run rabbit run

The question is what did I make of the motherland? In three simple words, I loved it.

The food was amazing, Beijing was a mixture of modernity and history, it has the pomp of a Communist capital, but the rare peaceful moment. Shanghai hasn't changed since the days of concessions except the buildings are much taller and the money goes into Chinese pockets now. Hangzhou is achingly beautiful, a tourist city which is surprisingly quiet. Wuzhen a mixture of typical poor countryside with one of the most beautiful places on earth.

It met a lot of my expectations, it broke a few others.

The little amounts of freedom taken away, it isn't anything like the West would have you believe, the police aren't hustling you from the moment you wake up. After living in Germany for nearly a year, I get the feeling its actually worse in a lot of cases in the West. The great firewall is more a pain less a way of censoring free speech (I direct people to fu ce ma). Police presence is everywhere, but I don't have the oppressive feeling I get whenever I see the polizei pulling up in Munich.

The poor are as poor as I imagined, there are ghettos in China, but there are favella in Brazil, there are the slums in South Africa, there are the council estates in South London. In reality I don't see how any of these places differ, crime rates high. Walking back from east side of Wuzhen I wasn't sure if we were going to get kidnapped, robbed of our stuff and then thrown into a pit to be buried. I've seen story lines in Chinese TV shows where things like this have happened, you take that with a pinch of salt, but when the local host tells me not to speak any English you have to wonder. My girlfriend was pretty aghast at these kinds of places, she even said she hated where she grew up in a Hutong in the north of Beijing. I suppose with my western eyes and keen camera skills I found it a bit romantic, being close to the locals which is something missing in the red brick estates all over the UK. Her question to me was 'what chance do these people have? They have no chance at a good education, I was lucky'. I didn't give an answer but thought about South London for a few minutes and the Dizee Rascal song World Outside.

On the flipside there is extreme wealth which I think is justifiable, Alan always says we shouldn't look at the past and take too much into account of what our fore fathers did, but after more than 100 years of foreign occupation and the stealing of Chinese wealth, it's only fair that the Bund in Shanghai is now faced by Pudong making more money than all the colonial powers did. This is the economic miracle of China itself, the British through trial and error found if the Chinese if left to their own devices in a free market economy, would chase every dollar as if it was water to man lost in a desert. Although this leads to the pressure you get when you want to browse a store, from both ends its the same, in Xidan on the north side of the road there is a massive expensive modern shopping malls selling designer brands and south side there are massive cheap shopping malls selling fake stuff. In both places you get pressurised into spending money, in the north the assistant followed us around the store until we walked out in disgust, in the south one assistant saw us looking and bargained against himself so we would buy something, while another said it costs this but if you want it I can make it cheaper.

It's been a long article, but take away the food, the photo ops, seeing the places in person, the chance to meet my girlfriends family, the holiday has been a chaotic place for me to learn something new and try to dispel a lot of misconceptions.

In a sentence, it was amazing my beautiful eggs.

throwing my hands up in the air

I think a lot about my time in Kyoto last year with Govey, it had a lasting effect on me, it's a place that reaches down inside. I didn't have the ridiculous notion of wanting to move there like some backpackers do when they end up in south east Asia so they are away from their lives etc. Maybe it was the smell of the incense you bathe in at the temples and all the places of natural beauty that their shrines are built around. I tell everyone to visit there whenever they mention Japan.

Susu was hoping to show me something similar in China because of my endless rattles about how great Kyoto was. Wuzhen at night was beautiful, but it also suffers from the fact its not too easy to get to (some would cry out and say that's perfect for an adventure, I wouldn't) and also it suffers very badly from the 'other side of the tracks' syndrome.

Hangzhou on the other hand, for me even in a terrible mood (a combination of not being able to get cash, a runny bum and feeling generally ill) was a beautiful place, its a place where I knew I had written a poem in my past not realising it was about a place I had yet to visit. Racking my brains I couldn't remember which piece of verse I was thinking about but that wasn't the point. The West Lake is a quiet beauty, even if there are a thousand tourists all huddled around, the Chinese is whispered. The mist moves across the lake past the mountains, bringing things in and out of focus. I saw the lotus leaves although sadly not in bloom, ache gently on the skin of the water as if they were long legged birds walking.

Dotted around the lake are several notable buildings, one I entered had a beautiful garden, this was the hidden China I thought had disappeared down the spout and up a chimney of progress and the future. The stone statues of the garden over grown with the thick kind of moss that can't be removed even with the strongest solvents. My dad told me that each of the places had special names and meant something, this was lost on me at the time.

The Tiger Spring was the last place we visited before Returning for Beijing. I expected it to be one of the few things that are free in the world, but it cost 15 yuan, the main gate opens to a path leading on a gentle slope to the left of a small pond fed by a small brook. The brook runs parallel to the path filling up different ponds with different plants and even trees. Past a statue of a pair of tigers the path gets steeper up some steps and then the spring, An emperor came to the spring tastes the water and said that it was the third best spring in the world. I haven't been to many springs in my life and neither am I an emperor, but it did taste sweet and clean. Past this was a monastery and something out of all the epic Wushu films I have seen in my life this was something that unrolled in front of me.

Is Hangzhou my favourite place on earth, I can be honest and say no, but it is in my top five of places I have seen.

Please enjoy the weeping willows my beautiful eggs.

train under water

It's rare to think that you might not wake up the next morning, it's even rarer for you not to care if you do or not. I suppose it was the first moments of blue sky in Shanghai, the sun coming out and the umbrellas, while I'm carrying a few pieces of luggage, foot hurting because of this that and the other. I feel like I'm going to keel over any moment.

All that forgotten (including the death in the morning by some Chinese countryside bandits), when you look across the beautiful town of Wuzhen. My girlfriend wanted to take me there especially, she knew I loved Hong Kong for all it's city like apparel, but she wanted to show me some of old China.

I don't know the ancient history of the place, but recent history is that it was an ancient city now renovated and now open to the public. Thankfully it hasn't yet succumbed to the mob of tourism (which it will). It sits between Shanghai and Hangzhou, on stilts which raise it above the river. I imagined people catching fish in the day and eating it with the family for dinner. During the day it looks like something from a Chinese Wushu film. But it's during the night that it made a real impression.

There are a lot of beautiful places in the world, many I still have to visit, Kyoto as everyone knows has been my favourite, Wuzhen over took it in an evening.

Hope one day you will see it my beautiful eggs.

god loves his children

Onto a third city, well village, this is to soak something which is slowly disappearing here in China, well in actual fact its disappearing across the world.

As people move into the cities, we see villages become smaller and lose their quaintness. Then people realise that they can move cities out into the country. Franchises are the ones with money and they move into these proto-cities and we end up with clone towns. I know that's a generalisation and actually more prevalent in the UK. But in China, like a lot of places in the world, people are trying to live the dream in the city.

It isn't like the times of the emperor with beggars dying on the street, the people are actually very well fed. For me the eye opener wasn't the strength of the upper classes that can afford the Gucci hand bags or live the bourgeoisie life or even the mass of the lower classes, peoples faces tanned and darkened because of working long hours in the hot asian sun. the most interesting thing I have found is the upper middle class and then way they live. The closest thing I can compare to are the people working in the city in London, except without Esquire snobbery (although, you will be surprised the lengths people will walk around some of what the Japanese would call Bukuramin, even if you were of a lower class).

Susu's cousin is pretty well into her career working as a Marketing Manager for a large clothes brand (it shocked us more because we didn't know which brand until we waited for her in her office). Her English was great with an international twang to it, I'm used to the accent because of where I work, but it had flecks of slang and colloquialisms people are used to from me. A very modern girl, but the life she was living was fast paced, well paid and always looking over the Pearl Delta to other horizons. In the moment I was chatting to her over some glass noodles, two things came to me. The first was that modern China was the city, as I have said disposable income for the upper middle class is increasing, secondly the country bumpkiness of myself and my lifestyle I realised I have been in Europe a bit too long and the culture is ingrained into me. Although that isn't a sign that I will be up and leaving any time soon, I just realise that you have to see the good and bad of the world to learn that you shouldn't always stay where you are.

See you soon my beautiful eggs.