Craving the howya
I am in the bosom of my family and my mother is stealing my clothes. She likes a red paisley-ish top of mine and has asked me for it before. I pointed out that at the moment I live out of a bag and have maybe five tops total. Yesterday she took in my laundry and spirited the top away to her room. Now, my mum hates ironing and only the other day she was announcing that she doesn't iron anything if she can possibly help it. Today I caught her ironing my top while packing for her ballroom-dancing week in Kerry. "Oh, I often give things a little rub when they're dry. I was doing it for you," she said.
Anyway, some more travel journal.
*
I never knew how it felt not to be able to read until I came to China.
Russia was relatively okay. There’s a pretty close correspondence between Cyrillic letters and our alphabet, I is backwards N, N is H, R is P, V is B, etc, fine, sorted. I could never remember what the one that looked like ‘bI’ sounded like, but even that would have sunk in given a few more days. But Chinese... whoa. I was helpless. I wished I’d done a course or something before I went. It refused to go into my head. After a week and a half I had two or three phrases and recognised maybe ten characters. I'd look at a street name and seconds later all I could remember was that it began with J. I felt guilty that I was there and robot_mel, Chinese scholar extraordinaire, wasn't.
I have often been snooty and withering about coddled package-tourists in the past, but because of the language barrier, trying to organise things in China was enough to make me cry. All my life-admin, coping and sorting-things-out skills were useless. Intensive bursts of telephoning, Google-fu, looking things up, navigation, persuasion: they’re all based on language. I felt so overwhelmed by it all one day in Shanghai that I wanted to hide in the hotel room and not come out. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn’t dream of discouraging anyone from experiencing it themselves. It’s... an experience. But it’s hard.
Now see how hard.
Adventures in Medicine-Buying
We wanted some over-the-counter medication. Here is how you get it in China, in a series of easy steps:
Weeks of fun with boat tickets!
We start trying to get tickets on the ferry to Japan a couple of days after arriving in Beijing. They don’t answer email. In fact the address on the website is dead. The website itself is almost entirely in Japanese and Chinese. There’s one page in English that shows the timetable and an application form. “Fax us the application and deposit your fare in Mitsui-Sumitomo Bank, Osaka-Chuo Branch, ordinary account number...” I haven’t a clue how to make a lodgment to a Japanese bank account from China, but let’s not worry about that for now, I think, let’s just give them a ring first and see if there’s room on the boat.
The Shanghai ferry office phone rings out. At least I think it’s ringing out, not engaged - I don’t know what the phone tones are here and I can’t look in the front of the Yellow Pages to find out because guess what, it’s in Chinese, what with us being in China and all. I fear there's no one in the office because the Sodding National Holiday (tm) is but a few days away. So we go to reception. “Can I call Japan, please? Can you charge it to the room?”
“Japan?”
“You know. That country over there. Japan. Nippon,” I flail.
“Ah. Buy IP card.”
“What’s an IP card?”
“You must buy IP card.”
“I can’t just give you money?”
“Buy IP card,” the receptionist says, clearly getting irritated.
We buy an IP card, which (obviously enough, now I think about it) is an international phone card, and try to phone Japan. “Sorry,” says a voice, “that area is not covered.”
I boggle a bit - it’s Japan, not Antarctica - and try the Shanghai ferry office again. It rings and rings and rings while I get more and more nervous. I hate the phone at the best of times and there's a particular sense of dread that goes with being sure you won't be understood. I flip through the Lonely Planet phrasebook with my other hand. I can’t find “does anyone speak English?”. I think they’ve left it out on principle. I bookmark the page that has “one moment, please” with my finger. Finally someone picks up.
“Ni hao.”
“Hello. Is that Japan-Shanghai Ferry Company?”
“Ni hao?”
“English? Does anyone there speak English?”
(wearily) “English... no.”
“No?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow will someone speak English?”
“Tomorrow. Bye bye.”
I can’t let him off the phone, it took long enough to get through in the first place. I try to open the book, drop it and panic. “One moment, please!” I say in English, feeling like a prize fool by now.
“Bye bye.”
“No!” I scrabble for the phrasebook and blurt out “derng ee sha!”, which is supposed to be “one moment, please” but considering the mess I made of the tones, probably came out as “toast your mother” or something.
“Er... bye bye.”
“Derng ee sha! Please wait!” I psst at Ivan to go and look for the guy who runs the information office, who seems to have gone for a coffee break.
“Bye bye.”
“Wait!” I beg.
“Bye bye.” I think I hear a click. Then the information office man rushes in and grabs the phone, a stream of articulate tone-perfect proper native Chinese issuing forth from him, and I practically slide to the floor with relief. “They are not busy,” he tells us, “don’t worry, you can buy tickets in Shanghai.” “Thank you, thank you,” I gush pathetically, and offer him a tip which he refuses. I’d buy him a beer if he wasn’t at work.
A week later in Shanghai we try again to get this boat-thing sorted out. We’ll just go to the ferry terminal and get tickets there. But wait, where is the ferry terminal? Can’t look up the Yellow Pages because it’s in Chinese, badum tish. I find another email address for the ferry company and mail a Mr Miyamoto, asking for the place the boat leaves from. He mails back a form letter telling me to deposit my money in the Mitsui-Sumitomo Bank etc etc. Back to the website. Pages and pages of Chinese and a map of Shanghai... in Chinese. It covers an area our city map doesn’t. Nor do Multimap or Google Maps. Ivan tries the ‘translate’ function on Google. It translates the port address as ‘hundred tree given name road’. The Shanghai office doesn’t answer the phone. Neither does the Japan Travel Bureau in Shanghai. Of course, it’s still the SNH(tm), they’re all down on the Bund avoiding the cops and hitting each other with giant inflatable hammers. Good for them. I try the Japan Travel Bureau in Tokyo. A woman answers. “Konnichiwa,” I say nervously, “eigo? English? Anyone? Please?”
“something something gaijin something something,” I hear her shout to the office at large, and I’m so thrilled to have recognised a non-English word, I don’t care that the word is “foreigner”.
(She couldn't help us, and in the end we walked to where it looked like the terminal might be on the Chinese map, off the edge of our own Roman-alphabet map, through the docklands, past the dump where they were loading garbage scows, as night fell. We had no idea if we were even on the right road. We put our heads into shops and cargo offices and said the ship's name, Su Zhou Hao, and at last when we were about to give up someone recognised it and pointed us further up the road. The ferry terminal was closed, guarded by a friendly security man and his yappy little dog, but at least we knew it existed and how to find it again on Tuesday morning when the boat was due to sail...)
I want to be a hardcore traveller, not a pathetic bleating monolingual wuss, but China was harder than my core. I promised myself I'd come back and do it properly, make it to Xi’an, climb obscure holy mountains and see little villages, sail through the Three Gorges, all that stuff, when I’ve had time to do my homework. In the meantime Ivan and I kept going out and seeing as much of Shanghai as we could, weaving through the festival crowds, but after all the boat-phoning we allowed ourselves a moment of weakness. “It’ll be nice to get back to Dublin and walk into a shop and have someone say ‘Howya’,” Ivan said. And there I was too, suddenly craving the howya. For the first time ever I understood why the world is full of Irish pubs. There’s one in Beijing called Paddy Field’s. I like that.
Anyway, some more travel journal.
*
I never knew how it felt not to be able to read until I came to China.
Russia was relatively okay. There’s a pretty close correspondence between Cyrillic letters and our alphabet, I is backwards N, N is H, R is P, V is B, etc, fine, sorted. I could never remember what the one that looked like ‘bI’ sounded like, but even that would have sunk in given a few more days. But Chinese... whoa. I was helpless. I wished I’d done a course or something before I went. It refused to go into my head. After a week and a half I had two or three phrases and recognised maybe ten characters. I'd look at a street name and seconds later all I could remember was that it began with J. I felt guilty that I was there and robot_mel, Chinese scholar extraordinaire, wasn't.
I have often been snooty and withering about coddled package-tourists in the past, but because of the language barrier, trying to organise things in China was enough to make me cry. All my life-admin, coping and sorting-things-out skills were useless. Intensive bursts of telephoning, Google-fu, looking things up, navigation, persuasion: they’re all based on language. I felt so overwhelmed by it all one day in Shanghai that I wanted to hide in the hotel room and not come out. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn’t dream of discouraging anyone from experiencing it themselves. It’s... an experience. But it’s hard.
Now see how hard.
Adventures in Medicine-Buying
We wanted some over-the-counter medication. Here is how you get it in China, in a series of easy steps:
- Go into pharmacy. Boggle at traditional Chinese herbs and things called 'Grubby Cat' and 'Good Baby'. See one packet with a recognisable big-pharma logo and no English. Say drug name to staff. Watch staff shake heads in bemusement.
- Go to foreign language bookshop. Find English-Chinese-English medical dictionary. Find drug name. Take photo of three lines of characters after drug name.
- Back at hotel, zoom in on photo, meticulously copy out three lines of characters into notebook.
- Web-search for 'english-speaking pharmacy shanghai'.
- Find pharmacy on kilometre-long street in intense people-jam.
- Show notebook page to receptionist. Get sent to top floor. Show notebook to three more staff members. More blank looks. It is not an English-speaking pharmacy. Mime symptoms. Listen to them debate the issue loudly among themselves. Get offered medicine for something else entirely. Make 'no' gestures.
- Wait for them to come back, hoping they are coming back and not just gone out for a laugh on the fire escape.
- Get medicine.
- Weep with relief.
Weeks of fun with boat tickets!
We start trying to get tickets on the ferry to Japan a couple of days after arriving in Beijing. They don’t answer email. In fact the address on the website is dead. The website itself is almost entirely in Japanese and Chinese. There’s one page in English that shows the timetable and an application form. “Fax us the application and deposit your fare in Mitsui-Sumitomo Bank, Osaka-Chuo Branch, ordinary account number...” I haven’t a clue how to make a lodgment to a Japanese bank account from China, but let’s not worry about that for now, I think, let’s just give them a ring first and see if there’s room on the boat.
The Shanghai ferry office phone rings out. At least I think it’s ringing out, not engaged - I don’t know what the phone tones are here and I can’t look in the front of the Yellow Pages to find out because guess what, it’s in Chinese, what with us being in China and all. I fear there's no one in the office because the Sodding National Holiday (tm) is but a few days away. So we go to reception. “Can I call Japan, please? Can you charge it to the room?”
“Japan?”
“You know. That country over there. Japan. Nippon,” I flail.
“Ah. Buy IP card.”
“What’s an IP card?”
“You must buy IP card.”
“I can’t just give you money?”
“Buy IP card,” the receptionist says, clearly getting irritated.
We buy an IP card, which (obviously enough, now I think about it) is an international phone card, and try to phone Japan. “Sorry,” says a voice, “that area is not covered.”
I boggle a bit - it’s Japan, not Antarctica - and try the Shanghai ferry office again. It rings and rings and rings while I get more and more nervous. I hate the phone at the best of times and there's a particular sense of dread that goes with being sure you won't be understood. I flip through the Lonely Planet phrasebook with my other hand. I can’t find “does anyone speak English?”. I think they’ve left it out on principle. I bookmark the page that has “one moment, please” with my finger. Finally someone picks up.
“Ni hao.”
“Hello. Is that Japan-Shanghai Ferry Company?”
“Ni hao?”
“English? Does anyone there speak English?”
(wearily) “English... no.”
“No?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow will someone speak English?”
“Tomorrow. Bye bye.”
I can’t let him off the phone, it took long enough to get through in the first place. I try to open the book, drop it and panic. “One moment, please!” I say in English, feeling like a prize fool by now.
“Bye bye.”
“No!” I scrabble for the phrasebook and blurt out “derng ee sha!”, which is supposed to be “one moment, please” but considering the mess I made of the tones, probably came out as “toast your mother” or something.
“Er... bye bye.”
“Derng ee sha! Please wait!” I psst at Ivan to go and look for the guy who runs the information office, who seems to have gone for a coffee break.
“Bye bye.”
“Wait!” I beg.
“Bye bye.” I think I hear a click. Then the information office man rushes in and grabs the phone, a stream of articulate tone-perfect proper native Chinese issuing forth from him, and I practically slide to the floor with relief. “They are not busy,” he tells us, “don’t worry, you can buy tickets in Shanghai.” “Thank you, thank you,” I gush pathetically, and offer him a tip which he refuses. I’d buy him a beer if he wasn’t at work.
A week later in Shanghai we try again to get this boat-thing sorted out. We’ll just go to the ferry terminal and get tickets there. But wait, where is the ferry terminal? Can’t look up the Yellow Pages because it’s in Chinese, badum tish. I find another email address for the ferry company and mail a Mr Miyamoto, asking for the place the boat leaves from. He mails back a form letter telling me to deposit my money in the Mitsui-Sumitomo Bank etc etc. Back to the website. Pages and pages of Chinese and a map of Shanghai... in Chinese. It covers an area our city map doesn’t. Nor do Multimap or Google Maps. Ivan tries the ‘translate’ function on Google. It translates the port address as ‘hundred tree given name road’. The Shanghai office doesn’t answer the phone. Neither does the Japan Travel Bureau in Shanghai. Of course, it’s still the SNH(tm), they’re all down on the Bund avoiding the cops and hitting each other with giant inflatable hammers. Good for them. I try the Japan Travel Bureau in Tokyo. A woman answers. “Konnichiwa,” I say nervously, “eigo? English? Anyone? Please?”
“something something gaijin something something,” I hear her shout to the office at large, and I’m so thrilled to have recognised a non-English word, I don’t care that the word is “foreigner”.
(She couldn't help us, and in the end we walked to where it looked like the terminal might be on the Chinese map, off the edge of our own Roman-alphabet map, through the docklands, past the dump where they were loading garbage scows, as night fell. We had no idea if we were even on the right road. We put our heads into shops and cargo offices and said the ship's name, Su Zhou Hao, and at last when we were about to give up someone recognised it and pointed us further up the road. The ferry terminal was closed, guarded by a friendly security man and his yappy little dog, but at least we knew it existed and how to find it again on Tuesday morning when the boat was due to sail...)
I want to be a hardcore traveller, not a pathetic bleating monolingual wuss, but China was harder than my core. I promised myself I'd come back and do it properly, make it to Xi’an, climb obscure holy mountains and see little villages, sail through the Three Gorges, all that stuff, when I’ve had time to do my homework. In the meantime Ivan and I kept going out and seeing as much of Shanghai as we could, weaving through the festival crowds, but after all the boat-phoning we allowed ourselves a moment of weakness. “It’ll be nice to get back to Dublin and walk into a shop and have someone say ‘Howya’,” Ivan said. And there I was too, suddenly craving the howya. For the first time ever I understood why the world is full of Irish pubs. There’s one in Beijing called Paddy Field’s. I like that.