Seasons on the Move

Hong Kong – July 12th

Rolled into Hong Kong around noon aftering catching a bus to Tsim Sha Tsui. We checked into a hostel just up the road from Chungking Mansion and caught up on our ZZZs before meeting up with Ian Smith, a good friend of Blair Stewart’s, who has been living and working in Hong Kong for the past couple of years. We took the Star Ferry across Victoria Harbour and met Ian at a pricey little joint over looking the water. Fab, Ian and I spent the rest of the night hopping from expat bar to expat bar talking about life, music and and mutual friends. Ian, being the gentleman that he is, treated us to a night on the town.

Fab and I wandered home sometime after midnight full of beer and good spirits. I lost the camera lens cap after mishandling it and consequently dropping it off the 12th floor balcony.

Beijing - July 6th 

After getting lost in a hutong looking for our hostel the previous night, Fab and I took it easy and decided to lay low and save up our energy for what was promising to be a gruelling next week. We were scheduled to fly back to Japan, take a night bus from Osaka to Tokyo, spend two more days (one filming) in the chaos that is Shinjuku, take another night bus back to Osaka, fly to Hong Kong, spend the night, and then fly to Bangkok.

Train bound for Beijing – July 5th

Spent the day on board a train from Zhongwei to Beijing. The train was packed with provincial kids headed to the capital on some kind of field trip. Fab and I were stuck in separate sleepers and I was fortunate enough to share a cabin with a group of brats who spent all night punching the underside of my bunk, pulling off my covers and staring at me whenever they thought I wasn’t looking. When I told them to stop, they, along with their parents, all giggled and whispered to each other.  On the other hand, Fabiola shared a cabin with a mother and a screaming baby who pissed all over the bottom bunk on numerous occassions. It should be noted that babies in China do not wear any sort of diapers and are typically bottomless. Fab was not pleased, but fortunately she had the uppermost birth.

The rest of the ride was spent exchanging “Hellos” with the kids on the school trip and hiding our noses in our books. I finished Hemingway’s “Fiesta: Sun Also Rises” and Fab was working her way through Alex Garland’s “The Beach” which she stole from the hostel lounge in Xi’an. I had recently finished reading “A Moveable Feast” and “To Have and Have Not” I came to the conclusion that I may have ruined Hemingway by reading “A Farewell to Arms” first.

We had dinner in the dining car with the train employees who ordered us much too much food and tried their best to make us feel welcome. Although the food was somewhat suspect, we had a great time and were well fed by the time we got off the train in Beijing.

Zhongwei, July 4th 

Our guide for the day, Tina aka Red (a child of the cultural revolution) picked us up in the early morning to take us to the desert. The night previous, Red had taken us to the night market and introduced us to some of her friends who ran a noodle stall. The best noodles we had had and the man who ran the stall said I was handsome like a movie star. Naturally, I agreed with him and we got along famously, but I digress. Red hired a taxi and we sped off down a lopsided Chinese highway bound for Shapotou, where rolling green farmland meets the Tengger desert.

We got to the sand dunes and immediately headed for the Yellow River, a border of sorts between the farmland and the desert, so we could raft before the hordes of Chinese tourists arrived. No such luck. We had to wait for more people to arrive. When we finally got on the raft we realized that it not what we had expected. We thought we were going down the Yellow River, into the wildnerness, to see a little of the hidden side of China. As it turned out, all we did was take a speed boat to a spot down the river and float back to the spot we had left from. To add insult to injury, the ride lastest about fifteen minutes and we were crammed onto a raft full of giddy tourists that covertly tried to take pictures of us.

The camel ride was also a disappointment. We wanted to take a four hour ride to a section of the Great Wall out in the desert, but because there was only two of us, we had to take a ten minute camel ride out to a tourist trap full of dune buggies spewing black exhaust and vendors selling over-priced merchandise, food and snacks.  We got stuck out there for close to four hours waiting for a camel to take us back. Red was extremely emabarrassed and apologized profusely.

We finished off the day by killing as much time as we could while waiting for a 22 hour train ride back to Beijing.

Zhongwei, Ningxia Province – July 3

Rolled in Zhongwei at dawn. The town was quiet as it was just a little after five in the morning. We walked from the train station to our hotel and immediately crashed. We have found that night trains usually kill most of the next morning.

On the way into the hotel, we noticed a film crew comprised of assholes in full on cammo gear and khaki cargo pants. Oh yes, Zhongwei is on the edge of the Tengger Desert.

We arose from a well-deserved sleep and wandered around the town, visting the obligitory temple and getting stared at everywhere we went. Fab and I were like fucking Tomkat or Brangelina. We went into a grocery store and were followed around by a group of people intensely interested in what we were buying. We would pick something up and they would snicker amongst themselves. On the street, we had packs of kids running after us and screaming “Hello! How are you!”. We had old ladies taking our picture and middle aged men looking at us like we were from another planet. Apparently, Zhongwei doesn’t see too many tourists.

We escaped from our rabid fans and booked a tour to the desert using pictograms, sound effects and charades. From what we gathered, the travel agency agreed to pick us up the following morning and take us out to the desert for some camel trekking and a ride down the Yellow River on a sheep skin raft.   

Xi’an – July 2

Got up and was taken over to the other clinic to have my gland examined. A nice Korean man called Mr. Kim took me. We went to a hospital outside the city walls. The first Doctor inspected me by shoving a thin, metal tube into my ear canal. Nothing wrong. Open your mouth, nothing wrong.

“Must be tooth problem,” the Doctor explained.

Immediately, I was escorted into a dental operating room.

“No, no, no…. hurt here,” I said, pointing to the gland under the corner of my jaw, “not here,” pointing to my teeth.

The Dentist paid me no mind and shoved me into a chair. Sweat started pouring down my face while Fab furiously flipped through her phrase book. I guess the rest of the dental assistants got a kick out of this because they all started laughing. The Dentist pried open my mouth and started viciously tapping my teeth with a steel rod.

“Hurt?” the Dentist asked.

It did, but not for reasons he thought it might.

“No, no, no…. hurt here,” I said, pointing to the gland under the corner of my jaw, “not here,” pointing to my teeth.

I was snatched out of the chair and taken into an x-ray room. After placing the x-ray film in my mouth, the dental assistants ran out of the room and slammed the door. They flipped on the x-ray and I could feel my eyeballs vibrate.  I looked down and noticed that I had drooled all over my pants.

I was taken back into the operating room and another dentist paid me a visit. She sat me back in the chair and asked me to open up my mouth. Then she grabbed a bunch of alien looking dental tools and leaned in.

“No drill, no drill,” I said in a panic, “hurt here, not here.”

Much to my horror, the dentist just laughed. Then she did the following: sent painful electric shocks into my teeth with a tool resembling a glue gun, melted a wax stick over an open flame and dripped it on my molars, filled my mouth with some kind of foul saline solution and tapped again with the metal rod. By now, Fabiola was having a good time, realizing that they weren’t going to drill, and was snapping away with the camera.

After being brutalized for more than an hour, the dentist let me go. She handed me a prescription for amoxicillin and some other medicine that I didn’t recognize. No explanation, nothing. Fab just smiled and said, “At least now if you get gonnorhea, you’re covered”.

Later in the day we went for Peking Duck ( very succulent) and then caught a night train for Zhongwei, further into the mainland.

Xi’an – July 1

Took a public bus out to the Terra-Cotta Warriors. Slightly disappointing. The Warriors themselves were fairly impressive, but the presentation of them left alot to be desired. Basically, they are contained in a massive airport hanger with limited historical and cultural explanation.

Got back in the evening and decided to go to the doctor. A gland of mine had been swollen for a little over three weeks and was starting to cause me considerable discomfort. An American guy, fluent in Mandarin, who worked at a nearby hostel took me over to the hospital. Chinese hospitals work differently than Canadian hospitals. There are no waiting rooms in Chinese hospitals. You simply walk into the doctor’s office and take a seat. It does not matter if there is another patient in the room. The American made a nice analogy between American doctors and Chinese doctors. He said that when you see an American doctor, you get the impression that you are seeing a rock star minutes before he takes the stage. In China, you feel like you are getting your fortune told.

Once inside the doctor’s room and waiting in line, the American translated for me as the lady being treated in front of me talked to the doctor. She had a bad case of gas and couldn’t sleep. Suddenly, a cell phone rang. The doctor pulled her phone out of her pocket and had a ten minute conversation with her sister about some money problems within the family while the gassy lady waited patiently (pun intended).  The American simply smiled and said, “That’s China for you.”

When it was my turn, the doctor took a brief look in my ear with a large flashlight and then said she couldn’t help me, I needed to go to a different clinic tomorrow. The American guy was enraged because, after all, what doctor can’t help cure a swollen gland. I didn’t really mind because I found the whole situation strangly entertaining.

Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, June 30

Got into Xi’an in the early morning. We took it easy and wandered around the city. We ended up having dumplings at a little shop in the Muslim Quarter. Best food so far in China. Not only that, we stuffed ourselves for a little over $1.00 Cdn. Then we went back to the hostel and I had a nervous breakdown because of the film.

In the evening, we had our first breakthrough. My father had managed to re-route us back to Japan so we could complete photography on the film. In addition, the lab had determined that we had a camera problem and agreed to replace the camera and some of the film. The “some of the film” part irked me a bit, but after losing my shit in the afternoon, any positive news was good enough for me.

June 29

Hung around Pingyao, took some pictures and watched Nic Cage’s “Wickerman” at the hostel while waiting for our train to depart for Xi’an.

A nice Australian gent from Perth named Daniel, who we met earlier in Pingyao, was in the same berth as us. We ate peanuts, talked about Hal Hartley and drank beer. Daniel had been travelling for close to a year. He had travelled most of Russia on the Trans-Siberian, made his way through Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Israel and was now on his way to the end of the Silk Road. Good guy, that Daniel.

Pingyao, June 28 

Did nothing today except try and straighten out the mess with the film. No luck, just more frustration and vague replies from the lab.

I also want to state that I hate hippies. In general, I find them to be disposable human beings, especially trustafarians like the one I met at night. I won’t go into too much detail, but I found this guy extremely hypocritical and somewhat of an Orientalist ( see Edward Said).  If you can afford to float around the world for 11 years without a job (this is what he said) then in my mind, you have no right to completely abhor capitalism and Western society.  Also, if you were to shave off this guy’s beard and hair, you’d be left with nothing more than a transient alcoholic with no meaningful relationships in his life. Sad, really.