lonely radio : buzz » china

i had a little boat

cos — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 11:38:30 +0000

I was adrift
awaiting the kind of enlightenment
that comes from a temporary immersion
in another place
I dodged traffic
learnt to read a few more characters
and wondered if I could fit in
somehow
in a place like this.

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the new year

cos — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 07:24:49 +0000

Somewhere in between the apartments full of people watching the CCTV new year’s eve broadcast, it all starts – explosions echoing through the streets all night, coloured flashes reflecting off apartment buildings. Two days later, exactly as I noticed the silence and suggested to my wife that maybe they’d already run out of firecrackers, one exploded in an alley nearby. The streets are a pulpy mass of discarded red casings and canisters – 15 tonnes of rubbish in one area, according to the news. In other cities, I’d seen signs that seemed to say “no firecrackers in this area” but I didn’t see any in this one. One night, outside the restaurant after dinner, a father holds a son who holds a small rocket on a stick, waiting for the moment of joy. Three days later, I hear birds singing instead, and wonder if This Is It, but on the way to lunch we see street shops with plenty of stock to sell. There’s a lot of noise still to be made in this town.

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beijing (北京)

cos — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 07:54:45 +0000

In this town…:

You can actually walk on many of the pavements (strangely, they’re not all used for bike storage and outdoor shops like in other cities I’ve been to).
You can get an “automatic guide” for the Forbidden City in Esperanto (so the sign suggests).
Pizza Hut appears to be some odd, TGIF-style “family restaurant” that sells all sorts of western food, not just pizza.
The taxi drivers are very polite and very helpful (suggesting good places to eat as you kill time on the expressway coming into town from the airport, finding the number for and ringing up the China Aviation Museum 40 miles out of town to find out how to get there).
There’s a great cheap jiao zi restaurant just around the corner.
You can fool the cheap trinket sellers at the Great Wall into thinking you speak great Mandarin if you can pronounce “bu-yau” properly.
There’s plenty to watch out of the hotel window (see? the soul of a city is in its streets).

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next time

cos — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 09:22:29 +0000

it’s not time, yet
but a sudden lethargy overtook me
yesterday evening
as i started to think about
the passing of
time
and what i should be doing
with it
all i have to do
at the moment
is what i’m told
but after a week of it
i’m feeling a little overcome.

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nanjing （南京）

cos — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 08:51:40 +0000

i’m in a dingy net cafe at the end of the street. piles of cigarettes on the floor around a couple of chairs (since cleaned up, I must add), grimy desks and a bunch of kids playing games while the two of us type. a few security cameras sit across the room, near the ceiling, with the power supplies hanging in the air. bandwidth out of this cafe (or this country? her site was going ok…) sputters and spurts and reminds me of the Old Days. behind a screen, an open window lets in the street below – food smells and occasional car horns. but nobody’s paying attention to that. still, at least the window’s open.

i’m thinking of the places they want to take me, and i wonder about how much you can really sense about a city by just seeing the sights? isn’t the soul of a city in its streets? i haven’t taken many photos yet – she tells me to keep things out of sight, to not draw attention to myself. i’m trying.

soon it’ll be another new city, a bigger one. i look forward to seeing new things, new signs, but i also look forward to a chance to find a nice tea-house to relax in, and not do things.

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wuhan

cos — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 08:50:08 +0000

she didn’t remember the streets
much
but she remembered her old friend
who showed us around
and kept us company,
and the professor
who was very nice
she said she could hear
his voice change
as he said goodbye
after lunch
later, after dinner
the 3 of us sat in a bar
while piano music looped
endlessly in the background
(just the one song)
and the 2 girls chatted
occasionally translating for me
and i watched a mouse
traverse the pipeworks
up above the barman.

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chengdu

cos — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 09:16:58 +0000

We hit town off another flight, surrounded by fog. Or is it smog? It’s hard to tell, but I’ll find out tonight when I catch up with an old friend. This city’s even bigger than the last one, though it’s hard to tell when you can’t see far. I think I see my first statue of Chairman Mao outside the Science and Technology Museum, just before we reached the hotel – I’m surprised it took so long? From the hotel window I can see the traffic curling around the intersection below. Green and yellow taxis abound. A late lunch contains the unavoidable Sichuan pepper, whose lemony numbness takes some getting used to (fortunately I’d tried it before I got here or it might’ve been a nasty surprise). Lian notices how the diners hold their bags on their lap. The traffic takes on its usual chaotic flow – it’s not something a westerner can try and make sense of, and sometimes it’s best not to watch. The beggars are aggressive in the middle of town, stretching across the steps and shaking their box at you while you try and dodge both them and the oncoming pedestrians. Somewhere on our journey for a functioning ATM, I think I saw an electric rickshaw – y’know, like an electric scooter, only…

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