Winter delight

Woke up, drew back the curtains and gazed out at a snowy urban scene. While everywhere in China from Shanghai south tends to warm up post the Lunar New Year, up here in Dalian February is traditionally the coldest month.
Part of the reason for taking so darn long to move of Hong Kong was that I had become a southern poof. This is my first winter this decade. In Hongkers one quickly becomes used to the fact that winter simply does not exist – the slightest drop in temperature bringing out a ridiculous display of thick North Face jackets.
Dalian sits exposed on the Liaoding peninsula, overlooking and buffeted by both the Yellow Sea and Bohai Bay.
The other day I went outside having just washed my hair. I stepped out into the curious vortex of wind that is my building’s entrance and within five seconds I could feel ice forming on my bonce. As I stepped gingerly on the tricky ice outside my gaffe, behind me all of a sudden a loud, protracted female shriek echoed around the buildings. A well wrapped up young woman behind me was pushed 10 metres, sliding, along the ice by the fierce wind.
And yet here really is not too bad. The thing is Dalian is very dry, so the worst cold does not go to your bones like you get in other cities like Shanghai. And besides in New Zealand recently I bought a possum fur hat and that really can withstand any cold.
The forecast for tomorrow is heavy snow. I might have to pull a Dr Zhivago to get to the airport on time.

Supermarket Sweep

The Chambers family has always been highly adept at the Carrefour supermarket sweep. Traditionally, it was the final port of call prior to taking the ferry back across the English Channel. Car doors would slide open, we’d be armed with a slew of francs (latterly euros) to unleash a battalion of trolleys. The family would march into the giant hypermarché. Wide aisles stacked high of just about everything lay ahead of us. Everyone had their own tasks. Timing was of the essence. We had a ferry to catch in a couple of hours. The organized side of the parental unit (Mum) would have a long list of household items that are just better value on the Continent. The focused side of the parental unit (Dad) would traditionally head to the alcohol department bringing my big brother for muscle. 10 cases of beer and a triple figure of wine bottles later (plus the obligatory giant pot or three of Maille Dijon mustard) and a three foot long receipt would fizz out of the till. Our car would have beer crates for seats and would be close to pulling a wheelie all the way back home in Kent weighed under by the then illicit volumes of booze we’d hauled across La Manche.
Fast forward a decade or two and I encounter a Carrefour experience of totally different proportions. Here in Dalian I have a lovely little abode in the centre of town. There were a few things I needed to kit it out though, plus I fancied doing a bit of cooking so I trooped down to the local Carrefour. Phew!
There’s simply no way of doing the fabled supermarket sweep here in the cavernous depths of this supermarket on the outskirts of Zhongshan district. The sheer volume of people wielding trollies makes for tough navigation up and down the aisles.
I am bamboozled by choice. Pick up a sauce pan or washing up liquid and an employee sidles up and suggests a different brand, giving a lengthy, keen rationale for her choice, not that I can understand her argument.
Anger spills over regularly among both customers and employees. A lady is irate that she hasn’t been served soon enough at the meat counter and vents her spleen, her decibel rant rising across the hectic shopping commotion. Unlike in Europe, say, the people behind the meat counter giver as good as her, a mass argument breaks out until she is escorted away.
It’s bumper trollies as I make my way to towards the fruit and veg section. It takes a while to find any bags to put the fresh produce in. Once secured, and lots of veg later, I then have to get it weighed. There’s a gaggle of people pushing and shoving to get their stuff weighed. My long arms eventually get the job done.
Staples that I take for granted in Hong Kong and Europe either do not exist or are prohibitively expensive with limited selections. Cheese looks like becoming a luxury up here. And amazingly for a country so famous for cha, a good tea bag is tough to find.
The checkout queue is haphazard. I eventually get out, head home and decompress with a calming cup of tea. The trick I have learnt is never, ever to go there again on a weekend, weekdays during work hours is easier.

Oasis in the concrete jungle

There’s nowhere quite like Shamian Island in the whole of China. Shanghai has the Bund, Xiamen has an island full of ancient colonial buildings too, but it is old Canton that one truly feels concession China as it used to be.
Guangzhou for the uninitiated is full blare noise and grime – a real wake up call from the pleasant surroundings of Hong Kong. Though Cantonese and proud of it, it feels like the real China as soon as you step out of the plane or train – a noisy attack on your senses. All of which makes Shamian Island all the more special. At the turn of the 20th century this little haven where was where the enfeebled emperor allowed foreigners to set up base and trade with China. The Swires and Jardines funneled their opium through here. The deal etched out was that the island – a narrow wedge between two rivers – was fair game but Joe Foreigner could not step foot off it. Up sprouted wonderfully sturdy colonial style buildings amid spectacular trees.
Go there now and little of this heritage site has changed. Sure, there’s the 28-storey white giant that is the White Swan Hotel, Guangzhou’s first five star and to this day best known hotel. Bar that though little has changed. Statues dotted everywhere depict yesteryear, plaques on buildings denote who was who a century ago. It’s quiet, which after a headache inducing day around town is a God-send. It’s leafy and it’s retained its dignified air. These days the majority of foreigners visiting this tiny strip of land – probably no more than 1.5km by 500m – are Americans here to adopt kids. Stalls garner business by offering free pram rentals. Western adults stroll the avenues as new parents – their Oriental offspring bemused by their hugely changed circumstances. All the restaurants here are top notch, Lucy’s is a pleasant bar to sup a beer as the dusk sets in and the banks of the Pearl river switch on a gaudy storm of neon. The annex of the Victory Hotel is a top place to stay at under half the price of the White Swan. An even better bargain is the Guangzhou Youth Hostel, whose rooms will surprise those brought up on a the European or American equivalents of the YMCA.
Before moving to Dalian I used to enjoy bookending my China trips from Guangzhou. The airport there is the best in the mainland with cheaper fares than Hong Kong while the train station is the starting point for countless exciting adventures. And after a rough few weeks away the civility of Shamian was and still is a joy to behold.

2008 in review

New countries visited

None that I can think of, strangely


Countries revisited after a long absence

Russia, Vietnam


Days spent on the road

250 approx


Biggest change

Leaving Hong Kong after so long for Dalian


Best trip

Xinjiang in August -- stunning


Worst trip

Xinjiang in August – repressed more than North Korea


New Year Resolutions

Travel less
Write 1,000 paid words every other day
Learn Mandarin


2009 outlook for the AsiaScribbler

Strangely positive despite the global downturn. I feel ’09 will be the culmination of years of hard yards getting to where I am, namely a relatively savvy East Asia writer with a dab hand at editing. People might not know me going into ’09, but I am going to be marketing myself hard this year!

Daily grind

Show dailies – they’re good money, ultimately satisfying but hugely stressful. For those that don’t know the terminology, show dailies are the newspapers that come out at exhibitions – a what’s on guide, plus news from the show type newsletter, generally done with a skeletal staff and amid incredibly tight deadlines … and often with designers who are a couple of bulbs short of a chandelier (or, at least, that’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it!).
For regular readers you’ll have noticed a strange, frankly worrying appreciation I have with things that I find are difficult or irritating.
The latest show daily I was asked to do was in Dubai in mid-December. There was an Ozzie company exhibiting just opposite where our show daily office was and the guy manning their stand described perfectly the frustrations, stress and all round madness that I endure editing these show dailies.
“At the beginning of the day, your hair was relatively neat,” he said, a kind lie given that I sorta pride myself by how few times a comb has ever touched my bonce! “But as the day went on your hair went more and more wild,” he relayed, “ I could see you literally tearing it out! By the end of the day your hair looked like someone who had been electrified.”
Therein lies the joys of editing and writing show dailies, but they do they get me around the world. Sometimes, though, the pressure does tell, such as in Greece this year where for the BOLD front page headline we managed to spell ‘heralds’ as ‘hearlds’ to much consternation the following day, scrawled large across 5,000 odd copies at one of Greece’s largest exhibitions. Nevertheless, this is me saying I’m a scribe for hire for any and all exhibition show dailies!

Hot and cold in Dubai

Dubai is a place that leaves me cold. And I’m not just talking about the indoor ski zone – perhaps the world’s most unenvironmentally friendly building (click here for video). Sure the forest of cranes shows ambition, the soaring skyscrapers dazzle and the blueprint for the future looks, on paper, to be world beating. And yet it feels so empty, so soulless. The locals are not exactly forthcoming with their friendliness. The expat brigade are a funny bunch too – obviously money obsessed since there is no other earthly reason why you’d chose to live here. And the workers from third world countries are treated APPALLINGLY.
Take a look here and you’ll see part of the reason this place is so soulless. It is all so new; there has been no time for things to settle, to take shape and character. The pictures of the main throughfare from 1991 to the 2005 show the dramatic changes. From desert dustbowl to Bladerunner in the space of a generation.
People in Dubai have size envy. Everything has to be the biggest. Whether it’s the tallest building in the world (pictured) or the recent opening of the Atlantis Hotel (click here for a video of the event), a spectacle so large it could be seen from space and used five times more fireworks than Beijing’s blockbuster Olympic opening ceremony in August.
But this theme of emptiness was all too apparent on my second visit to the emirate this December. Dubai is running out of cash. It has been too lavish. The immense property boom has crashed. The emirate has attempted to build an economy on a grand scale that is diversified away from oil dependence, yet it does not have the hinterland to achieve its aims. Newsweek memorably wrote that the opening of the Atlantis Hotel resembled Nero partying while Rome burned. While I was in Dubai, its leaders had to make a humiliating journey to the UAE capital, Abu Dhabi, cap in hand to ask for some urgent oil dosh.
Projects are on hold, cranes are stationary, the normally constantly rising skyline is experiencing a rare moment of monotony, and workers from the sub-continent and the Philippines are heading home as work dries up.
With my parents I boarded an open air double decker tourist bus to get a feel of the city. The prerecorded guided tour relayed by headphones was amusing in that it perfectly encapsulated Dubai’s severe lack of character. I’d say about one in two of the twenty odd places described was a shopping mall – not what I in particular with my aversion to malls (see previous story here) would classify as tourist stuff. (NB The best, most characterful thing to do in Dubai is to take a water taxi or abra to and fro across Dubai Creek.) The bus tour stopped at one of many malls on the tour – in fact the one where we were staying. It had the aforementioned ski resort with snow inside. Environmental guilty secret: I’ve only been to Dubai twice and both times I’ve skied there! Anyway, you think that’s bad: at a beach 15 minutes walk away (or 25 minutes in a taxi through Dubai’s notorious traffic) they plan to build an underground cooling system because, poor lambs, the sand gets too hot in summer! That’s not all that’s burning in Dubai as Newsweek pointed out.

Uniquely Singapore

It had been an especially gruelling travel schedule and so one Tuesday in Singapore this December rather than going out on the lash for the umpteenth night in a row a colleague and I decided to check what was on at the flicks. A quick bit of research around lunchtime showed the best option was Ridley Scott’s Iraq spy movie, Body of Lies. To be safe we booked online though we had nothing to worry about, with just ten of the seats taken.
We bundled down to one of Singapore’s many shopping malls that evening where there was little sign of the credit crunch. The place was mobbed making negotiating the countless cluttered escalators to get to the top floor cinema a very trying experience; Singaporeans, like many in this part of the world, have zero spatial awareness.
I cannot stand shopping malls as a rule. The muzak gets on my nerves; the sheer volume of people buying pointless tack annoys me. In situations such as negotiating a mall, I switch off – I go on autopilot, turn down most of my sensors and adopt a sort of tunnel vision.
A spot of nosh, a quick pee (there’s nothing more annoying than needing a piss during a movie) and film time beckoned. Into the cinema with ten minutes to spare and we’ve got the whole place to ourselves. We plonk ourselves down at the centre of our allotted aisle and wait, leaving a gap of one seat between us because a) I’m tall and b) two blokes going together to a cinema frankly need some breathing space or people will wonder!
A couple come in and sit a couple of rows behind us. Two more come in and take up seats at the far end of our aisle. Still, with barely five minutes to go before lights down it’s about as busy as a Lehman Brothers board meeting.
Suddenly they started filing in. Not in any great torrent, but a steady number. At no point was this cinema, which could hold around 200, busier than 25 people. For some strange reason though 15 of the said 25 people had opted for tickets on our row.
Gradually our row filled up. We were shunted more towards our actual seat numbers as the row filled up, even though the rest of the room was pretty much empty. To my right a gigantically fat pair were chowing down on three courses of cinema junk food, blubber rolling onto the arm rest where my elbow had been.
The situation was crazy and very Singaporean in the lack of spatial awareness and the supreme observance of following rules, in this case seat numbers.
It got to a point whereby there was a guy and a gal who came in just before lights down and who had the end seats of the row. They were taken as we had shunted everyone to our right down by one to ensure we had a seat between us. The film was about to start, the man could have had a centre seat on just about any other row in the place but, oh no, he wanted to stick with what he had been given, the crappy pair of seats on the end. He called an attendant over. Our extra seat was swallowed up. The entire row was full. Crazy-la!
As the ads came we made our move getting in everyone’s way as we tramped over the refuse of my neighbour’s junk food, trod on people’s toes, tripped on people’s shopping and clobbered others with our bags. We bolted for a nice empty row two ahead of where we had been. Phew! The movie was a humdinger; the movie experience uniquely Singaporean!