 .
...and I've decided to do something about it. Maybe I should, however, merely be revising for my exams.
(That's not ,me in the picture by the way. I think, by the looks of things, they might be Americans, the teachers that is, I mean I can't see any guns in the pictures, but then of course in China guns aren't allowed in the classroom, because, ahem, some of the Students Might Get Hurt, whereas in American schools they probably will be within a couple of years.)
Incidentally, I would like just like to take this oppurtunity to be the second ever person in the world (here is the first) to question the use of the verb 'to port', as in 'to transfer your number from one 'operator' to another'.
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He's laughing at you, you prick
Flicking gamely as I was through a predictably-difficult-to-read edition of 'Le Monde' the other day, I came across the following headline:
'Comment les Rolling Stones et U2 s'arrangent pour payer un minimum d'impôts'
La presse néerlandaise a révélé, lundi 31 juillet, que le groupe U2 avait, depuis quelques semaines, lui déménagé U2 Limited, la société qui détient les droits musicaux du chanteur Bono et de ses trois comparses, de Dublin vers les quais d'Amsterdam.
En conflit avec le gouvernement irlandais, qui a lancé une réforme fiscale et veut désormais taxer les artistes, U2 a décidé de confier ses intérêts à Jan Favié, directeur général de Promobridge, Promotone et Musidor, les sociétés néerlandaises des Rolling Stones.
Comme ses prédécesseurs, U2, le groupe le plus riche du monde - 201 millions d'euros de revenus en 2005, pour 120 millions à Jagger et sa bande -, entend bénéficier des largesses offertes par la législation des Pays-Bas, qui n'impose les droits musicaux qu'à hauteur de 1,6 %. Cette exception européenne a été dénoncée à de nombreuses reprises par la Commission de Bruxelles et l'Organisation pour la coopération et le développement en Europe (OCDE) mais le gouvernement de La Haye résiste vaillamment aux pressions.
Hmm, let's see. The richest rock group in the world, which made €201 million of revenue in 2005, which is more than I earn in two years, have moved their financial affairs to Holland, in order to take advantage of a somewhat overgenerous tax regime which has been condemned by the European Commission. You can find an interesting account (in English) of the groups's stance on paying their taxes here. In the meantime, I decided to find out what my old French friend Monsieur Petit-Choufleur, who was born in Wales to Parisean parents but learnt French from a free CD he got with the Daily Mail in 2004, thought of it all:
"Alors, U2, Bono, le nome me semble quelque chose...ça ne sera pas le petit nain qui toujours nous dit que les problèmes du monde seulement seront résolus si nous, erm, donnons(?!) notre argent a la charité? Le superbranleur qui a dit que ce n'est pas une question politique, qui est tres bonne ami de George Bush, tellement que lui a donné un cadeau d'un ipod et une Bible?! Qui a declare que 'Blair et Brown sont comme les Lennon et Mc Cartney de la lutte contre la pauvreté'? Qui nous urge que nous achetions une téléphone portable rouge et un carte de credite de la même couleur de son autres grandes amis de Motorola et American Express?
C'est incroyable, n'est pas? Bien sur, si les hommes riches du monde paierai ses impôts, nous aurions l'argent pour resolver tous les problèmes du monde, n'est pas?"( Read more... )
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An evidently confused woman walked up to me une fois in the centre of Dublin and asked me something in French with what sounded like 'cherche' and 'GPO' in it.
Now she might just have been asking 'Vous cherchez le GPO, n'est pas?', in which case the answer would have been 'Sí (it's true, it's proper grammar and everything, look it up), je suis pas Joseph Connolly et nous ne sommes pas dans l'an 1916'. I evidemment presumed that she was asking me where the General Post Office (which was about 20 yards behind us) was, so I told her immediately. By pointing.
My French has become much better now, danke schön very much. As for other foreign languages: I can do every word in Chinese except for tree, politics and, er, word, and I will hopefully soon very much impress my girlfriend during our Mystery Holiday in Berlin next month (NB: THAT BIT MEANS I CAN SPEAK GERMAN - R. Willmsen 22/03/07); I can speak almost as much Spanish as every other smug fucker out there who just happens to speak fucking Spanish. Oh yes, and I am also learning Italian. Very, very slowly.
More significantly, I speak better Portuguese than José Saramago, and will one day have a job to prove it. Which is partly why, in Battersea Park on the Hottest Day Ever (does that mean it's going to start getting colder now?!), sparsely surrounded by lots of people speaking the less passionate, more bored-sounding variety of the Portuguese language, on seeing a young black family walking towards me along the path, I, thinking that they may well be Angolan or maybe Portuguese or something, thought that I might say to them in a smiley fashion 'Fala-se português por aqui!' (they speak Portuguese round here).
I didn't say anything, thereby soundly killing off any possibility that I might a) the same day become the subject of an entertaining 'This sweaty guy we didn't know said something to us in a language we didn't understand!' anecdote or b) become the firmest of friends with some people for about 2 minutes.
About sixteen seconds later another young black family walked past me, speaking Portuguese. In the treasured words of Alanis Morissette: You live, you learn.
Incidentally, has anyone else in the imperial capital noticed that every single cafe in the centre of London (with the honourable exception of 'Brasil By Kilo') is suddenly run by Portuguese people?! They're everywhere all of a sudden, especially around here. Especially since I, you know, moved house. Quite a lot less Bangladeshi people too. That is not why I moved, by the way. I wonder if, one day, 'the Portuguese cuisine' will enjoy the same elevated position in our gastronomic hierachy as does that of our Polish communities. But as for competing with the Bengalis for a larger share of the cheaper end of the restaurant market...nem pensar!
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I’ve always found it a bit puzzling that people pay (often lots of) money to sit in a class and practise speaking foreign languages. Everyone on earth already has at least one language at their disposal and it’s not too hard to track down someone who wants to learn that language and in return will help you as your try your hardest to make yourself understood in their language. It’s just a case of tracking down that someone, which these days, what with the gumtree and whatnot, is not a very difficult task at all.
Of course occasionally you may, especially if you’re a woman, meet people with ulterior motives, or who are actually just really boring, or who laugh pitilessly every time you try and put a sentence together – or in the case of Mandarin Chinese, look at you with such puzzlement that you’d think you’d just told them there was something wrong with the Communist Party, whereas in fact you were simply trying to let them know that you come from Sheffield and you prefer broccoli to spinach. But on the whole it’s preferable to and a lot more effective than, say, paying €50 a month to some unscrupulous bastards who will continue fleecing your bank account long after the school has gone bankrupt and the teacher has fucked off back to London in poverty, or, if you’re Brazilian, will stick you in a tiny classroom on Oxford Street with eighteen of your compatriots so you end up speaking less English than you would back home.
Now I come to think of it, language teachers spend so much time trying to make their students pretend that they are not actually in a classroom at all that it really makes you question the point of being there in the first place.( Read more... )
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I take a certain amount of encouragement in life from the fact that I don't speak Italian. Perche? Well, I have tried to learn, a little bit. I spent a few days in Rome years ago wondering why all those street signs with arrows on them all said 'Unica Via', and I can put together some simple phrases like 'No me piacce il calcio', ' Dove c'e musica' and 'Oggi ho fatto qualcosa nostra', but I don't I know if I'd be up to, say, having a short conversation about il tempo meterelogico. So how can my lack of basic Italian conversation skills be a source of encouragement, even pride?
Well, Signor Nessuno, what it is is that I like knowing that it will always be an opzione. If at any point I ever have cause to become really bored or despondent, like per exemplo if we ever get to the point where newspapers stop asking asinine rhetorical questions like 'is it too late to prevent global warming' and start accepting that we really are actually finito nella merda, then at that point I can always invest in a cheap grammar book and a copy of 'La Republica' or whatever the most left-wing daily newspaper is and comenzare (a?) aprendere.
See, it's easy to learn Italian, and it's fun and makes your brain grow. To the size of an Italian's! If I ever get really interested in it I could always go and live there for a while, although one less radical option would be to find an intercambio. Recently I put an ad on the gumtree site 'cause of wanting to practice those few languages in which I can have a short conversation about the weather. Italian wasn't one of them, obviously, which is why it was a bit of a sorpresa to recebere una risposta from una ragazza Italiana. Ma no voglio praticare mi inglese! I protested in reply. Alguni personi sono idioti.
I'd recommend this nozione of Learning Italian as Potential Life TherapyTM to anyone feeling down, bored or even suicida.
If you're ever faced with someone – friend, family, or even someone you work with but don't actually like – who is entertaining thoughts of topping theyselves, just ask 'parle italiano?' If by any chance they answer 'Ma sono italiano!', you could always try, I dunno, 'Dych chi’n siarad Cymraeg?', although that might actually not work in quite the same way. If you're for any reason having this conversation with Berlesconi or Paulo di Canio, just tell them, in all seriousness 'Penso, come amico, que la migliore cosa que le puoi fare è suicidaresi. Stronzo fascista'.
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It's just struck me that, for all the time and effort that I put into learning to understand and to use new words in other languages, with lots of words that I just can't seem to understand and to use, there are lots of words in English that I hear people using, but don't understand and therefore don't use.
Two of them are 'pithy' and 'glib'.
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Any pretensions I may have entertained of Learning Chinese Through FootballTM would have quickly been doomed to failure. Although I had a good grasp of the basic numbers, the names of the world's leading clubs and players are often unrecognisable and hellish to pronounce. I wouldn't imagine that Paul Gascoigne found it particularly easy.
I did, briefly, try: in my first or second week I played my first game of football in quite a while. Disappointed to see the fruitless-yet-predictable results of my time-honoured technique of chasing-the-ball-all-over-the-pitch-and-then-kicking-it-straight-to-the-other-team, I turned to our goalkeeper and asked him how the Chinese say 'Fuuuuck!!!' He told me, I repeated it about ten times and then never used it again.
Chinese kids (male kids, that is to say, which is most of them) love playing football, especially in a curious 20-a-side variety. Nor is it unusual to have to share your tennis court with two or three other pairs. There are just so many young people with so much energy to expend. Now personally, as I may have mentioned somewhere around here, my own preference would be for them to devote their efforts to storming the bastions of power and making their country into a decent place to live, but what the hey. They prefer to direct their youthful frustrations elsewhere.
One of my students, faced with the question of which people he would least like to meet, surprised me by not offering the standard response of a Taiwanese politician or 'anyone from Japan'. His answer was that he would hate to meet the football players of AC Milan, given that he was a fan of their city rivals Inter.
How had this 20-year-old boy (as the Chinese like to say), no more from the north of Italy than I'm from Shanghai (I'm not), developed such a strong emotional attachment to Inter Milan? Well, he'd read about the team in officially approved articles in state-controlled newspapers and on the government-sponsored internet. These days, if Michael Owen fails to score for Newcastle of a weekend, or if the Chelsea manager suggests he may need to strengthen his right-back position, it is back-page news around the world - and in China (and probably in Japan, although for different reasons) it makes the front page.
This contrasts with a genuine lack of interest in home-grown football. In early 2005 the start of the soccer season was delayed for several weeks because a number of clubs didn't have the funds to field a full team and to travel to matches. When I went to see China's number 1 team Dalian Shide I saw a sparsely populated stadium witness the most desultory performance I'd seen since, well, my own a few months earlier. After what I think was the fifth goal ((I wasn't sure as we arrived late, the result of a fairly unnecessary argument with my slightly irrational then-girlfriend over my paying almost three euros for two tickets), the players left the pitch five minutes early, presumably because they simply couldn't be bothered to run around in the cold to such a lukewarm reaction any more.
In European football and American baseball, though, there is a huge amount of interest. The Government don't mind; they seem quite happy to see their young people doped up to the eyeballs on this particular foreign opiate. And football and basketball are foreign imports - it is a form of cultural imperialism just as profound as Hollywood movies or McDonalds.
This Guardian article from two days ago, about the aspirations of a certain British football club to cash in on this new 'goal rush', reads like a grotesque and hilarious satire of the original Age of Expansion:
Sheffield United's manager could become a household name in Chengdu after his club revealed at their AGM yesterday that contracts have been exchanged on a deal to buy the Chinese second division club Chengdu Five Bull FC for a "minimal" sum with completion anticipated early in the new year.
"We are taking the Blades global," enthused Kevin McCabe, the chairman of Sheffield United's plc, who already has extensive real estate development interests in China. "Chengdu city has a population of 11m and is the capital of Sichuan province which has a population of 100m. Although I don't expect them all to become Sheffield United fans, this does represent a potential fan base which we can use to develop both the Five Bull and Sheffield United brands."
Five Bull boast a 40,000-capacity stadium, but it represents virgin marketing and merchandising territory. Previously effectively under government ownership - the club was run by a collective of state enterprises - the Chinese government's recent decree that the country's soccer clubs can no longer be even indirectly state-owned dictates that Five requires outside investment. "We intend to establish a club shop at the stadium for the first time as well as a Blades Bar in the city and to sell branded merchandise, also for the first time," McCabe explained.
The idea is that Five Bull fans will develop a twin affection for the Blades, their enthusiasm fuelled by the internet and satellite television transmissions of English football.
Now speaking as someone from Sheffield, there is little more absurd to me than the thought of someone from Sichuan province dreaming of visiting Bramall Lane. I'm aware that what might appear mundane to me could seem exotic to someone from China and vice-versa, but I can assure anyone who hasn't had the opportunity to see it for themselves that there is very little of the exotic or charming about that part of the city. There are, of course, many positive benefits of globalisation - the internet and being able to buy pesto in Dalian spring to mind - but this, while certainly not the worst thing about our brave new world, is definitely not the best.
The article put me in mind of William Gibson's article about Singapore: a place where the past has ceased to exist. Forget about silk dresses, Mao suits and charming Sichuan tea shops - what the future has to offer China is a replica Sheffield United football top - made, in China, natch - and a Blades theme bar.
To me, it sounds uncannily like my particular vision of hell.
The F Word part 5
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In summer 2001 I decided that, having honed my football conversation skills to the enésimo degree, it was about time I got myself an actual team to support. There were three, no wait four, reasons why I, although I was living in Lisbon at the time, didn't want to choose a Portuguese team:
1)I happened to be holidaying in Spain at the time, and I had decided to Teach Myself Spanish Through Football.
2)Like, in my humble non-fish-or-seafood-eating opinion, Portuguese food, consisting as it often does in either Fish-&-Potatoes-&-Lettuce Combination or Meat-Fried Egg-&-Chips Combination, Portuguese football is Not Up To Much.
3)I am a contrary bastard.
4)It was clear to me that Real Madrid's policy of buying up the world's greatest players was going to be a disaster, and that what would follow would make quite an entertaining soap opera.
Why did I think this? Well, even someone as unkeen on sports as me could understand that a team is more than a collection of superstars. Even the most elementary knowledge of group dynamics can tell you that unless there is some team spirit and fellow feeling amongst the players, the group will not succeed.
As if to back this up, my copy of Marca told me that this, now my, new all-singing all-dancing superteam had just drawn their first match of the new era, with a team from Egypt, which is probably at the end of the day, Brian, one of those countries where it's just too hot and possibly too interesting to waste time and energy playing football.
Another reason, and I will have to briefly revert to technical football language here, was that their defence was rubbish.
El tiempo pasó, and I watched proudly from afar as their policy of buying up the world's most sought-after soon-to-be-past-their-prime players, while systematically getting rid of any good defenders, curiously failed to bear fruit. Any good defenders, that is, apart from Michel Salgado, presumably because Florentino Perez (a man who evidently knows and cares even less about football than I do, and who was re-elected President with a huge majority last year) didn't want to get the shit kicked out of him. They resorted to fielding what were basically little more than local kids who, it was clear to me, had never played football in front of more than 200 people before. One of them, Ruben, was cruelly substituted 26 minutes into his debut, which they were already losing three-nil; he responded by, quite understandably I felt, crying a little bit like a girl.
And since then all my predictions have come true – they haven't won anything for two years, and stand no chance whatsoever of doing so this year, and it is obvious that the players cannot stand the sight of one another. And as for the analysis and criticism filling the pages of the Spanish and foreign press: I could have told you the same information in a cafe in San Sebastian in ten minutes in 2001.
I'm not in the least bit proud to say this, but it would be difficult to say the least for anyone to tell me anything about the last four years in the life of Real Madrid that I don't already know. I have to consider myself something of an expert, which is a shame because at the same time my Spanish is only Quite Good, and the game of football remains as boring as ever. Other people know and care a hell of a lot more about the sport, however; how was I able to predict with such accuracy what would unfold?
The reason was, I think, because understanding the world of football requires very, very little intelligence. It stimulates very few of your comprehension skills, and talking about it demands very few leaps of imagination. This remains true despite all the detailed coverage and analysis in grown-up newspapers and all the wordy ramblings of Nick Hornby et al. Once you take a step back from boyish enthusiasm and submit it to a good hard look, all analysis of football is a futile intellectual exercise which reveals little we don't already know about the world.
Today's conclusion, then: Football - and here I'm talking about the thing we see on TV, not the game played on the beach, in the park or, while we're at it, on a football field - is on the whole a sport followed by boring and notveryintelligent people, and choosing to dedicate your time to following it can make you a more boring and less intelligent person than you were before.
And neither is it a particularly effective way to learn Spanish.
The F Word part 3
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They often say that at the time of the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal there were three pillars of the regime: Fatima (or Faith), Fado and Football. And upon moving there in 1999 I quickly realised that if I wanted to learn to communicate with people, I would have to learn not just their language but also how to express opinions about a sport that, since the age of about 11, I had had no interest in whatsoever.
In fact in Portugal, football is such a ubiquitous topic of conversation that it really should be awarded the status of a second language. I soon discovered that I could hold a very basic conversation with taxi drivers and cafe owners by just making reference to different teams, learning the numbers from nil to five and chucking in a good few recently and proudly acquired swearwords. It was taken deadly seriously by some; the one club in town, Vitória de Guimarães, sometimes questionably claimed to be Portugal's fourth 'grande', had two dedicated 'claques', something like a cross between a fan club and a 'firm' of hooligans, which existed purely as deadly rivals of one another. The head of one of the groups, the unfortunately named 'White Angels', kept a baseball bat behind the bar of his, well, bar, in case he spied any members of the enemy sect, the tragically named 'Insane Guys', trying to enter.
I took advantage of the conversational opportunities open to me by trying to 'teach myself Portuguese through football'; one of the first sentences I taught myself to say was 'A minha última ambição é falar melhor português que Bobby Robson' (My ultimate ambition is to speak better Portuguese than Bobby Robson, the English football manager who had trained two of the three big clubs in Portugal (inevitably someone, possibly hailing from Guimarães, is going to respond and claim that there are in fact four, which isn't true) and whose Portuguese was very limited and the source of much mirth).
And at the end of five years in Portugal I could accurately say that I, in all probability, sei mais do futebol do que ele – I know more than him about football, or at least as much. In Portugal it is inescapable: the two biggest selling and most widely-circulated newspapers are football ones, it takes up most of the news bulletins, and it seems to be the default theme for casual and not-so-casual conversation. Everybody knows which team the President and the Prime Minister support, and it tends to colour people's opinions of their politics. Everybody knows the affinities of each of their friends, families and workmates, and, oddly enough, in this women are not entirely excluded.
It's very easy to get caught up in the banter, the name-calling and the pre- and post-match analysis (mostly, it must be said, of the performance of the referee), partly because it tends to exclude and take the place of other topics of conversation – and in this, I would argue, football plays exactly the same role as it did before the Revolution, stifling proper political debate with a populist call for unity behind the largely fictional entity of a football club. But also because it's not in the end a very complicated thing to understand, and a small quantity of information combined with a large amount of irrelevant opinion added to a tiny amount of insight can lead to a very lengthy but inevitably boring conversation.
I must admit I got caught up in the swing of things. It provided a quick common denominator to start conversations with people – finding a Portuguese person who doesn't claim to have a team to support and an opinion on the footballing issues of the day is like finding a Chinese person with no interest in food. But when I did occasionally meet someone like this, I'd realise I had crossed a line and was in very dangerous and disturbing territory.
Sometimes, faced with a stranger or acquaintance, I'd ask them what they thought of the previous night's game (football in Portugal is often a seven-nights-a-week thing). And it was when they responded that they didn't much care for the sport, that it would hit me with shame and horror that, at the end of the day, Brian, neither did I.
Which led to a confused spell during which I was struck by the insight that nobody actually likes football, they're just pretending, because they think that everybody else does.
But that can't possibly be true, can it?!?
The F Word part 2
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Although my life has of late been blessed in some ways by a certain amount of serendipity, that has certainly not been the case in financial terms. You get paid less money for teaching English in Spain than the average monkey in a Chinese zoo, which is causing me to seriously reconsider my options ie. you might find me working in Starbucks in London before too long.
In fact it was the realisation that one of my best options for avoiding a life of monkey wages or the need to become a barista and learn how to bombard stoopid people with a seemingly endless succession of daft questions about loyalty cards and biscuits entailed taking an exam which I failed twice half a lifetime ago, and which there is no guarantee whatsoever of me passing this time (I still haven't figured out what the numerical value of X is supposed to be. I mean, to me, it's always been more of a letter than a number. I'm quite happy to admit that my mathematical genius is not of Noble Prize-winning standard, I mean I can count to twelve but it takes a fucking long time) that brought me to a level of deep deep despondency on the way back from my insufficiently-rewarded job on Friday afternoon, when I received a rare stroke of financial good fortune - I got a message from my mobile 'service provider' (am I the only person who finds that phrase sickening, and its ubiquity quite so depressing?) saying that, for no reason whatsoever, they were going to give me €65 of free credit.
Woo-hoo! You might say. I skipped into the Chinese shop, splashed out on some butter (not literally I should stress) and had a cheery conversation with the less reticent of the two weirdos who work there about different words for broccoli, and positively beamed my way up to the door to my building, where I.
dropped.
my.
phone.
Which started to beep wildly and say something about a 'error de tarjeta'.
Now I am not in any way a god-fearing person, but I did for an instant get a clear image of a vindictive and scornful bearded face cackling at me from between the darkening clouds overhead. The bastard, or in all sobriety probably just the bastards, had given to me with one hand and then gleefully swept my fortune from me with the other, er, claw. I shook, rattled, swore beautifully at, and eventually fixed! my phone.
Which was a relief.
My confidence boosted, I decided to take my mobile 'service provider' (AAARRRRRGGGHHH!) up on one of the promotional offers they have been, despite my very best and at one point even temporarily successful attempts to get them to stop, deluging me with over my last two penurious months. One of those things where they let you phone five numbers for a slightly less outrageous price. This required, along with three spare euros of credit, huge reserves of patience and moral courage, given that to get through to actually speak to someone at Movistar is about as easy as finding your way out of a maze the size of the world, or passing a GCSE Maths exam, if you're me, except that it takes a lot longer than the seventeen years it's taken me so far.
I digress. Over 30 separate calls later, and after one mind-bendingly long wait, I got to actually speak to someone. After a brief contest about who could speak Spanish faster, in which after a few minutes I was forced to admit defeat, I asked to speak to someone in English.
When I'd waited quite a bit longer and explained to an extremely German-sounding person what I was after, she asked me to hold on while she got the details, and she seemed to be taking a fairly long time. And when she finally came back on the line she sounded a bit surprised, in that slighty shrill German way, and asked me when was the last time I'd put money on my phone.
I can't quite describe the level of angst and regret that took hold of my entire head at hearing this question. Evidently by making this torturous phone call, which had by this point drained me of such reserves of time and energy that I would have been pathetically grateful just to be told that the promotion was no longer valid, or just have someone blow a whistle down the phone and hang up, I had drawn the attention of the empresa to the fact that they had inadvertently granted a misplaced windfall to one of their least lucrative clients, and they were about to take my now cherished sixty five euros of credit away from me. For the second time in a handful of hours I, rather than fate, had seemingly just, as they say, totally pissed on my own chips.
I mumbled something as unspecific and incoherent as possible, and she buggered off once again to 'check out some details', while I waited, feeling as distraught as someone lost and parched in the desert who has just absent-mindedly upended his water bottle in an misguided attempt to pass his Maths GCSE.
And so to the end of the story, which is ... nothing. No more mention of the free credit; I gave her four phone numbers, because it turns out that I don't know five people in Spain with Movistar phones, which is a bit dismal when you consider that it's by far the biggest network, and that like in most European countries a population of forty million people somehow shares about 137 million mobile phones between them. And no less than two days later I now have, let's see, €42 of credit left, because our perceived need to be in constant and immediate contact with other people, and to be seen to be so, blinds us to the fact that we are paying ferocious amounts of money that we simply don't have for something that, at the level of landlines, is basically free, just like people who live in countries with clean drinking water who 'only ever drink bottled water', and whose boundless idiocy is a constant source of awe to me. But, you know, Richard, why don't you tell us what you really think for a change.
Ho hum. The moral to the tale, then, is don't look a €65 gift horse in the mouth, or don't tempt fate when it comes in the form of an serendipitous SMS. And speaking of free gifts, if anyone out there has it within their power to gift me a Maths GCSE, I would be humbly and profoundly grateful. Now how do I set up one of those wishlist things that girls have...
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At the height of the recent anti-Japanese protests, a lot of my students told me that they were going to Lushun for the weekend. Their explanations were a bit confusing, but I gathered that it had something to do with Japan. Lushun is a sensitive area, off-limits to foreigners. In addition to a huge naval base, it apparently features museum commemorating Japanese war atrocities - the whole peninsula was occupied by them in the 1930s and '40s. Naturally I assumed that they were going for some sort of protest.
I was completely wrong. They were actually going there to see the Cherry Blossom Festival - just like in Japan, they told me, when this flower blooms huge numbers of people go for a day trip just to take a look.
When China blooms it can look really beautiful. Out of the window while I write, I can see a large apple blossom tree blocking out the dull view that kept us depressed those long winter months. Let a thousand flowers bloom!
Another thing I'll really miss here is the parks in the summer. Without ever really seeming crowded, they teem with people, singing screechy opera numbers and playing those instruments that I never got round to learning the names of, playing badminton and that ubiquitous shuttlecock-kicking game that all Chinese people can play a thousand times better than me, or gathering under the trees for a game of Mah Jong, Chinese chess or cards. It makes for an enchanting and very friendly atmosphere - people seem so content that I often feel I've just blended into the background, sitting on a bench soaking it all in.
Just yesterday I was sitting watching someone's hilarious attempts to dislodge a mis-hit shuttlecock by throwing the same rock up into a tree again and again, when a young guy sat down beside me with a book. We had a fascinating conversation for about 20 minutes about the different books we were reading. At least, that's what I was talking about - it's quite possible that he was telling me that he'd just failed his driving test for the third time and was thinking of buying a canary.
You sometimes see odd sights in the park. In Beihai Park in Beijing a few weeks ago I was startled to see what looked like an entire army unit with their riot shields and truncheons drawn, all marching in formation behind two soldiers carrying between them a flat-screen TV!
The simple friendliness of some of the people who've been part of my everyday life these last ten months is a memory that I'll cherish. The woman who sells me pineapples and bananas, and who used to sell me strawberries until they were suddenly replaced by cherries, exhibits remarkable patience with my Chinese, and astonishing dexterity at cutting up pineapples. The old man in my local shop is also relentlessly enthusiastic about my Mandarin, even though all I ever really say to him is 'me want two beers/four eggs/one big bottle water/one small cold bottle water', thank you and 'Bye Bye!'.
And this cafe I'm sitting in right now is quite a find - friendly, efficient and cool. They also finally helped me to learn the word for cheese. Just a shame I only discovered the place yesterday.
好, that's it. I'm off to the beach.
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rwillmsen's journal