Sondisa Coffee

OK, The coffee here is awful and Sondisa coffee’s URL doesn't work. In fact, Baidu has never heard of the place and Googling Sondisa Coffee just brings up this picture in this blog posting. But I like it here. There's either free WIFI of the ability to poach WIFI from nearby. The staff here is great, they even found an adapter so I could plug in my laptop. But the coffee part of Sondisa Coffee needs some work. A small cup costs a minimum of Y20, that's close to $3 US. It arrives with small container of a white substance. Milk?  Melamine?  Who knows, it has flowers on it and simply says, "ME".

This gives me time to reflect on Guiyang, capital of Guizhou province. Guizhou is a poor province and I can see that just by walking down the street. Peasants with their baskets cruise the streets looking for work. Or pick through trash. They gather in small groups playing cards between jobs or trash picking gigs or wander aimlessly and spit. Normally only Chinese men spit (and spit up a storm they do) but among the poor in Guiyang loud expectoration is an equal opportunity street activity. Like most of China Guiyang is a mixture of poverty and extravagance, only more so. Peasants pick through garbage cans for plastic and cardboard while BMW's, Jaguars, Range Rovers and the usual gaggle of Chinese knock off cars cruise by. There were fewer peasants on display in my previous stops of Xiamen and Nanjing.

Last night 2 young women approached me and asked in English what language I spoke. They explained to me that they were hungry and wanted money for food. This was laughable, they were well dressed and worldly enough to speak some English. In China that's a marketable skill although begging to gullible tourists might result in a quicker and easier Yuan than bothering to do any actual work. And those here who are obviously dirt poor peasants pay me, Mr. Laowai Walking Wallet, no mind.

Speaking of begging, in Xiamen I saw a man by the bus depot at the SM shopping center with his guts hanging out from a hole in his belly. I'm not sure whether this was some sort of parlor trick or not but I don't know how he wouldn't quickly succumb to a massive infection if it wasn't. It looked so awful and pathetic that I couldn't look twice.

Next stop: Kunming

Let the Good Times Roll

Mao is right on the money, quite literally. He's on every denomination of Yuan notes so Mao is near and dear to everybody in the new China. He's in the textbooks of their kids and there's often a big statue of him in their town squares. In Chengdu a massive Mao gazes over the development of a new multi-block high end shopping plaza and the new subway that's being built to get Chengdu's citizens to the goods that they want from that new multi-block high end shopping plaza and back home again. In Dandong a giant Mao salutes the Real Love disco.

Mao wouldn't recognize the place. China has outgrown orthodox "workers control the means of production" communism because China has proved conclusively that communism just can't accomplish the basics of providing the food and fuel average folks need, let alone the luxuries they desire and dream of. In sidestepping communism it has brought prosperity to many of it's citizens. It's true, China still has 800 million rural, dirt farming peasants. It used to have more and plenty of urban peasants too. Even the Bang-Bang army in Chongqing bear their heavy burdens because as bad as it is it's better than life down on the farm. The ocean of good old classic iron fisted state planning in the world has dried up into a small dirty little puddle. That kind of good old time classic communism can only be found in garden spots like North Korea and Cuba and it's subjects are kept penned in physically and ideologically by fences and censorship. On the big collective farms that those countries are ideological purity is sprinkled liberally with power shortages, unemployment and famines. China had wide spread famines that starved millions to death in the late 1950's and 1960's, thanks in no small part to that guy on the banknotes.

In today's China food is cheap and all of the stores I saw are overflowing with quantity and quality. Chinese food stores have apples from New Zealand and Washington state, bananas from the Philippines and almonds from California. The English language China Daily from May 16th said that doctors here are running into something never before seen on a large scale before in China; type 2 diabetes. Many of it's citizens never had it so good and they want the good times to continue to roll. China's system is one not seen by the world before. If it ain't communism then what is it? It isn't democracy in the sense of voting for the candidate and party of your choice and the right to stand up on a soapbox in Tiananmen Square and say that the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China is ideologically hypocritical and full of crap. There's only one political party permitted, the "Communist Party", even if it's communist in name only. Coca Cola had cocaine in it way back when but even though the coke is gone from Coke it remains the name of the brand. In China perhaps the name "communist" is just traditional, part of China's branding.

So maybe it doesn't matter what the party in power is called or what it does just as long as it delivers the goods and they don't piss off too many people in the process. China does that sometimes, since the central government owns all the land they can decide that a new mega-mall or chemical plant or condo project is going to be built where your house is now. Be gone in 30 days because the bulldozers are coming they'll tell you and give you a paltry payoff while others get rich with the kind of in your face corruption that Enron could only dream of. China's new industry needs electricity and much of it comes from burning dirty coal. When the state electricity grid decides to build a new coal fired power plant in your neighborhood you don't have much recourse beyond living with it or moving someplace else. Is the ruling Communist party delivering the goods? In my travels it appears to me that they are. Traditional classic communism usually took a country with lots of nothing and made sure that the nothing was spread around equitably. This usually resulted in every body having an abundance of nothing and nothing else. China's been there, done that. There are no cell phones in North Korea, they're banned by the ruling Worker's Party. Cuba has a few because nobody has money for such a luxury. China has more cell phones than there are people in the US, over 300 million and increasing rapidly. I was in Guangzhou for a few days in 1982., there were next to no cars and everybody wore the same clothes and cheap black cotton shoes. Everything looked worn out and run down. The Chinese don't have to read their history books to find out how bad things were in recent Chinese history (assuming the government would accurately print that history where some 80 million died due to Communist Party ineptitude and indifference), they lived through the famines, the scorning and punishment of intellectuals and the purging of innovators or those with contrary ideas. It's recent enough for many to have lived through it, they know what depravation and unbridled state power are like.

The Chinese people want air conditioners, cars, good food with variety, computers, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Starbucks Coffee, Wal-Mart and they want to go on vacations overseas. Oh, and they want fashion and they want it in abundance. If there's one English word I saw over and over on store fronts, the sides of cars and motorcycles and emblazoned in glitter across teen aged girl's chests it's F*A*S*H*I*O*N. They don't always spell it properly but they pursue it at the makeup counters, jewelry and clothing stores with a single minded gusto that suggests that they're making up for lost time and they want to enjoy the party before some bubble headed bureaucrat with more ideology than brains changes his mind. So I saw T-shirts with English gibberish ("World's Greatest Lovers, We Don't Move!", "#1 Killboy" on a 5 year old), women of all ages tottering around in high heels and lots of young people of both sexes with dyed hair.

Chongqing, bang-bang!

In 1997 the central government in Beijing carved off the piece of Sichuan province where Chongqing (pronounced Chong-ching) is located and made it the municipal equivalent of a province. So most everything about Sichuan cooking applies to Chongqing, which means that edible things can be chili hot and everything is saturated in oil. Yesterday I slipped and fell down about 5 stairs. Today I did it again and I've got a nice welt on my left arm and a scrape on my right wrist. There is so much oil in Western China that they're spreading it on sidewalks and stairways? The chilies melted the soles of my shoes? Ever since I've arrived in China people have been staring at my feet, specifically my shoes. I guess that they're fashion conscious. I'm wearing a pair of Asics Kayano running shoes because they're comfortable. They're made somewhere in China by a Japanese company but possibly only for export.

Chongqing municipality has about 31 million people of which at least 10 million live in Chongqing city. The central government in Beijing has been pouring billions into this city to make it the industrial, business and cultural hub of western China, sort of China's Chicago on the Yangtze river. Chongqing is where Ford, and Suzuki build cars, A large Chinese company named Lifan builds motorcycles and cars here. Chongqing has a monorail (more on that later), skyscrapers and they've done up their sidewalks and stairways in tile. It's been raining and to my running shoes that wet tile might as well be glare ice. Gotta be careful out there before I come home with my black and blue butt in a sling.

Planning means a lot to any of these trips of mine. What to pack, where to stay, where to go, what to do. For the Chongqing leg of this trip I blew it. For one thing, I underestimated the size of the place, it's massive. Chongqing is known as one of the three furnaces of China because of the heat but it's been wet and in the low 60's. I packed shorts and short sleeve shirts. The hotel I picked turned out to be cheap for a reason, it was a run down fleabag, a fleabag with a free blazing Internet connection. I used that Internet connection to reserve myself a room up the street at the Marriott with real A/C (it's very humid).

Back in Seattle I'd reserved myself an airline ticket from Chongqing to Shanghai and arranged to pick it up at a place I thought was nearby my hotel. Was I wrong, I took a cab clear across town and even though I don't speak much Chinese somehow I knew that the cabbie was saying, "It's around here someplace" when she turned me loose. I looked and looked, I went into businesses and presented the address in Chinese. Nobody knew where the place was and I had no idea what I was looking for. In Shenzhen I picked up my ticket at an airport kiosk, last year it was at the airport at a bank. I screwed up but the Chinese people came to the rescue, they all tried to help me or somehow told me that they didn't know. I started stopping people in the street, old men who perhaps lived in this neighborhood for years, a neighborhood that I'm sure doesn't see too many folks who look like me. I had a 2 hour window to score the ticket and it was ticking away fast. One of the locals took it upon herself to call the place that had my ticket, find out where they were and to take me there. It was nowhere near where I was looking, maybe 7 blocks away, up a dark flight of slippery stairs in and an office. If she hadn't done that I'd still be looking for that damn ticket to Shanghai. So in return I bought her lunch and then she showed me around town a bit. That's not the way I usually see a city, my way is to just plop myself down and hit the streets but seeing a city through the eyes of a local is better. We took the cable car over the Yangtze river and had a grand old time in Chongqing. She relied on her 6 years of rusty high school English which she's never used and I on a few Chinese words aided by pantomime. Planning what to pack means planning what to wear. I bought some shirts before I left but I've run out of clean ones. I considered letting the Marriott wash them but they wanted more for one shirt than it costs for a nice dinner for two so I took a different route to cleanliness. I went to Carrefour and spent the money on new shirts instead.

In the US Walmart stomps the competition but these guys give Walmart fits in the rest of the world and they've been wise not to face Walmart down on it's home turf. They stack 'em high and sell 'em cheap and globalization be damned the Chinese love it. Carrefour is a French company but all the signs in the place are in English and Chinese. I was walking around in there when I saw an employee pulling a pallet of boxes and an old woman got in her way. It sounded like she was chewing the old woman out but when the employee saw me she broke into a big forced smile and started to say "lalalalala" in mid chew-out. I might be the only round eye she's seen in awhile and I could be from the home office in France.

In Carrefour I was able to buy some domestic clothes and some T-shirts with the word Xiongbalang! on them. These were about $1.15 each. I turned down shirts advertising "Seattle Hornets" whoever they are. In Chinese shirt sizes I'm and XXL, that's 180 in metric. Chinese pants are trickier for a Westerner to purchase. I was able to quickly figure out my size but in China it seems that the size of one's waistline determines the length of the pants. I couldn't find pants in my length so if the weather turns cold again the hunt will continue in Shanghai. I later found out that a tailor is on duty in the store for alterations.

A big bustling city like Chongqing needs rapid transit that goes beyond cheap taxis and buses so Chongqing built a monorail. Not a toy for tourists or a political cause célèbre that's going to be a model for the nation like in Seattle but real rapid transit that for now hugs the Jiangling river. Unlike Seattle Chongqing's monorail runs for about 18 stations (more are being built) and the first 3 or so are underground. Chongqing's monorail is simply a train that runs on a different kind of track, a concrete center is hugged by rubber wheels instead of a bed with steel rails. From the inside of one of the cars it's impossible to determine that it's a monorail instead of a train that runs on tracks. There doesn't seem to be any of the Seattle romanticism over the style of the train, it's just a train that uses a different technology. The fare is cheap, anywhere from about .25 to .75 US per ride depending on the distance. Service is frequent, about every 5 minutes.

Chongqing is also famous for it's "bang-bang" people, mostly men. Bang-bang (pronounced closer to bong-bong) means stick or bamboo and is possibly where English gets that word. The bang bang army can be seen everywhere in Chongqing carrying their ropes and bamboo poles if they are looking for work or if they've found work bearing large loads hanging from the pole that they balance on their shoulders. It looks back breaking but they do the work that is often done in other Chinese cities by people on bicycles. Chongqing is too hilly for bicycles so the solution is a combination of Chinese ingenuity and Chinese overpopulation. The bang-bang army consists of uneducated recent rural arrivals in the big city who work for peanuts as beasts of burden. I saw them carrying all sorts of things; couches, chairs, tables, giant baskets of fruit. It's awful work and they're looked down upon by the locals I saw this myself, every time my friend who helped me find my plane ticket would see one of these guys she'd sing out, "Chongqing, bang-bang!" and laugh and point. Maybe it's a cultural thing but I didn't get it, these guys looked like the lowest of the low to me and to mock them struck my pampered American sensibilities as cruel. My cubicle life suddenly looks just a little less dim by comparison.