Category: Uncategorized

It was red nose day, when people are encouraged to do silly things to raise funds for charity. These guys were dressed up as Doctor Who and his Dalek and were apparently all over campus, and were interviewed by journalism students glad of a story (we are only half-joking when we tell students that if they can find a story in Preston they can find a story anywhere). I gave them money, but really, they couldn’t find a proper bow tie somewhere?

I don’t go out on St Patrick’s day as a rule, but it was my friend’s birthday, and we went for a drink after work. Apparently, Preston celebrates St Patrick’s day like everyone else, drunkenly, and in silly hats. The beer isn’t green, though, it’s Guiness, sold for a pittance. We left early, before it got too insane.

No, not China, but Plungington road. I assume this house is inhabited by Chinese students, maintaining the tradition of banners on the door for new year. It’s kind of sweet, but also sad – I realised when I saw it how homesick and lost the Chinese students must sometimes be – Preston is different to China.

Home again, to the first signs of spring, and the worst jetlag I’ve ever had.

The past week kind of vanished in a haze of work and sleeplessness, so not only did the photos I took in China not get uploaded (Flickr was blocked), but I barely took any pictures myself.

This is Martyr’s park in the centre of Guangzhou. It is packed on weekends, although this was early, with people walking, practicing dance and martial arts, playng games, and generally living their lives. This was on the steps facing a courtyard where there were two separate dance classes, a group of young women with swords practicing something that could be fighting or dancing, a class of young boys learning something strenuous from a hard disciplinarian, and a group of young women whose babies wandered freely among all the rest. Still, apparently the newspaper was more interesting to at least one person.

Paradoxically, Japanese pop culture has a following in China, and cosplay is fairly common. I’d not seen it before in Guangzhou, but on Xiamen island we wandered into the end of a session. The kids were congregating outside the ‘excellent toilet’ near the restaurant in green wigs and fancy costumes, and coming out in everyday clothes. This group was still performing, though, something that appears to be Hamlet, I think. Unfortunately, Ophelia came off her incredible shoes and tumbled down the stairs. She managed to walk away, though, with some help from Hamlet and the photographer.

This is the notice board outside a recruiting agency in Guangzhou on a Saturday morning. The place was packed with people trying to get a glimpse of the notices and hopefully a job. China’s economy is still growing, but not fast enough to provide employment for all the young graduates, and cities are full of these scenes – educated young people desperate for a break. In the Middle East, this same circumstance has had spectacular consequences, but not so far in China.

I eat well when I travel to Guangzhou. The food is cheap, varied and my colleagues there delight in exploring the various options available. Guangzhou is a major international trade city, so the options are considerably more varied than Chinese. In fact, the local food style, Cantonese, is the one I hardly ever eat when I’m there: it tends to the bland and [forgive me] slimy and is heavily reliant on local fish. I’ve seen that river, and what goes on upstream, I’m not eating things that live in it.

This is Korean food, a new restaurant in the city, and it was excellent – spicy and crunchy and tangy, just to my liking. And no, that’s not raw chicken, it’s one of the five or six kinds of cabbage we were served.

The campus in Guangzhou has a large number of sculptures – a garden of them, in fact. My colleagues there joke that they got a job lot of socialist memoriabilia – there are several Marxes (Karls, not the brothers), several Maos, a handful of Chinese heroes (Lao Tzu, Confucius, etc). The effect is rather odd. This knockoff of Rodin is not actually in the sculpture garden itself, but slightly away from it.

Bicycles are still a major form of transport in China, especially on university campuses, where students can’t have cars and staff seldom bother. Every building has a rack of these outside. The favoured bicycle in China is still a traditional beast,upright with a chain guard, a basket and three gears. Some even have a built-in umbrella holder, a useful addition.