Doorways: Dolphin Cottage

As I got ready to photograph this rather striking doorway, in an otherwise somewhat rundown street, a couple in their fifties stopped so they didn’t intrude onto my shot. Knowing my propensity for fiddling around with different settings, I said something like ‘come by, it’s no trouble, I might be awhile’.

There was then a minute of British ‘no, no really, it’s no trouble’ on both sides, to the point where I just wanted to say, actually, it makes me quite uncomfortable having two people standing and staring at me whilst I’m trying to take a photo.

Although obviously, not as uncomfortable as it would’ve done before I went to China.

After this polite agonising the couple went to walk past me, and the man asked what I was photographing. ‘What do you want to do that for,’ was his response. His wife then made a spirited defence of the merits of the door as a photographic subject, and, standing right in front of me, they had a self-contained, but rather heated, argument about this.

I had a few minutes of thinking, ‘well, this isn’t a situation you find covered in photography books’ and feeling exceptionally awkward, before they moved off without acknowledging me.

So far, I’m feeling that this incident sums up my week: things almost go right, and then…

Weird Doesn't Cover It...

Witnessed today: sitting in the first floor of a café we heard a siren, heralding the arrival of two fifty something men, the type who have lank hair and T-Shirts stretched over grossly distended beer bellies. They made a bee line for a group of teenage girls sitting in the corner: one proceeded to tell them that he was the King of England, Richard III, and periodically pressing his little sirem-sound-making-device, whilst the other one put a plastic joke shop turd on his head and pirouetted around ranting and raving.

We sat there wondering is this really happening, has our coffee been laced with something exotic, is this some weird candid camera type tv stunt? Not to mentioning readying our best Anglo-Saxon in case they decided to attempt to persecute us.

Then, after approaching another group and being told where they could go, they pressed the siren again and announced ‘Time to go’.

Photos were taken outside (yet another) cafe in Amsterdam. I do do things other than loitering in cafes and blogging - promise.

Queuing For Banksy

Last Monday, my friend and I went to the Bristol Museum vs Banksy exhibition. We had assured ourselves that the queue, on a chilly Monday morning, would not be too long. Unfortunately, we were suffering from the same mass delusion as the other few hundred people waiting to get in.

And being July in England, men wore T-Shirts, women flimsy dresses and cropped cardigans, as we shivered under a cloudy sky and sporadic showers. Apart from the small smug minority who’d come prepared for a Biblical deluge, complete with knee length pac-a-macs, sou’westers, umbrellas, and in some cases, a lunch box of home made sandwiches and snacks, suggesting that perhaps reports of the queuing time had been over exaggerated.


It wasn’t that bad – about a 45 minute wait, but obviously, we managed to be in front of a possibly the most caustically irritating people there. They were a late thirtysomething couple, divorcees with children, who were at that awkward stage where you’re having sex but not yet a fully established couple.

And I know that they’re having sex because apparently the woman didn’t realise that if you’re talking in quite a loud voice people standing a foot in front of you can hear everything you’re saying, or, more likely, she did know and was indulging the kind of attention seeking ploy that is tedious in a teenager but mortally embarrassing after the age of 25. My mind recoiled from the images conjured in it, like a foot from an ill placed slug.

The guy repeatedly remarked about how she’d told him there wouldn’t be a queue, in a way that was, on the surface, a joke but you could tell underneath he was pissed off and didn’t want to be there and was only doing because he still felt the need to impress her and that in three months time it’d come up in an argument, ‘what about that time you made me stand in the rain for 45 minutes to get into that bloody art exhibition.’

She, however, appeared to be experiencing a queue for the first time. As behoves an English queue outside a museum, everyone was very well behaved, needing no telling to keep to one side of the street or not to cut in or jostle. This did not stop her trying to peer on tip toes towards the front of the line, wondering where the line went (I had to restrain myself from turning round and telling her presumably the entrance after she said this five times in twenty minutes), whether people were cutting in, whether this was the right queue (no, this is the queue for people who don’t want to see the ground breaking art exhibition and instead want to peer at fossils in the museum vaults), why were people all bunched up ahead (where the queue was snaked around the museum entrance), whether the entrance was on that side or this of portico.

By the time we’d got to entrance I’m not sure if I was glad or sad that you can’t carry firearms here.
A twenty something man also attracted my attention because he was wearing a university society T-Shirt, which in the UK is normally a sign of being remarkably socially inept, and had an aura of being extremely peculiar. The kind of person who isn’t aware that his fellow students don’t avoid him because he’s different per se, but because his different in a way that suggests it’s only a matter of time before he’s arrested for flashing people or having dodgy pornography.

I felt justified in my initial judgement when I happened to find myself looking at the same painting. ‘Dogging!’ he loudly and lovingly exclaimed, actually, actually rubbing his hands together like a cartoon Dickensian villain, with a fervour that was enough to make me move rather swiftly to the other end of the gallery and leave him with a remarkably large amount of uninvaded personal space.

(If you don’t know what dogging is, and can’t work it out from the picture, don’t google it.)

More Banksy, and less sarcastic commentary, tomorrow.

Why I will never be visiting a Chinese bank again...

There are many reasons why I will be glad to get back to the UK, and the incredibly stressful experience I had at the bank this afternoon illustrates one of them.

I had wanted to transfer my Chinese money to my British bank account. This morning I went to the bank with my American friend and was told I had to go to another branch to transfer money to the UK, so I waited for less than half an hour whilst my friend changed her money and closed her Chinese bank account.

I had been told to go to the other bank branch at two. I arrived at ten past, only to find that the section I needed wouldn't open until half past. Problems mounted up: I had too much money to transfer, I couldn't exchange or transfer any of my money into sterling unless I had a certificate, but the bank clerk, who I will call Ms Ignorer, wouldn't tell me what certificate I needed, and kept asking me why I hadn't brought a Chinese friend with me so she could explain to them. Er, lady, because the reason you have a well paid job is to help international customers?

This went on for almost an hour: I kept trying to ask what certificate I needed, but she would cut me off halfway through the question and tell me 'It's not my fault, I don't make the rules.' Very true, but actually bothering to explain the rules to me would've saved us both a lot of time.

All the staff seemed very confused about bank transfers to the UK, so I said I would just exchange my money, as I had a feeling that my hard earned cash would've ended up brightening someone else's day.

In the end I had to half shout repeatedly, 'Listen to me! Let me speak! What does the certificate need to say? Do I need it from the bank, from my employer?' which made me feel like the stereotypical obnoxious Westerner but I think if I hadn't I'd still be there now. It turns out that to change Chinese RMB into sterling I would've needed a certificate from my employer to say that the money I had was my saved wages and not money that I'd earnt by being, say, a gun running, drug dealing whore. Oh, and in any case I could only exchange or transfer $500 worth of sterling at a time.

Then she grabbed an unfortunate and kind Chinese man who had come up to the desk to transfer funds himself. She told me (after I'd been there for an hour and a half) that a Chinese person could transfer or exchange as much RMB into sterling as they pleased and needed no certificate. They guy agreed to help, and repeatedly I told Ms Ignorer that I wanted to exchange my money, not transfer it.

I sat and waited for ten minutes or more, and only when they brought the transfer form up to me to fill in my bank number did I realise that, yet again, she hadn't listened to a word I said. And she kept ignoring me as I tried to tell that I wanted to exchange my money not transfer it, until I grabbed the form, turned it over and said as loudly as I could without shouting 'I don't want this! I don't want this!' in Chinese, and refused to let her turn it back over.

My Chinese saviour then exchanged my money, which took all of five minutes. After I'd thanked him profusely, I asked Ms Ignorer which section I needed to go to to close my bank account. Again, I'd told her that I needed to do this repeatedly, but had she paid any attention? Of course not, she looked totally surprised and asked me why I wanted to do that. Well, probably because I'm leaving the country for good this week, which is, strangely enough, what I'd told her when she asked me why I wanted to change so much money.

Thankfully, closing my bank account was as painless as the currency exchange mainly because Ms Ignorer had nothing to do with it. If she had bothered to explain the rules to me, instead of taking the unfortunately prevalent Chinese attitude of 'I understand this, so obviously everyone else does too and therefore I will not even listen to what the other person is saying', it would've taken half an hour rather than two hours.

Given the attitude of Ms Ignorer, from opening late to acting outraged that she had to do her job of speaking English to an international customer, I strongly suspect that she is an example of the rampant nepotism that causes so much resentment here. And I should add that she spoke perfect, fluent English so she didn't even have the excuse of not understanding me.

O is for...oranges, oddities and osama

Oranges, and other fruit and veg, are often sold on the streets from the back of bicycle pulled carts. Street selling of all sorts is very common here, and the fact that an enterprising person can set up shop almost anywhere selling their wares is one thing that I love about China - no hideous EU type red-tape nonsense.

And so on to an oddity: these plastic fruits were the floor of a cafe I ate at. It's a popular trend in China to decorate the floor with say, a collection of plastic fruits, or astroturf, then cover it with a sturdy sheet of clear plastic. It can occasionally mean that you get a very disturbing vertiginous sensation, thinking you're going to fall into a hole that doesn't actually exist.

Finally, a strange incident that occurred in a park on Sunday. I was approached my a man who wanted to practice his English and then asked to take my contact details. When I was putting my number into his phone, I accidentally pressed the wrong button and ended up staring at his wallpaper: a photo of Osama bin Laden. I was so surprised that I nearly dropped the phone. I've been left wondering if he's just a random loon, or if some Chinese people secretly admire him. What makes it more puzzling is that neither him nor his wife/girlfriend appeared to be Muslim, and he seemed eager to know Westerners and to know about the West.

Check out worldwide O's with abc wednesday.

What to do in China on Valentine's Day When You're Single

So I get woken up on Valentine’s Day morning by a text from one of the teachers at my school wishing me a happy and romantic Valentine’s Day. This is not weird for China, a lot of my students wished me a happy Valentine’s Day yesterday. I read it in a barely conscious state and then lapsed back into slumber for another couple of hours. I seem to be stupidly tired at the moment, even though I really have no reason to be.

I went with Kara to have lunch with Mr Dong, who is my boss of sorts, and his daughter. When he called me yesterday I was having quite a bit of trouble understanding him, so I assumed that it was just going to be a casual meeting. It turned out, however to be a feast of such dimensions that I began to wonder if there was a magic stove in the kitchen, as just when I thought we’d finished, another dish appeared.

Daisy, the English name of Mr Dong’s daughter, is studying in Kunming, Yunnan Province, and the gist of much of our conversation was the general superiority of Kunming to Shijiazhuang in most respects, which I don’t find hard to believe. It’s not that I dislike Shijiazhuang, but most other places seem to be more interesting.

I also discovered that I teach Mr Dong’s son, who is a junior two, and at that teenage boy stage of hiding in his bedroom and then lurking silently at the family dining table, although I have no doubt he probably yaps his head off when he’s with his friends. When prompted by his father to speak to me, in a socially deft move to avoid having to talk to your teacher on a Saturday afternoon in a foreign language, he cheersed me.

On first catching sight of six plates of cold appetisers I made the foolish mistake of wondering if that would be enough for six people to eat. There was a dish of pig’s ear and onion, which was actually quite toothsome if a little chewy, an absolutely delicious plate of corned donkey, delicate starch noodles and cucumbers, some of the peculiar frankfurter type sausage so beloved by the Chinese, a dish of crunchy and tangy lotus roots in a garlic and ginger sauce that was so addictive Kara and I are hoping that Mrs Dong will teach us how to make it, and a plate of incredibly fresh cherry tomatoes that got rather overlooked amongst the somewhat less quotidian options.

This was followed by a resplendent fish, served whole in the Chinese style, that I had to manage to refuse to eat politely. Luckily, it was accompanied by a dish of succulent green beans, so that I had no difficulty in eating busily. Then came what was remarkably like an Irish stew, and a roasted fowl. A discussion of what you would call a baby marrow in English resulted in the said vegetable being transformed into another delectable morsel faster than I would’ve thought possible.

This was followed by the sweet course, a selection of sticky rice balls with an orange flavoured filling in a sweet soup and baozi (a steamed bread bun) filled with a sweet red bean paste. Really, these were just too sweet for my taste, but I managed to womanfully consume most of my portion. Especially as I wanted to remain in Mrs Dong’s good books in the hope she might teach us how to make dumplings – and lessons from such a good cook would almost be worth eating fish eyes for.

After having eaten so much food, washed down with red wine, the gym might not have seemed like the ideal way to spend the rest of the afternoon, but as I’ve been backsliding for the last couple of days I decided not to let myself makes excuses again, and apart from a slight feeling of nausea when I was on the elliptical I was glad I went. Not least because I bumped into one of my students there, a Senior 2 boy called Micheal. I have so many students (well over 1000) that it is quite impossible to get to know most of them, so I really enjoyed talking with him. How he manages to fit in six hours a week at the gym on top of the truly insane homework load he has is quite amazing.

I didn’t enjoy talking so much with the man that accosted me outside the gym. I’m obviously wearing my ‘stalk me’ hat at the moment as it’s the second time this week that I’ve been followed down the street. I think he was trying to obtain my phone number, as he kept waving his iPhone at me, but given his lack of English and my evident lack of Chinese, I would have thought he would realised the futility of his endeavour before he did.