After much deliberation and
searching for a blog that isn't blocked in China, I've caved in and decided to
let Sam upload a blog for me. I know, this is a crazy idea, and who knows how
many “I miss Sam so much” and “Yeeeeeeeeeeah’s” will be added to each blog
post, but still, it’s better than nothing (or figuring out how to set up one of
those proxy things to circumvent the Great Firewall of China).
After a disastrous start to my journey during
which my luggage pretty much started coming apart when I pulled into London,
and forced me to buy an emergency new suitcase at St Pancras Railway Station
(thank God a shop selling them was actually open!). To be fair, this was an old
suitcase, which even when we were travelling through Australia in 2010 my
father had started raising doubts about, but I didn't really think it was
getting this old and bad. The long and the short of it though, was that not only
could I no longer pull it along my the handle, but the wheels were splayed and
some edges were starting to look less than secure, and I really couldn't afford
to run the risk of it coming apart during the transit of such a long journey.
So I made the decision to buy a brand new one then and there, and dragged along
two large suitcases through London to get to the Holliday Inn at Heathrow where
I unpacked everything and left the hotel staff a present of a broken, but loved
old suitcase, that I was almost sad to part with, since it reminded me of fun
journeys of the past. Bye bye suitcase my old friend.
 |
| Shit happens. Especially if you fail to plan and check your suitcase before packing for a very large and long journey |
This palaver had led me to go to
bed quite late, and I had to wake up at 5 am to catch my 8 am flight to Zurich
the next morning. However, this actually put me for a great start in adjusting
to Chinese time, since that was the equivalent of waking up about 12pm (not too
bad a start), and it also made me very tired which would only encourage me to
sleep more in the second, 11.5 hour leg of my journey, from Zurich to Shanghai
Pudong airport. Zurich was a great stopover, not only because Swiss Air came
highly recommended to me for flights to China, but also because this allowed me
to stock up on some quality chocolate at a good price (as a welcome present of
course, but some for me too!)
The real turn up for the books
though came during this second journey from there, when I introduced myself to
the middle aged Chinese lady booked on the seat next to me. It quickly
transpired that she didn’t actually speak more than a few words of English, but
having lived in Switzerland for 20 years, her German was fluent, and she was
happily reading the Bild next to me for the first hour or so. I expected a lot
of things from this journey, but I never expected to be discussing my trip to
China in German! It also made me realise just how many gaps I had in my German
knowledge (what is the German for “research exchange”? Or even “PhD”?! It’s
lucky that ‘Mikrobiologie’ sounds so similar to the English!). Nevertheless, we
just about managed to get by, and she explained that she was going home to
Shanghai to visit her family for the important National day holiday which
starts next week. She also explained that she’s been working as a
Chinese-German translator in hospitals, and that on the side, she also taught
Chinese. She made a valiant effort to correct some of my pronunciations of
various words I’d learnt, but after a while I think she decided it was too much
of an undertaking to give me a crash course in Chinese, via German in the
little time we had. Probably wise, as I think I'm pretty much a hopeless case
in Chinese! We tried to sleep as much as we could after it got to evening time.
Overall rating for Swiss air was
that although it wasn't as spacious as Qantas, it was tolerable, and they had a
good choice of things to watch and listen to on the entertainment system (even
Great Gatsby! And Community!), and the food was adequate and given at good
times that helped to adjust to Chinese time.
My new professor to be Prof
Hong-Yu Ou gallantly agreed to meet me at the ridiculously early arrival time
of 7:15, although thanks to the queues at passport control, I didn't make it
out until about 8:00, but he politely waited and then pulled my luggage along
to the car, to make the perilous journey back through Shanghai city centre, to
get to the other side of the huge city to drop me off at the Jiao Tong
University. I say perilous because all car journeys seem to be perilous here.
Heck, crossing the road is quite often perilous.
This was the start of my
introduction into Chinese etiquette, which traditionally means that the host
should do his utmost to be as hospitable and polite as possible. It means that
whoever is receiving or guiding you is compelled to pay for things and carry
your bags and to refuse would be offensive to them! I didn't quite get a grasp
of the extent of this for a while and got a bit confused, but I'm getting used
to this as normal now that I understand more about it. More on this in the
upcoming posts.
No comments:
Post a Comment