I finally made it out to London after spending two months in England having seen nothing of it’s capital but the airport. In my defense, I was rewarding myself for getting the first of my four (!) assessments handed in on time, so I’ve been more than a little busy here in Brighton. Nevertheless, I held off on going until the weather turned nice, and on a chilly December day, I went for a casual stroll up the Thames.

It turned out that doing so took me on a walking path of many of the major sights in the city, including Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, the London Eye, the Globe Theatre (best part of the day), the Tower Bridge, and the Tower of London. As always, I stayed until my camera ran out of batteries and it got too dark for photos to turn out. But it was just the break I needed before I shoved my nose back into that grindstone, and I now have a big list of all the places I have to get to next time. I think I’ll start from the Tower and work my way north…

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Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t’was his intent
To blow up King and Parli’ment.
Three-score barrels of powder below
To prove old England’s overthrow;
By God’s providence he was catch’d
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, let the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!

On November 5th, 1605, Guy Fawkes and others attempted to assassinate King James I by blowing up the Houses of Parliament while he was inside. Despite what V for Vendetta would have you believe, this was not a political statement, but rather an attempt by angry Catholics to kill off the Protestant aristocracy. Needless to say they were captured, tortured and executed in a rousing public display, and the day is now celebrated every year here in England. It turns out they celebrate it the same way many countries celebrate; by getting drunk and setting things on fire!

Interestingly, while most of the political connotations of the act from 400 years ago are forgotten, the whole celebration smacks of anti-Catholicism. Oh sure, they have tar barrel races and fireworks and burn effigies of Guy Fawkes, and that’s good fun. But that’s all in addition to the burning crosses paraded through the streets, and the effigies of Guy are standing alongside effigies of unpopular modern figures, like the Prime Minister, police officers, and the Pope. No one seemed to be bothered by it, since they know the history and see it every year. But I’m from North America, where a burning cross is a symbol of something quite different. So it was more than a little jarring to see a night of revelry and family entertainment involving such blatantly hostile sentiment.

Don’t believe me? Here’s the (not often sung) second verse to that song above:

A penny loaf to feed the Pope
A farthing o’ cheese to choke him.
A pint of beer to rinse it down.
A faggot of sticks to burn him.
Burn him in a tub of tar.
Burn him like a blazing star.
Burn his body from his head.
Then we’ll say ol’ Pope is dead.
Hip hip hoorah!
Hip hip hoorah hoorah!

Real classy, England.

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It’s always a bit odd visiting archaeological ruins; unless you know all about the history, it just looks like a big pile of rocks. Stonehenge is different, though, because what makes the whole site so fascinating is that we don’t know exactly what it was all used for. It was built, fell apart, rebuilt, rebuilt again, and continually fixed up for two thousand years, then promptly abandoned in 1600 BC, and is included in everything from Arthurian legend to pagan rituals. But it’s all just speculation, and the uncertainty is the whole reason to see it. Sure it’s just a pile of rocks, and yet somehow, it isn’t.

Bath is much more clearly historical, as much of the city was built under Roman rule, and it’s still visible in the architecture and heavily elaborate public baths (no bathing allowed anymore). They’re fueled by the only natural hot spring in the country and the whole site has been built up into a glimpse at Roman life, which is really cool. The rest of the city is beautiful, but not as historical unless you’re into Georgian architecture, which I’m not. But your mileage may vary.

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Over the Sea of Japan, May 8^th

As I’m writing this on the plane back to Fukuoka, I think I can proclaim my vacation over. This morning inexplicably went off without a hitch, the only difference being my use of taxis instead of buses since I didn’t have time to accidentally catch the wrong one. The suit was ready right on time and fits… differently. At first I thought it was too small, then I realized that I’d been wearing off the rack suits before and they were probably intentionally large to allow for adjustments. After a few minutes, it was like finding out what suits are supposed to feel like. I should have gone earlier just so I would have had time to have more than one made.

Suit in hand, I decided to indulge my trip to the airport and caught a taxi to the mag-lev station. It’s only a seven minute trip from there to the airport, and with good reason; the train is magnetically levitated and hits an eye-popping 430 km/h! We barely even hit the top speed when we had to start decelerating to stop safely, and of course, none of my pictures turned out showing us at maximum fastness. I took the risk of cutting it close by mailing postcards and buying omiyage before locating my gate,

and almost missed my flight as a result when I misread my ticket and ended up at a gate on the opposite side of the airport. Thankfully I wasn’t the only late passenger, and they whisked us off to the plane with no time to lose. I won’t get back to my island for another few hours, as I have to go through the same multi-stage trip that I took to catch my flight so many days ago, only backwards.

And that’s all she wrote for China. Now is the time when I sum up what I thought of my vacation in a few short sentences, but nothing I write is ever short. And if you’ve read all of these entries so far you already know what I thought of China; it’s absolutely incredible. Everything I saw and did was so different from anything else, and there’s a huge list of things I wanted to do but never had the chance. Seeing the pandas in Chengdu, catching an acrobatics performance, all the historical sights in the non-major cities. Hell, I had the opportunity to get invited to a gong-fu school in Xi’an to watch them train, but there was just no time. I would love to go back and see what I missed the first time, but it will have to wait until I’ve checked a few more countries off my list. I’m still looking for travel buddies for my next excursion, since the one thing I really know about this trip is that it would’ve been even better if I wasn’t traveling on my own. But considering my choices were to travel solo or not travel, I don’t regret it at all. I can’t decide where to go next, either. Possible ideas are Vietnam, Mongolia, South Korea, Malaysia, Bali… the possibilities are almost endless. If you have an idea, let me know because I seriously can’t make up my mind, and the clock is ticking.

With that, I close this travelogue. Until the next trip!

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“Brick, you said this was a shortcut!”

Shanghai, May 7^th

It’s strange walking around a truly westernized city again after so much time in less foreigner-heavy places, including my island in Japan. In some ways it’s easier, as the average English level has increased and the city has a more Western street layout, making it much easier to navigate. But it makes it incredibly obvious how different and unrepresentative Shanghai is compared to other cities. I can’t say whether it’s a positive difference or not; people who live here can probably be more objective and knowledgeable about the Westernization of China. If you know any, ask them what they think.

As expected, I did do a whole lot of walking yesterday, but it turned out to be an absolute pleasure. I had time to kill before I got my memory card back, so I just walked around the neighbourhood and out to the nearby Bund. It’s the name given to the entire boardwalk area of the Huangpu River that cleaves the city into the Pixu (old) and Pudong (new) areas. I thankfully had my camera-phone with me, so I just wandered around taking pictures for around two hours. It’s a fascinating area, filled with street vendors and couples and families just walking and enjoying the sights. No one seemed to be in a hurry to go anywhere, which was quite a change from the rush-all-the-time mentality I’d been surrounded by everywhere else. The whole street is lined by dozens of different architectures and billboards and office buildings, and its position right in the center of the city seems perfectly fitting for the hub of activity it has become. I was so fascinated by the area, I ended up returning to get my memory card and heading straight back out to get even more pictures.

I also decided to head over to the Pudong area to see how Shanghai is developing. I thought it felt Western on the west bank, but over there it’s like being back home. Department stores, restaurants and souvenir shops were all either Western-focused or at least had multi-lingual signs. I even found a Hooters restaurant of all things (Asian waitresses at a Hooters seems like a contradiction, wokka wokka). The trip to the far bank involved going through some kind of trippy light-and-sound show tunnel that was probably artistic to whoever designed it, but bewildering and surreal to everyone else. The ticket through also got me into a deep-sea creature exhibit (depressing, it was so lackluster and half-assed that the surviving creatures on display were visibly uncomfortable in their tanks) and an exhibition on Chinese sexual history. That was actually more interesting than I expected, as it showed a bunch of sex-related artifacts and writings from the past several thousand years of their culture. Here’s their intro:

Part 1: The sex evolution

There are two instincts and basic needs of human life, one is food, and another is sex. This two elements greatly influence upon the development of society. As for sex of human beings, there are two characters, one is natural as well as animals, another is cultural which is different from animals. The natural character demands that sex would be opened, not shackled, the cultural character demands that the human sex life would be scientific, healthy and ethical, not unconventional and unrestrained. To combine this two characters means the civilized development of society.

Pretty deep stuff, duuuude. I love historical stuff like that, despite studying very little of it formally, and it was cool to see how the perception and knowledge of sex evolved and how it was viewed in ancient times. I mean in ancient China, sexual education and health dealt not only with safe sex, but with learning how to better satisfy your partner and yourself. Now that would’ve made high school health more interesting!

Once night fell, I hit the old side of the bank again to get pictures of the riverside lit up at night, and to sample the famed Chinese street-side food. I love anything in the form of ________-on-a-stick, and that’s what most of it was, including some crazy spiced beef thing that was shockingly good. The competing seller even tried to convince me that my seller fucked the cows he cooked to steal my business, but I was unswayed. An attempt to find a restaurant listed in the Lonely Planet proved fruitless, but led me to another hole in the wall where I scored some delicious crispy noodles and pork. Finally, I headed for Zhapu Lu for more tasty snacks. I didn’t find any, but I did try my hand at bargaining down some souvenirs at the stores.

Surprisingly they were adamant about their prices and refused to budge, even when I was armed with a friendly Chinese speaker who tried to help me plead my case. I decided to pass and try my hand the next day; that would turn out to be a great decision. Back at the hostel I met Katie from Manchester, who was leaving the next morning, but we chatted until an angry Japanese man staying in our room walked in and said, “I sleep now. Be silent.,” at which point we relocated to the bar. Other than being woken up at 4 AM by the three loud Chinese guys also sharing the room, I slept like a log.

Today I had a similar plan, only instead of wandering the Bund, I would be wandering the People’s Square and the Yuyuan Bazaar. With no breakfast (saving my appetite), the first step was the Shanghai Museum in the square, since I had the time and a ticket was only 5 yuan with my very expired student card. I’m glad I went, as the sculptures and bronze and jade artifacts on display absolutely shamed the China section of the Royal Ontario Museum, which was all I had seen before. From there I had a decision to make; I wanted a suit at the cloth market, but I would need to get more cash before I did that, and at some point I wanted to head to Yuyuan.

So which do I do first. I opted for the money, which meant a subway trip back to the hostel area to visit the Bank of China (it should’ve been my first stop for maximum efficiency, but I assumed I’d find a bank near the museum). The bank was sadly closed, but I decided to experiment with my bank card in a Citibank ATM, and against all odds, it worked! Cash in hand, I headed for the Yuyuan Gardens and Bazaar.

I didn’t get there until earn 4:00 after the money search, and since the gardens closed at 5:00, I decided it wasn’t worth the 40 yuan and stuck to the bazaar and markets that had sprung up around the gardens. They were worth the trip alone, the kind of place professional shoppers dream about. I’d been saving my hunger for some highly recommended steamed buns at the bazaar, and they were totally worth the wait. It’s gonna be hard to go back to foreign-style Chinese food after this trip.

The rest of the time, I just explored the area and picked up a souvenirs for my family and myself, including shirts, hilarious Engrish magnets, and fake Communist propaganda posters. The market was really tiny and packed with tourists, which I expected, and that seemed to make the shop owners much more open to doing business with foreigners. It turned out that waiting on last night’s purchases was wise, as I bargained everything at this market down to much more reasonable prices. I have no doubt I could have gone even lower than I did, but it was getting late and I still had one more stop to make.

The Dongjiadu Cloth Market was bizarre, a huge building sectioned into hundreds of cubicles packed so full of fabrics of every material in every colour and pattern that there was barely room to stand. After scouring the floor I managed to find a place that could not only fit me for a custom-made suit, but could have it ready for pickup the next morning! I’d heard that I could get a cheap suit made in Shanghai and made it one of my goals to find one, but I didn’t think it would be as seamless (groan!) as it was. They took my measurements and details so fast, I had time to order a custom-fitted shirt as well and pick up a new belt and some ties on my way out the door. After spending years wearing off-the-rack unadjusted badly fitted suits, I can’t wait to see what a suit is supposed to feel like. I decided to take the long way back and caught a bus to Nanjing Road, the big Western strip.

Lit up like Vegas, it wasn’t something I expected to see after the cities I’ve been to. It’s almost a symbol of what China is trying to be to foreigners, as opposed to what it’s like now in so many places. It’s also where all the “You want massage?” guys hang out; I had wondered why I wasn’t being accosted everywhere, but apparently they adopted a hive strategy of advertising. I happened across a ramen shop and figured my students would get a kick out of it, so I ordered the most Chinese/Japanese dish I could find; Peking Duck ramen! Frankly, it was underwhelming. Japanese people think ramen is a Chinese dish, but everyone else thinks it’s Japanese, and they do it so much better it might as well be.

I was forced to pack it in early due to my schedule the next day; wake up, check out, pick up my suit, and book it to the airport to catch a noon flight. Speaking of which, all this beer has had the intended effect of making me sleepy, so I’m out for tonight to pack. In our final chapter, we find out whether I make it back to Japan, and my final thoughts!

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