alex in the 'jing

I'm not sure what the state of international focus on China, so I'm going to give a little background before I write about this. This year, 2009, marks the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, which in 1949 marked the end of the civil war that had been raging between the Communists and the Nationalists through the course of the second world war (though they did, of course, "band together" for general morale's sake against the invading Japanese). China's National Day is October 1, which is one of China's two Golden Week holidays (the other being Spring Festival, or Chinese New Years), and this year is going to be a ripper. Not only is it a nice round anniversary, but Beijing is still in its post-Olympics haze, the memories fresh in the nation's mind, and this celebration is going to be massive.

Of course, practically, it's making living in Beijing a bit of an inconvenience. Because of political sensitivity, being a foreigner is even more annoying than usual: visa rules have been tight for months, access to websites have been restricted, registration checks at your apartment gate more frequent, and rumors about restricted access to the outside world for the duration of Golden Week are flying. It's not just foreigners getting burned, either.

For the last few weeks, there have been sporadic road closures that nobody ever seems to be warned about or prepared for in the south of the city near Tiananmen Square (where the celebrations will be held) for logistical planning. The other night, we heard practice fireworks going off (though they were too low for us to see), and they've been doing practice runs of other pieces of the celebrations as well. Today, however, is the first time I have been personally inconvenienced by these practice runs.

Today, they are running a practice parade through the entire south of the city, spanning most of the CBD as well as the area around Tiananmen Square. My building is in the path of the parade, so all of the businesses and office buildings in the path of the parade are being shut down from 1pm. We have to leave the building by 1pm, and while I'm sure people will try hanging around to see the show, that's a lot of people to turf out. I'd be surprised if it was under a million people that they are sending home early this Friday - possibly closer to two, considering some of the high rises the closures are cutting through.

Of course, I'm not about to say no to half a day's work, but it's not just being turfed out. Buses will stop running altogether along the south section of the city, and the subway will be running reduced in all places from 3pm and closed in other places from 4pm. While there will still be taxis, the road closures will make driving in the south of the city a nightmare, though I'm sure a bicycle will still be able to worm its way through the traffic jams. For that, I am incredibly thankful.

One rule that does not affect me directly but makes me a little sad is that, in the area, residents have been asked to refrain from kite flying and releasing their pigeons, from September 15 to October 8. This is a habit of a lot of old Beijing residents, and it will be a shame not to see them around the city. It's a small prohibition, on the scale of prohibitions they could be making, but one that I feel is worth noting.

I don't bring this up to point at how China Is Big And Scary And Controlling, because I hope everyone who has lived in a large, central, capital city will recall a time when their city was at the centre of something large and politically sensitive that inconvenienced them in some manner and caused them to feel watched. I'm thinking, of course, of a very direct parallel in my own and many Sydney-siders' history: the APEC summit in 2007. While APEC didn't affect me and my life directly (I lived on the North Shore and worked in Hornsby at the time), my sister was greatly inconvenienced by road closures and re-routed buses and limited public transport. And another friend of mine, who is of Portuguese descent and has dark skin and dark hair and a few piercings, got stopped and questioned by police just for walking around in the area just outside the road blocks.

So I don't think anything of the road closures and the tightened watch on foreigners in Beijing is anything sinister. If anything, it's perfectly natural. China's a big country, with lots of foreign investment and interest, and the government knows that being Communist is seen as dangerous or at least contentious for lots of Western nations, so as they gear up to celebrate the sixtieth year of the founding of their Communist nation, it's only natural that they're a little cautious.

I don't know why they don't want old men letting out their pigeons, though.

So, about ten days ago I had my first proper bike crash on the way to work. It wasn't too bad, in fact it was fairly mild, I just sort of... didn't slow down enough, didn't swerve when I could have, and bumped into an oncoming electric bicycle. I somehow ended up turfing out the chick who was being dinked on the back ('dink' is apparently an Australian term; I'd never heard it until I got here though) and sat on the back of their bike, instead of falling off my own bike. They laughed good-naturedly at me, I apologized profusely, and we both went our separate ways.

So the crash wasn't too bad, but somewhere in the mix, my pedal exacted its revenge on my calf and bit a chunk out of it. Pedals are evil things, as anyone who bicycles will tell you, and inherently hold a grudge against legs. Mine are no exception, and my poor calf was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I got a wound, which looked at the time to be a nice, neat cut about three inches across the back of my calf and a bruise spanning my entire muscle. I got to work, cleaned it with water, and wiped it with some disinfectant wipes. I then got some bandages on the way home from the pharmacy.

The bandages are an amusing point in the story, because they were the only large bandages you could get in the pharmacy, and they were laced not with disinfectant but with 云南白药, or Yunnan White Medicine, which if you consult Wikipedia you will find is a hemostatic medicine that was used on the field in the Vietnam war in powder form. What it says on the packaging is STATE SECRET PRODUCT, which is hilarious. It didn't do anything one way or the other to my wound, but it did seem to dry it out a lot.

On Saturday I finally stopped wearing bandages during the day (on about Wednesday I stopped wearing them to bed) because it's now scabbed up very nicely. The skin around it is dry as anything and I have to take care not to touch it, because as soon as I touch it, it gets itchy and I am terrible with scabs. This is probably really gross, but I love picking scabs. So I have to remind myself not to do that. Because this is one wound I don't want to relive. It's in way too awkward a place to take care of all over again, and it's already been way too long healing and I don't want to go through it.

If you likewise enjoy gross things, I took some photos of my wound for my mother so that she wouldn't worry, which you can see here. This was from the day I got the wound, and then maybe... three days later? I might take more if there's popular demand for it, but now it's pretty boring. Also, it is seriously difficult to take pictures of one's own calf muscle.

Since the bike crash, I've slowed my biking down a lot. Crashes happen to anyone and everyone, but they're only dangerous if you're going too fast. I just took a bit too much of a risk and my depth perception failed me, so I'm taking it easy. I only added about ten minutes to my morning commute, and now I don't turn up to work nearly as sweaty and gross as I did when I biked faster.

My day on a train could not have been better. Chinese trains are lots of fun, when you've got the right crowd, and generally the train that I took overall seemed to be low on the rough Northerners who enjoy spitting and throwing sunflower seeds on the floor and high on prissy Southern and overseas Chinese or foreigners (who don't spit and place their sunflower seeds neatly in a rubbish bin). As a brief overview for those who don't know, Chinese sleeper trains come in four classes: hard seat, soft seat, hard sleeper, soft sleeper. But because this is such an epic through journey, there's no reason for seats-only.

I slept in a hard sleeper because it's cheap and you can sleep anywhere. I got the middle bunk, which is middle priced, because on the top bunk you barely have breathing room and on the bottom bunk you have people sitting all over your bed all day. The bunks are arranged in little six-bunk compartments, which means you get to know your six neighbours pretty well. In mine, there were two Mongolian girls who slept most of the time in the top bunks, myself and a Chinese guy who'd been living in Chicago for the last 16 years, and on the bottom was a guy from Fujian who had buddies in another compartment so he was off a lot, and a nice older lady (我叫他阿姨) who could not speak a lick of English but who had been living in Vancouver for 10 years.

The compartment next to us seemed to be the foreigner's compartment. There was just one poor guy from Tianjin who didn't speak any English who was in there, but the rest seemed to be foreigners of different persuasions who had just gone to Hong Kong for a visa run. Somehow, bizarrely, I immediately made myself known as a Chinese speaker by asking where I was meant to put my baggage. I... never do this. It's stupid, but anyway. I guess I was just so relieved to be out of a place I couldn't speak the language that I spoke Mandarin the first chance I got. This is totally related because the guy from Tianjin (Zhang Shun) was talking to the Chicago-living Chinese guy (Sheng Kai) and looking at me. I was sort of peering curiously around the train from my bunk, as you do, and Kai told Shun that I spoke Chinese so he came over and started talking to me.

I don't know how long I spent talking to him - a while, getting all the obvious stuff out of the way like where are you from, why are you in Beijing, what were you doing in Hong Kong - and there was probably other stuff as well but I can't remember. He was really interested in me - both as a foreigner who could speak Chinese and obviously as a girl, which was all very very strange to deal with. Considering by that point I had changed into my pyjamas.

But it made the next day on the train much more enjoyable. I've only been on trains with other people before, so I've usually retreated to speaking English and sitting with people I know, because I'm a super woos, but this was just like when I took the tour group trip to Guilin - it forced me to speak Chinese, and it was amazing. I spent the next day speaking with Shun, Kai, and the nice older lady. We also tried to include a nice young architecture student from the other compartment who was 混血 mixed blood American and Japanese, but he didn't speak a word of Chinese, so it was Kai or me translating most of the time. I think the best part was, though, that despite the fact my Chinese is obviously not very 流利 (fluent or flowing), Kai didn't underestimate my ability to understand and didn't try to translate everything for me. But when I didn't understand something, he didn't mind translating. It was the best of every world.

We all spoke about everything - lots of East vs West, movies, NO politics thank god, food, things you get used to, Japan (a lot, seeing as Shun was pretty anti-Japan), education, family relationships, money, Beijing... and it was great. I probably didn't participate as much as I imagine I did, but I really enjoyed listening and being taken seriously and being understood. They all agreed that my Chinese was 够流利, or fluent enough, which was nice to hear. It both highlighted my language shortcomings and reminded me that I can actually speak Chinese well. I just need to remove myself from the temptation to speak English which, in Beijing, is ridiculously difficult.

So that is an entry I have been meaning to make for a while. Next up: Bike Crash Wound Update, and Accidental Bike Trekking 101.

While in the West, toilet talk is frowned upon in the same way as fart jokes, explicit sex talk or descriptions of gory wounds, when Westerners travel to the East, they see it as almost necessary. Though all large cities and the majority of in-home toilets in Asia are now Western-style seated toilets, public toilets of all standards - from slats placed over pig troughs to gleaming white porcelain with fully functional doors - are generally of the squat variety. (If you don't know what a squat toilet is or looks like, Wiki's on it. There's handy pictures and everything!) So being confronted with this new and strange technology that must be used on a more-than-daily basis, it is the most universal topic of conversation one can have with a fellow traveller.

Everyone has their own opinions on squat toilets. There are those who expound on the health benefits of a squat toilet, those who use words like "splash back" and complain about the dangers of slipping, and everyone in between. It's something everyone has to deal with, that everyone has in common, and no matter how blasé the seasoned traveler can get about it, everyone has their favorite squat toilet stories that they can share - stage whispering because you're still not really meant to talk about trips to the toilet, even if you're in Asia.

And here I am, armed with my stage whisper, to tell you my own opinions on the matter. This has been a long time coming because I have been to China three times, for a total of over a year, traveled through nine provinces, over hills and down rivers, through big cities and countryside, on trains and boats, and I have seen many a public toilet in my time here. I have my own horror stories and my own favorite toilets, but it's everything in the the middle that has informed my opinion.

Living where I do in Beijing, where a large majority of houses are centuries-old courtyard houses along the historical hutongs and have no indoor plumbing, there are public toilets every other block. You won't need to walk far to get from one to the next, and they are very clearly marked with helpful distance markers telling you how far you have to walk. Even if it's three meters. The public toilets servicing the hutongs generally come in three classes:

• First Class: Stalls of porcelain squat toilets with doors and locks. Inside stalls are hooks for personal effects.
  
• Second Class: Stalls of metal squat toilets with waist-height barriers between toilets. (Note: The configuration of these stalls affects your experience greatly.) Hooks for personal effects are communal. Do not take your bag with you to the toilet, you will never get it far away enough and if you do - where is your toilet paper then, missy?
  
• Third Class: Arrangement of squat toilets without barriers.
  

(Note: All public toilets have one Western toilet, marked as reserved for disabled or 弱者 - which will translate as "weak" but it's the term they use for people you'd give up your seat on the bus for - pregnant, infirm, injured, elderly.)

Public toilets at the hutongs do not come with toilet paper, so if you are a girl you must always carry your own supply (usually in the form of a small packet of tissues). You will forget too late one day, but from that day on you will never forget and have at least three packets of tissues in each bag you own.

Related to toilet paper, though, is something that many people have expressed confusion over: you cannot flush toilet paper in a large portion of public toilets. In fact, I can't even flush toilet paper at my own home. Toilet paper is disposed of in a little bucket beside the toilet. I've been told that the reason for this is that the pipes in this part of town - some of the oldest, original parts of Beijing - are too old and can't handle toilet paper. The bins in public toilets get emptied at frequent intervals, though, because with so many people looking for work, there are a lot of people hired to just clean up parts of the city.

So that is the situation. Most of the restaurants, bars and music venues here don't bother having toilets on the premises because there are plenty around the place, but those that do are largely squat toilets of a similar calibre (though they do usually have doors, they can be dirtier because they are cleaned less often). You get used to it, and if you don't you're likely to end up with a urinary tract infection from holding onto your bowel movements until you get to a clean Western toilet.

Personally, I prefer a squat toilet, for almost every occasion. I wouldn't want one in my home, because by design they get a little smelly, but when I'm out and at least half of the time at work I will use the squat toilet. And because I like lists, here are the reasons:

• Partly it is the "health benefit" angle, but I actually only read about that after I made my decision. To be crass, using a squat toilet makes me feel more empty, and there's never really any danger of my needing to go again any time soon.
  
• Sitting on a dirty Western toilet is the most foul thing ever. While a truly dirty squat toilet isn't any fun to deal with, at least you don't have to actually sit on it.
  
• You get your business over and done with in a timely fashion. I guess you could sit around on your haunches reading the newspaper on a squat toilet, but they're not exactly made for it. (When it comes to the open-plan toilets, it really rushes you.)
  

And after a late night out drinking and partying, which would you rather be confronted with: The toilets at The Annandale (Sydney music venue, generally grungy but not the worst), or the toilets at Drum & Bell Bar (similar to most hutong toilets). I'd rather take the squat toilet any day.

Previously, in ye olde Sydney, where Western culture is the norm, I found myself being a little confused when I saw an Asian hipster. It might be slightly racist of me, but I was brought up understanding that a hipster was a pasty white person with health issues stemming from their diet of clear spirits and cigarettes, so to see an Asian hipster in Sydney was just... well, it didn't sit right. Didn't make sense. Definitely didn't seem to fit.

In Beijing, I've come to realize that the Asians? They're doin' it rite.

While in other countries, if people know any Chinese music outside the "traditional" stuff played at your high class Chinese restaurants, it's usually Mando- or Cantopop, which is the same as any other manufactured pop music in any other part of the universe. Just as catchy and easily digestible as NSync, but just as much substance as well. If you're really cool, though, you've heard of Cui Jian, who is considered the godfather of Chinese rock & roll. Personally, I'd heard the name but hadn't gotten over the Mandopop enough to investigate.

What I've found, however, is that at least in Beijing, there is a rich variety of sounds coming out from the underground. While still not as highly regarded as the current wave of Chinese fine artists (see: Beijing's well-funded 798 Art District), musicians are getting along. Gig-going is an acceptable and popular pasttime, and the music is amazing. I've only been to a handful of gigs and surfed a small percentage of China's music blogs but I've already found death metal, indie rock, Britpop, punk (old-school and glam), and a really interesting folk scene. You can find any sort of music you want to hear, and usually there's someone to talk to about it.

Beijing's hipsters speak fair enough English, too, which makes it easy to get a glimpse into a world that seems further away when there's a language barrier. Going to the local music shop, one of the interested muso owners comes up to you and shows you the Chinese rock section, handing you as many CDs as you can carry and telling you the genre names in English. I've already bought three legitimate CDs while I've been here. And they say this is the country of piracy....

The best part is, though, that Beijing's hipsters know the music I do as well. They're still hipsters. They'll still want to talk to you about Jens Leckman and Seabear and Joanna Newsom because they actually know who they are. The internet here is restrictive now, but no more restrictive than tourist visas in the 1980s, when the Chinese youths got their hands on cassettes of music brought over by reporters and diplobrats and exchange students. Chinese hipsters are the same as everyone else - they have their sources and they've probably downloaded it before you have. This is the country of piracy, after all.

So Asian hipsters? They don't really confuse my that much anymore. It slots right back into "people are the same everywhere", because even though China's gig-going masses are still green to it, there are the same types you see at any gig. The photographer, the crazy dancers, the aloof, the groupies, the friends-of-band, the fangirls, the boyfriends... they're all there, and it all makes sense.

The best thing to come out of it, though, is that I'm much more inclined to talk to people at gigs here. When you're in a country where you don't know the language, every piece of communication comes with the same level of embarrassment whether you're asking where the train station is or what the name of the band is. May as well go for it.

After that excessive amount of description, here are some bands to check out:
1. SuperVC (果味VC) - http://www.myspace.com/supervcband (Britpop)
2. Joyside - http://www.myspace.com/joyside (glam punk)
3. Casino Demon - http://www.last.fm/music/Casino+Demon (punk rock)
4. The Flyx - http://www.myspace.cn/theflyx (old-school punk)
5. Shan Ren (山人乐队) - http://blog.163.com/vip_shanren/ (folk rock)