Looking Out To Sea

As promised, it’s time to continue the record of our recent trip to China. My brother lives in a new high-rise flat on the edge of Xi’an, in an area still under massive construction. In fact the bottom floors of his building weren’t even finished. I’m not sure if they built all 26 storeys from the top down.

Inside the house are my brother, his girlfriend and five (!) cats. The tale is that he used to have two cats but one died. He bought a companion kitten for the lonely cat that was left… but this kitten turned out to be pregnant. This kitten, illustrated here, is now known simply as “Mama”.

And she’s no longer a kitten, obviously, because she’s got three of her own — Milk, Chocolate and Milkshake, who are white, black and a mixture of the two colours, respectively.

Life revolves around the low table in the living room, and in drinking tea.

This is the same style of tea-drinking that my brother treated us to for my birthday when he visited Scotland last year. It involves lots of heating cups and rinsing the tea and very fast infusions (seconds). The tea is poured into tiny little cups, like espresso mugs. It was very different from British tea-drinking — and the ceremony (well, the process anyway; there was no formality) was something that became quite comforting for all its strangeness.

Near the flat there were a couple of supermarkets which gave us our first glimpse of Chinese consumerism. Oddly, many of the shops reminded me of Chinese supermarkets in the UK. I wonder if the same holds for other immigrant supermarkets? Are all the Polish convenience stores on Leith Walk just like they are in Poland?

It’s amazing how little one can determine from some packaged products. You’d think many mass-produced items would have simple pictures to let you know what you’re dealing with but that isn’t actually the case. And any English description which did appear could be suspect to say the least:

We saw many great Engrish slogans, and t-shirt watching became a full-time occupation in the crowded parts of the city. The glossy branded products were also not above some awkward or ill-advised English text:

Not really in the spirit of the One Child policy, is it?

Helen and I recently went to China. China! It’s a long way away and my brother’s been living there for several years, so I don’t see him often. We visited him in Xi’an — but first things first. We took a lot of photos there and I’m slowly putting them all online. I’ll try to blog about them as they appear.

We left Edinburgh airport at some unreasonable hour in the morning and arrived in Charles de Gaulle airport for six hours of hardcore sitting. I read my book and Helen slept for much of the time, though we took some time out from this rigorous schedule to pay through the nose for a bottle of Coke. Even €3.80 wasn’t enough to dampen the spirits:

Then we hopped on the second leg of our journey to Beijing, which was longer and less comfortable. Ten-and-something hours later we landed in an extremely foreign country. The words were not related to any words we knew, and the writing even less so. Somehow, through gesture and confused looks we got a bus to Beijing West train station and then onto the sleeper train to Xi’an.

The restaurant car was our first attempt at prolonged transaction and ordering a meal. We got some things on plates and a couple of beers, and that was all we could really ask. The staff and train crew sat and smoked underneath the no-smoking signs.

I’ll spare you the picture of my bleary-eyed face as we pulled into Xi’an the next morning. Just be assured that I had really needed that sleep and that the train could have been stationed in a steel works all night and I still wouldn’t have stirred.

Outside the train station in the bright lights of another strange and bustling city, we managed to call my brother’s mobile and get him to meet us. He lived with his girlfriend, Joy, at the edge of town (er, city) which was an hour’s ride away on the bus.

I will introduce you to his house in the next post!