didn't see any from other countries, only Chinese. They all wear baseball caps in some bright primary colour, presumably so they can be marshalled easily by their tour leader (something I rather approve of as a some time tour guide).

The people on these groups often look like old peasants from the countryside who might have done a spot of re-educating in their time. They would wander, slightly perplexed and aimlessly around these sites before being organised along to the next one.

I know how they felt a bit. I was often left a bit cold by enormous tourist attractions. While huge and impressive I often didn't connect emotionally with them, they seemed a bit sterile and dead in a way I didn't feel about the places I visited in Mumbai. Everything has been so heavily restored that it was hard to imagine the emperors and empresses living there. I like the places best that spark my imagination most.

By contrast the living places were fantastic. We went to a three storey tea market with rows and rows of little boothes where you could try and then buy hundreds of different types of tea. In one we asked to try some tea and the guy helping us laughed and said, 'we have over 200 hundred kinds'.

In the first place we had our mini tea ceremony the ladies helping us spoke no English. This is not unusual in Beijing, though a lot of people do have a bit of English. There were three. One older and clearly in charge did all the talking in clear, precise and completely incomprehensible to us Chinese. I couldn't even say if it was Mandarin or Cantonese that she was speaking. Even though we understood nothing she kept on gently explaining to us.

There were two younger girls one of whom went and got the different teas from huge (of course huge, this is China) fridge freezer. The other was in charge of the pouring and brewing and swilling. The tea was made in a little pot and then presented to us in an even smaller tea cup, more like a doll's saucer. If you had finished and didn't want any more you poured the dregs over a clay figure. In front of the DFP there was a large clay frog and in front of me a fish.

We bought two kinds of tea from two different shops and we each bought a mug made of dark clay. This clay is supposed to slowly soak up the flavour of the tea. Purists would only drink one kind of green tea from their mug. You have to make a couple of dummy cups of green tea before you drink it to start the seasoning and make it safe to drink from.

I am not sure whether we got a good deal on these things or not. Bargaining is expected.  You are supposed to start by offering 30% of the asking price and go up to no more than 50% of the asking price in theory. In practise this is very hard to do. You just have to decide how much the whatever is worth to you.

I also bought pearls (pearl earings £1!) from the pearl market and went to a huge (of course) area of artists warehouses called 798 which was über cool. Despite the anxiety that you were probably paying well over the odds at these places I found them enormous fun and far more vital than the huge, dead, heavily restored buildings.

Meanwhile, while I was site seeing, the DFP eas having meetings with businesses. They had one with an enormous Chinese company and got to see the man one up from the CEO - the clerk. They went to his enormous office for several hours while he sat there and smoked his way through the meeting.

So, Beijing. Should you visit? Definitely yes. I think this sums it up for me. I met up with an American friend who I'd met while we were both living in Paris and is now posted to Beijing.

'Nobody believes me,' she said 'but its much easier living here than in Paris!'

That says it all for me. Oh yes, and like this blog entry, it's big.

Parish Notices

I've had a few emails asking how my new job is going. A fair question given how long ago I announced that I was going to join the ranks of the happily employed. The answer is, 'not yet'. In fact not until after Xmas not yet.

This is because I need to be checked by the Ministry of Education (MOE) and then the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) . I heard today that I've been given the okay from the MOE and have just finished filling in an irritating form (another irritating form, grrr) for the MOM and well on my way to being a valid Employment Pass (EP) holder and able to do exciting things like open a bank account and have a mobile phone contract.

So that's the first of today's notices. The second is to answer the question I can already see forming on your lips. As Cilla so well asked, 'Sew, number 3, what do yer do with yer spurrr time?' I have had quite a lot of it now, haven't I?

Well Cilla, I write. I expect that those of you who've heard me whining for the past few years about how 'I never have time to write' will be delighted to hear that I am (largely) getting down to it. Now I can start to see if I can actually do it.

This week I finished a 30 minute long short play and I'm on the second draft of the play I've been not writing for about three years. It's stupidly ambitious in its themes and scope and in stripping away what was lazy writing in the first draft and starting on the second I've realised how much research I need to do.

This is quite fun and extremely interesting. I teaching myself in as much depth as I can what it's like to live in a small village in Southern Sudan, to be a member of the Dinka tribe and then to have to leave it and come to the UK. All this is background for a character. She won't necessarily talk about it, but I need to know it if I'm going to write her credibly. So there you go Cilla.

Third of today's announcements is that I'm going to Beijing next Thursday. Whoohoo! Once again the DFP is going on a work trip and I'm following him on a much cheaper flight and staying for free in his hotel room. (Air China. Cross your fingers everyone).

Initially, (and I can't quite believe how spoiled this sounds as I write it) I wasn't that taken with the idea of Beijing. All that changed as soon as I looked at a map of it. The place names alone are pure magic. The Forbidden City, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the Drum Tower. And then those that conjure a different kind of image like Tiananmen Square. More anon.

So that's everything for today everyone. There's tea and biscuits at the back of the hall. Do remember to put 20p in the jar and if you can help with the washing up it would be very much appreciated.

The rainy season

Winter in Singapore is hot. Surprised anyone? Thought not. It's just as hot as summertime, the only difference is that the rain comes down. It's monsoon season, as Orwell or Kipling would say.

There are two seasons, winter and summer: either hot and humid or hot, wet and humid.  Even as we speak the rain is coming down in torrents and the thunder is cracking. It arrives without warning and it's very easy for an ill prepared expat to be caught out.

You often see Singaporeans carrying an open umbrella above them, protecting them from the sun as often as from the rain. It's strange how quickly you adjust to trying to keep out of the sun, finding a spot of shade to wait in while the traffic lights changes or choosing the table in the shade.

I got completely drenched in one such a downpour last Saturday. Quite often of a Saturday morning we go down to the lagoon on the East Coast Park and go wakeboarding. East Coast Park? Lagoon? Wakeboarding? Let me explain....

The East Coast park is a stretch of organised greenery, not far from where we live, that boarders the sea. There are cycle tracks neatly marked with bicycles and pedestrian footpaths running alongside the cycle tracks neatly marked with large, yellow footprints.

There are barbecue areas which can be reserved by contacting the correct department of local government. You also have to fill in the appropriate paperwork with the appropriate officials if you want to pitch your tent up there for the night.

Lots of young people do this as a way of getting some privacy from their parents with their boyfriend or girlfriend. This is partly because people here tend to live at home with their parents much longer than is usual in the UK (except for some actors and musicians of course still found in their parents homes in the UK well into their.... well let's not investigate that one too much eh?) The other reason that people live at home longer  here is (I am reliably informed) so that they can buy designer handbags. Shopping is a kind of religion here.

The lagoon is a big pond, or small lake, man made from sea water. Around it there has been constructed a kind of pulley system like an enormous washing line. Attached to it there are long lines with handles on the end. Wakeboarding is when you take hold of one of these handles and are pulled around the lagoon or washing line on a board. Sort of like snowboarding, but on the water. Or water skiing.

For those who don't fall off it looks like enormous fun, skimming around the water nonchalantly holding onto the handle, sometimes one handed. Often making little jumps either off the geometric shapes which poke out of the water at various intervals all around the lagoon, or just when the mood takes them. It all looks very impressive.

I had slight trepidations beforehand. When I think of seawater I have a lot of memories of teeth-clenchingly cold swims on childhood summer holidays. My family, while distinctly un-athletic, are resolute swimmers in the sea, the temperature being a trivial side issue.

Imagine my delight when, on immediately falling off, I plunged into lovely warm, salty water. This, I thought, is what living in Singapore is all about. And then I fell off again. And then again. And again. And again. And again. And again.

In fact I have been about four times now and while the DFP is smoothly circling the pool I am still falling off. And always within the first few feet.

The problem is, or rather my problem is, that the initial pull on the handle is extremely fast. The speed goes from 0km to 28km in about two seconds. So starting for anyone does involve quite a lot of falling off, but I have definitely done more than my fair share.

The skateboarder/surfer types, usually men, who frequent the place have started to take pity on me. They see me falling in over and over and have started to give me tips. 'You need to keep the tip of the board out of the water' they say. 'You're standing up too quickly, keep your legs bent', 'Try leaning back a bit more'. All good advice and much appreciated and sometimes I make a bit of progress. (At one point one of the guys was actually holding onto the back of my life-jacket as I started to stop me tipping forwards). But not enough progress to get me beyond the first mark.

These skateboarder/surfers are an interesting breed. Very friendly and easy going as you might expect. You hear them talking about their injuries, comparing notes on how many times they've broken different bones. Lots of them wear knee guards and I'm never sure whether its to protect against new injuries or support old ones.

I overheard one man talking cheerfully about going snowboarding and having his board smash into the back of  his head the week before his wedding. 'They stitched me up and I was all right on the day' he said. 'What did your wife think?' someone asked. 'Oh' he said 'she understands'.

Anyhow, last Saturday I'd had my hour of falling into the water and then we'd had breakfast. As we were about to leave the DFP discovered he had a puncture so I cycled home in the mid day heat, my face blazing red, sweating like a bastard. On the way back with puncture kit, tyre leavers, pump etc. the heavens opened and I got wet all over again. And then the sun came out, as it always does in Singapore and everything was all right.

Mumbai

Mumbai is a memory. All I have left to remind me of it are some photos (see below) and a slightly dickie stomach. It is a fantastic city. A welcome change from the neat, orderly, tick-boxiness of Singapore.

Mumbai seems to have been crumbling slowly in the heat ever since the British left in '47. There are the remains of colonial days in the moulding forms of the most beautiful buildings everywhere you go. 

How many photos do you usually take on holiday? I'm usually quite a lazy photographer. 30 is a high number on a trip for me. This time I took 115. So often I saw something so beautiful and full of contrasts I had to get my camera out. Not the ordered, architecturally planned, shiny new beauty of Singapore but a long ago shiny and new melting away through lack of maintenance and always strung with washing. And not only in the buildings.

Not an inch of space is wasted. Colour and life are crammed into every corner. Each window you look up to has someone hanging out of it, usually on a mobile phone and of course the obligatory multi-coloured string of washing, like festive bunting. It adds a jaunty verve to the place.

That verve, that energy is what makes Mumbai so appealing despite the poverty. Poverty and prosperity live cheek by jowl. Slums and skyscrapers spring up and are pulled down with equal speed. Life is lived out of doors, probably because there isn't much room at home, so everywhere you go there's a congregation of people and sometimes it feels as though all of them are trying to sell you something.

Well, quite a lot of them are trying to sell you something. You get followed a lot. Now, as a liberal, middle-class westerner I am well aware that I've won the jackpot in the lottery of birth and feel suitably guilty. On the other hand I really don't want to buy any 'scarves, pashminas or handicrafts'. I always feel conflicted when I ignore the cries and walk away but usually this is what you have to do in order to get anywhere. But there is a kind of bravado, showmanship and hope about the people trying to sell you something, or trick you into something, that even while really not wanting to be conned, I liked and respected. 

We went to Juhu beach and had street food from the stalls that flank it one evening. It was Sunday and the whole beach was heaving with life. People were wandering through the dark, the women in brightly coloured saris, children running in and out. Often the baby girls are in beautiful, glittering dresses, sometimes with their huge eyes ringed with kohl, making them even huger, even more striking and beautiful. 

Everywhere people were selling things: candy floss; enormous balloons, pani puri (mouthsized fried, hollow, chickpea pastries filled with crunchy peashoots and tamarind water, utterly delicious), corn on the cob and anything else that might attract a beach wanderer. 

We were approached by an immaculately dressed, rather beautiful girl who I would have guessed at about 14. She had a basket full of carved wooden blocks and henna dye pads. We tried to ignore her and walk on as she pushed her stuff. She followed us down the beach asking the usual hooking questions, 'where are you from?' 'what's your name?' The DFP answered a few and then strictly got rid of her.

Later on as we were coming back we bumped into her again. 'Ah, there you are' she said, as if we were old friends who'd somehow lost each other in the throng and then started chatting to us in the easiest, most self -assured way and in immaculate English. 

It turned out that she was 17, not 14 as I'd guessed. She told us the beach was busy because it was a Sunday night, that she had two brothers and a sister. She said she'd stopped going to school at 12. She asked me if I'd been to India before. I said I had, 'when I was your age'. 'Then you must be about 23', she said. 'You're flattering me' I said. 

And she was. At the end of the conversation I bought some of the wooden printing blocks for far more than they were worth, a willing victim of her charming manipulation. But I was buying them because someone as intelligent and sparky as she is should have every opportunity in the world. Because when I was 17 instead of walking up and down on a beach selling from a basket on a Sunday night I was doing an exchange with Deli Public High school and visiting India as a tourist, paid for by my generous parents. I had every opportunity in the world and though I don't know exactly what her life is like I think I can make a fairly safe bet that she has an awful lot less.

And that's not fair. I can't make it right. I can't address the huge misbalance of wrongness in the world but little gestures are a start. Unless you open yourself a little, when you can, the world will just stay one big slammed shut place.

The DFP laughed at me and said she had known exactly what she was doing. She'd made conversation and then at the end had put a price on the personal exchange, on the fact that we liked her. I think so too. But I don't mind.

So often when you're travelling what you are really buying is interaction with people, a look into their lives. I saw some breathtaking sites. The Buddhist temples carved into rock on Elephanta Island and in the Sanjay Ghandi National Park and they will stay with me for a long time. As will the crumbling glory of Mumbai's architectural past, it's beautiful Art Deco buildings along the seafront, the old Victoria Terminus railway station and the people hanging off the trains as they pull in. 

But I think most of all I'll remember the people: the girl on the beach who should be head of Marketing for some massive corporation with her intelligence and charm; the little boy who ran up to me with a bunch of flowers, a hopeful, cheeky smile and said '5000 Rupees!?' (about £65 - I laughed); the grumpy driver Vjay who completely ignored us when we asked to go somewhere and took us back to the hotel instead; Raj the tour guide with astonishingly little knowledge but snazzy trousers with a silver pinstripe which glinted in the sun and the guard at Elephanta who spoke NO English but took my arm and lead me, very purposefully, around a cave putting my hand on the wall to touch it and into the pools of water.

There's so much I've missed. This could become an opus. But I'm going to leave it there and let you look at the pictures.

 the outside laundry at Dhobi Ghat

Victoria Terminus Station

Lime Soda - fresh lime juice, soda water and either sugar or salt. The perfect drink in the heat.

Wonderfully bosomy goddesses. I so prefer them to the ironed out Christian Virgins.

Buddhist caves carved by monks a long time ago. (When exactly unclear from Raj).

Juhu Beach.

Photos

Here are some photos which I've been meaning to put up for a while. The first four are of our weekend in Phuket. You can see the drips of rain in the first but it does not give a true impression of the torrent of rain.

Above is the view from a cafe we sheltered in

Here is the DFP swimming in a waterfall

A truck drove into the post holding the power cables for our hotels and the others down the road we were staying in and we were plunged into darkness for the evening. Lots of local people came to watch as they worked deep into the night to try and get it up again while scooters drove over or around the fallen power lines, including ours.

Back in Singapore above a lovely nearby shop house and below a deity.

This is the temple down our road where all sorts of exciting things go on. A rehearsal for a Chinese opera seemed to be taking place and I wandered over to have a closer look but when I did a man came and smiled sweetly, bowed down hands clasped and then shut the doors. Religion eh? I thought it was supposed to be welcoming and doors open. But perhaps not when something is rehearsing and not ready for it's audience yet. That I can understand.

The worm turns

Finally in the past couple of weeks something inside me has clicked and I've started to feel that I'm at home here, that I have a place in Singapore.

A few very silly things seem to have made the difference. I've bought saucepans and am able to cook whatever I feel like. This has resulted in a riot of casseroles, stocks and meat balls. Of course, typically, as soon as I bought them several different people told me about the fantastic wholesale saucepan restaurant suppliers they'd got theirs from. Why is it always like this? Probably because usually I don't start conversations about saucepans but have recently been saying, 'oh it's such a relief to finally have saucepans!'. Saucepans don't usually crop up in conversation, do they? Perhaps never in interesting conversation.

There have been graduations in settling in. We both definitely felt more at home as soon as we were in the flat. Then when our bikes and all those useful high heeled shoes arrived in our boxes from the UK there was another shift and now with saucepans and a hand-blender at last I am at home.

I have another more important reason as well. I've got a job. I'm going to be teaching drama to kids with a drama company here. I went for an interview on Thursday last week, observed all Saturday and received my formal offer today.

I feel validated. A huge, invisible weight has lifted off my heart. I've had a constant, low level, nagging kind of guilt about not working. An unemployment hangover. I've felt that I shouldn't be jaunting around Singapore visiting interesting places and that I ought to be sorting the flat out and applying  for jobs. So I've been largely sorting and applying and not really jaunting. Which is right to some degree but was making me a bit miserable.

So a couple of weeks ago I took myself aside and had a stern talk with myself. I said I needed to be a bit nicer to myself. I needed to give myself some treats - trips to the cinema, swims in the pool, visits to art galleries. I should perhaps mention here that both the DFP and my mother have been saying this sort of thing for ages. The DFP, like all of humanity has his downsides, but has been hugely kind and supportive to me in my wildly fluctuating (and very annoying) states. He's told me I can aim higher, that I'm doing all right and that he'll support me as long as I need. I've continued to act like a crazy person. Let's not tell my future employers about any of this though, eh?

Anyhow, I'm making up for lost time now. So toodle-pip everyone. I'm off to the National Museum of Singapore! 

The Festival of the Moon

For the past couple of weeks there have been celebrations for the festival of the moon. Isn't that a magical name? The celebrations have included frenzied buying of mooncakes, music and drumming and last weekend a red dragon danced down our street.

There is a shop on the way to the station which sells moon cakes. The week before last there were long queues outside it everyday. I planned to do a Monet like study of the queue throughout the day - the queue at 7am, 10am, noon and so on. Taking photos rather than painstaking oils observing the different qualities of light. But last week the queue had suddenly gone and I was too late. Here are a couple of snaps I took of it anyway. As you can see it's quite a long queue so the cake must be really good.

Although a great cake lover I am not overly fond of moon cakes, despite their delicious name. They have a thick crust a bit like a pork pie and inside translucent lotus seed paste. They can also, if they are particularly auspicious, have salted duck eggs inside. Very much like a sweet pork pie. Three salted duck eggs means that the eater is due for a long run of good luck.

There have been large open tents put up all over the place. In one we saw about 50 large tables set out ready for an enormous feast. Smaller tents hold stages where Chinese opera is performed. You can see the backstage area as you walk past sometimes. The performers getting ready painting their faces thickly into characters masks of bright white and red.

I came across a performance in full swing on Tuesday night opposite the Monkey Temple in Tiong Bahru. It was raining lightly and there were a group of four or five people in the audience outnumbering the performers. An old man held a blue umbrella over his little grandson as they watched the performance. People tell me it's a dying art form because the younger generation aren't interested. Here are some pictures and the video at the top (if it works) is of the performance.

I think you can get the idea from the photos that it's very brightly coloured, though a fairly bare stage. There's lots of singing and yowling and dancing using the long sleeves in a significant seeming way. It made me think of pantomine or music hall.

I loved it. It also reminded me of the workshop I did with the French 'Theatre du Soleil'. They are very influenced by Eastern theatre -Balinese masks and Chinese opera. It felt really exciting and enriching to wander past a street corner and find theatre going on as a part of people's lives. It's a shame that people don't seem as excited by it as the cake, but I am.