Report from WuhanOct 23, 2009
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Hi everyone Well a brief email from me to add to John's below. Today we visited the Wuhan Provincial museum and were totally bowled over by the a series of rooms displaying the contents from the tomb of the Marquis of Ji, a lord from around this area who was buried with all the goods he needed for his travels to the next world including a panoply of cauldrons, musical instruments, tables, weapons, armour, chariots, AND... 13 women and one dog. Fantastic display model of the tomb looking down on it.
This was from around 700-400BC. I think they call this the warring states period (as if all the others were peaceful!). Such a rich sense of one person's material life or i guess of a period's material life. One thing that was particularly stunning was a set of bells that range in size from small things to great drum like things arranged in rows on two great frames set at right angles to each other. They put on a performance at the museum's concert hall using replica musical instruments - pan pipes, flutes, sir (zither like thing) and others. Good to hear what the instruments would have sounded like though of course they did not know what the music might have been. It took modern metallurgists five years to work out how they had managed to cast the bells so that each could produce two tones. Dad you would love the stuff about the technology of this culture.
Out to dinner tonight across the road from here. Delightful people so concerned to help us ignorant foreigners, so friendly, so concerned that we wouldn't like chili. First escorted outside to choose our fish from great tanks and to witness the fellow attacking it with great relish on chopping blocks lined up in front. Raucous restaurant, great barn like place, kids, families, noise, smoke, us being gawked at. But overall such good humour and helpfulness. A great night.
Home again now and expecting to meet Owen and Qiuran tonight late. We hope we have them registered successfully. Given our poor Chinese it remains to be seen! Love to you all, Joan
Hello everyone. We are in Wuhan in Central China, a big city on the Yangtze. Totally different from Beijing and Shanghai, which are not quite but almost like Western cities - dynamic and flashy in a lot of ways with a million flyovers and wide roads tearing through them. Both choking on the air - the worst smog I've ever seen in any city I've been in, including India. But if you want air pollution, try Wuhan. It's like flying down into a carbon soup. First impressions are that it is much closer to somewhere like India than it is to anything in the west. It has a stronger sense of the third world, but I wouldn't want to exaggerate - it is also going flat out building and developing and it has its own areas of flashiness.
We are staying in a hotel where no one speaks English - well they have about as much English as we have Chinese - almost none, so it is excellent to be forced to make an effort to communicate all the time. It is part of a Chinese chain called Home Inns and we recommend if you want very inexpensive clean and comfortable accommodation. It costs about $12 - 13 per night each. Yesterday we got a cab down to the central area of Hankou (lit. mouth of the Han), one of the towns that have come together to make Wuhan. We wandered into an area where boats and ferries dock and had a view across this massive river. Never having looked at the map of Shanghai properly I had always thought that the large river that flows along the Bund was the Yangzi, but that's a pipsqueak called the Huangpo and the Yangzi is what you think at first is the sea. Here, we couldn't see the other side all that well because of the bluish haze but it's an impressive sight.
We walked along a street taking note of the restaurants for future reference. Along the way there were a lot of funny looking shops with rather scantily clad young women in them, then mechanical places fixing motorbikes, little clusters of people playing cards sitting on boxes and kids running around. I said to Joan, do you think the girls are some sort of manicurists or beauty parlours? resisting the obvious because I couldn't believe it would be allowed to be so blatant. 'Knocking shops' she said - she does like the old argot. Later, when I was ahead of her a bit, one gestured for me to come in and I noticed a poster of a bare breasted woman on the wall behind her, so Joan was clearly right.
What is allowed and not allowed is surprising here. In the main bookshop in Beijing there were books that we knew were very critical of the regime on sale and even one that had the hilarious banner across the top 'Banned in China!'. BBC and CNN were on tv in Shanghai. That sort of thing.
We turned down a side alley and found ourselves in a district not that far removed from many areas of Indian cities, particularly Muslim sections and this turned out to at least partly be one. Uighers maybe, I'm not sure. Teeming with small shops, their goods flowing out onto the street - mainly food - fruit and vegetables, fish splashing around in buckets of water, meat hanging in the openings - very few had any glass windows - shoe repairers and fixers of various sorts, all sorts of barbeque meats on sticks, men clustered on low boxes gambling with cards, a group of older women further up playing what looked like mah jong. We went along asking if we could take photos, then showing them on the screen to universal delight. Some of course giggle and run for cover while others strut their stuff, onlookers laughing and making comments on the photo. It is a bit awkward, taking photos amid such evident poverty with a camera that probably costs more than many of them can imagine. I used not to do it for that reason but I think it started in a market in Madurai where the poverty was not an obvious issue and the shop people seemed to love having the photos taken. Asking is essential, almost always met with agreement, and almost always with a huge amount of mirth, not used to it, not used to seeing images of themselves and a lovely way of making contact with people, especially when there is such a language barrier.
There are few foreigners here and you get gawped at as you walk along the street. Even in Shanghai the waiters all ran away when we went into one local restaurant and we couldn't get them to serve us. Every time we said something they'd run off giggling. Something similar happened at one place here but the restaurant was almost deserted so we went back to one that was bursting at the seams and waited on stools out the front for a table.
Communication becomes exhausting so we pointed to pictures in blind hope. A young woman from a nearby table came over to help after one of the waitresses asked her. This waitress was very smart and was worried about what we had ordered, having learnt in school no doubt that westerners have funny attitudes to such delicacies as pig's colon. The woman who could speak English said 'you have ordered the hands of the pig'. 'Pig's trotters' said Joan. 'Yum,' said I. I don't think I've had pig's trotters since I was a kid when they were quite a common part of Australian cuisine. We had also ordered roasted goose, so it was a meal that an eighteenth century Englishman would have felt perfectly at home with. And another dish of tiny shrimps and greens with some of those fat dark red chilli shells with the seeds taken out so that you get the flavour without the hotness. I hope all of you are having half as much fun as us, John
