Love Land

Firstly, the Chinese government, in its infinite wisdom and benevolence, has now abruptly decided that the residents of the Middle Kingdom shall not be allowed onto Blogger, meaning that I've just spent an enjoyable hour cursing said government and looking for the miniscule number of proxy sites that the shadowy internet monitors (who I like to think of as nefarious, shadowy baddies in suits sequestered in very dark rooms) haven't cottoned onto and blocked yet. And, for now at least, I have found one, so I am still here. Strangely, all of the Guardian's current China-themed articles (including those with titles such as 'Secret Tiananmen Square Memoirs of Chinese Party Leader To Be Published that are, erm, somewhat uncomplimentary about the government) are allowed, and yet my blog, the content of which is not (or has not been until this paragraph) remotely seditious, is blocked. Geh.

Anyway, at the same time as clicking on every proxy link in existence, I was also meandering through said China-themed articles on The Guardian website, when my eye happened to catch upon the headline 'China to open first sex theme park.' Now, take a guess where said theme park is. Yep, no prizes for guessing that it's not only in Chongqing, but is attached to the incomparable Meixin (due to limited proxy access I can't attach a link, but rifle through March or April's entries and you'll find it).

So, the noble plan was that once you've been suitably thrilled by a visit to the world's biggest public toilets, you could go underground, where Love Land promised to offer you 'naked human sculptures, giant replicas of genitals and an exhibition about the history of sex and sexual practices in other countries.' Park director Lu Xiaoqing claimed that the park would be educational and informative, saying that he would 'pay attention and not make the park look vulgar and nasty.' Which evidently explains the centre of his marketing campaign (again, unfortunately I can't do pics or links at the moment, but you must click on this):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/15/china-sex-theme-park-love-land

Unfortunately, The Guardian appears to be a little out of date, for the BBC informs me that in the last couple of days the government has now put the kibosh on the project for fear that it was too 'vulgar.' It's unknown whether the existing attractions of Meixin, including seats with holes instructing small boys where to stick their penises and a plastic Christ the Redeemer statue perched atop a shed, will also fall victim to this sudden and surprising outbreak of classiness. Sadly, however, it does seem that this potential paradise of skag is, for now, not to be :(.

My Dear Mushroom

So, over the last few weeks our Chinese lessons have started, and we've been having fun amusing our friend and Chinese teacher, Jenny (yes, even in China there are bajillions of Jennys - thanks again for that dear parents) with our terrible Mandarin. According to Jenny I have already cultivated a Chongqing accent, and although this basically means I am as crap at doing tones properly as the locals are, I'm taking it as a compliment.

Anyway, Chinese has some brilliantly literal words ('jeans' in Chinese literally translates as 'cowboy trousers') but our absolute new favourite is the word for mushroom, 蘑菰 or 'mo gu.' According to Jenny, the Chinese also use 蘑菰 as a word to describe someone of rather limited brain capacity. Taking inspiration from this, we have thus adapted the anglicized version, 'mogu,' to affectionately describe all of our, erm, slightly dimmer kids.

Now, I have a good few really bright students, I have plenty of average Joes (although the only kid I have who is actually called Joe is a little ten-year old shithead who likes shouting out 'F-U-C-K' what it mean?), but, well, there are a few little sweeties who appear to be just a few sandwiches short of a picnic. They are the children for whom you repeat a word five times, demonstrate it, attempt to use every possible means at your disposal (including, often, translation by the Chinese teacher) to convey that 'apple' means 'pingguo,' and yet will still be met with a smile and a completely blank stare. You can practically see the tumbleweed bouncing through their little minds as they smile sweetly and uncomprehendingly at you. And these are my mogus.

My favourite little mogu is Bobby. Bobby is my youngest student at Aston, being only four years old, and is a gorgeously vacant little kid who attends the parent and child class with one other student, five-year old Lily. At first, I thought Bobby was struggling because he was so young, but Annie, my Chinese co-teacher and I have come to the conclusion that he is in fact just a wee bit dim. A typical attempt to teach Bobby something goes like this:

Jenny: What is it (holds up flashcard at Lily)?
Lily: It's a rabbit?
Jenny: Are you a rabbit?
Lily: No, I'm a girl.
Jenny: What is it (holds up flashcard at Bobby)?
Bobby: Monkey
Jenny: Are you a monkey (points at Bobby)?
Bobby: Monkey
Jenny: Are you a monkey (points at Bobby and then at monkey picture, shakes head)?
Bobby: It's a monkey.
Annie: Ni shi houzi ma? (Are you a monkey? in Chinese)
Bobby: Monkey.
Annie: Bobby, ni shi houzi ma?
Bobby: It's a monkey.
Jenny: Annie, are you a monkey?
Annie: No, I'm a girl.
Jenny: Lily, are you a monkey?
Lily: No, I'm a girl.
Jenny: Bobby, are you a monkey?
Bobby: [blank stare]

(continue by revising 'girl' and 'boy' flashcards and getting Bobby and Lily to say 'I'm a boy,' 'I'm a girl.' Try 'are you a monkey?' again to no avail ad infinitum)

Yep, the kid's the cutest mogu in all of Chongqing. Poor little mushroom. Anyway, Katie and I have been bandying about the word 'mogu' for a couple of weeks now, so I just thought I'd share. I love 'mogu' as a word, and would also like to forewarn a certain Ms VD Trinh that she might have been proclaimed 'Mogu In Chief'. I mean sure, Van, you're a med student, which indicates that you might be part of a strangely academic subset of mogus, but in every other respect you embody the virtues of true mogu-dom. I hope you are proud, and that you embrace Bobby and his friends in your heart as your own little mushrooms.

Hammer Man

Not only am I sad that I can't have pictures on the blog for the next few weeks, but am also wishing I had a way to add sound. That way I could better communicate THE ANNOYINGNESS OF A NEXT DOOR NEIGHBOUR WHO HAS SUDDENLY STARTED HAMMERING LOUDLY ON THE WALL ALL THE LIVE LONG DAY.

Yes, our hitherto quiet neighbour, whoever he (or she, but I'm assuming he's a he because men are stupider and like to bash things more) may be, has gone wrong in the head. He for some reason has decided to bang constantly at something in his apartment with a large hammer for about seven hours a day, commencing at the rather anti-social hour of 8am. I hate him.

I have no idea what he is doing - unless he is a blind man who is also in possession of the world's worst set of Ikea instructions, no piece of furniture assembly requires three whole days of near-constant hammering. Maybe he is crazy. Maybe he is tearing down the wall between our apartments breezeblock by breezeblock because he wants to be our new roomie. I do not know. I do not care. I just want him to STOP!

Anyway, Hammer Man TM, as he is now officially known, is a bad neighbour. He has, though, inspired me to write my first song on the guitar, which, on second thoughts, probably makes it a very good thing that this blog does not support sound clips. I haven't written about my adventures in guitar playing, but about a month ago we 'borrowed' a cheap, out-of-tune and unloved old guitar (manufactured by the interestingly-named 'Stains and Music') from school, and Katie has been teaching me how to play it (I can do American Pie n'all now :). Guitar is fun, and it proved very easy to use the minimal number of chords I now know to express my displeasure at the evil lurking next door.

The song is still a work in progress, but its general theme involves ramming the hammer (metal side first) up the sphincter of a certain individual. And I want some help with the lyrics - how should I improve on/continue the following?

There was a man who had a hammer in his hand,
He banged it all day to complete some pointless task.
And all that endless banging drove us fucking mad,
So we thought we'd ram his hammer up his arse.

Whoa--oh, Hammer Man,
We're going to stick that hammer where the sun don't shine,
Whoa-oh, Hammer Ma-an,
Shove that hammer backwards right up your behind.

And yes, before you ask, my quest is to become Phoebe from Friends.

Another Year Older...

So, today I was chatting with the Chinese teachers at are school (who are all lovely), and the conversation turned to what our Chinese zodiac signs were. Now, with the exception of our manager, who has recently hit the big 30, every single employee at our school is between the ages of 21 and 26, and so we were trying to group ourselves into our relatively limited Chinese star sign groups.

When I said I was 24 and was thus a rat according to the Chinese zodiac (supposed characteristics: talkative, pioneering, quick-witted, friendly, terrible with money - actually far better than my crappy western star sign of Capricorn, whose sole characteristics appear to be stolid, conservative dullardness), they looked at me with blank incomprehension. According to them, if I was 24 then I would have to be born in 1985, and thus I would be an ox. I attempted to refute that logic by saying I was born in December 1984, and woulld thus still be 24 for another 8 months, but this was met with jokes that I was trying to deny my age!

So, it turns out that in China your age is dependent on the year of your birth; like racehorses, all Chinese people age a year on January 1st (yet they still celebrate birthdays -I'm not entirely sure what the deal is with that.) For a person like me who is born on December 28th, this effectively adds a whole year to my age. So, until September at least, when I will revert to the comparative youthfulness of 24 for a few more blessed months, I have now officially hit the big fat quarter century...

Though It's Hard to Avoid Being Sad, I Want To Be Happy in MXCJ

As we all know, many times in life there are things that are just so crap that they swing all the way back round to amazingness again. Bonnie Tyler's 'Total Eclipse of the Heart,' for one, or the terrible/wonderful skagfest that is 'Oxford Blues.' And after only six weeks in Chongqing, I would already be confident enough to wager that a good proportion of the world's amazing/crap things can be found right here in China.

A couple of weeks ago (I know, bad blogger), we had the good fortune to stumble upon one of these gems. We were not forewarned of the shitfest that awaited us; we simply thought we were going to 'Foreigner Street,' which according to the guidebook and to other westerners in Chongqing had some good foreign restaurants and cafes (and, believe me, I do miss coffee and cakes). What the book neglected to mention, however, was that Foreigner Street was situated in Meixin or MXCJ, which I think may actually be the world's worst theme park ever.

Now, 'theme park' may be a tad too generous as a descrption of this place. There weren't really any rollercoasters, and - thank the lord - you didn't have to pay to get in. Rather, this was Chongqing's attempts to present its citizens with a veritable panorama of the delights that exist across the globe. Only, because this is China, it somehow got it more than a little bit wrong. It was situated right on the edge of down (and next to it were rural houses and farms), and looked like this:


Attractions of this theme park thus included:

- An exhibit devoted to Thai culture with the following tagline:



- Little chairs in the shape of bums, some of which helpfully had holes to instruct little boys where to place their penis and testicles.



- A big plastic Jesus spinning atop a wooden shed on a recently dug mud hill. I don't need to go to Rio now that I've seen this:



- A tape on loop that included the tracks B.I.N.G.O., Alouette, I Went to the Animal Fair, and the Alphabet Song. The first one of which was then stuck in my head for days.

- A fake Great Wall made out of breezeblocks.

Rather aptly, however, Meixin's main claim to fame is that it boasts the world's largest public toilet, which is modestly titled as this:



There are literally floors of toilet stalls (which, as this is China, are holes in the floor). Upon entering this labyrinth of lavatorial delights, you are confronted by a statue of a naked baby who 'pisses' water upon your head. Nice. Sadly photo of said baby did not work out, but I did manage to capture some of the helpfully rendered instructions for the uninitiated on how to piss:



There were also lots of signs abounding that instructed foreigners to 'call Helena' if they wanted to invest in replicating Meixin somewhere else. Sadly I didn't write down her number, but if you think that these attractions would go down well in your hometown, I'd be happy to go back and find out for you. On second thoughts, no, I wouldn't.

Oh, and after all of that the - three - cafes and restaurants on 'Foreigner Street' were all very, very closed.

火锅

To condense the customary apology: sorry for no blogging/have been very lazy/will try to do better so please keep checking etc etc. And now that's over, let's move on to one of my favourite things in the world: food. I love food. I love making it, looking at it, smelling it, talking about it and, of course, eating it, which I have been known to do in rather sizeable quantities. In short, I am an unapologetic hog. And given China's considerable culinary reputation, great food was one of the things I was looking forward to the most about moving to Chongqing. Suffice to say, it has not been a disappointment; food is abundant, cheap and delicious, and it will take far more than one post for me to even start to express the wonders of Sichuan food.

Where better to start though than with huo guo, which is the Chongqing speciality. When any Chongqinger with a smattering of English approaches us to try out their skills (this happens frequently, and is normally accompanied by requests to pose for a photograph with them), one of the things they are almost guaranteed to say is 'do you like huo guo?' I dread to think what would happen to the poor soul who answered 'no,' as huo guo is a matter of such local pride that to snub it would be like telling the residents of Pisa that you don't think much of the Leaning Tower, or the folk of Anfield that you think Liverpool FC are a big'ole pile of shit.

Although it's usually transliterated into English as hot pot, huo guo literally translates as 'fire pot,' and is definitely deserving of that moniker. To whit, it looks like this:



Now, that is by anyone's standards a sizeable quantity of chilli. And this is hotpot in a relatively tame state; when it heats up it starts to fizzle menacingly and give off acrid chilli fumes that makes poor foreigners' eyes water and noses expel phlegm in considerable quantities. It is so toxic in smell that it could be used effectively by the police as a means of crowd control.

And yet, despite its initially off-putting aroma, this fearsome brew is delicious. It is a communal meal; the hotpot is places and heated in a hole at the centre of each table, and you then order various delights- which can be anything from fish balls to rabbit's blood and lamb's testicles - which you place in the hot oil to cook. After a couple of minutes, armed with chopstick in hand you delve in to the cauldron to dig out your food. And although it is spicy, it's not actually the pot of death juice that it appears to be - on coming out of the pot, the food tastes really, really good.

Hotpot is not the only dish in which the Sichuanese indulge their love for chilli. One dish we ordered in Chongqing arrived looking like this:



With all the chilli-fied delights on offer in Sichuan, we've found that our palates have adjusted to spice with alarming speed. As my home cooking adventures in Sichuan cuisine have progressed (on which more to follow soon) I have found myself adding ever more liberal amounts of chilli and chilli powder to dishes, and have even come round to the Chinese way of considering green chilli as essentially a vegetable. Much as Van has been known to stay behind in the kitchen to dollop a fat blob of Vietnamese fish sauce on her fajitas, I wouldn't be altogether surprised on my return to Blighty to find myself surreptitiously adding chilli powder to the strangest of dishes.

Mangled Names

One of the many wonderful things about the language school where we are teaching is that all the pupils at the school are given English first names to use. This is an absolute lifesaver, as it saves me having to learn the near-identical sounding (but, alas, tonal and thus likely to be badly mangled by my foreign tongue) Chinese names of over 100 students.

There seems, however, to be very little consistency as to how our students acquire their English names. Some of the little kids who are just starting English classes are named by us, but many of our students arrive with English names intact. And some these names are wonderful. Absolutely, head-spinningly wonderful. Between us, Katie and I are currently teaching:

- Scrabble
- Derail
- Sharpie
- Moon
- Susie (boy)
- Tessie (boy)
- Uriel
- Sun
- Sago
- Ice
- Sesame
- Thunder
- GeeGeeBoy

Now some of these missteps I can understand. Some kids seem just to directly translate the meaning of their Chinese name into English, but whilst 'Little Cloud' might be a perfectly lovely name in Chinese, it is a rather less than wonderful moniker in English. Although, y'know,Sun,Moon, and Ice actually sound pretty cool. Others, however, seem to have just opened a dictionary and picked names out completely at random. Scrabble? Sharpie??? Derail???? Why on earth, when a child is looking for an English name, would anyone happen upon 'derail' in a dictionary and decide they want the little darling to be named after a train accident?

And finally, GEEGEEBOY????. There are quite simply not enough WTFs in the universe.

Speed Blogging / Mangled English III

Ah yes, so the blog died again. Oops. I did mean to do it, but somehow between eating huge amounts of dumplings (my trip is basically a tour of Communism and dumplings), learning to appreciate Sichuan spice, loving the fun that is warbling at the KTV bar and, oh yeah, teaching some people some stuff, it got rather forgotten and neglected.

As this blog has only just reached Beijing and is now officially a month behind true time, I have decided to give up any attempts at comprehensiveness, and as such the blog is just going to magically skip forward to today, March twenty-whateverth. The month in a nutshell: there was a very expensive teahouse, time spent wandering round Xi'an at four in the morning, a lovely apartment, some hotpot, a drunken training session in Chengdu, an ultrasound, pandas, some lost piss, and a shiny new permanent residency card. They were all supposed to be blog posts and some of them are even half-written, but, alas, apart from the oblique references above they are now sadly lost to the vagaries of time as I cannot be bothered to write them. Although in cryptic, abbreviated form my month does sound like one long drug-induced dream, which makes me feel more interesting than I actually am.

So anyway, this blog will now morph back into normal, Prague-style mode in which instead of posting tedious updates about 'places what I have been to' and 'stuff what I have done' I will just, as the fancy takes me, post tidbits and random musings about life in China. And where better to start than with a celebration of unintentionally prescient Chinglish? I happened upon this little gem today in Eling Park:



P.S. For those of you that care (Mum), I have just put a few pics of Chongqing up in my Picasa. This album will grow as I add more over the next few days, so stay tuned to see some pretty pics of neon lights etc.