Qingdao

Undone by insomnia, travel fatigue, dehydration, and a nasty chest, sinus and urinary infection-combo, I stared out at the sea as if looking at the shifting surface of another planet. It had been so long since I'd seen the sea I'd forgotten how alien it can look. Mist enshrouded it; seaweed skirted it; white gulls cried and swooped down into it; colours of briny-brown, mustard yellow, jade green, electric blue. I crunched down a pebble shell beach, took off shoes and socks, and stood in the shallows like a holidaying pensioner, the cold water pulling at my ankles and caressing my toes, then coughed up some of my own alien yellow substance and added it to the water.

The old district of Qingdao is a pretty jumble of various tasty influences, seemingly thrown together and stirred brusquely without recipe. There's a pier (Zhang Qiao), with a long wooden promenade like many English seaside resorts, except, unlike in Brighton or Weston Supermare, there's a pagoda at the end of it selling Chinese tourist junk (you can see it on the Tsingtao beer label). Rugged mountains in the background, sandstone and knobbly, provide the city with a horseshoe-shaped shelter, rather resembling Nice or Cannes on the Cote d'Azur. Battleships and submarines lie like cold dead fish on the surface of the water, which reminded me of The Hoe, in Plymouth. Add to that the fact that the Germans occupied the city for many years, giving it not just its famous Tsingtao beer, but also its old-town architecture - brash castles where the Governors once lived, surrounded by narrow streets of yellow sandstone houses with red roofs - before then being handed over to the Japanese after the Treaty of Versailles, then you can appreciate my confusion. Where, exactly, was I? I was still in China, I knew, because there were thousands of Chinese people all around me, many of whom still, reassuringly, came up to me, garbled 'Hahlaow!' then walked off laughing; but in many ways Qingdao did not resemble the China I knew, loved, and hated.

Was that a good or a bad thing?


A Strange Dream


That evening Danuka gave me some strange brown powder, along with bright green and yellow pills that looked like M&M's, alleging them to be full of calcium, vitamins and Chinese herbal remedies. I sank into a spluttering, stuttering sleep, having the strangest dreams, of which this is an example:

Tam and I are eating in a typically noisy Chinese restaurant. We're the only foreigners there. I'm tucking into one of my favourite dishes, beef noodles in chilli sauce. It's impossible to eat this dish without slurping it, making a nasty noise your mother would have told you off about as a child. On trains, at roadside stalls, or in restaurants all over China, however, it's a common noise:

'Sssssshhhhhhlllllleeeeeeooooooooo-puh!'

So I'm slurping and sucking my noodles, making a bit of a mess. However, every time I suck and slurp, every Chinese person in the restaurant starts tutting at me in a disapproving manner, shaking their heads and making faces at each other. This is making me really self-conscious. I try to eat my noodles silently, picking up a few strands at a time with my chopsticks then biting into them, but I still make a noise. I can't help it! And to cap it all, every Chinese in the place continues to spit and gob, clear their nasal passages with a howk onto the floor, and sook and slurp away until their hearts' content. Surely, if this is acceptable, then my slurping of noodles should not be criticized?

Worse is to come as Tam goes to the toilet. Now, toilets in China are nothing to write home about, not unless you're an Environmental Health officer on a busman's holiday, anyway. They are of the squat design, stink to high heaven, usually have filthy floors covered in human waste, paper and water, and brown disgusting stools stuck to the porcelain which the cleaner, if there is one at all, will need dynamite to shift. When Tam returns a few minutes later, the whole restaurant goes up in arms, complaining about the smell. They refuse to finish their meals, or even pay for them, threatening to walk out if something is not done about the horrible stench left by the foreigner. They accuse us of having no manners at all - we slurp our noodles rudely and leave a terrible smell in the toilets - all the time clearing their noses, spitting onto the linoleum and shouting at the top of their voices.