china

Street food is fine and extremely cheap (it won’t cost more than Y7 or A$1.50 for a really big feed), but it’s difficult to get a balanced diet from it. I’ve slowly been working my way up to cheap restaurant level, which is harder than it sounds because menus are always in mandarin characters and servers rarely speak English. Contrary to what one or two people told me before I came here, the food is similar to what you would find in any Chinese eatery around Sydney. The menu structure is identical with dozens of choices grouped into categories, and yes the options are more diverse (I saw my first dog, donkey and snake dishes on the menu in Qufu), but the food itself is largely the same though perhaps a little hotter chilli-wise.

I’m very slowly learning some key menu symbols, and the with the patient indulgence of servers I’ve had a couple of decent meals so far:

Bengbu

pork cooked in soy sauce – perfectly cooked shredded pork with diced shallots and chilli in a spicy sweet sauce. Amazingly good, but not filling enough so I also had crispy skin tofu. A very large serve that wasn’t dry or tasteless with lots of sliced green capsicum and a few flecks of chilli, also good. Total cost including a longneck of local mid-strength beer: Y22 (A$5)

Qufu

chicken with green capsicum and chilli – the chicken was overcooked and I spent half the time picking bone fragments out of my teeth, but it was welcome heat on a frigid night (-3 degrees, apparently). It also wasn’t filling enough, so I ordered “Kong-style tofu” which is a specialty of this town. Right choice. Grilled tofu squares that were silky and dense with an enticing smoky character, with bok choy-like greens and a few shreds of chicken, the whole lot floating in flavoursome chicken stock. Chilli dipping sauce on the side that was sweet rather than hot. Beautiful and extra filling, it more than made up for the sub-standard chicken dish. With a longneck of local beer the lot cost Y35 (A$7.80).

Bengbu isn’t as nice as Shanghai.

While plotting my route to Qingdao, where Welm lives, I wanted to include a place that was definitely not a tourist town. Somewhere I could get a taste of “real China”, whatever that means. I guess I wanted to experience a place that is completely untainted by tourism or international trade, and boy did I choose good…

Bengbu is on the main Shanghai-Beijing train line and is clearly a decent-sized city, but it didn’t rate a mention in the Lonely Planet. Not even a “don’t bother”. Located halfway between Shanghai and the Confucius theme park that is Qufu, it seemed ideal so I booked my ticket without knowing a thing about the place. I didn’t even have a map. Stepping out of the train station into the warm afternoon sun I was assailed by several dozen touts offering taxis, motorcycles or pedal rickshaws to take me wherever I wanted to go. Not knowing where that was, I chose instead to walk slowly around the nearby area and take it in.

The first thing that struck me is that I am, quite literally, possibly the only foreigner in town tonight. They must get the occasional one because there is the odd sign about in English, but going by the gaping stares, smiles and occasional giggles I provoked the previous guy wasn’t here recently. The second thing I thought was that this is a poor town. The streets were genuinely dirty rather than just untidy, there are few restaurants (but loads of street food stalls) and a high number of unemployed people sitting around, chatting, smoking and playing cards. In Shanghai virtually all the people you saw idling during the day were old and retired, here many were of working age. It had the look of a place that once was modestly bustling, but that time had passed. I had the unsettling feeling that if I stayed too long I might draw unwanted attention, so I kept walking.

I was looking for a hotel without much luck. In most cities and towns the cheapest but sometimes dodgiest hotels are usually located around the train station, so I deliberately went a block or two onwards in the hope of finding something half-decent (I somehow don’t think there’s a YHA here). Walking past the blatant red-light district made me think I’d done the right thing, but after 20 minutes circling the area I had no choice but to turn back. The utter alienness of this place was getting to me, and I was seriously considering returning to the train station and taking the first seat out of town.

Then in front of me appeared a giant sign in English: “Railway Hotel”. Next door to the railway station, just to the side of where I’d started. After a painful exchange at the front desk I managed to book a room, even bargaining the price down a bit. And what a room! On a high floor with a view of sorts, excellent bathroom and shower, flat screen TV with the English language CCTV-9 and clean comfy bed. There’s an internet connection too but I don’t know what it costs, and I’m afraid the receptionist will hit me if I try to assault her with my Mandarin again.

Then to the train station to get a ticket out of here tomorrow. I decided to go fully prepared this time, making the effort to write out what I wanted in mandarin characters just in case my spoken efforts failed. Note that I can’t read a character to save my life, I simply copied them as best I could from the guidebook and crossed my fingers. Still didn’t work. Apparently I’d stuffed up one key bit of information and the machine-gun questions from the ticket officer left me blank-faced and reeling. But the gods were smiling and a young woman in the queue behind me jumped in to translate. Ticket sorted, I could finally relax and meander again at leisure 🙂

With the pressure off I found this is quite a friendly town, and with time to wander properly I discovered my first impressions were off the mark. The railway station is indeed the wrong side of the tracks; about 15 minutes away is the real heart of town and it’s quite attractive in a dusty, Chinese kind of way. There’s a large park with big lake that attracts dozens of tai chi practitioners in the morning, and an industrious buzz on the streets as people go to work and school. It still feels like its heyday was several decades ago, but it was a pleasant stop on the way to QD.

Construction, destruction, factories, fields, power stations, superhighways, derelict buildings, canals, rubble mountains, grim and dirty terrace blocks, barges, cranes, abandoned land, windowless shacks, sparkling new apartment towers, a thousand tractors shoulder to shoulder, billboards, small farm plots, power pylons everywhere.

This ever-changing view passed by relentlessly at speeds of up to 200 kmh as our clean and modern train fled Shanghai. Change, construction, destruction seem everywhere in this place. Unlike Europe, where much of the view from a train window is likely to be the same in ten years time, I wonder if the landscape I’m passing will be similar in 2018?

After Nanjing, several hundred kilometres from Shanghai, the turmoil lost intensity. Naked winter trees dominated the landscape, sometimes marking large square ponds with no obvious purpose. Fallow fields were larger, less interrupted, and clumps of forest huddled here and there. A gentler landscape, but far from idyllic. More rural, less shiny or grimy, the older houses more lived-in and clean. it might be an illusion, but it looked less…. desperate? Or perhaps just more forgotten. Laughing teens in western fashion ignore the view.