Looking through Guido’s Eyes - Part 1

Looking through Guido’s Eyes

Guido is a friend of twenty years who is twenty years younger than me. He is well travelled in Europe and English-speaking parts of the world but has never been to Asia and has never been to the tropics so his reactions to what he sees in my part of the world should be interesting. He is also a very curious naturalist.

So where to go?

Obviously start with the store of, now, nine storeys of shit that nobody could possibly want to buy. There must be about 500 shops in this one arcade. I underestimated the man. Within ten minutes he wanted to buy two sparkly (and I mean sparkly) purses shaped like a hare and a goldfish – costing about 50 euros each.   Fortunately his wife, his mother and his sister are not entirely devoid of taste so he had no-one to buy them for.

Fifteen minutes and three floors later he decided that he must have a lamp shaped like pak choi (Chinese cabbage) being towed by a horse. He won’t dare take it home so I have a suspicion that he will go back and buy it and it will end up in my apartment.

The fungus shops were a bit of an eye-opener. Basically these are for any variety of dried mushroom-like things in huge bags. Essentially it a wholesale market targeting restaurants and hotels but if you want a lesson in the variety of stuff that Chinese eat people go this is the place.

We had imbibed a small amount of alcohol so the next day began with lunch with Jennifer and Qin Gang. Lunch was excellent. Most of you won’t believe me but the mushroom and tofu dishes were generally agreed to be the best.

This turned into an afternoon visit to an “old village”. Most of this old village was, of course, built last week. When G & I suggested it we hadn’t known that Jennifer and Qin had been many times before so J & Q G wandered off and left Guido and I to wander round.

WTF is this? A bloody theme park with illuminated fairy grottos. But we started going into a building or two or three or four and in fact there was lots of old stuff – mainly bronze ware going back 3,500 years ago but also porcelain, wood carvings, paintings, calligraphy and jade ornaments. Actually rather good. Guido was rather taken by a Bodhisattva with a Jesus like halo.

Guido was taken with the balance. Keep the kids happy with fish feeding and silly things to do whilst having a chance to look at a lot of interesting stuff. And you were paying for this balanced mixture.

We stopped for dinner in the middle of nowhere. G & I were probably the first “white” people in there for a year or few. The food wasn’t spectacular but it was the highlight of G’s day. He should get out more.

To Hong Kong.

7 million people in quite a small area – the most densely populated part of the world they claim. But there are some areas that are not developed. At all. So off we went looking for this. Fog on the mountain, roads not paths and that sort of stuff conspired against us. But Guido is a naturalist and an ace spotter so we saw lots of birdies – excellent. It is an indication of Guido’s travels that he had never seen black kites – which I have seen in several parts of the world.

Finally we escaped the urban sprawl and got out in the country. Guido is at his best at this time pointing out things I don’t notice and spotting things about a week before I would. We saw lots of stuff. At some later date I may update this blog after two events. We go back to Guangzhou to look up the bird book and when I am next outside mainland China so I can post to this blog.

We bussed around quite a lot in the afternoon/evening. G was not impressed by Stanley (a real HK tourist spot) but was impressed by the mountainous nature of the Island. I kept thinking “What happens if the brakes fail on this double-decker bus on these incredibly tight and twisty steep roads?”

We took the tram up to “The Peak.” This is 428 metres high so you look down on all the sky –scrappers. Well most of them. The IFC – 2 tower in Hong Kong is about level and there is a building in Kowloon (the name of which is unknown to me) that is higher than the peak. I thought about how much effort it took to create all the skyscrapers and roads in Hong Kong and it would all be gone in a few hundred years at most. Guido thought about geological time and how tiny all this stuff was. Such is the way that minds work.

Next was go to see the lady to get rid of our demons. The high spot of this was that she hit a piece of paper that with a slipper until it was knocked to pieces and then burnt it. There were other bits that were burnt, various incantations etc. Guido was fine but I am possessed by an evil spirit and it would cost 300 dollars to get rid of it. I like my spirit and declined.

Guido is really taken with all the food here. I truly live in the food capital of the world with Hong Kong as a small satellite.

We are off mammal hunting in the mainland but I can’t post from there so you will only get the next instalment in a few months.

Southern California is Hell

Southern California is Hell

Matt is left behind. I have never been to Washington State or Oregon. OK. Matt was in Seattle.

In fact he was jealous of the next journey. Seattle to Los Angeles. By train.

He needn’t have been. Train is by far the most civilized way to travel. You can walk around, chat to who you like, doze or sleep when you want, get fed and do a fair number of kilometres.

Ah!  Amtrak does not exactly rocket along. A journey of 1,377 miles was scheduled to take 35 hours and 40 minutes. That is about 62 kph. Compare that to TGV or even the good old Great Eastern London to Edinburgh. Can you imagine that in modern times that is acceptable? Perhaps that explains why there is only one train a day on that route. The USA is crying out for high speed trains but they won’t get them. The car lobby and Boeing will stop it.

 If you do not live in the USA (and even if you do) you do not understand the power of propaganda here. No other country in the world has so much propaganda. It starts at the highest level. The flag waving above half the houses. (Ian got threatened by some guys who said that the Irish flag was not sufficiently beneath the “Stars & Stripes”)  The land of the hope and the brave. Hmm. A slightly more accurate portrayal would be the home of the coward and the drone. In the USA everybody who has ever served in the armed forces is a “veteran”.  The most likely cause of death in the armed forces of the USA is murder by a fellow member of the said “brave.” It is difficult to imagine a country less accurately described than that it is “the home of the brave.”

Propaganda goes on at every level.  For most Americans the concept that there are things worth seeing outside the USA is anathema. The slaughter rate on the roads and by guns is assumed to be normal.

Local TV is dominated by “Man bit dog” type stories. National news only occurs 2/3rds of the way through a broadcast and international news is Israel or somewhere else in the Middle East where the USA is supporting fascists or bombing the fuck out of somebody.

It is a deeply uncivilized country.

Don’t get me wrong, there are many places that I have been in the USA and many people that I like but the weight of evidence suggests that, on the whole, the USA is an uncivilized country that is so conceited that it refuses to learn from others. Its downfall will occur in the first half of this century.

Having said that I have just thoroughly enjoyed two wonderful and contrasting visits in Southern California.

Tom met me in Los Angeles at 9.00 p.m.  Well he would have done if the train had been on time. Amtrak is so crap that he could not check. So he listened to the radio for 1 ¾ hours until I arrived.  The two best bits of the Seattle-LA trip are the mountains half way (at night) and the coastal bit near the end (in the dark because the train was so late.)

Tom is a very good host. He gave me his bed, which I rather graceless sly accepted.    

Tom is also diabetic. This means, in the state of California, that he has a licence to legally buy marijuana. No apologies to the Captain Kirk fans for the split infinitive.

As would any reasonable citizen would do, he exerts his rights. Normally that means he only smokes at weekends but when a fully qualified tester arrives in town what is he supposed to do?

Inbibe and we did. The first day after the pick-up consisted of a three hour drive round parts of LA. We were out of the car for a good ten minutes in that time.

What followed was a visit to his folks who live in nearby Orange County. Lovely people, good food, get your washing done etc. One small problem. 3,200 bottles of wine. What is one to do when invited to sample? And after that bottle? And the next? And.... A rather pleasant evening.

Next day up before the noonday sun? The Getty museum? Universal studios? Disneyland?

Er. No. Hack round a 9 hole golf course. Twice. A spot more parent-paid for food and a splash of wine that sets you up for the following day.

The following day consists of another 9 holes of golf – stoned. This was a new experience for me. If you are going to hit a drive a long way in golf you must grip the club firmly.  If you are stoned you think that you grip everything firmly. This is true – I have got callouses gripping motorbike handles in the past. So I gripped the club hard and hoped. It went a long way. I wonder where. During the next five holes Tom was even more shit than me.

Off to Newport Beach to meet his lady acquaintance. A spot of dinner then off to a superb bar.

Think Hemmingway. Seedy does not get near. Western film swing doors, pool tables but not enough real cowboy hats. Men who weighed more in kilos than their age smoking and playing better pool than I have ever been capable of. A quiet blonde who sat at a table for an hour and a half (not that I noticed) suddenly became the classic blousy pool player – and she could play.

Tom is a decent pool player so we survived a couple of rounds but the beer had done its damage so we stayed at the acquaintance’s. Unfortunately she was teaching ice-skating in the morning so we got kicked out at 6.30 a.m.

True Californian fog back to his folk’s for a three hour kip then true Californian traffic for a journey of an hour and a quarter or so to deliver me to Ian.  Naturally on a six lane highway (that is six lanes each side) it took 4 hours.

The USA transport systems are as ridiculous as their healthcare systems.  OK, I won’t go on about the shit transportation system any more but consider the USA spends 16% of GDP on healthcare (only Cuba has a higher percentage and they send doctors as aid workers all over the world) whereas in Europe it is about 8-9%. No prizes for guessing who lives longer by a margin of two years.

Ian’s – a real different experience. Unlike me, Ian can manage a decent relationship with the opposite sex.  This time he has stumbled on one that involves a family. She also appears to be rather nice. There are two great difficulties with this situation but we will come to those later.

Ian moved to the USA 17 years ago – the fool. To make it worse he was in upstate New York. The populace of small towns there are like the Midwest – narrow-minded, ignorant in the extreme and completely confident in their knowledge. Arseholes. Of course Ian managed to find a few reasonable people but none he called real friends until he had been there many years.

Anyway he has moved to Southern California and lives with the aforementioned attractive woman a dozen years younger than him. She has two daughters. Ian is not used to family life but, in his rather gentle way, seems to cope OK and I have not noticed any problem at all. But, as many of you know, I may not possibly be the best judge.

Anyway, Tom drops me off in this sober household near San Diego. We sit in the garden and drink tea. TEA.  Hardly my beverage of choice but Ian developed Parkinson’s three years ago and he has found alcohol a bit of a no-no and he lives in a tea-total household.  PANIC! I am a man of infinite resource and manage to contain myself for the next three hours until we find ourselves in an establishment for the sale of Maguritas. (Sod the spelling.)

Sitting with Ian in the garden is a delight. Reminiscing isn’t really my thing but I haven’t seen much of him in the last seventeen years (we used to go walking together about thirty days a year in those days). Oriels are small birds and hummingbirds are smaller – having them buzzing around is great. Mel (Ian’s partner) liked some of our stories about misdemeanours twenty or thirty years ago. In mid February it reached 31 degrees (or 87 to the yanks) – what is not to like in Southern California?

Well a bit.

CARS

CARS

CARS

The concept of walking is abhorrent, unless you are taking your dog out.

Naturally I have done some. A little warm for lots of walking but T-shorts and shorts in February under a clear blue sky is good enough for me.

Melissa’s mother offered to get her granddaughter (they are both in the house) to drive me less than a kilometre to the shops so I could shop and granddaughter would come back later to collect me. They are both pretty nice people. The ridiculousness of the suggestion appeared to be beyond Pam – who, despite her political views - is a perfectly acceptable member of the human race. Morgan –granddaughter - was not consulted. This is America – children are expected to do as they are told and even (although not in California) call you “Sir. “ Pam thought it was over a mile because, naturally, she had never walked it. Obviously it took me an hour to cover the kilometre by the direct route because of my navigational difficulties. Even though it is mid February the temperature was 84 (29) so a couple of revivers were required.

I mentioned the problem of traffic. There is another.

Ian became friends with an Irish priest in Jamestown, New York before he moved West. Nothing wrong with that if you don’t take it seriously. Get pissed with an Irishman and fed by his wife is OK in my book. Except Ian carried on going to church when he moved West.

Frederick the Great of Prussia in the eighteenth century said something like ”Christianity was a lot of legends invented by orientals and given to our Europe where some charlatans used it for there own purposes and some fools believed it.”

Melissa appears to belong in the last class. We held hands round the table while she prayed. For fuck sake what have I shrunk too to be so “nice.” I am losing my character. These days I class myself as a militant atheist. Even if there were such a thing as God why should she be interested in one of seven billion of a particularly destructive species on a small planet around a very insignificant sun on the outer arm of a perfectly ordinary galaxy? Christians (and other nutters – Jews and Moslems) are so arrogant. I have heard all the rubbish about spirituality faith, can’t believe in finality etc. many times with no shred of evidence offered to support such ideas. Can it just be they are so stupid? Do the monotheists not understand that they are unnecessarily divisive; they all worship the same God by different names? A bit of a bugger that, individually they tend to be nice people – whether Christian, Jewish or Moslem. I truly believe that they do not understand how evil their petty beliefs are in the way that they manifest themselves collectively against other groups who believe in the same things.

Anyway. Blue skies, sitting in the sun in February, flowers in bloom, lovely birds around you, decent food and good wine. Yes Southern California is truly hell.

Vancouver is full of weirdos and Seattle is full of dossers.

Vancouver is full of weirdos and Seattle is full of dossers.

Having said that some of Seattle’s dossers are pretty weird.

Perhaps I had better start from the beginning. Mat and I live eight time zones apart. So the obvious meeting place is for us both to fly eight time zones. Yep – me from China, Matt from London to meet in British Columbia.

So Vancouver it is. Matt has never been to Canada, I have never been to B.C. What are a few time zones between friends? I arrive Tuesday morning, Matt Tuesday evening. Naturally by the time Matt arrives I am suitably ensconced in a bar which, with a few instructions, Matt duly arrives at.  Nothing worth remarking on so far. Except that, due to a bit of time zone prevarications Matt had, allegedly left at 9 a.m., I had left at 2 p.m. on the same day but I had arrived in Vancouver 10 hours before Matt. Naturally, it didn’t stop us having a few pints.

So WTF were we doing in Vancouver? Obviously we were on the way to Whistler. For the non-cognescenti, Whistler is one of the world’s premier ski resorts and, as you can imagine, I am one of the world’s premier skiers.

But there would be a bit of jetlag, neither of us had been there so why not three days in Vancouver?

Well three days is certainly enough. It is a spectacularly uninteresting place. Yep, Stanley Park is good for a few hours bike ride if you are bored and like being told which direction to ride, there are a few beer shops/local breweries although the beer all tastes the same, everything is orderly – the cars stop at red lights and people wait for the walking sign at junctions – but is it exciting?

Well there is a clock driven by the steam from the thermal underground system that is quite interesting. We did find some decent seafood chowder but...

There are a lot of wierdos. They would come in all shapes and sizes, although being hirsute helped to get the job – foot long beards were a requirement. Some of the women had quite long hair to. These people were all dressed oddly or behaved oddly – lots of them talking to themselves, of course. Who could possibly employ them? A small example – we were walking by a construction site which was surrounded by corrugated iron sheeting when, suddenly the sheeting opened and out stepped a girl, who clearly did not work on a construction site, closely followed by the smell of marijuana. Our guess was that there was a very select party going on inside the corrugated iron.  We suspected that some of the wierdos rather enjoyed a spot of heroin.

Actually Matt quite liked it, thought he could live there.

For me - too quiet.

And.

I am sure it didn’t rain all the time it just felt like it.

 So to Whistler to meet Bill and Tina. They had only had a five hour flight across three time zones so no sweat. Except... Matt, Bill and I all have knee issues. Tina came out in sympathy on the second run of the first day by falling over and buggering her right knee. Matt is easily the best skier amongst us and often went off on his own. Bill and I poodled around. Until the penultimate day. Bill and I had done three excellent runs before a break. Then B, M & I went high in the thick swirling snowy mist. It was horrible. We decided to take a green run (the easiest grade) to escape. I fell off it. It is easy so you can’t fall far. I fell all of two metres. I couldn’t get up with skis on so I took my skis off.  My feet went into the snow over my knees. It took me more than ten minutes just to get back to the piste – a distance of about five metres.

Tina did come out for one run on the last day but it was horrible. Fortunately she had arranged bobsleighing in the afternoon.   Fantastic. Try doing 125 kph with your bum 5 cms off the ground at 3 or 4 g when the ground is also about 30 cms from your shoulder because you are effectively riding the “Wall of death”. Brilliant. I had the best seat just behind the driver. You slam from turn to turn incredibly fast. I would have my left shoulder about 30cms above the ice and what felt like half a second later my right shoulder would be 30cms above the ice.

Whistler is small by the standards of European ski resorts – only 37 lifts, although many are long. The Green runs are true French Greens – very long roads. These are not pleasant and distinctly unpleasant when you are skiing latterally across a steep slope. The blue runs are like French blues – steep in places but always wide enough. There are no red runs. The blacks are divided into single diamond and double diamond. They are all so horrible that not even Matt tried any of them. The other thing about Whistler is that it is west coast so we only had one day of sunshine – the others had rain, snow, wind or a combination of them. And we had a good week. The week before had been all rain and the week after we were there it was forecast to be too hot.

Seattle is a very rich city. Home of Boeing, Microsoft, Starfucks and Amazon.  I don’t think it has a million people. If you like dossers on every street corner and half way along each block on major roads it is the place for you. If you like over-priced crap bars full of loud mouth tossers come on in.

Yep, it is typical USA but worse. On the bus south from Canada as soon as we crossed the border it was trailer-trash. How can a country that is so rich be so mean? The worst health care in any half-civilized country, cops that shoot hundreds of people dead every year, 10,000 people a year are murdered and three times that killed on the roads. It is a dreadful country. I hope that I escape it alive after seeing my friends here.

In Seattle we went up the Space Needle which, despite being built in 1962 for the “Worlds Fair”, was surprisingly good. 

We also did a tour of “Underground Seattle” After a major fire the whole level of the city was raised so there are still some old shop fronts below ground. What it really was was a history of the city. The high point of the very funny commentary was the role of “seamstresses” in a city where the men outnumbered women ten to one. The city elders decided not to throw out the seamstresses – have an “entertainment” tax – a brilliant solution. One “madam” only employed well educated seamstresses so that the clothing of the richer men in the city would be well cared for. She had no heir when she died and left a fortune to the Public School system. This was the largest pre-Gates donation in the city but, because of her profession, no school is named after her. Our guide did not like this and thought that there should be one with a school icon of a thimble to encourage safe sewing.