Meet the Chinese

"Follow that man!"
When you don't speak any Chinese and when the Chinese you meet won't speak any English, you kind of become a helpless child again. At the train station when you ask at which platform your train leaves from, they won't answer you but find a man who has ticket for the same train than you - and make the poor man babysit you to the train. It's great!
You don't have to worry about anything, just let the Chinese guys take care of you. This applies almost for everything. When you need a train ticket, you just ask someone to write the information down on a piece of paper in Chinese and hand it at the ticket office.
In a restaurant you just point at some food the person at the next table is eating and you usually get something great. At a foodstand on a street you just pick the stuff you want: this is how we've got some of the best food so far (more about food coming up).
This goes both ways. When the Chinese want something from you, they make it very clear without any common language. For example pictures: for some reason a Finnish girl and a Swiss man are the biggest tourist sight for the rural Chinese. Especially in places like the Tiananmen Square or the site of the Terracotta Army, you will most likely end up posing with at least one group of Chinese tourists. This is because the famous Chinese tourists attractions attract many tourist from outside the big cities. For many at the Tiananmen we were possibly the first foreigners they ever saw. Oh yes, quite many Chinese family photoalbums include now a Swiss and a Finn.

But there are of course also downsides in not speaking Chinese. You are not able to communicate with the locals in a deeper sense or to really meet people. You are kind of floating in a different reality and there's really no way to get a grip of the world of the Chinese people. Still somehow, adapting to Chinese culture has felt easier than adapting to for example in Russian culture. This is somehow strange because in Russia I mostly understand the language.
Or maybe this the reason why China feels so familiar - you just don't understand the weird stuff.
But there is more in that. For example, Chinese are easy to brake a smile for you (in Russia not), they're familiar with the concept of customer service (in Russia mostly not) and everything happens pretty fast and efficiently here (in Russia... well, NOT). In principle, they want to make money and as a tourist you have the money, so they will make everything nice to you just to get to strip you from your yuans. (Although we have found out that smiling doesn't always indicate happiness or friendliness, it can mean anything from shame to anger.)

After all, in China it's the same capitalistic logic that dictates the culture than in the Western countries. Capitalism is capitalism, even when it's labelled as communism. Same guy, different clothes.

Our trip started at an interesting time, one week before the 18th Communist Party Meeting where they choose new leaders for China. By "choosing" I mean, it's already decided. By "they", I mean the politbureau, not the Chinese people. Elections are non-existing on a national level - even the Chinese Idols winner seems to be chosen by politbureau style jury, not the SMS-voters like in other countries. It would have been too democratic, after all.
Ahead the party meeting the streets of Beijing were filled with civilians just standing around. First we had no idea why. Some were sitting on their portable camping chairs, some reading newspapers or watching soap-operas in their smartphones. They were young, old, men, women, but they all had one thing in common, a red band around their arms. In few English armbands it said "Security Service". You could see these people in every corner, especially in the business district of Beijing. Later we learned, these people were volunteers, who were recruited "to maintain harmony" ahead and during the one-week party meeting. Altogether there were 1,4 million of them. You could see the party meeting in other ways as well, but of course when in an autoritarian state like China, as restrictions. In some of the taxis, they had ripped off the window regulators in the back seat so the passangers couldn't throw any anti-communist propaganda flyers out of the windows. Even some food vendors on street were told to stay home during the meeting. What's the danger there? Selling anti-communist noodles? We also noticed that the Great Fire Wall got some new bricks on it. Normally it blocks Facebook, Twitter and several other sites (the latest major site that was blocked was the New York Times which revealed the vast fortune of the president Hu Jintao's family). But now even some travel sites, like Couchsurfing, were blocked. This made it even harder for us to meet the Chinese. Couchsurfing is not only for hosting people on your sofa but to meet the locals as well. But now we couldn't really reach them and discuss Chinese reality with the locals - of course that must have been the purpose of the freshly erected censorship. We could eventually reach the page by downloading the VPN connection which goes around the Great Fire Wall but still the censorship must have some effect on how keen the Chinese are now using the site.

This brings to what happened on our first Friday in China. We were in Beijing, the capital of the biggest country in the world by population, with lot of lust to go partying but no one to go with (and somehow the crowd at the hostel felt a bit young: strange because since the last hostel travelling we haven't aged a day). So we ended up in a international Correspondents' Club meeting in a Western style book cafe called the Bookworm. Really nice place by the way. That's also where we found the best travel reading ever, "When a Billion Chinese Jump" by former Guardian China-correspondent Jonathan Watts. The book made us change our travelplans dramatically (more on that later).
We already knew that my colleague Mikko would be there as well as some other Finnish journalists. Of course at the event we also ran into a half Bernese, half Pihtiputaa-ese girl Laura who works for Unesco in Beijing. These Swiss-Finns are all over the place! In addition to speaking German, Finnish, Italian (her father is Italian Swiss), French and English, she speaks Chinese. Finland, you gotta get these youngs talents back somehow, otherwise they just make more money for Switzerland!
Along the foreign correspondents, there were some Chinese journalists as well. We ended up chatting with a Chinese women called Sicily (here they rename themselves with Western names when they learn English). Sicily works for the infamous China state tv CCTV, which would be great fun to watch if it wasn't so sad. It's even worse propaganda than the Russian state channels (at least the English language service we have been watching). In one talk show they seriously discussed why the Koreans managed to break into the Western pop culture with the smash hit Gangnam style and not the Chinese (BTW that song is played on repeat everywhere you go here!). The conclusion was that "the Chinese have no understandment for irony". Well, if they would watch themselves speaking about for example of the island debate with Japan, maybe they would find some. Another great discussion we heard was in the morning show of CCTV: two Westeners in the studio discussed if it would be possible to live with less than a dollar a day. They kind of oversaw the fact that many do live so in China and debated that actually the Chinese don't understand how hard it can be for poor university students in Europe. The climax came when the other guy in the studio claimed that poverty is easier for women, because "when you are beautiful young women, men will take you out dining and buy you nice stuff". Öööh, when did prostitution became a priviledge?
Poor Sicily, I think she had to defend the  channel a lot that night at Bookworm.
All in all, the evening was nice, actually so nice that it must have been already after 6am when we headed back to our hostel from the diplomatic compound, where we were having a great, if slightly too long, after-party. We were leaving Beijing for Xi'an the next (or in this case the same) day so after checking out after few hours of sleep, we spent the day inside waiting for the rain to stop and our night train to Xi'an to leave. In this mental state (read hangover) many thinks are left unnoticed, so was this time.
This brings us back to the fact, that Chinese people are just great.

We were already in Xi'an when we noticed that one of our wallets was missing (we had money in several places because for our next destination Burma we have to carry the cash with us). The only place we could have lost it was a crowded bus on the way to the Beijing West railway station - or so we thought. You know, too many backbags, tired from the party and wet after the rain, you are not that alert any more. We already wished goodbye for the 300$ and a Swiss ID card when an email arrived. It came with a picture with all the coins,  dollarnotes and documents in the wallet - and with a question "is this your money?". The hostel staff had found it in the bar downstairs.
The  only problem was how to get the wallet back to us. We were already a long way down to Southwest of China with no plans to go back to Beijing. First, the hostel staff wanted to mail the money for us by some of the international express services. Turned out, none of them would deliver money. Only option was to ask somebody to pick up the wallet at the hostel. Luckily we knew Laura by now. Her boyfriend was coming for a visit so maybe they could collect our lost money and he could then bring it back to Switzerland. By the way, he is one of the few, if not only, rapper in the world singing in Rätoromanisch! The band name Liricas Analas translates more or less the "anal lyrics", or that's at least what we like to think.
So the lession of the story is, if you must loose you belongings when travelling, make sure you go drinking the previous night. That's the way to meet the people who will help you out of your troubles. And you will get into some, that's for sure.