Friday 31 August 2018

Book review: A Game of Thrones

I've just finished reading George R. R. Martin's 1996 book A Game of Thrones.  You may have heard of it -- it's also quite a popular TV series.  Thrones is the first book in the massive multi-book series A Song of Ice and Fire.

It's fair to say that before reading the book I already had a pretty good understanding of the story.  It is not that I had watched the TV series (I've never even seen one episode), but it is hard to avoid it with the way the media has been flooding us with teasers, tidbits and gossip over the past several years.

So, what did I think of the book?

First off, Martin is a good writer -- he puts his words together nicely, in a way that makes the reading smooth and enjoyable.  And that's important in an 800-page book.  On the whole, I felt that the pages slipped by quickly and easily.

Nonetheless -- and I say this as someone who generally likes longer books -- by about two thirds of the way through the book I was beginning to feel a little bored.  Honestly, I thought it was just a bit too much of the same and it would have been a stronger book if it was cut to around 600 pages.

For me, the sameness came about because Martin doesn't do a lot of deep character development.  He does lots of characters and lots of action, but the characters are never really especially complex.  As far as I could see, almost all of the plot conflict occurred because of love triangles, forbidden love, hidden love, loveless arranged marriages, affairs, secret love-children, and immature characters unable to deal with romantic rejection.  But Martin is no Jane Austen, and Martin's characters are psychologically boring.

Martin has an interesting approach to his chapter structure.  Each chapter is written from the point of view of one of nine (?) different characters.  The chapters are titled by the name of the character being focused on at that time, and they cycle around as the story progresses.

Briefly, for those of you who don't know the story, it is sword and sorcery stuff, set in a medieval-ish imaginary world.  We have kings and knights and castles, nobility and peasantry.  It is all very England-centric, and even the maps at the front of the book show the main land to be a slightly squiggly mirror-reversed British Isles.  The northerners live in the ice and snow.  Off to the east are the hot, barbarian lands.

For this reason, I felt that there was a slight touch of casual racism.  It was written a little too much from the perspective of the whitey Englishman.  The darker-skinned characters tended to be portrayed as scary, exotic or barbarous.  And the presentation of the folk-beliefs also had a different feel to them -- the whitey beliefs were portrayed as more normal and sensible, while the folk beliefs of the darker-skinned people were portrayed as more uncivilised.

We enter the story about 15 years after the multi-generational hereditary king and most of his family were killed during a civil war.  Through flashback we progressively learn that the old king was a little too quick to chop off the heads of his nobility (and the peasantry, but they don't count for much in this story), and so the surviving nobility banded together and cut his head off.  (There is a lot of head-removing in this book.)

The new king was a big-muscled popular war hero but he turns out to be a useless administrator.  He drinks and hunts and gets too fat to fit into his armour.  There is corruption aplenty around him.  His chief advisor dies (poison, we learn) and he requests his old war-buddy to come to the capital to take over the job and run things for him.

At this point in the book we have mostly been following War Buddy, Lord Eddard (Ned) Stark, and his family, and so we know that War Buddy is supposed to be a Thoroughly Decent and Honourable Gentleman with a Loving Family.  He lives out on the northern edge of the kingdom, away from the slimy politics of the capital city, ruling his land in a tough but fair and honest way (he still chops off people's heads, but he feels sad doing it and it is done even-handedly according to law and not merely on a whim).

This might sound like a lot of "sword" and not much "sorcery", but the sorcery is hinted at because the Starks live not far from a wall (huge wall, beautiful wall), which protects the kingdom from the evil hordes outside the kingdom.  Something spooky and mysterious is happening over the other side of the wall.  Zombies are coming!

At the beginning of the book we follow the Honourable Stark family as they heed the call to leave their simple, secure ancestral castle home and head to the inner parts of the kingdom, fully knowing that they are walking into a complex web of political intrigue, which will likely destroy their family.

So far, so Dune.

Yep, it is obvious that Martin has copied significantly from Frank Herbert's Dune series.  The Stark family is the Atreides family.  Lord Ned is Duke Leto.  Jon is Paul.  Seeing this, it becomes a fun game of spotting the many parallels (or should that be many plagiarisms?).  One of the weirder parallels is that both Herbert and Martin like their redheads.

Spoiler alert!  The king dies.  And copying from Dune, he dies in the exact same way as the old Duke Paulus Atreides died.  Then Ned, being Leto, dies too.  In a similar way.  And then the Game of Thrones is on, with plenty of characters putting their hands up for king-duties.

But unlike Dune, the politics in Thrones is simplistic.  Herbert's political story-telling is subtle and thought-provoking; the complexity in Thrones is merely from the huge number of characters.

In the same way that Dune is a teenage boy book, following the 15-year-old Paul Atreides as he grows from normal teen into superhero (every teen boy's fantasy), so too is Thrones a teenage boy book.  In Thrones, we often follow Ned's two 14-year-old sons, Robb and Jon, as they mature.

But Thrones is a teenage boy book for these more modern times.  Teenage boys these days are used to Internet porn and violent video games.  And so Thrones includes plenty of detailed graphic descriptions of sex and violence.  And violent sex.  And disturbingly inappropriate male-fantasy pedophile sex.  For example, skinny little 13-year-old Dany gets forcefully married off to a huge muscular warrior-king twice her age.  They don't speak the same language, and he is off with his war-buddies killing most of the time, but somehow she very soon falls in lust with him and can't get enough of his body.

So, yeah, Thrones is a dumbed down, spiced up through sexual titillation, Dune.  I'm satisfied that I read it, and it was entertaining enough, but I wouldn't bother to go out of my way to read any more in the series.

UPDATE: I just did a quick Google search, and it seems that I am not the first to see the Dune-Thrones parallels!

Thursday 23 August 2018

Book review: Little House in the Big Woods

Yesterday, I finished reading aloud Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods to Mulan and Miya.

This was a read-aloud for Miya, as Mulan has already read the whole Little House series to herself. But Mulan never minds hearing books again, and was happy to listen too.

Before this, I had never read any of the books in the series.  But I had certainly heard about them often enough — it seems like entry into the homeschooling community requires reading the series!  But alongside hearing from many Little House fans, I had also heard from the occasional critic, whose comments suggested that too much racism made the books unworthy of being read.  Sigh, why are so many of the old books racially questionable?!

So, I had to find out for myself, and reading aloud to Miya gave the perfect opportunity.

Little House in the Big Woods is a short (138 page) book, written in very simple language.  Miya would have had no trouble at all reading it silently to herself.  It tells the story of a year in the life of Laura, a 5-turning-6-year-old girl living “60 years ago” (published in 1932) in “the Big Woods of Wisconsin” in the USA.

Starting in autumn and finishing the following autumn, the story describes the seasonal changes of the everyday life of a young family living from farming, hunting, and tree-felling.  For the most part the five of them (mother, father and three young girls) live on their own, and even trips to the grandparents’ or uncle’s houses relatively nearby are big events.  The day-trip to the nearest town (with one store) was a huge event.

Reading about their daily life is indeed fascinating.  It is a little bit Swiss Family Robinson-ish in the way that there are plenty of detailed descriptions of how they collected and prepared their food and clothing from their surrounding environment.  But, at least in my opinion, it was much more interestingly written (maybe partly because it was much shorter and didn’t labour the point so much).  It was also much more realistic!

Similar to the Swiss Family Robinson, Laura’s family relies a lot on killing the local wildlife to live.  Laura’s Pa has a gun, which he takes with him almost every time he goes out.  Partly this is because there are a lot of bears in the woods, and he needs it for safety.  But partly it is to kill the animals for their meat and fur (fur is traded at the store in town).  In the first autumn, we read about a lot of killings — especially bears and dear.  Pa seems very matter-of-fact about these killings, though he emphasises that he doesn't kill during spring and summer because the animals have their babies to look after.

But interestingly, in the second autumn, described in the final chapter of the book, Pa apparently has a sudden change of heart and tells the family of how, when he was about to shoot, he saw the animals as beautiful and couldn’t pull the trigger.  This creates an interesting development.  Will Pa start killing again, or is this a permanent change?  Do they need to kill animals to survive?  Perhaps in the next book in the series we will learn more about Pa's ethical dilemma?

As far as the possible racism goes, I didn’t notice a lot in this book.  Mulan tells me that there is more in later books, which means I may have to read more.  In this book, mostly there was little opportunity for racism because the family lived on their own and they didn’t interact much with anyone else.

However, a little racism showed up in the songs that Pa sang while playing his fiddle.  For example, in Chapter 5 Pa sang about “an old darkey” who “had no wool on the top of his head, in the place where the wool ought to grow.”

To me, the most questionable aspect of the book was the way Wilder got up on her hobby-horse a bit too much to emphasise how parents should beat their children to correct them.  There was the incident with cousin Charley in Chapter 11, where Wilder was deeply critical of Uncle Henry for the way he was raising Charley.  She described Charley as a spoilt, lazy boy, and connected it with the fact that Uncle Henry did not beat Charley when he was naughty.  She maintained that a good beating ("tanning his hide") would have corrected his bad behaviour.  There were also a few other situations where Pa beat his daughters to correct them.

The girls and I laughed at the unintentional irony in Chapter 10, when Pa beat Laura because Laura hit her elder sister Mary:
"You remember," Pa said, "I told you girls you must never strike each other."
Laura began, "But Mary said --" 
"That makes no difference," said Pa, "It is what I say that you must mind."
Then he took down the strap from the wall, and he whipped Laura with the strap.
These days, we know the evidence is clear regarding hitting children for correction.  It doesn't work.  And it makes children worse.  Wilder was wrong.  Pa was wrong.

I am thinking I should continue reading the second book in the series to Mulan and Miya.  Will Pa continue in his ethical turn?  Will they interact more with other people and will this bring out the racism I have heard about?  I'll find out, and write more here.

Tuesday 14 August 2018

Book review: Tom Sawyer

Way back, just before we left for China, I finished reading aloud to the girls Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

We've done quite a bit between then and now, but I still wanted to say a few words about our reactions to this famous book.

Almost everyone knows the book, but just to remind you, Tom Sawyer, published in 1876, tells the story of a mischievous boy living in a small town alongside the Missouri River in 1840s USA.

In my opinion, the book deserves its reputation as one of the great classic novels.  It really is a must-read (with the brain switched on).  Twain has a delightful way with words that makes reading him so pleasurable.  His storytelling is engaging, and his barbed social commentaries delicious (so much of what Twain wrote just drips in irony).

When choosing which books to read aloud to Mulan and Miya, I take it in turns to choose books suitable for each of them, and this book was chosen for Mulan.  Miya also enjoyed it, but Twain's language can be a little complicated at times, and periodically I had to translate it into simpler words so Miya could follow what was going on in the story.

But the language in the book is catching, and even now the girls think it fun to talk of ha'nted houses or say they ain't doing something.

The three of us were laughing out loud at many of the adventures Tom got up to.  His creativity for getting out of duties is amazing.  His whitewashing the fence escapade, in Chapter 2, is well-known to most people, but there are many more equally inventive incidents filling the pages.

The superstitions of Tom and the other characters in the book was both eye-opening and funny.  We all found it amazing how much of Tom's actions were based on his superstitious beliefs.  Dead cats and midnight seemed to play important roles in the often very complex rituals that they believed in and followed.

We also laughed out loud at Tom's methods of attracting Becky, who he liked.  I asked Mulan and Miya whether if a boy did those sorts of things in front of them, they would start to find the boy attractive. They doubted it!

Coincidently, just as we were reading about Tom and Becky in the cave, we read the sad real-life news about the soccer team boys lost in the cave in Thailand.

And then there is the racism.

I understand from various online articles that many commentators focus on the fact that the word "nigger" is included multiple times throughout the book.  I read that this is such an issue that some people have published editions of the book which change "nigger" to "slave" and "injun" to "Indian".

Yes, offensive words are one aspect of racism.

Nonetheless, as I read the book to Mulan and Miya, I read aloud to them these words, as Twain originally wrote them.  I also talked with the girls briefly about the offensiveness of these words, and their background.  And, obviously, I pointed out that these words are Not Good Words To Use.

But what drew my attention more while reading was not so much these specific racist words, but rather the casual racism built into the characters' interactions.  It's the sorts of things that were in there just in passing as if they were so commonly assumed by the characters that they didn't even need properly mentioning.

For example, in Chapter 6, when discussing how to cure warts, Huck says:
Why, he told Jeff Thatcher, and Jeff told Johnny Baker, and Johnny told Jim Hollis, and Jim told Ben Rogers, and Ben told a nigger, and the nigger told me.
Tom then replies:
Well, what of it?  They'll all lie.  Leastaways all but the nigger, I don't know him.  But I never see a nigger that wouldn't lie.
The casualness of this conversation is important.  The boys are not even specifically discussing the people -- they are discussing curing warts, of all things.  Huck bothers to take the time to fully name all the other people involved, but he doesn't give the name of the person who he was actually directly talking to.  Twain has (intentionally, I think) set this up to show the dehumanised status of "the nigger", who doesn't even have a name.  And finally, Tom's reaction is to just as casually dismiss the report with the negative racial stereotype, again showing that "the nigger" didn't count as an individual person, but just as a member of a group.

(The article I linked to above gives a very clear example of this in Huckleberry Finn, arguing that Twain deliberately set up the characters and story to highlight and criticise the casual acceptance of African Americans' dehumanised status.  It really is worth reading this short article.)

Tom's later involvement with the character Injun Joe showed equally questionable attitudes regarding native Americans.

When these sorts of casual racist attitudes popped up while reading, I tried to draw them out, to make the casual racism obvious to the girls.  I think that their being able to see these sorts of things in casual conversations is even more important than their avoiding those specific offensive words.  It is about them becoming deeper readers and thinkers, not merely stopping at specific individual words.

With this in mind, if Twain did indeed seriously (or at least partly) think that Tom Sawyer is for adults exclusively, then I can see his point.  Twain wrote a book filled with characters who say, with plausibility, bad and questionable things.  Twain often wrote using an ironic voice, and clearly many of these questionable things were put in there intentionally by Twain (were they all put in there intentionally?).  A child reading the book without further discussion may absorb uncritically the questionable stuff; open discussion is essential with this book.

Sunday 12 August 2018

China trip: Part 4

(Continuing from Part 3)

Sunday 22 July
We were up at 7 am for our train, which left Guiyang at 10:20 am.

Around midday, at the Congjiang train station, three trains arrived, bringing together the old friends — Mulan, Lily, Yiran, Xiner and Lara.  Back in 2007, they all met and became friends at “baby place”, the main grassy area at our home at Sun Yat-sen University, where the babies and pre-kindy kids would hang out every day for their outdoor exercise.  When the girls were barely crawling, we shared each other’s mats and toys, talking baby stuff.  As they got older the girls had play dates and sleepovers at each others' homes.  A few years later Xiner and family moved to Guilin, and then a few years later again we moved to New Zealand, and Lily has also now moved away, so it was awesome that we could all get together and let the girls reconnect.

Jumping into two people-mover taxis, all 14 of us (the three new girls just brought their mums each) drove to the holiday resort where we would stay for the next few nights.  It is an old village area of a minority people, the Dong, but newly set up as a tourist resort.  That is, a few of the buildings are old and authentic, while most are newly created replicas to house and entertain the tourists (I think Yiran complained that it was too fake).  A lot of it is quite picturesque, with cutesy old-looking wooden (or wood clad or wood facade) buildings set in a valley dotted alongside a creek.  The road into the village is barricaded, and we need tickets to get in.



We arrived at our hotel about 12:30 pm, but apparently it is a busy place and fully booked out, so our rooms weren’t available until after 2 pm.  So, everyone else went off to lunch while I sat and rested with the bags.



Around 2:30 pm we got our rooms.  Inside the rooms, they have a bit of a tent-like feel to them, as the rooms are small with low ceilings and the beds are on the floor (mattresses are Chinese style — inner sprung with what feels like a wooden board on top, making it extra, extra firm).  They don’t even have TVs!  The hotel itself is like a rabbits’ warren, with corridors and rooms at odd angles, small stairs up and down and half-height doors.  It looks like it was a bit-by-bit construction, with not a lot of advanced planning.  But somehow it all comes together to have an artistically creative feel, and, of course, lots of potential for children to Have Grand Adventures.


While we were organising our room, the children found the art room, and came back a while later splattered with clay.  We felt that our hotel area was safe enough that the children could run around reasonably freely.



I had a late lunch of specially ordered vegetarian jiaozi at a nearby restaurant.  For dinner, all the families got together at another nearby restaurant (about every second shop here is a restaurant!).

At 8 pm we went to a free one-hour concert at the village outdoor stage, which told the story of the Dong people coming to the area.  It was too loud (at least for my non-Chinese ears) and, though enthusiastic, a little amateurishly performed.  Miya and I left early (along with maybe a quarter of the crowd), but Mulan wanted to stay until the end.

Monday 23 July
My tummy had been continuing to trouble me in a moderate way, and it wasn’t coming right as quickly as I had expected.  With the busy activities and not much food going in, I had eventually run out of energy to the point where I was feeling dizzy and wobbly.  I was also feeling sick in my stomach, and couldn’t eat.  So, it was time to visit a hospital for antibiotics and an energy drip.  Fortunately, the village has a hospital, and we caught the local golf-cart taxi there.  A couple of hours connected to a drip, and I started to feel stronger.  I was also supplied with pills and energy drink sachets (to add to my water) to get me back to normal again.  We returned home, where I rested on the bed for the remainder of the day.

In the meantime, Mulan and Miya had continued to happily play with the other girls out and about around the hotel, while Mama was with me at the hospital.

This was the end of Mama’s holiday with us, as she had to go to Beijing to be with Laolao, who was having another operation for her cancer.  The exact date for the operation hadn’t been known before we left New Zealand, so Mama leaving partway through our travels was late re-planning.  Mama left the village about 4 pm, catching a taxi to the train station, then a train to Guilin, then finally a plane to Beijing.

Mulan and Miya had dinner out with the other families, while I continued resting at home.

Tuesday 24 July
Feeling a bit stronger, I ate our free hotel breakfast with the girls in the morning.

About 10 am, the girls went out for a walk with the other families.  Apparently they bussed up a mountain, then walked back down, getting back around 5 pm.  A good time was had by all.

I rested in the morning, then around mid-afternoon I felt strong enough to start exploring the outdoor neighbourhood.  I wandered out and around our hotel, before heading out back, discovering that behind the hotel I could follow the river upstream up the valley.



A newly built stone path criss-crossed back and forth over the river as I steadily walked away from the village, rice paddy fields on either side of me.  No other tourists were around at all, but I met up with the occasional group of locals.  There were plenty of hellos and ni haos from both sides as I passed, and one builder offered me a cigarette while one woman worker on her rest break patted a seat beside her asking me to sit with her.  It is interesting that without Mama and the girls, the locals were immediately much more interactive with me.




Dotted periodically along the path were newly built, or partly built, or being built, wooden structures.  Some were recognisably pavilions.  One may be going to be a public toilet building (just a guess).  One was a covered-in bridge, a tradition of the local area.  Clearly, there is a lot of construction work going on, with the intent of making this area a massive tourist destination.  In the village itself there are a huge number of hotel-like buildings being built.  I have my doubts about whether the finished project will be worth visiting, and I am glad we came now before this village gets too big.




Since the path kept going, I kept walking, too, until Miya phoned to say that they were back home at the hotel.  So, I turned around and started back.  At a fast, continuous pace downhill, I got home 40 minutes later, having been out a couple of hours or so.  Not too bad, considering my weakened state, but my legs were slightly wobbly going down the steps.

The girls ate dinner with the families, while I had takeaway jiaozi in my hotel room.

Wednesday 25 July
We had our free hotel breakfast again in the morning.

Our (Mama’s) original plan had been to leave the village this day, and stay one night at a nearby tea farm.  Without Mama here, we left it up to the other four mothers to make the decision about whether to stay or go.  I thought that (a) there was plenty to do here for the girls to play freely around that made moving unnecessary, and (b) with me being sick I still hadn’t explored everything here, so my non-forceful thought was that I’d rather stay.

I am not sure what the final reasoning was, but the mothers decided to stay at the village rather than move.  At least partly I guess it was because Yiran had to leave early anyway, catching her train back to Guangzhou at something like 6 pm.

Nonetheless, they decided to have a day trip to the tea farm, before Yiran left.  I didn’t go with them, thinking it best that Mulan and Miya do Chinese stuff without Dad interfering.  They left just after 10 am, and got back around 4 pm.  Again, from what I hear, they all had a wonderful time.  I heard that some thought that maybe we should have stayed the night there at the tea farm!  I know nothing more about the trip other than that the tea farm owners Tom Sawyer-ed them into picking tea up and down the fields.

Meanwhile, I wandered out the front door of our hotel this time, heading down into the village centre.  In this direction, almost everyone I saw was a tourist, and the streets were fairly crowded.  There is a real mix of buildings, from genuinely old looking village homes, to make-do brick and wood, to modern several-storey concrete hotels with wooden cladding.  Pretty much the entire village consists of hotels, restaurants or souvenir shops.





A local product they do here is dyed cloth.  Mulan told me that they saw it being done, where the locals put wax on parts of the cloth before dipping it in the dye.  Mulan also informed me that the village colour is blue, since their dyed cloths are all blue.  The girls all bought fold-up blue-dyed fans, which they took with them everywhere outside, fanning themselves in the heat just like local Chinese.

Near the entrance to the village, they had another of the covered bridges (much older this time) where a few men were sitting painting the scenery, which included water wheels lifting water to irrigate the rice paddy fields.  I wandered around in their scenery for a bit.



The village is also known for their several drum towers, dotted around.  These were kinda interesting, though perhaps they were all just modern replicas — an old-looking one’s sign says it was re-built in 1982 (it looked much older than that).



When the others returned about 4 pm, I joined them for “lunch”.  It seems that they had snacked a lot throughout their tea-picking time, and hadn’t had a chance to sit down to eat.  We said goodbye to Yiran immediately after lunch.

After lunch, the girls continued to play (somewhere) with the other three families.  They had planned to see a performance in the evening but it didn’t happen, nonetheless they stayed out until 9:30 pm.

Thursday 26 July
We had our final free hotel breakfast in the morning.

The girls were saying their goodbyes one by one.  First up, we said goodbye to Lily and family.  Their train home wasn’t until later in the evening, while ours, Lara’s and Xiner’s trains were all around midday.  So, we three families left the village together around 11 am, getting a people-mover taxi to the train station.

Next it was time to say goodbye to Xiner, as her train to Guilin left at 12:10 pm, while ours to Guangzhou, with Lara, left six minutes earlier.

Our train journey took about three and a half hours, and then it was back to our familiar home territory of Guangzhou.  We said a temporary goodbye to Lara after we got out of the metro station.

It was a busy evening: a return to our (Kane’s) apartment to dump our bags, then walking to our old Park n Shop for supplies, and then we were out again to meet up with Yiran and Lara.  The girls had dinner together at Pizza Hut (I had a quiet dinner at home) before returning in about 9 pm.

In the meantime, Laolao had had her operation, and from what we hear it went well.

Friday 27 July
Just before 10 am, the three of us headed out for a walk to and around our old home of Sun Yat-sen University.  I had lived there from when Mama and I got married in 2006 until we moved to New Zealand in 2014.  We walked in the Uni at our old gate (West Gate) and down the drive to our old home building (747).  The only change that we could see was that they had built a handrail going up the ramp to the building entrance door (my guess is to stop cars parking too close by the entrance).  Mulan grabbed the door as a water delivery man went in, and we caught the lift up to our old home (1001).  In the lift some old neighbours recognised us and plied Mulan with lots of questions.  We didn’t knock on the door of our old home, but we looked out the window in the stairwell, enjoying the old familiar view.

We then walked past the local market area (but of course we wouldn’t unnecessarily go in!), and on towards baby place.  A couple of years ago, when we last visited, we saw that the old running track/soccer field by baby place was being dug up.  Well, now they have finished it and it looks amazing.  They have build a new outdoor sports ground (a 6-lane rubber athletics track around a fake-grass soccer field) with a car park underneath.  Mulan immediately did some handstands and cartwheels on the new-looking fake grass, and found she was a bit rusty from not doing any of those sorts of movements for a month.  If I remember rightly, it was on that old soccer field that Mulan first learnt to do forward rolls.


Then it was on to baby place, which Mulan thought looked so small, then past Mama’s old work buildings and out the Uni North Gate to the river.  We ate our lunch at the riverside, before walking alongside the river towards home.  Once again, coming up the street from the river we passed Mulan’s old kindy and the pet shop before arriving in home, just over three hours later.

At 2 pm Tongtong (another of Mulan's friends) arrived with her mum, as planned, and the girls went out to play at Xiaogang Park.  I stayed at home again to give them some quality Chinese time without Dad.  They arrived back about 6:30 pm.

Us three had takeaway pizza at home while packing our bags for our flight the next day.

Saturday 28 July
Our holiday was over, except for a day of travelling home (does that also count as part of the holiday?).  We left home about 10:30 am, escorted by Grace and Yiran’s Mama, who were tasked with the job of making sure we really left their city.  At the Guangzhou South Railway Station (really, this time), we said our goodbyes to catch the 12:10 pm fast train to Shenzhen.

We had a small bit of trouble in Shenzhen.  We aimed to catch the metro from the intercity train station to the airport, but the first problem was that the metro had three stations that had “airport” in their name — Airport North, Airport East and Airport.  It looked like it might be possible to fly out of any of them, and we didn’t know from which we were scheduled to depart.  So, a phone call to Mama was needed, while we stood at the crowded ticket machines.  After some quick research by Mama, it turns out (we think) that the "Airport" is the only genuine airport metro station, and the other two are just badly named stations nearby.

Problem number two was that we didn’t have enough change — these ticket machines don’t accept notes bigger than 20 RMB.  So, while I held our place at the front of the long queue, the girls raced to change a 100 RMB note.  With those delays, we arrived at the airport slightly later than intended, about two and a quarter hours before our flight left.

But all was good, and, with about 40 minutes until we were due to board the plane, we sat at the gate and ate our lunch.  Our flight, which was due to leave at 4:50 pm, took off maybe 30 minutes late.  We all slept a little, but not a lot, on the smooth flight.  I watched one movie, while I think the girls watched a couple each.

Sunday 29 July
We arrived into Auckland just after 8 am (New Zealand time), where we caught the shuttle bus almost to our home door (we got off at the Smales Farm bus station).  Home just after 10 am, for a door to door journey of just under 20 hours.

Sunday 12 August
Mama arrived back in Auckland, after spending an extra two weeks in China.  Laolao is recovering well from her operation.

Monday 6 August 2018

China trip: Part 3

(Continuing from Part 2)

Sunday 15 July
It rained heavily in the morning, but on clearing in the afternoon we headed out, with packed sandwiches, to visit the old city centre.  We caught the metro to the Kuanzhaixiangzi station, where, emerging out, we discovered that lots of others had thought the same thing on a Sunday afternoon.  So, we found a sitting area on the roadside and ate our sammies while people-watching.  Opposite our picnic spot was a Rosa Cake shop, which the girls took photos of to show to cousin Rosa.


We wandered around the local area, which is a bit like the old hutongs in Beijing, and has been done up as an old-style modern shopping area.  There were plenty of street-side skilled artisans sells their wares.  We passed by several dripping a treacle-like liquid onto a marble-looking bench to make clever shapes/pictures, which then hardened for people to eat.  Another was also using a sugary heated goo to make edible balloon animals, which also hardened on cooling.  We saw people walking around drinking multi-coloured and/or steaming drinks.  Another shop had interesting musical instruments.  (The girls and I learnt here of a different musical notation system, which uses numbers with dots above/below for sharps/flats.  Mama was surprised we didn’t know it.  Maybe it is just local Chinese?)





(What is the square root of tree?)

Miya got a bit overwhelmed by all the noise, and we exited the area in search of a quieter park.  We came across the People’s Park, which was a little more restful, though Miya complained about the noisy cicadas!

Sufficiently recovered, we investigated the park and discovered it to be like its namesake park in Shanghai, where in one area oldies were lining the pathways advertising their descendants and trying to find good marriage partners for them.

Mulan and Miya are still a bit too young for marriage, so we left that area and headed to the central lake, where we found rowboats for hire.  This was just the thing to relax the mind, and the four of us hopped into a boat with two narrow paddles to very slowly push us around on the water.



Our hour up, just before 6 pm we headed for shore.  The boat-hire business was closing for the day, and we were almost ready for dinner.  More walking, and we found a suitable restaurant.  Yet another shared meal, and my stomach has grown hugely in the two weeks.  I’m looking more pregnant than gym-fit, and this time I refused to squeeze in the leftovers.  We doggy-bagged one dish into the boxes that had previously housed our lunchtime sammies.

Mama said that before we head home we had to visit a light-display area.  So, a bit more walking and we got to Jinli, another crowded old-style modern outdoor market area, this time with lots of red lanterns hanging on the walls.  We walked a few minutes into the crowds, before Miya had had enough, and then extricated ourselves back the same way.


The bus stop to the metro was opposite the market entrance — we needed to catch bus number 1.  Our driver, whose name Mulan translated as Tall Sun, was even crazier than usual for a bus driver.  We’d just found a spot to stand near the back door, and were luckily mostly holding on, when the driver stopped suddenly and people literally went flying.  Mulan, Miya and I managed to keep hold, but Mama didn’t, and stumbled into the door-opening area.  I stuck one arm out towards Mulan, and a leg towards Mama (and my chest for Miya), which I think may have slowed her down a bit.  Mama was unhurt, though she'd had a fright.  My ankle was slightly twisted, and took a couple of days for the pain to go.  Unfortunately, the driver hadn’t learnt his lesson, and continued to make several more sudden stops (though not quite as sudden as the first).  But it was a good lesson for the girls, and both are now making sure to hold on properly at all times (Miya has been a bit nervous about buses since, not liking any bumps, but is still riding them).

Monday 16 July
Around midday, while the others were relaxing at home, I went out for a couple of hours on my own, walking around our neighbourhood taking photos.  I  walked past the Global Center and into Jincheng Park, doing a circuit around the lake.  I returned home via a scenic route, doing a lap around our block.

For most of our stay in Chengdu, Mama had been talking about a huge aquarium that we should go and see, and so after lunch we set out in search of it.  It was pretty far away — we caught the metro to the Wuhou Ave station before catching the 368A bus for about 40 minutes to the end of the line.

When we got out of the metro station we saw a big black cloud of smoke rising in the distance.  It looked fairly newly started, and later on the cloud was darkening more of the sky.  Was it a huge building fire?  Was it an explosion?  Was it a terrorist attack?  Most locals were ignoring it and just going about their business.  But one old man stood by us watching it and seems very curious, too.  It wasn’t in the direction we were going, and eventually we continued on our way.  Mama couldn’t find any news about it later, so either it wasn’t serious enough, or it was too serious and the news was suppressed.

Getting out of bus 368A, we arrived at yet another shopping centre, indistinguishable from the hundreds of others.  But inside there was supposed to be a giant fish tank with a huge glass viewing wall.  Well, the fish tank and impressive glass wall was there, but it was done as only China could do it.  The two-story high glass wall was set in an atrium with about four or so floors viewing it.  But rather than make a feature of it, with easy public viewing, they had built temp-style shops in front of it, obscuring large parts of it from being seen, as well as significantly restricting the standing areas available to see it.  But don’t worry, you could pay to get in to a fenced-off section up close to the glass.  And when, after a few minutes, you were bored with looking, there was plenty of the usual noisy entertainment, including a mini-train circling around every few minutes.


As I said to the family, our expedition to see the giant aquarium was a bit like climbing a mountain.  Lots of effort to get to the top, then we look at the nice view for a few minutes before starting the long journey home again.  In total we were out for over four hours.  Mulan and Miya said it was worth it.

After dinner at home, we went downstairs for pudding — another cheese-tea drink.  I tried a chocolate-cheese one.  It was still nice, but it didn’t have the interesting taste combination of the tea, which made it so special.

Tuesday 17 July
We had a rest day, in preparation for leaving Chengdu for Guiyang.  Mama had lunch out with the extended family.

Wednesday 18 July
Mama is not quite at the level of Pussy Riot, but she did get caught rebelling against the system.

We left Chengdu in the morning, catching the 10:39 am train to Guiyang.  The girls and I insisted on leaving home a bit earlier than needed, and it was a much more peaceful journey to the intercity train station.

Mama’s rebellion was against the train company.  They have a ticket payment system in which half-fares are for children who are both (a) less than 150 cm tall and (b) 15 years (we think) or younger.  Mulan, at age 11, is now over 150 cm tall, so according to the train regulations she is supposed to pay full fare.

By most standards, this is a strange system, where some 11-year-olds pay adult fares, while some 15-year-olds pay child fares.  Or alternatively, if, implausibly, the train company’s reasoning is based on the size of their passengers, because of the resources used in transporting them, then surely adults under 150 cm should just pay half fares.  (When we got to Guiyang we passed by a male guard outside a restaurant who we are sure was shorter than Miya!)

As far as we can work out, this payment system is a relic of the past, when Chinese IDs with ages were not so trustworthy.  So, it was easier for the various Chinese companies to use height rather than age.  But these days IDs are reliable, and other transport in China, like planes, use age-based systems only.

We think the train company should update its system, and so Mama, as a token rebellion, bought half-fare tickets for Mulan.  This was the only time the attendants on the train took notice, and they asked Mulan to stand up and be measured.  On finding that Mulan was over 150 cm, they required that we pay the price difference to upgrade her to full fare.  Mama paid this on the train.  We think that everyone with children 15 or under should do the same, creating extra work for the train company, until the train company gets the message.

Our train journey took about five hours.  We passed through areas where the train display told us that the outside temperature was up to 39 degrees.  It was slightly cooler than that in Guiyang, and moreover, upon exiting the train we were delighted to feel it was more of a dry heat than a humid heat, and really quite pleasant.

One of Mama’s ex-students, who lives in Guiyang, organised a car for us to get to our apartment, and we had an interesting 30-minute drive from the train station through the mountains.  It is a mountain/valley area, and we drove through tunnels connecting little valley areas filled with apartments and other bits of city-life.  One valley seemed entirely made up of a spaghetti-junction-style motorway interchange.

We had been very spoilt in our Chengdu lifestyle, and our apartment in Guiyang was more typical hotel-room style.  There was a tiny little room (which in other apartments was a mini-kitchen) that had been set up as an extra bedroom, where the girls slept, top-and-tail.  But the balcony was a lovely closed-in sun-room.


Mulan's friend Dudu (now known as Lily) and family (Mum, Dad and little sister Kaka) had come to join us in our travels for the next several days.  They had flown in, arriving not long before us, and we said a quick hello to them while they ate at a nearby restaurant.  In the evening we all (both families) walked to an old bridge area for a spot of sightseeing.  The river was very low, but the riverside area was pleasant.



Our family was getting hungry so we said our goodbyes and us family went in search of a restaurant.  This would have to be the worst restaurant in our travels this time — the food arrived so slowly (and the restaurant was only about half full), and in the end after waiting ages we cancelled the last dish which apparently hadn’t even been started yet.  Our first dish, though, was a very interesting local one.  We received a tray containing about 20 small dishes of various chopped veggies — some recognisable, some not — as well as a pile of thin sticky pastry.  We put the veggies in the pastry and closed it up, dripping some vinegary liquid over it.  Apparently we paid for extra pastry, while the veggies were free to top up.  Most people at other tables seemed to leave most of their veggies, which were thrown away.  I mostly finished ours off, as our third dish, a potato one, turned out to have bits of meat tucked away inside (Miya just ate the potato parts).

In retrospect it was probably a mistake for me to eat the raw veggies (and so much of them).  Often I feel like a Chinese local, and so get relaxed about my eating habits, but my stomach is still a foreigner, and as we all know, eating raw veggies while travelling is not terribly wise.  I had about a week of feeling a little uncomfortable (and I had to visit a hospital for a couple of hours).

Thursday 19 July
It was just a one-night stay in this apartment in Guiyang, before moving on.  We had to leave home at 10:30 am to catch the train, but about an hour before leaving the power went off in the building — no idea if it was scheduled or unplanned.  Luckily, the lifts still worked, so we didn’t have to walk down from the 20th floor.

We caught a bus through the crowded streets to the intercity train station (a different one from the one we arrived at).  Mama said Guiyang reminded her of how Guangzhou used to look in the olden days, with chaotic traffic and lots of construction (lots of metro lines being built).

Our train to Anshun, which left 10 minutes late, was also a return to the olden days, being an old two-level slow train (though it did have air-con!).  Unfortunately, the double-glazed windows were fogged up inside, and it was hard to see the scenery.

Why were we here?  Anshun is the train stop to get to Huangguoshu, the world’s largest waterfall cluster, containing 18 waterfalls.  From the train station we (both families) took a 30-minute taxi ride to our hotel in the falls area, where we were staying one night.  Our plan was to walk one waterfall area this afternoon and another one the following morning.  Mama had done her research, and thought she knew where to go at what times, to (slightly) avoid the crowds.

So, first up, after dumping our bags and grabbing food for our walk, we got another taxi to the Tianxingqiao Falls area.  Our walk, which took about three or four hours, was pleasant and not too crowded by Chinese standards.  The first part of the walking track had stepping stones that each had a day of the year written on them.  The four children had fun finding their birthdays, and I guess it was a good way to keep the interest alive in kids who don’t normally do much walking.




(The Bridge Forest Bridge Forest Bridge is both to the left and to the right.)


(Outside a toilet block, this sign helpfully told us which cubicles were currently occupied.)

There was also plenty of the usual Chinese thing of named natural features (rocks, trees, etc) that supposedly look like people or animals.  Mostly, I couldn’t recognise the lions and dragons and so on that they claimed were there.  I saw a few, though not all, of the curvy-women-tree-roots, which was supposed to be an indicator of manly lustfulness.  The Tianxingqiao Fall itself was a beautifully shaped fall, and well worth the walk.


The park closed at 7:30 pm (the entire falls area is State-controlled, and only approved taxis go in and out of the area), and we arrived at the taxi pickup area just after 7 pm.  A taxi driver was busy on his phone ordering more taxis one-by-one as visitors straggled out of the park just before closing.  I am not sure what would have happened if we had exited too late.

We had dinner at our hotel before crashing into bed.  Our hotel was a typical Chinese small-town one — a basic, clean, four-floors-and-no-lift, concrete building with tiled floors.  We were on the fourth floor.  Our toilet was squat-style.  The restaurant, on the ground floor, had plenty of mozzies.



Friday 20 July
We were up at 6 am, aiming to prove that Mama’s research had paid off.  According to her research, the best plan for seeing the main Huangguoshu waterfall was to get in there immediately when it opened.  Too much later and the crowds would be horrendous, even by Chinese standards.

The taxis to the area started moving at 7 am, so we grabbed a quick breakfast out on the footpath of the neighbouring hotel, and jumped into our (late) taxis about 7:30 am.  Apparently another group of tourists from the next door hotel had also ordered two taxis, and there was some dispute as to whether the arriving pair were ours or theirs (the drivers seemed to say they were ours).  Compromising, we took one of the first pair, while Lily’s family took one of the second pair.


Before seeing the falls themselves, the walk through the park was pleasant.  The potted banzai trees near the beginning were interesting, and the girls and I tried to decide which ones looked most like shrunken normal-sized trees.

To avoid the suspense, Mama’s research was correct.  We got to see the falls before the crowds became too much, and even as we were leaving the falls we could see that the paths leading in were getting ridiculously busy.

But the waterfall was indeed spectacular, and a definite must-see.  At 74 m high and 81 m wide, it has a unique natural(ish) path in the rocks behind the waterfall where we could see out through the curtain of falling water.  Behind the falls it was quite wet, and we had to wear raincoats to walk through.  We brought our own raincoats, but once again, just like at the panda park, the raincoat salespeople were doing excellent business with disposable plastic ones (but no plastic boots this time!).  Just after the falls, there were dozens of sacks of disposed-of raincoats — ten minutes and done.



On exiting this park area above the falls, we walked the short distance to the Doutangpo falls, the widest falls in the Huangguoshu area.  This waterfall was also pretty nice, but after the other two earlier falls, it didn’t have quite the impact it would have had on its own.


We finished our walk around midday and grabbed taxis back to our hotel, where we picked up our (packed) bags and some food and hopped into another couple of taxis for the return drive to Anshun train station.  Our train, again old-style but this time single level with clear windows, left at 3:24 pm, returning us to Guiyang.  We had booked an apartment in the same building as before (9th floor this time) for another two nights.



Mama and the girls ate at Pizza Hut just opposite our apartment building, but I stayed home because of the slight food-poisoning tummy.


Saturday 21 July
Mulan got her boil dressed at the nearby hospital for the final time this morning (they had been going daily for the past two weeks).  It had healed enough that we could do it ourselves after this.

Mama and the girls, with Lily’s family, went to Hebin Park for a few hours, while I stayed resting at home, fighting the food-poisoning.  They tell me that they had a fun time at an amusement park there.  They were going to visit a mini-zoo with monkeys, but it was too crowded.

In the evening, Mama met up with her ex-student.

(Part 4 here)