BEijing (sleeper train)
Climbing up the Walls
When I was eight or nine we bought a kitten.
Cat I was a slow-moving ball of orange whose care was meant to steer us children away from lives of wanton selfishness. Dad ended up feeding it most days and all I really learnt was that I prefer dogs. Nevertheless, when it shuffled off its mortal coil some years later, we were soon at the pet shop, lined up for a replacement.
Cat II quickly grew to resemble Cat I in appearance, temperament and habit. Its familiar orange fur could be seen through the door as a too-early meow signalled hunger, seen on the veranda in the same spots of sun, and found in tufts on the chicken-wire of my older sister's guineapig cage.
Cat II was, as replacements go, seamless. That didn't make it our original feline--by this stage Cat I was resting subterranean, a distinction even my younger brother understood--but it did allow us continuity as pet owners.
Fast-forward a decade to an hour's drive outside Beijing: I was looking at Cat II.
The Great Wall is sold as testament to a larger-than-life past, a palpable link to the scale of Chinese history. Maybe it is, in parts. Badaling, the section we visited, looked as historical as the latest Disney World exhibition: buses disgorged tourists in front of packed stalls at the base of craggy mountains; from there they photographed their way the steep few hundred metres along a crenellated, tower-punctuated, handrail-boasting Wall that looked younger than I am. Old it wasn't.
I hadn't expected it be to be flawlessly preserved--no more than I had expected Cat I to live forever, or a country to leave so iconic a cash-cow unmilked--but neither did I anticipate it being completely new. Yet here it was. Fresh as if it'd just come from a giant box. Same form, replicated. Cat II.
Restoration. That's the word the flyers use to explain what I was looking at. Here's another word: nonsense.
We didn't 'restore' Cat I when we bought Cat II; we replaced him. Restoration was what happened at the vet's all but the last time. It's not a perfect analogy, but then again, he wasn't the perfect pet.
Still.
Restoration happens to something. A few bricks maybe, crumbling remains--a physical thing, diminished but present. Badaling was built fresh. You can replace a memory, but can you expect it to support blocks?
It wasn't that I couldn't understand the thinking. Sometimes you want to introduce Cat II as Cat I.
Aside from money, there's the question of pride--no doubt it's easier to bury a cat than it is to abandon your nation's history.
And it is an achievement, of course. Even to a skeptic abraded by Chinese tourism. If you could block out the gaudiness--the tour buses, the shutter-storm of SLRs, the loud tourists in just purchased t-shirts--to focus instead on the shape of the Wall and the ageless mountains, mountains that must have looked the same hundreds of years ago when indentured workers were dragging bricks up their dry slopes, it wasn't hard to be awed by the original magnitude. You could do worse than label it great.
I guess, on a more everyday level, that's a bit like what we did with Cat II: squint until he looked like Cat I.
Who knows? Maybe we would have even called him Cat I if we had cashed-up hordes at the fence.
Beijing Showdown
It's easy to feel the sucker when you step out in the middle of a capital like Beijing.
You've outpaced your expectations. Prices shoot up, meal portions plummet, day-trips are guided shopping and along with all the other tourists and Westerners (including people who'll wear bum-bags in public) you're a clear commodity--one more potential victim helping to refine the local scam industry.
There's a scam for every occasion but it was the unlicensed taxi drivers who became our first nemeses.
Licensed taxi are clean, honestly-run and metered. They're cheap, but often difficult to wave down. Unlicensed taxies are, like their predatory drivers, always waiting. They're never metered. I haven't yet discovered the formula they calculate their price through, but I think it'd probably include the following:
When I was eight or nine we bought a kitten.
Cat I was a slow-moving ball of orange whose care was meant to steer us children away from lives of wanton selfishness. Dad ended up feeding it most days and all I really learnt was that I prefer dogs. Nevertheless, when it shuffled off its mortal coil some years later, we were soon at the pet shop, lined up for a replacement.
Cat II quickly grew to resemble Cat I in appearance, temperament and habit. Its familiar orange fur could be seen through the door as a too-early meow signalled hunger, seen on the veranda in the same spots of sun, and found in tufts on the chicken-wire of my older sister's guineapig cage.
Cat II was, as replacements go, seamless. That didn't make it our original feline--by this stage Cat I was resting subterranean, a distinction even my younger brother understood--but it did allow us continuity as pet owners.
Fast-forward a decade to an hour's drive outside Beijing: I was looking at Cat II.
The Great Wall is sold as testament to a larger-than-life past, a palpable link to the scale of Chinese history. Maybe it is, in parts. Badaling, the section we visited, looked as historical as the latest Disney World exhibition: buses disgorged tourists in front of packed stalls at the base of craggy mountains; from there they photographed their way the steep few hundred metres along a crenellated, tower-punctuated, handrail-boasting Wall that looked younger than I am. Old it wasn't.
I hadn't expected it be to be flawlessly preserved--no more than I had expected Cat I to live forever, or a country to leave so iconic a cash-cow unmilked--but neither did I anticipate it being completely new. Yet here it was. Fresh as if it'd just come from a giant box. Same form, replicated. Cat II.
Restoration. That's the word the flyers use to explain what I was looking at. Here's another word: nonsense.
We didn't 'restore' Cat I when we bought Cat II; we replaced him. Restoration was what happened at the vet's all but the last time. It's not a perfect analogy, but then again, he wasn't the perfect pet.
Still.
Restoration happens to something. A few bricks maybe, crumbling remains--a physical thing, diminished but present. Badaling was built fresh. You can replace a memory, but can you expect it to support blocks?
It wasn't that I couldn't understand the thinking. Sometimes you want to introduce Cat II as Cat I.
Aside from money, there's the question of pride--no doubt it's easier to bury a cat than it is to abandon your nation's history.
And it is an achievement, of course. Even to a skeptic abraded by Chinese tourism. If you could block out the gaudiness--the tour buses, the shutter-storm of SLRs, the loud tourists in just purchased t-shirts--to focus instead on the shape of the Wall and the ageless mountains, mountains that must have looked the same hundreds of years ago when indentured workers were dragging bricks up their dry slopes, it wasn't hard to be awed by the original magnitude. You could do worse than label it great.
I guess, on a more everyday level, that's a bit like what we did with Cat II: squint until he looked like Cat I.
Who knows? Maybe we would have even called him Cat I if we had cashed-up hordes at the fence.
Beijing Showdown
It's easy to feel the sucker when you step out in the middle of a capital like Beijing.
You've outpaced your expectations. Prices shoot up, meal portions plummet, day-trips are guided shopping and along with all the other tourists and Westerners (including people who'll wear bum-bags in public) you're a clear commodity--one more potential victim helping to refine the local scam industry.
There's a scam for every occasion but it was the unlicensed taxi drivers who became our first nemeses.
Licensed taxi are clean, honestly-run and metered. They're cheap, but often difficult to wave down. Unlicensed taxies are, like their predatory drivers, always waiting. They're never metered. I haven't yet discovered the formula they calculate their price through, but I think it'd probably include the following:
- D1 = Quoted distance of trip (30 km)
- D2 = Actual distance of trip (6 km)
- D3 = Distance you are dropped from intended destination (4 km)
- Pe = Number of other hapless tourists already extorted (2 people)
- Pr = Price you would have paid for a metered taxi (25 RMB)
- Ta = Number of taxi rides it takes to find a (faulty) compass (4 taxis)
- Tr = Time spent in a hardseat on train to Beijing (25 hours)
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