Meet the Winner

The park ballroom dance practise wasn't the only shameless dance we have seen in China. The next day we took the 20-hour train from Chengdu to Kunming further Soutwest of China. As always, we were the common joke for the other passangers. When the conductor was checking our passports, some other passangers grouped around her and insisted seeing our passports. The next thing we saw was people circulating our passports and laughing out loud. We couldn't figur out what was so funny, our faces in the passport photos or the fact that we didn't come from the same country (this has been often hard to explane. "What, Switzerland? But she said Finland."). Anyway, one girl got especially fascinated by us - or to be honest, by Thomas. It was 3pm in the afternoon but she seemed to be already a bit wasted by the beer she had in her hand. Five minutes later she was suddenly in our cabin chatting with Thomas (me she totally ignored). "What's your name? Do you like to dance." And then "Let's dance!" Before we had time to react, she had put on Chinese pop on her cellphone and started... well... kind of lapdancing around Thomas (me still sitting next to him). The show attracted also other passengers around our cabin. Now the joke was on her (or maybe still on us, who knows). Thomas as a gentleman tried to stay as polite as he could in that situation. "You dance really well, but maybe you can continue it later", he said, already blushing because of the unwanted attention. Finally, the girl understood the dance was leading nowhere and left. We decided to lock the door for the night - just in case. After all, it was 11.11. - the famous singles' day in China. Two ones are supposed to equal two and two ones made the date especially lucky.

Also in the city of Chengdu, meeting the Chinese went hand in hand them being a bit  tipsy. Like we all know, speaking languages gets easier during the dark hours and only way for us to communicate with the locals is to speak English (or Russian, like with the guy in the park). This brings us back to Friday night in Chengdu when we tried again our luck to meet the locals.

First we had dinner at the Tibetan neighbourhood of the southeast Chengdu which hosts some authentic Tibetan cuisine. After all, the province Sichuan (or Yunnan) is the closest you can get to Tibetan culture without the special travel permit you need for going to Tibet. Chinese visa is not enough, you need to be at least 5 people from the same country travelling together or a married couple to even apply for the special permit. China has strenghtened the travel permission to Tibet because of the recent tensions. Especially during the party meeting there have been problems at the Tibetan areas also elsewhere in China. At least according to the Free Tibet organisation, already several Tibetan monks have set themselves on fire during the past days to demonstrate the Chinese influence in their region. They know that the world's attention is now on China because of the party meeting so it's an effective time to promote their cause.
But China being China, this wasn't going to be allowed, at least not in the heart of Chengdu. We have seen an impressive amount of police officers in every Chinese city we have visited (serious environmental problems and the unequal distribution of wealth have incresed the demonstrations in China during the past five years. China now spends more money on maintaining the inner harmony, e.g. guarding its own people, than for defency) but the security was rised to a new level in Chengdu's Tibetan neighbourhood. There were police cars and minivans filled with police officers everywhere. Four cars in one crossing was a minumum.
Even in Beijing the security forces were alerted. One soldier attending the daily flag ceremony at the Tiananmen square was carrying a fire extinguisher. Just in case there was some Tibetan in flames.
In Chengdu, the Tibetans hanging out in front of their small shops or restaurants looked at the patrolling security forced amused. Indeed, there is something funny about how much China has to protect itself from its citizens. After all, it is supposed to be the People's Republic of China.

Despite the "alarming situation" (not) we had a lovely dinner in a small Tibetan restaurant. The food was good but as imaginary as you can imagine the food is up in the mountains (Tibet is mainly located up to 4000 meters). In other words, it was yack and lamb meat in diffent forms, usually wrapped in a wheat dough or in a dumpling. Good but nothing special.
While I was using the restauran toilet (and almost surprised a monk peeing), Thomas made friends with the Tibetans dining in the same place. The only message they got through was that our next destination Kunming was a bad choice for some reason. At least they seemed disappointed when we told that - maybe we should have travelled to real Tibetan villages in Sichuan instead of sticking into Chengdu neighbourhoods. Actually, it was our original plan.
Before the trip started we wanted to travel to some Tibetans villages in Chengdu or Yunnan, which are pretty popular destinations among tourists. But then, on the road in China, I started the book mentioned earlier "When a Billion Chinese Jump" by Jonathan Watts. (Already before the trip many China-specialists in Finland recommended the book but I could only find time to buy it in Beijing.)
The book starts by describing what tourism has done to traditional Tibetan villages, like Lijiang and near by Zhongdian (now Shangri-La, the new name mainly being a marketing trick; there's no undisbutable location of Shangri-La). These former Tibetan villages have been largely rebuilt for the use of tourism. The sensitive nature is under serious threat if not already destroyed. The traditions have been bulldozed under four-star hotels or changed into money-making tourist attractions. Like my friend Aaro described in his travel blog, http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/aerotrevel/1/1249085682/tpod.htmlin some places, like in Litang, you can even pay to attend the local "funeral". In the mountain villages the tradition is to cut the flesh of the dead person open and bring the body up to the mountain for the birds to eat the remains. Despite being a logical way to treat dead ones (from earth to earth and so on), a group of tourist taking pictures of birds tearing the flesh seems more like a mockery than preserving real traditions. So we decided to skip these "traditional Tibetan villages".

A lot more eco-friendly way of travelling was to stay mainly in the big cities. If there are already 5 million people living in the city of Chengdu, what harm could two extra tourist do? After all, the "real China" is now based in cities. For the first time in history the urban population has outnumbered the rural population in China.

This brings us back to how we met the tipsy Chinese on our night out in Chengdu. After the Tibetan yack meat feast, we took a taxi to the famous bar street of Chengdu. With no language in common, the taxi driver confirmed the destination by demonstrating drinking.
Yes, that's the place!
There were bars lined up along the river that crosses the city. Every second place played Gangnam style on repeat so we chose one which didn't. It turned out to be a good place.
As a couple you usually end up drinking alone but not in this place.
Before even finishing the first beer we had made about five new friends, all of then local students of the Sichuan university. First we toasted with the guys at the next table, two minutes later they were sitting next to us, bringing more beers and trying to force us smoke non-filtered cigarettes. One of them could speak some English so we learned some important stuff in Chinese. Our new friend Yang teached us how to say "we are all brothers" in Chinese because "Mao said that" (no idea any more how to say it). And this was a guy wearing a smart shirt and an expensive-looking watch around his wrist.
Teaching Chinese was funny only for some time so we had to come up with new ways to communicate with our new friends. The common language was based on what we found in the Lonely Planet phrasebook. Luckily the Chinese seem to love games - and there were some dices on the table also this time. LeeLee (or LeiLei) teamed up with me and Yang with Thomas. It can be hard to learn new game without anyone explaning the rules (especially when the game is based on bluffing) but after around 30 rounds, we got the rules. No idea what the game is called but it was great! (Have to play that with Beat and Nicole in Burma.)
Of course, me and LeeLee kept winning - and not because she was cheating all the time. But it may have helped.

Meet the Dancers

"USA? UK?"
The guy couldn't or just wouldn't speak. He stopped us in the middle of the People's Park in Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan. Instead of asking the questions, he drew the words with his wet sponge brush on the ground. I answered him by drawing with the brush FIN. That broke him into spontaneous cheering.
"I'm from Russia", he wrote next, in Russian this time.
It turned out that the man came from Russia's eastern part, near the Chinese border but had lived in St. Petersburg - that's why he knew Finland. "Happy to see you here in China", he wrote and left as fast as he had come.
Five minutes later we saw him joining a local fashion show - on stage. Probably uninvited, although it seemed the models posing on the red carpet were as out of place as he was.

This wasn't the only strange thing happening in the park that day.

The city is supposed to be famous by its teahouses but even more interesting was what happened around the teahouses in the parks. The Chinese-Russian character was just one of them.
First we thought there was a special set of events in the park happening that Saturday afternoon because of the on-going Communist Party Meeting. After all, the shows scattered around the park were a mix of pseudo-ethnic costumes and Mao uniforms with patriotic singing and flag waving. The amount of communist flags was so impressive that we sure the party must be party-related. But no.
"This happens every Saturday, or actually everyday", Mr Lee told us in fluent English. He was just one of the Chinese who came to speak with us in the park. Especially the parents were eager to force their children to practice English with - the future generations' language skills are much more impressive than the ones of our generation.
Mr Lee explained us that the shows were organised by different neighborhoods councils in Chengdu. This also explained why the loudspeakers were competing with the volume - each group wanted to be the biggest and noisiest one. It seems, that parks are kind of common backyards of the people, which is understandable in big cities like Chengdu where people have only little or no space and small apartments.
In addition to communist hymns, people were singing karaoke, zipping tea at the cozy teahouses, playing badminton or rowing on unsteady boats in the pond of the park. And of course taking pictures together with the only tourists in the crowded park (read us).
But the most impressive thing were the ball room dancing groups scattered around the park. Middle-aged and older Chinese seem to gather to parks on their free time just to dance to the music played by some old cd-player placed in the corner. We saw these dance groups also on the streets of Beijing just enjoying the music after the traffic slowed down and the sun had set. Even some young men with no sense of rhythm were dancing solo to slow music with zero feeling of shame. This was something great for a Finn to see and for the Swiss as well.

Luckily we ran into our special Chinese-Russian friend again in the park. We were totally astonished by what we had seen and he had an explanation for what was going on in the park. He took his sponge brush once again and started drawing.
"Hullu=idiot", he wrote and pointed at communist singers and dancers around the park. This time in perfect Finnish with Russian translation!
(he must have learned some Finnish while working in St. Petersburg)

We thought he was the crazy one, but in reality, he may have been the most sane one there.

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.