The end is near

I’m writing this last part of my travel blog on the train from Guilin to Beijing. That is around 2000km and a good example of how developed China’s infrastructure is. Besides driving yourself on the highway network which is not really an option for this kind of distance, there are flights, bullet trains and slower sleeper trains that go overnight. While ticket prices for bullet trains and flights converge for long distances, sleeper trains become an ecofriendly, cheaper alternative, though far from the South-East-Asian backpacker’s paradise cheap. China has been out of this league for quite a while. The upside is, standards in sleeper trains are so good that you don’t have to be adventurous or desperate to use them. When I took the standard “sleeper” class in India, I could travel 1000km for 10€, sleeping on a barely upholstered berth covered by dirt-stained articifial leather that would make you sweat instantaneously if it came in touch with your bare skin. Since no bedding was provided, you’d better bring a sleeping back. There was no AC but big, noisy metal fans attached to the ceiling, that, were you unlucky enough to get the upper berth, would run right next to your head. What can I say, the first time it was terrible, the second time I slept like a baby, you can get used to more things than you’d think. In China you don’t have to though, the berths are small but comfortable, bedding provided, AC/heating exists and people are actually quiet after the lights are switched off at 10pm.

Guilin is built around the jagged karst mountains

Sun & Moon pagoda, illuminated accordingly

The last few days were a disappointment in some way, but I have only myself to blame. The weather in the Guilin area has been outright crap for the last weeks with no improvement in sight and yet I wanted to spend four days there. Should’ve just stayed two days more at the beach in friendly Beihai. I entered the train after a cooling thunderstorm in Beihai at still around 20 degrees and exited only a few hundred kilometers north at Guilin station to 5 degrees and rain. Very much like Berlin in winter, with the difference that not all places here have heating, e.g. my hostel for the first night. Deciding to postpone showering the next morning, I quickly made my way towards Yangshuo on the quest for warmth and also some scenery (but mostly warmth really). Even if you’ve never heard of Yangshuo (阳朔), you have definitely seen photos taken or pictures drawn from the area (LIIIIINK). Its karst landscapes were the inspiration for generations of Chinese ink painters and truly are a beauty to behold. Even the miserable clouds added to the aesthetic and mystery of the jagged hills. It goes without saying that where there are sights, there’ll be crowds in China, but go away from the area under service by the tourist coaches and all you see are a few Westerners who also had the idea of renting a bike.

To me, this was the first time I’ve seen real Chinese countryside. I’ve been to smaller cities before, poorer parts of China, but never to actual villages. The Yangshuo area is probably not very representative (if any place can be) for China since tourism guarantees a decent income for most people, but even here one thing was strikingly visible: The absence of the middle-generation. All I saw was kids and old-people. 250 million people in China are migrant workers, easily more than a third of the workforce. The lengths to which parents go to guarantee their kids a better future are stunning and it’s very normal for Chinese children from the countryside to grow up with their grandparents, seeing mom and dad only a few times a year. It’s this type of dedication, poor peasants working in dismal manufacturing jobs in faraway cities to improve their and especially their children’s life a little, that brought China forward in the last decades. These days jobs have become better, salaries rose and mobility too, allowing parents to travel home more often, but the fact that many kids grow up away from them hasn’t changed. This is in big parts due to the Hukou (户口) policy that severely restricts the freedom of movement for Chinese citizens in their own country. You’re free to move and work wherever you want in China, however, most public social services to you and your family are only available in your own designated district. Imagine moving from a small city in East Germany to Munich for a job opportunity, only that you’ll have to send your kids to a private school now (if you can afford, else they’ll have to stay with their grandparents) and get no benefits from the municipal administration whatsoever.

This policy helped China as a whole because it kept people in their place and under control. Think of the slumification of metropolitan areas in countries like Nigeria or India. These developments didn’t make people’s lives better, neither did they help the cities those people swarmed to. The downside of China’s approach is quite obvious: Whereas in European countries the state does what it can (and in the case of Germany fails badly) to counterbalance the effects that growing up under less privileged circumstances has on children and grant the same opportunities to everyone, China doesn’t even attempt to. Be born in Beijing or Shanghai and a good life lies ahead of you. Even if you’re too dumb or lazy to perform well in the excellent local school system financed by the high taxes levied in your area, you could still marry a rich partner who wants to get the Hukou for your locale (this is one way to change your Hukou. Work is another, but rules vary depending on municipalities and of course the more desirable cities are, the harder it is to get one). On the other hand, be born poor in a small village in Gansu and well – stay there or maybe spend your best years as a guest worker in a mid-sized city. All I can say is that I’m impressed by the pragmatism and stoicism with which the people accept the crooked rules of the game and make the best out of them.

Actual vacation

My last 10 days on the road are more backpacking like I used to before I had friends I could visit in other cities. I think I mentioned before how annoying I find it to just hop from one sight to another, so I restricted myself to one Chinese province. I chose Guangxi for two reasons, first because it was close enough to Hongkong to not fly there and second because it has beach and warm temperatures even in February. When I was younger I really liked winter in Germany, but in the meantime I realized how much more pleasant tropical climate is. Maybe winters were really colder back then so that you’d have some beautiful snowscapes instead of the grisly, grey, depression-inducing mess that is Berlin from November until March.

My first station from Hongkong wasn’t in Guangxi yet, but just across the border from Hong Kong. Shenzhen, a fishing village 40 years ago, now a city of more than 10 million and the world’s manufacturing hub for IT hardware, is just a metro ride from Hong Kong’s centre. What it lacks in history it makes up with its high standard of living. It’s quite green and friendlier than most Chinese megacities feel. I only had an afternoon there, which I spent in a converted warehouse area (that might as well be located in London or Berlin) and my favorite corny tourist attraction so far, 世界之窗 or “Windows of the World”. That’s a theme park that has replica of hundreds of famous buildings and monuments in different scales, with the center being a 70 or so meter high Eiffel tower. But there’s also the Statue of Liberty, the Cologne Dom, Tower bridge and so on. It also has a dinosaur section and a bar area that is built in the style of a typical “European” inner city, including a church, cobble stones and authentic ancient-looking street lanterns. As my architect co-scholar said after seeing a replica of a church in a shopping mall with a big LCD-screen instead of an altar: “Die scheißen sich nix”, which is a friendly way of saying they don’t give a shit. I like that. The ingenuousness with which things that appeal are simply copied. It really is a sign of respect and admiration. Chinese like Europe and especially Germany for its architecture, lifestyle and nature. It’s just that sometimes they idealize and disparage it at the same time as a romantic, cute, old-fashioned thing from past, more of a display in a museum than an actual place with actual people living their lives there.

Also note the two towers of the world trade center in thiss model of New
York that looks like the city has been abandoned for a century

The next stop after Shenzhen for me was Beihai, a rather small city (1,5 million inhabitants) at the southern coastline of Guangxi, not very far from the border to Vietnam. Tourist sights are rare, but the weather was perfect, my hotel had a pool and was next to the beach and I needed some time to work and study anyways. I liked it so much that in fact, after checking the weather forecast for Guilin (8 degrees, rain), I decided to stay four days until the 17^th. For one night however, I took the ferry to Weizhou Island (涠洲岛), a rock formed by volcanic activity about 40km off the coast. Just a few years ago, it was barely known and a hidden gem, but with more and more Chinese tourists able to afford trips to the south, the tourism industry discovered the place and relentlessly developed it. I can see why many expats in China take the next flight out of the country if they want to go on vacation. Travelling in China can be fun, interesting, entertaining, but it can’t be relaxing. Unless you’re willing to explore very far off the beaten track, you’ll always have crowds of Chinese around you, with a surprising number of noisy children, given that the birthrate here is not a lot higher than in Germany. Along with the tourism come its unsavory side effects: Touts and charges for everything. It’s great that an otherwise underdeveloped island gets the chance to develop a local economy, but being treated like a money fountain that has to be squeezed as hard as possible just doesn’t leave you with pleasant experiences (and it wasn’t cause I was the only white person around, Chinese tourists were treated with impartial greed). I managed to have fun nonetheless, meeting some young Chinese who showed me how to properly arrange a seafood dinner (go to the market with the fresh catch, haggle hard (don’t be white), go to the restaurant, haggle hard, get fresh oysters for 40ct/piece) and showed me the island on scooters. I also went jetskiing by myself. It’s exactly the type of blowhard, adrenaline activity you’d think it be and hella fun. After another night in tropical Beihai, I’m now on the way north, slowly moving towards the cold reality of Beijing in February.

So chill and full of nice cafés and bars

You can have your (Chinese) written with Caramel. Taste is so-so,
but a great shot for your instagam collection.

A global hub retires

Hong Kong at present is a place in suspense. Gone are the days where the city was the gateway to China and Asia’s financial hub. It’s still a global city and has its very own special feel, but nobody really knows how much longer, and you get the sense of a place that has lived through its golden times. Many young people are moving abroad or to the mainland to look for work because the immense cost of housing makes Hong Kong unattractive to all but the highest-earning. The central Chinese government doesn’t seem to see any benefit in continuing to give Hong Kong its special status and thus squeezes its space with a mixture of competition from the neighboring cities, (regressive) reform and infrastructure projects to further connect it with the mainland (background info: Hongkong was returned to China from the British in 1997 under the “one country, two systems” premise, presumably until 2047. Currently the Chinese government gives the impression that it’s not willing to wait another 28 years until full reintegration). A new high-speed railway links it to Shenzhen and Guangzhou now, the two biggest cities in the so-called pearl river delta area. The world’s longest sea bridge was also opened last year, connecting Macao, Zhuhai and Hongkong over a distance of about 40km. A new set of policies made clear that the times when Hong Kong was one of the freest places on earth are over. Advocating independence can get you into jail now and “disrespecting” the Chinese national anthem will soon be punishable too. A foreign correspondent’s visa got cancelled last year on grounds of hosting an event with an independence activist. A mixture of strategic buy ups by mainland investors and self-censorship lets the media appear increasingly toothless. For instance, nobody in the allegedly free press would dare to propagate independence or expose high-level corruption within the communist party for fear of retaliation. On top of all that, tourism is a boon for the local economy but threatens to suffocate the city. In one year, Hong Kong has an influx of 65 million people, that’s nearly 10 times its population. Most of them are on short trips from the mainland, the improved connections help funneling through more people than ever before. Me, being there during Chinese New Year, could witness what that means. Streets in shopping areas and around tourist sights were barely walkable because of the sheer amount of people pushing, standing and queuing. I stopped going to any places that were mentioned on travel guides or blogs because it was safe to assume that coaches with hundreds of tourists would already be there. The good thing about Chinese tourists though is that they usually stick to the top spots and don’t bother exploring too much, which means if you go off-track just a bit you can still get a hassle-free experience.

Just a normal crowd in central Macao waiting to for their turn
to take a picture with the cities landmark

Why not building a mall that looks like Venice, put a channel in it
and then hire Italians as gondolieris, including the opera-singing?

So altogether Hong Kong gives a fairly sad impression and I sympathize with every local who is mourning the days when their city was rightfully admired as the (capitalist) pearl of the East. Those days won’t return, but it’s not like everything is going down the tube either. In fact, I enjoyed Hong Kong so much that I stayed seven nights in total, with a three-day break in Guangzhou for the Chinese New Year celebrations. It still has its very own character, this mixture of extreme wealth and poverty, incredible efficiency even when things look chaotic on the surface, big South- and South-East-Asian minorities and beautiful nature just a few footsteps from the center. 

Just a few kilometres away from Kowloon...

Old villages in rural Hongkong, most of the buildings are abondoned
and slowly decay

Talking about efficiency, Hong Kongs infrastructure is jaw-dropping. This might sound like a nerdy city planner thing to marvel at, but everybody who’s been to Hong Kong would agree. Combining the metro and the minibuses that go virtually everywhere where there are roads, cars are completely obsolete and not even faster. With its many, hilly islands separated by the ocean, the topography is not really conducive to creating a megacity, which makes the neatness and elegance with which highways, skyscrapers and railway lines are laid upon one another all the more impressive.

Kowloon, the island opposite to Central Hongkong with its famous glistening skyline is the grubby, lively part of the city where my hostel was. It looks like a steampunk fantasy at night, with neon lights, claustrophobically narrow lanes and house alleys, hookers and every inch of public space occupied by street vendors, food stalls and people. You can’t get more urban than this. There’s a portion of Indians and Pakistanis significant enough to give the place this peculiar smell of spices that I otherwise only know from India. The lack of space might sabotage the housing market, but it also helps create a buzzy atmosphere that I often miss in the vast, newly built cities of China. I also enjoy the shabbier sides that come with so many people living together on little space - if pretty and clean was my thing, I wouldn’t have spent the last 4 years in Berlin.

What happens when you have no space, but many people who want to buy
apartments.

Of course, places are just as good as the people you meet there, and Hong Kong had the best people I met on this trip so far (part of the reason is certainly that I was by myself for the first time). The city might not be Asia’s global hotspot as in the past, but the people are still very international and have a global mindset. I met a French guy who’s built and run clubs all over East Asia, a Chinese working for a pro-mainland propaganda channel in Hong Kong to get the citizenship (sometimes biographies can really be contradictory) and my lovely hostel reception lady is a local multilinguist who’s doing Chinese-Spanish translation as a profession during the day and for some reason enjoys nightshifts at a reception desk, going back to Spain to finish her master in interpretation in a year or so.

I came to Hong Kong not expecting much, for once because I constantly read about how integration into China is killing its vibe and also because I often heard it is a soulless finance hub. The latter is certainly not true, the former can be felt and might get worse, so it’s recommendable to see this bustling place rather soon than late.

Now for a quick excursion: As a welcome interruption to my personal travel plans, I got invited by my co-scholar Karin to join her and her family for Chinese New Year. With her in China and most of the family living there anyways, her parents flew in from Germany for holidays and new year celebration. New year celebration can be read as – you guessed it – eating. Several days in a row, with friends and relatives, someone was always keen to invite us to his favorite restaurant, from morning to evening, interrupted by brief sightseeing sessions. Since we were in Guangzhou (one hour by train from Hong Kong), the food consisted of Dim Sum mostly, which is not only steamed stuff, but actually more of a classifier for all sorts of small plates of food. Typical Cantonese cuisine stands out for its focus on seafood, the fact that it has sweet dishes (desserts in the European sense have no tradition in China) and that, if you wanted, you could eat everything, whether that be monkey brain or ox penis. The Cantonese will know a way to make it consumable. I stuck to more common dishes, which didn’t prevent me from a minor food poisoning. The funny thing about that episode is that not only me and a few other DAAD friends who were invited felt sick, but also Karin’s family. I couldn’t really enjoy seafood dim sum since then.

Besides eating, hongbaos (= 红包 / red envelope) are the most essential part of every Chinese New Year. They’re given from the old (working) generation to the young and contain, unsurprisingly, money. It’s not that easy to determine the right hongbao rate for someone, since it depends on a range of factors (how close is the blood relationship, how old, already earning some money, has a partner or not and sadly often also whether it’s a boy or a girl). We were told by Karin that first of all a scholarship doesn’t count as income so we can still count ourselves on the receiving side and second as foreigners the rules of Chinese courtesy don’t apply to us in a strict sense, meaning we neither had to bring hongbaos nor presents for her family. We all received some though, making me feel a little guilty towards Karin’s family, who was incredibly hospitable to all of us.

It's a bit tacky, but seriously one of the most elegant structures
I've ever seen - Canton Tower

Not Hongkong but Guangzhou (wins the dick comparison for the higher buildings)

Fuck, more food?!?

Being with a Chinese family, I was consciously watching Chinese TV for the first time in my life. That has nothing to do with the program being Chinese really, I haven’t watched TV the last years in Germany either. Watching CCTV1’s new year show gave me an idea of what historians call “modern Chinese nationalism”. There’s still some reverence for Mao and dutiful, ritual affirmations of communism, but the most important message these days is how beautiful, powerful and bigger than life the PRC is. There’s virtually no reasoning, just pure grandeur and emotions (which really triggers me, but then again, I’m German). People in traditional costumes dance together while video projectors show huge pictures of either pristine nature or symbols of national strength. A few people will sing something along the lines of “I love my China, my fatherland, we all work together for a better China, go China blabla”. While Beijing undertook some serious efforts to project this kind of stuff on an international stage in the past, it is becoming increasingly savvy in more subtle approaches that work better with a foreign audience. It’s a shame, some of the funniest propaganda videos were the fruits of former attempts. It seems the Party decided the two things that are supposed to hold China together are consumerism and nationalism, let’s see how that goes.

Now before I indulge too much in the little details of the last week and half, let’s call it a day. One more blog entry and I’m back in Beijing, which has kind of become a symbol for my normal life here in China. Until then, I’m gonna try to keep the °C as high as possible, preferably in some place in Guangxi that has access to the sea.

Tokyo

Just like in Taiwan (and in my holidays more general) I tried not to rush in Japan and make Tokyo my surrounding rather than a destination that needs to be explored. Of course I did many of the things that are on a travel bucket-list, but besides I also worked on applications for two days and spent lots of time just strolling around neighborhoods. That’s a luxury I want to savor as long as possible, I guess with a regular job and 4 weeks of holidays per year you’d think twice if you want to spend one fourth of that crashing at a friends apartment with no plans whatsoever.

Japan is definitely one of the weirder places I’ve seen, but then again, not as weird as you’re sometimes made believe. Besides children’s books of a literal buttface and soft-porn animes in every convenience store I also found Tokyo to be an extremely calm, clean and pleasant city, especially given its population of half of Germany. Except for the famous areas that you usually see on photographs (Shibuya, Harajuku), there’s not more light pollution than in Berlin or London. The air is crisp and clean like in no other big city in Asia I’ve seen, so clean in fact, that on good days you can see Mt. Fuji 130km away. And the Japanese’s extreme courtesy and respect for rules makes even the rush-hour mania in public transport endurable. The efficiency of public transport is incredible, each day millions of people take trains from the suburbs to the city center and return within a few-hour time window – and it works. It can get very, very crammed, but it works. As a tourist, as long as you have google maps (this app deserves accolades and eulogies and I’m happily giving all my data to google as long as they continue to improve this service and let me use it for free) getting around by metro is a cakewalk. I don’t know about the time before smartphones though, if you’ve ever seen a map of the Tokyo urban train services, it’s one huge clusterfuck. Travel times in Tokyo are actually not that different from Berlin if you live in the center, since the city is fairly centralized. Only when you’re on the way out, you realize how crazy big it is. When I took the train to the airport, the first 30km were only buildings, no forest, no farms, no countryside (and I didn’t even cross the city, I started from the center).

Everything you see on this picture is sea and city, all buildings

The famed punctuality is a true cliché in my experience. I took long-distance buses three times in the last 8 days and each time they didn’t deviate more than 5 minutes from the stated arrival time. It certainly helps that Tokyo has adventurous, wound flyover highways cutting through its core. My assumption is those were built at an earlier stage of Japan’s development when tunneling was not feasible and roads/cars were more important in city planning. They don’t really look appealing from down below, but if you’re inside a vehicle driving on them you get a pretty nice view of the surrounding area.

Now what did I actually do? I went to Mt. Fuji and no matter how many mountains you’ve seen, it is a breathtaking sight. The mountain is just so smoothly shaped with its perfect snowcap, you might think it’s man-made (or god-made, if you prefer religion). And since I already was in an area with volcanic activity, I got naked in an Onsen, a Japanese hot springs bath that seems to be the equivalent to the sauna for Finnish people (also in its significance for social interaction – but obviously Japan is a little more prudish and separates men and women).

I ate Kobe beef. As a steak lover, this was a wish coming true. Seeking a compromise between affordability and taste, I opted for rumpsteak, which has great taste but not the fatty, extremely fine marbled texture for which Kobe is famous. It was still an amazing experience, but maybe I should’ve pushed my worries aside and just gotten the real thing. Then again, 100€ for 100gr of meat? Well, I’m sure I’m gonna be back in Japan at some point, probably with more money and less time to spend it.

I got quite drunk in a skybar. The Peak is on the 41^st floor of Tokyo’s possibly most famous hotel – the Hyatt in Shinjuku. Confusingly, the peak is not the actual peak, the actual peak of the building is home to the New York Grill, which is a fairly random name, but make no mistake, this is the place where many of the scenes of the cult movie “Lost in Translation” were shot. It’s also unaffordable. The Peak however has an amazing happy hour, where a reasonable amount of money buys you into 3 hours of all-you-can-drink liquor/sake/beers/wine just in time for sunset. This kind of pricing is maybe not the healthiest incentivizing, but it gives you a good economical rationale for drinking more than you should. I started to really like sake this week, especially after Charlotte took me to a bar only serving that. The options and tastes are innumerable and go way beyond what I knew from my prior experiences.

I don't know if filling up the cup until only the surface tension of the sake
keeps it from leaking is a thing in general or specific to this bar 

I went to a concert of my favorite band who just happened to be in Tokyo at this time. No J-Pop, that’s a cultural experience I was happy to skip. The band is called Jungle, comes from London, plays very listenable and danceable Electro-Soul/Funk and does some of the best live shows on this planet. I was really happy to see people actually dancing and moving along, after my decision to never again go to a concert in China. Chinese people have the urge to film every second of the performance while standing still and holding their smartphones over their head. It seems to be more important to show everyone you went there than to actually enjoy yourself.

I visited the Ghibli Museum. Studio Ghibli is Japan’s Disney, but it really is soooo much better than Disney. Its movies are known for appealing to children and adults alike, having very profound conflicts at the bottom of their storylines and don’t go down the easy, predictable path of most Western blockbusters. The co-founder and most popular director of the studio Hayao Miyazaki might be the best animator that ever lived. This video explains a lot about his approach to filmmaking, his recurring subjects and why his characters have a degree of humaneness that is usually not seen in characters played by humans. Personally, I also really love his depiction of Japan and Europe, wavering between timeless fantasy and a beautifully romanticized version of the time of the industrial revolution. The museum was nice too, a bit focused on children and Japanese visitors, but nonetheless entertaining with some creative tributes to the history of animation. But who cares about that or the many other minor things I did last week, go watch a Studio Ghibli movie!

The Tokyo nightlights picture is a must have