A Nomad in the Land of Noise

Silence. Most people loath it, since it will make them feel uncomfortable they will try to avoid it at any cost. Some people need it to keep sane. I am one of them and at times China is turning me into a raving mad neurotic. There is simply no silence.

You enter the city, there is constant honking. Most drivers use the horn in a more Confucian sense. It serves not as a humiliation device like in Germany or most other Western countries, but more like an echolot, preventing the others from loosing face through ill-advised maneuvers by constantly sending out an array of honks announcing “here I come” wherever they are going. Who knows, natural evolution might equip Chinese drivers with a bat-like sense to locate other cars just by their sounds in the future. The horn volume is proportional to the importance of the concerned car; a major intercity express bus will easily honk out a starting jetplane.

So you might try and flee the city and enter the countryside sleeping in a small village. That works pleasantly until at 6am a tower of gigantic loudspeaker on top of the hill screams the morning news into the valley. Good morning.

You might try to enter a hotel for some sleep. Good luck. The windows are usually so thin you will probably find yourself checking at least once if there is really glass inside the frames—but don’t worry, the street sounds will falter at around 1am. Having just fallen into sleep, you might be mildly infuriated when you wake up at 3am from people shouting at the top of their voice right in front of your door. At around 6am the honking will return with all might.

You might be tired now. How about going to the park the for some rest? Cicadas the size of mice and with proportional acoustic might most probably greet you from every tree with a sound so loud you instinctively shield your ears. Only the karaoke craze in the middle of the park will be able to overtone their concert. Most pleasant.

Long distance buses are usually a good place to catch up on some sleep. Not in China. There will be either music or sound of an ancient kung fu movie transmitted over the vehicle’s speaker system, preferably at such a volume it’s all distorted.

After a month you will most probably feel like a rabid dog, loaded with irate fury but impossible to release it. Only Earplugs can save you.

Birthday in Chengdu

I almost forgot its my birthday today, only realized when I saw the date on the New York Times website this morning. A Gin Tonic in the garden of my hostel was the climax of my celebration.

Work on my Ningxia report takes longer than expected, potentially due to a certain degree of not wanting to do it. Took a walk to the local McDonalds to cure my broken stomach with some of the tasteless matter they sell as food. Could not resist taking some pictures on the way.

Chengdu

A Night in Xi'An

Having finished my report and hosting a happy stomach bug I was looking forward to my bed in Chengdu where I planned to sleep for the next twenty-four hours. I doze off constantly in the bus to Yinchuan arriving at the airport in a state of complete daze. Stomach is returning to normal, but fever seems to be kicking in. My flight is delayed 2 hours. My translator leaves me saying "Oh, and something I just remembered, a friend told me once never to fly with China Eastern airways, so good luck!". At around eleven the plane finally takes off and I sink into deep sleep. Just a moment later the stewardess shouts at me, I have to put my seat in the upright position for the landing.

Stopover at Xi'An.

30 minutes later the pilot lifts the airplane into the night sky again. The airport is deserted and the shadows of the airplanes look grotesquely deformed in the artificial light. Screaming rips me out of my dreams again, but this time its a collective disdainful groan coming from all other passengers. It is a response to some announcement in Chinese, the following English version is barely audible, but I when I make out the words "bad weather","captain" and "return to Xi'An" I understand the mood of dissatisfaction.

Back at Xi'an.

The plane has been back at its gate for at least 20 minutes now. Finally there is an announcement "we have arrived at Xi'An, please wait for further information". Several passengers are shouting at the flight attendants. The girl in front of me tells me in English she has seen me today at the Yin Jiao hotel in Xi'An. There is another announcement, calling the passengers to leave the airplane and wait in the airport for further developments. Some people comply but most refuse to leave their seats, maybe feeling a bit closer to Chengdu already this way. In the airport emotions are running high, a Chinese man shouts at the top of his voice towards the service staff who answer with a pitiful grin. Three security officers encircle him and he becomes quieter. For two hours there is no information, an Nepalese family borrows my laptop to change their flights to Kathmandu for the next morning. At around 3am I find an English-speaking airline staff member who tells me "bus is coming, waiting". Just 60 minutes later the bus to some hotel in Xi'An arrives. It takes another 30 minutes until it leaves and at 5am we arrive at the hotel. I fall into a manic sleep with intermingling dreams. The phone rings at 7am, we have to get into the bus to get back to the airport. But there is breakfast.

Leaving Xi'An

Things run smoothly at the airport this time. Without comment I am given 400 yuan by airline staff in exchange for my signature on a list. At 10:15, perfectly on time, the plane takes of for Chengdu and I arrive an hour later. Still I have a feeling that most probably I will never fly with China Eastern again.

A Night in Xi'An

Ningxia

Still in Guyuan. Still in the Dust. Still in the Bus. Its the second week in Ningxia province in China and it is consuming me. Up to six hours we spend every day in crowded buses riding over the pothole minefields euphemistically called streets here. Sometimes we reach Jiao Cha, 'our village', in less than 3 hours. The villagers have never seen anybody from the outside world. It is extraordinary. We have chosen a family which we have been visiting for the last weeks. Their life is a struggle incomparable to anything I have ever seen, but still they have not lost their will to life.
There are no problems with the government or police, in fact the local government organized a driver for us.
This place is like a desert. The dust gets in everywhere, even the food in the village restaurant is dusty. There are no pictures yet, because they might be for the German magazine. I will post them as soon as possible.

beijing part two

Today I had some time to have a look around. No time to write anything unfortunately, tomorrow morning will start at 4:30 for me.

Beijing 2

First Impressions of Beijing

I am an illegal alien sleeping on a bamboo mat. My new home is a room in Beijing university student hall and yesterday I was supposed to register with the local police. Since I am staying here secretly I decided not to do so until I leave tomorrow morning.

Beijing is very secure. Uniformed security guards are everywhere. In fact it is so secure that the subway station at the railway station was closed when I arrived. Thus me and my guide spent 2 hours in overcrowded buses to get to the university. As we arrived he looked at the Beijing Metro internet page where it read the closure was due to a security issue. That's it.

'Kung Fu Fighting' is the music of choice in the buses, it seems to be put on infinity repeat. Its a nice soundtrack to the driver's efforts of infiltrating Beijing traffic. The major weapon is pre-emptive honking, which is effective but not invincible. It did not help against another bus taking our rear view mirror with us while overtaking.

In the subway there are video screens mounted in the tunnels showing advertisement movies traveling at the exact same speed as the trains, so one can watch them from the inside.

After five hours of trying different banks and ATM's to get money with my credit card I can finally buy the high end portable recorder the German magazine wants me to take to Ningxia. The agent stays in a apartment high riser on the outskirts of Beijing, the well furnished room is full of sophisticated audio equipment. Directly next to the house, visible from the window in the agent's room, is a slum-like quarter for migrant workers. It smells of rotten garbage and human waste as we walk through, the houses have dirt floors and look like they might collapse at any time. I did not expect to find such a vivid example of the sharp divide between rich and poor one always reads about in articles. Especially not in the capital city and on my first day.

Beijing

Yangdong Market

Korea is deeply infected by Modernity. The cities are concrete wonderlands full of neon signs where no non-temple buildings are older than fifty years. Humans scurry to and fro to a soundtrack of advertisement songs and traffic noise. Cellphones are advanced enough not only to play music, but also to act as portable TV's, so people are able to constantly sprinkle themselves with entertainment wherever they are. And they do it with ardour. Life feels like an LP played at 45rpm.

Yangdong Market has resisted. The most prominent sound is that of rain dropping on the canvas roof. Sometimes it is disrupted by the laughter of market-women when one of them has shared a joke. They sell all imaginable staples of food: mountains of Chinese cabbage, edible grass, pig heads, peppers, live duck or duck roasted by a flamethrower. Their customers stroll along the stands in graceful pace, the median age is well above 40. Most of them grew up when Korea was still a Third World country. Yangdong Market seems like an anachronistic island in the middle of this ultramodern city, a sort of reservation for the last pre-modern generation.

Yangong Market