Fish in the sky
Oct. 31st, 2005 08:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deviHello! I am back and not dead. I'm in Dublin and I feel dislocated from everything. I keep almost saying 'arigato gozaimasu' to people in restaurants and shops, and falling suddenly asleep at 9pm as though I've been hit on the head with a cartoon hammer. I'm going to keep up the travel journal all the same, even though it's like those times when you write postcards, can't find a post office, accidentally bring them home and then post them from your home town with your own country's stamps on. Or is that just me?
Thank you very much, o kind person who bought me two more months of paid account time. I'd like to buy you a drink but you're anonymous. Maybe I'll pay it forward by doing something for some randomly chosen person instead, and who knows, by some weird coincidence it might turn out to be you?
Since Friday I've helped Ivan move house (he came home to a voicemail saying he had to be out by Saturday noon!) and been to Gaelcon, but thereby hangs another post. From tomorrow I'm doing Nanowrimo, but I'm cheating - most of the words will go to finish the current book-thing of which there's already 37,000 words written, and I'm counting anything fictional or potentially floggable/submittable towards the total. Good luck, anyway, to all you other frantic scribblers, who I'm sure are doing it properly.
It's probably all a distraction from sorting the next bit of life out, which is difficult because Japan has kidnapped my brain. But I hadn't even got to Japan in the journal yet, had I? We'd only just arrived in Shanghai...
We had to fly down there because train tickets to anywhere in China were not to be had, due to the Sodding National Holiday(tm). Beijing airport was mad, probably also due to the SNH(tm). Chinese domestic flights are given only a few minutes to fill before they have to be in the air. You get to your gate with half an hour to go but it doesn’t say Shanghai, it says Guilin, and people are actually sprinting through the boarding gate with jackets and ties flapping. The last person clears the gate maybe a minute and a half before the plane should be in the sky, and maybe now your flight number will come up? No, it says Chengdu, and an attendant is hanging another flight number on a board, figure by figure like on Countdown. The Chengdu passengers start running to their plane, which scrambles up into the air with unseemly haste, and then the board says… Xi’an. Someone tells you your gate’s actually upstairs. You go upstairs. The board there says Dalian. You wait and wait and your flight time comes and goes, then they send you downstairs again…
It’s all a bit much before you’ve had your coffee. Then Carol Vorderman hangs up your flight number at last and you run to board your plane, where they serve you a sachet of mushy green stuff labelled simply "Aviation Food".
When we stepped out the front door of Shanghai airport the heat felt like someone had dropped a brick on my head. We gave in to the first taxi tout who accosted us. He drove us down Yan’an Elevated Road, cruising between old art-deco highrises and newer, uglier Communist-era ones. Every apartment had its air conditioner fan, like the square carbuncles of some weird rash.
We were staying at the Dongshi Hotel, a dull little business place but right in the middle of everything. It was on Fuzhou Lu, a tall, narrow, noisy street jammed with revving motorbikes and meat-on-a-stick sellers. Laundry hung from every window up above, flapping in the hot wind. It (Fuzhou, not the laundry) led straight to the Huangpu River and the Bund, the British-colonial promenade street that runs along the river. So we dropped the bags, lay on our beds gasping while the aircon started up, and finally – just before sunset – felt up to some exploring and headed out along the Bund.
Which was packed solid with national holiday revellers, strolling, shoving, posing and laughing, playing with inflatable toys and wearing glow-string round their necks. Vendors were selling food, lightsticks, unidentifiable flashing things and foam rubber hamsters that capered on strings and the chance to have a Polaroid taken of yourself by the river, all going ‘hello hello hello! look look!’. A cool damp breeze was blowing down the river, which was churning with boats, and behind them the sunset was reflected on huge glass towers. People were flying kites – some with flaming tails of gold foil, and a pair of sinister-yet-cool ones in the shape of big black catfish. We tried to work out how the atmosphere was different from Beijing. Maybe it was just the national holiday, but it seemed that things were more relaxed here – more fun.
Then, just as it got dark, we came to a bit of the riverfront which was roped off. Inside the roped area sat maybe four hundred police, cross-legged, in rows, motionless and all facing the same way. We watched them being deployed, marching in step, to different bits of the Bund, to join streams of police marching from other places. After a while there seemed to be more police than civilians, although no one seemed disorderly or even at all drunk. Maybe the ‘although’ should be a ‘so’. I don’t know.
We had dinner on a tied-up boat, ‘The Waterborne Restaurant of the Bund’, which served things like
I don’t remember what I had. But the music was country. There was a song about someone’s old dad who has a US flag on his front porch to remind him what’s important in life, and then one about a man who loves it when his wife asks him to buy her something expensive, because it means "love is on the way". (Ew.) All around us the lights were coming on in the skyscrapers, floor by floor like erupting geysers of light or haphazardly all over the face of the building, and the advertisements bloomed out of the dusk in intense red and blue. On the Aurora building there were ten-storey-tall tropical fish swimming among coral, then a giant girl eating Dove chocolate.
The steel guitar twanged away. Suddenly it all seemed hilarious. Not just sitting listening to country on a boat in Shanghai, but living in the sort of mad world where we think nothing of glancing across a river and seeing two-hundred-foot-tall women eating sweets.
Pictures are here. (There’s more on the Great Wall gallery as well, if you’re interested.)
Oh, and happy Samhain, happy new year.
Thank you very much, o kind person who bought me two more months of paid account time. I'd like to buy you a drink but you're anonymous. Maybe I'll pay it forward by doing something for some randomly chosen person instead, and who knows, by some weird coincidence it might turn out to be you?
Since Friday I've helped Ivan move house (he came home to a voicemail saying he had to be out by Saturday noon!) and been to Gaelcon, but thereby hangs another post. From tomorrow I'm doing Nanowrimo, but I'm cheating - most of the words will go to finish the current book-thing of which there's already 37,000 words written, and I'm counting anything fictional or potentially floggable/submittable towards the total. Good luck, anyway, to all you other frantic scribblers, who I'm sure are doing it properly.
It's probably all a distraction from sorting the next bit of life out, which is difficult because Japan has kidnapped my brain. But I hadn't even got to Japan in the journal yet, had I? We'd only just arrived in Shanghai...
We had to fly down there because train tickets to anywhere in China were not to be had, due to the Sodding National Holiday(tm). Beijing airport was mad, probably also due to the SNH(tm). Chinese domestic flights are given only a few minutes to fill before they have to be in the air. You get to your gate with half an hour to go but it doesn’t say Shanghai, it says Guilin, and people are actually sprinting through the boarding gate with jackets and ties flapping. The last person clears the gate maybe a minute and a half before the plane should be in the sky, and maybe now your flight number will come up? No, it says Chengdu, and an attendant is hanging another flight number on a board, figure by figure like on Countdown. The Chengdu passengers start running to their plane, which scrambles up into the air with unseemly haste, and then the board says… Xi’an. Someone tells you your gate’s actually upstairs. You go upstairs. The board there says Dalian. You wait and wait and your flight time comes and goes, then they send you downstairs again…
It’s all a bit much before you’ve had your coffee. Then Carol Vorderman hangs up your flight number at last and you run to board your plane, where they serve you a sachet of mushy green stuff labelled simply "Aviation Food".
When we stepped out the front door of Shanghai airport the heat felt like someone had dropped a brick on my head. We gave in to the first taxi tout who accosted us. He drove us down Yan’an Elevated Road, cruising between old art-deco highrises and newer, uglier Communist-era ones. Every apartment had its air conditioner fan, like the square carbuncles of some weird rash.
We were staying at the Dongshi Hotel, a dull little business place but right in the middle of everything. It was on Fuzhou Lu, a tall, narrow, noisy street jammed with revving motorbikes and meat-on-a-stick sellers. Laundry hung from every window up above, flapping in the hot wind. It (Fuzhou, not the laundry) led straight to the Huangpu River and the Bund, the British-colonial promenade street that runs along the river. So we dropped the bags, lay on our beds gasping while the aircon started up, and finally – just before sunset – felt up to some exploring and headed out along the Bund.
Which was packed solid with national holiday revellers, strolling, shoving, posing and laughing, playing with inflatable toys and wearing glow-string round their necks. Vendors were selling food, lightsticks, unidentifiable flashing things and foam rubber hamsters that capered on strings and the chance to have a Polaroid taken of yourself by the river, all going ‘hello hello hello! look look!’. A cool damp breeze was blowing down the river, which was churning with boats, and behind them the sunset was reflected on huge glass towers. People were flying kites – some with flaming tails of gold foil, and a pair of sinister-yet-cool ones in the shape of big black catfish. We tried to work out how the atmosphere was different from Beijing. Maybe it was just the national holiday, but it seemed that things were more relaxed here – more fun.
Then, just as it got dark, we came to a bit of the riverfront which was roped off. Inside the roped area sat maybe four hundred police, cross-legged, in rows, motionless and all facing the same way. We watched them being deployed, marching in step, to different bits of the Bund, to join streams of police marching from other places. After a while there seemed to be more police than civilians, although no one seemed disorderly or even at all drunk. Maybe the ‘although’ should be a ‘so’. I don’t know.
We had dinner on a tied-up boat, ‘The Waterborne Restaurant of the Bund’, which served things like
- Goose’s stomach
- Fried croaker in squirrel shape
- Small row inside the cow New York rice
- Fried now the cover hand over the rice
I don’t remember what I had. But the music was country. There was a song about someone’s old dad who has a US flag on his front porch to remind him what’s important in life, and then one about a man who loves it when his wife asks him to buy her something expensive, because it means "love is on the way". (Ew.) All around us the lights were coming on in the skyscrapers, floor by floor like erupting geysers of light or haphazardly all over the face of the building, and the advertisements bloomed out of the dusk in intense red and blue. On the Aurora building there were ten-storey-tall tropical fish swimming among coral, then a giant girl eating Dove chocolate.
The steel guitar twanged away. Suddenly it all seemed hilarious. Not just sitting listening to country on a boat in Shanghai, but living in the sort of mad world where we think nothing of glancing across a river and seeing two-hundred-foot-tall women eating sweets.
Pictures are here. (There’s more on the Great Wall gallery as well, if you’re interested.)
Oh, and happy Samhain, happy new year.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-10-31 09:32 pm (UTC)So hey- will you be in Dublin during December, perchance?
no subject
Date: 2005-10-31 09:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-31 10:31 pm (UTC)Whoo!
(the one I hear you're being both Hardcore and Very Silly to get to)...
It's nice, every once in a while, to do something unexpected and silly. Besides, if you think about it, the jet lag will actually work in my favor- at 2am I'll still think it's 9pm! :) I can party with the best of them!
Granted, I'll be useless Sunday, but I doubt people are expecting me to, for example, operate heavy machinery or put on a production of the Pirates of Penzance.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-31 11:20 pm (UTC)I can man a tractor or a mining robot mineral...
Nah.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-01 12:26 pm (UTC)As in "argument" or as in "of skittles" ? Hopefully the former just for the rhyme, though I'm not sure I'd want to eat the resulting rice.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-01 01:41 pm (UTC)