Mirrors and the language of the soul. Also a correction.

I’ve just finished pulling the remaining shards of mirror out of the big wooden frame that used to hang over the fireplace and a lugubrious task it is. There is something a bit sinister about the other side of a mirror.  It is so dead and grey, the absolute opposite of the lively life confirming reflective side.  Add to that the nasty sharp points, and a broken mirror is one of the ugliest things around.  No wonder its supposed to herald seven years of bad luck (but I’m not going to dwell on that). It reminds me too of the Snow Queen’s mirror that shattered and how a splinter of it lodged in little Kay’s heart and made him forget Gerda, to say nothing of the trouble making mirror that ratted on Snow White so she had to hole up with the seven dwarves or have her lungs and liver delivered to the wicked queen, when her majesty was told by the mirror that she was no longer the fairest of them all.

Anyway it’s done now and perhaps I’ll make a nice wall hanging to go above the fireplace instead.

It is sunny and the Sydney air seems so pure  after Shanghai. I delight in taking deep breaths when my meditation tape tells me to, and I realise that the disturbance I feel after the Chinese experience is fright.   I have a huge respect for all that China has done to house and support its massive population but is a necessary prerequisite of doing that having horrible air?  Is some complicated outcome of our own messy ways going to rebound on us sooner or later? 

My other sobering realisation is that there are ways of thinking so different from those shaped by western words (a dark day, a light hearted remark etc).  Chinglish, as it is patronisingly called, is well known for its comical rendering of English but perhaps instead of deprecating it we would be richer if we read it for the insights it gives into the Chinese vision of things.  I still love the Shanghai Starbucks English advertisement  “Every shot with precision and passion”.  No native speaker could ever have come up with that, and yet how exciting it makes a cup of coffee.  

I have one addition and one correction to make to a previous blog.  On our penultimate day in China, Finn took us to a truly delightful place about forty minutes away from Jaiding where we were staying.  It was a water town built around canals which are all over the place because China needs them just as much as the Netherlands did for draining the swamps.  It was called Zhujiajiao and was bustling with Chinese tourists taking boat rides and shopping for everything under the sun in the little shops that lined the banks of the canals.  The glutinous orange pork portions and baskets of cooked egg yolks belong here and not to the old town of Linhai as I said in a previous blog.  This place was certainly not like a theme park that hadn’t opened yet.  It was enormous fun and Grant bought a little flute and I bought some floppy black trousers which Fredi says makes me look like a hippy’

It was such a nice day.

Tonight I am going to dip my toes into a modest choir experience in Glebe. Only about twenty people instead of 200 plus as is the Philharmonia Chorus which I found a bit intimidating.  But it’s lovely to sing and apparently they do Palestrina whom I remember from my boarding schooldays.  Hope I can still manage such things.  Bye for now.

Last day, back home and mirror mirror off the wall

I spent my last day in Shanghai with Finn and Grant and Fredi went to Shanghai Disneyland for some strange reason.

We had a good day spanning an aggressively orientalised tourist area jam packed with chains of Chinese people following leaders bearing flags.  We slipped into a rather tasteful department store and admired nice things but nobody else was there.  I wondered why. I would have expected a few crazy rich Asians at the very least but people seem to prefer to be in a swarm here.

 Then we went to the remnants of the old town. Not a bit like the prettified ones elsewhere. Narrow lanes had shabby hovels all the way up and down and many windows were fiercely bricked up. Excruciating tangles of rusty electricity wires ran above the doorways. Not far away a demolition team was at work. It was a bit creepy but good to have seen how things once were.But I don't think all the dwellers had gone. Now and then a washing pole spanning the lane would sport a pair of jeans stuffed with newspaper or a jacket with the pole through the arms.  Just drying, or a signal, like the trainers that get chucked over our wires? I don't know.  There was one solitary lady selling fish however.

I wanted to get some nice cotton for patchwork so we headed for what we hoped was a fabric market.  Enticingly a whole building promised "Soft Spinning Material". It was busy but not so much for buying fabric as ordering garments to be made.  I hadn't enough puff left in me to argue for the little half metres I was after and how on earth do you explain patchwork by miming. Now I think about it I should have been able to do it but my thoughts were heading to the airport.

We caught an amazing magnetic train which sped to the airport in twenty minutes.  I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't been told while on it that there had been some fearful accidents "not technical, just a signalling matter". Humph.

The flight  on Eatern China airways was a bit gruesome.  The seats didn't recline and I felt I was slipping off mina all the way.  The solace of alcohol was not to be had. "Only five bottles for the whole plane" we were told on asking for refills.  There were films of great age and obscurity on the entertainment system.  I began an Argentinian one buried in subtitles both English and Chinese which was so boring I decided plain boredom was better.

On arrival, bless him, Eddy was there to meet us.  I could have wept since Grant had vanished the baggage hall and I was sure he'd had a heart attack somewhere in the airport - a not so melodramatic thought when we are in our seventies and carrying heavy bags. In fact he had gone to terminal 5 instead of 9.

It was good to see our little terrace again though someone had ripped open our mail, (not much gone) and getting inside we found the wire that holds the big mirror over the fireplace had rusted and it was spectacularly shattered all over the floor.  My Pollyanna thought was how lucky no children were playing lego when it fell but nevertheless there is a dark quality about a broken mirror which I could do without.

The whole week was amazing and I am hugely grateful to Finn and Fredi for bearing with us and our carnivorous ways, facilitating our purchases and guiding us through a world more incomprehensible than any I have ever visited.  

Linhai and the Light Oxygen Hotel

We caught the Very Fast Train yesterday and arrived in Linhai in three hours. It would have taken about ten hours were it not for being able to whizz along at 250kmh.  It didn't feel that fast from inside the train but I noticed anything interesting spotted from the window went by in a flash. Travelling this way is not as gentle and ruminative as old fashioned train journeys can be.

We are staying in the Anman Light Oxygen Hotel and it is funny. Our room is 999 and Fredi and Finn have 899.  They are obviously the honeymoon suites with sex toys by the beds and candelabras with little lamps instead of candles.  The furniture is imitation French regency with ornate legs and a plush buttoned sofa. There is a gracious modern bath and only glass separates the bathroom fro the rest of the room  which makes using the toilet disconcertingly public. I wonder what a shy honeymooner would feel about it.  On the glass is written something in Chinese and then in English "Dream Love Memory". The heavy window curtains swish open by themselves when you enter the room.

The panorama that the window looks out on to is rather cheerless. Shabby old four storey units crowd each other and their windows are black squares. In the distance are some mountains veiled in smog. Spiking up in the middle distance are seven groups of tower blocks and maybe because I've been living in one they seem more optimistic than the rest of this still scene.

Breakfast is unexpected but quite nice. Hot orange juice and a hard boiled egg with a choice of stir fried vegetables, not totally meat free however. I realise how hard it must be for Fredi to get anything Vegan in a public eating place.She let us eat alone last night and went and played on games in glass boxes where you try to catch a soft toy with a little crane. It is cheap but very difficult to win and rouses all the gambling instincts pertaining to poker machines. "I want that cat," says Fredi, "the one with the curly tail. Its mine"  But she didn't get it.

We went to the old town yesterday where there is an ancient city wall.  There was a very discouraging flight of steps stretching  up to a pagoda and at its foot a musician and a singer producing amplified songs.  An old man and his friend were swinging a heavy red rope for two kids to skip.  He was laughing at us so I took one end of the rope and swung for the children too.  It was a nice feeling, the heaviness of the rope and seeing the pleasure the kids took in their competence at this old fashioned game.

We wandered the lanes that made up the old town and saw gleaming orange bits of pork and duck and baskets of cooked egg yolks (What happened to the whites, I wondered) So many strange foods amidst stalls selling jade and pearls.  I bought a little green teapot. We found a little bar with a hipster ambiance and craft beers called after the Beatles.  I had a gin and tonic with an everlasting steel ice cube in it.  It was expensive and against his better judgment Finn asked the barman for a restaurant .suggestion. With lots of swapping of phones for interpretation purposes the needful knowledge was transferred and we got a Didi (the same as an Uber) which took us a long way to a huge hotel with a vast empty dining hall laid out as though for a conference.  Several kind waitresses tried to help us understand the menu even though we were a rather shabby looking bunch, very out of place there. Fredi and Finn were getting uneasy about leaping into the gastronomic dark. Eventually we escaped because they didn't accept credit cards but only used the ubiquitous phone pay system.  They urged us to come back with cash next day and gave us some snacks and insisted on paying for our taxi. Such kindness.

Money is both amazingly difficult and extraordinarily easy here. Locals (including F and F) have an app on their phones which allows them to tap the funny little cardboard squares with black and white barcodes on them that all businesses have.  You just kiss the square with your phone and pow - the transaction is complete.  Street traders and even beggars, I am told, have these squares thus effectively sidestepping the banking system.  Credit cards, however work hardly anywhere.  Cash is OK but its a palaver o get out of banks so we are clocking up a debt to Finn with his magic open sesame phone.

We went back to the old town which has been tenderly resurrected with paving now covering the open sewer that used to run there.  There are quite a lot of old people here. I saw a quartet playing cards and one cheeky old lady poked Grant in the tummy and cackled merrily.  Apart from the people manning the little shops that lined the narrow streets there were few people there.  Grant likened it to a theme park not yet open to the public and I know what he meant.  But three acts of kindness made us feel good.
1) We rang the bell to the police station by accident because the English translation above the door said "Information Centre" and we wanted a map. The door opened and we saw wall of screens showing different views of the town and several uniformed policemen. Clearly they expected us to have information for them rather than the other way round and once this was cleared up we turned and headed away.  In just a few seconds though a policeman rushed up behind us with a brown envelope containing a lovely map and three postcards which he'd found for us.
2) Grant was hellbent on finding a "bubble drink", some kind of liquid sago pudding drunk through a fat straw. Someone gave him an orange to console him when he couldn't.
3. F and F wanted to walk on the wall round the town but G and I were tired and wanted to stay put.  We found a hotel and though we could perhaps have tea and a place to rest. The hotel didn't do tea but encouraged us to rest in their nice outdoor lobby and provided cups of hot water. They were very solicitous and sent Fredi in our direction when she came to pick us up.

One other moment was good too. I caught the attention of a grandmother with her little grandson and went over to him and made him smile while she spoke Chinese which Fredi told me meant "Nice grandma, nice grandma".

This whistlestop tour is good in many ways - no emotional investment - pure observation but I am beginning to crave being able to understand more and being able to penetrate the strange script and the mindset that gives rise to its images. But I think I've learnt an awful lot about being an outsider and have huge sympathy for anyone Chinese who lands untutored in out space.

Shanghai's past and waxworks

Admiring the Shanghai Museum from People's Square

The Lonely Planet extolled the virtues of the Shanghai Museum so we went and looked at jade and porcelain.  I was a bit underwhelmed, perhaps because I know nothing about either and the signs didn't help much.  I was amused to note however that my Chinese co-tourists were a bit museumed out too.  Anywhere it was possible to sit was occupied.  The museum is free and numbers of visitors per day is limited.  Grant caused a bit of bother by buying a replica knife that was once used as currency in the gift shop and it showed up in the security tunnel. He wanted to give it to Fredi and Finn as a cheese knife even though they don't eat cheese. Then his fold up glasses looked horribly like a cigarette lighter.  But it was all ok in the end.

Shanghai Museum interior 

However the next museum we visited charmed and moved me and taught me so much about Shanghai.  It was located in one of the garish buildings which features a tripod and some glittery globes. This one wasn't free and I could see why.  So much care and delicacy had gone into creating a walk through time with waxwork figures, each expressive as an old master portrait.  There was a pickle trader in his shop with one hand up over the counter.  A fellow tourist posed  as though purchasing and touched the pale wax fingers.  I too touched them and was glad I did. A pulse of the past came through them to me. Dried fish hung in another shop and there was a section dedicated to the film industry with a very old film flickering on a screen.  It showed a naughty child being spanked. There was an opium den with a recumbent addict and a young girl gazing out of a window.

A wax shopkeeper in the Shanghai city history museum

 I learnt about the appalling behaviour of the British - how they drenched Shanghai with opium from India in order to trade for what they wanted.

A British opium dealer on the Bund

I want to know more about Shanghai, once monocultural, then exploited and abused and yet fertilised by the experiences brought by encroaching traders.  There was a French concession as well as a British one and also a Jewish quarter that was very hospitable to refugees from Germany in WWII.  Maybe this history of embedded alien cultures accounts for the urbane way in which we rare foreigners are ignored.  It is easier to go with the flow here in Shanghai than anywhere I have ever travelled.  Nobody seems to notice us.

Going with the flow

We had a very fiery fish soup for dinner and caught an Uber home. Ubers are called Didis here.

The Bund, no place for epileptics

We are taking a trip on the metro today to the heart of Shanghai.  It's a bit over an hour from here.  I'm looking forward to some city vitality.  The buildings out here are overwhelmingly grey or muted brown.  When the sun shines it is fine. The humanity of the multistory buildings is evident and there is a happy feeling.  But when the skies are grey a sort of despair washes amongst them. The pollution is evident and it all seems a bit sad and pre-apocalypytic..  I wonder if that is just my impression.

The view from the window - West Jiading

Chinese writing fascinates me - each complex little square of lines and curves that can be understood by people who can't speak each others' languages.  Fredi told me "Be careful" is represented by signs which mean "little heart".  Maybe that means "moderate your rashness" who knows.  Sometimes however,translation out of the symbols into English yields up lovely poetry. In Starbucks (which is one of the few places that accepts credit cards here but more of tthat later) a sign says "Every shot with precision and passion"  I sipped my cappucino with relish.

Starbucks Chinglish

We've come down to the Bund area of Shanghai which lines one side of the Yangtse River.  It consists of a kilometre of European style grand buildings built  from 1902 through the 1920s with one from 2010.  In the day they are sombre and darkened by pollution but from 6 pm onwards they are bathed in golden floodlighting and look ethereal as fairy palaces.  They need to because the competition on the other side of the Yangtse is extraordinary.  Pudong, the financial district  sports insolent glass structures, tall and curvy and defiantly modern. As if their presence were not assertive enough, at about 6pm each one puts on a light show, shifting flashing lights and messages - some in English "I (love heart) SH" A spiral of vivid letters spelling OBSERVATORY curls up a tubular building and ironically the end of the word disappears spookily into the smog. The lights flash and unravel butterflies and cartoons in dizzying disorder and I'm glad epilepsy isn't my problem.

Touristing on the Bund

Pudong from the Bund - the 2nd tallest tower in the world, centre

The Bund at night

We take a little cruise boat down the river with heaps of other Chinese tourists.  (I'm surprised how rarely we see another European face) We are afraid we'll be packed on like sardines but no so.  There's room for all.  We sip beers brought by Finn and look out on to fairyland on the way down the river and then turn round to witness the demonic garishness of Pudong on the way back, Flash Flash Zip Sprawl of fluorescent light bars.

Pudong lights at night - from the Bund

We have dinner at a restaurant called Grandmothers and are rushed out at 9.30.  "She says we really must go" says Fredi and we set off to go home on the metro.  There's so much I don't understand about China.  There is a nanny state quality about the video screens on the trains.  One tells me how to stand on the escalators, not hunched over but upright.  I tested hunching and it felt all right to me.

Shanghai Metro map

I think I am beginning to lose my collectivist feeling of being one of many.  My acquiescence to the controllers of life here is wearing a little thin.

Shanghaied and one of many

Here we are in the far out north west suburb of Shanghai which, Fredi tells me, is older than Shanghai itself. I am finding it very good in a way I would never have anticipated. Most of the buildings are high rise - twenty storeys or so, including this one.  We are on the fifteenth floor and the flat itself, like all the others, is a cross section of the tall slice that is the building. At one end of it is a little glass room for washing with a clothes drying rack that extends into the void outside. Fred has planted a box of parsley by the washing machine . I am sitting by it with the sun flooding in and tiny cars are beetling about below with hardly any sound.  It is apparently a good pollution day with the purple grey mist only beginning behind the buildings across the wasteland immediately below us.

By conventional standards it would be an ugly landscape but I can't help appreciating the way it has been shaped to accommodate all of us humans in our cubes.  Out on the other side of this apartment is a huge grey flat wall broken up by countless little windows. A woman is beating a mat at one and there are splashes of colour and washing at others and the awareness that every single unit  contains a configuration of people just as real as us moves me.

Nature is not much in evidence from this window.  The road below has bare trees on either side  and up the middles and the surrounding wasteland is covered in brown scrub with the occasional fluoro  outburst of some weird vegetation.  It is more moony than earthly.

What is it that, at least for the moment makes me feel peaceful and free? Maybe just for now I find my individualist self in abeyance and I am enjoying the feeling of being one of many.

The Westman Islands

It is months now since we were in Iceland and for some reason I have found it impossible to get down to writing my last Iceland blog.  There is a sadness about coming home after a long absence.  The lively fire that was my life before we left seemed cold and ashy when we returned.  It took a while to get going again.  Just now, though, I reread my Iceland blogs and realise I must rectify matters and write about perhaps the most beautiful and strange place we visited – the Westman Islands which are raw and volcanic in origin and from time to time host devastating eruptions still.

   To get to the islands you need to go to a ferry terminal close to Rekjavik.  Like all ferries this one is lovely and even has a little cinema. You disembark after about an hour and a half  into the little town of Heimaey which seems to huddle in the middle of group of fierce volcanic peaks. The one and a half hour ferry is relatively new.  In the past it took several hours to cross the often stormy water.

The weather was bleak and windy when we drove our van off the ferry and made

 our way to our campsite just before midnight. In fact it turned out to be situated in the crater of an extinct volcano whose sides stretched up around us and had seabirds nesting high up and soaring back and forth in the everlasting daylight.  There were buttercuplike flowers in the crusty volcanic grass. It amazed me.

To our delight we found there was a proper camp kitchen out of the weather so we fried up our Icelandic lamb chops  and quaffed one of our precious bottles of red before creaking into our sleeping bags in the back of the van.  Despite the huge influx of tourists who hire campervans every year, Icelandic camp sites are usually pretty basic so this one was special not only for its beauty but its hospitable amenities.

When I woke to go to the loo at about five am there were two puffins nearby who took to the sky,flapping clumsily. It was cold and rainy but yet again the toilet had a no nonsense heater. On thinking back now, heat and cold were so much part of the rhythm of life in Iceland. Horrid rainy winds but thermal springs, puffing geysers but snow capped mountains.  All a far cry from the balmy English summer we had left behind. 

There were fascinating things to see on the island. A volcano museum and a cultural museum as well as an aquarium that has provided a home for an unfortunate puffin that has never learnt to swim The Westman Islanders have suffered at the hands of both man and nature over the years.

In 1627 Algerian pirates led a series of raids on Iceland and came to the island.  They took over 200 people as slaves and murdered thirty four in gruesome piratical ways, cackling with laughter as they did so, according to a blog on the subject (that can be found by googling Algerian pirates in Iceland)..  There is a very good simple illustration of these events in the cultural museum.  Rather surprisingly, close to this heartbreaking account there is a roomful of pirate costumes for children to put on. I suppose it was a long time ago and children play cowboys and Indians after all, but at the time I was a bit shocked by the museum’s response to such a terrible event.

The cultural museum also had lots of accounts of the fearsome job of being a fisherman in Iceland’s stormy waters and the vicissitudes of being a fisherman’s wife.  Most of them were apparently bad tempered and impatient of their spouses when they got home and interrupted the calm business of child raising and housekeeping.

I was cold and wet when we arrived at the aquarium and was given a cup of coffee by the very hospitable curator for which I was very grateful.  It’s a small museum but gives a chance to get up close and personal with a puffin that stands bemused on a table.”Every so often we try to get him to swim but so far he won’t” said the curator.  On the wall beside the stairs are pictures of children cuddling pufflings (baby puffins) that they rescue each year when, instead of heading out to sea to start their adult bird lives, they get confused by the town lights and land up in the streets.

“Aren’t you sorry you are not a little Iceland boy with a puffling to cuddle? “ we text to grandson Jacob with a photo. Daughter in law Fredi replies “I too would like to cuddle a puffling.”,  and indeed they look very bewitching and fluffy.

But of the three museums the one that sticks in my memory and comes back in dreams is the Volcano Museum.

 In 1973 the Eldfell volcano erupted, sending up vivid flames from a chain of fissures and eventually engulfing a portion of the town and forcing the evacuation of all but a few residents who stayed to try and salvage what they could.  By, what islanders still talk of as a miracle, the weather had been so bad the day before that the whole fishing fleet had stayed in port and been there to evacuate the islanders to the mainland, where they stayed for months with many never returning.  Apparently only one person died from the poisonous fumes and that was because he was robbing the pharmacy for drugs.

After we returned to Australia we had dinner with our Icelandic friends Villi and Aldiss.  Now Aldiss was from the Westman Islands  and that night I asked her about the eruption and what effect it had had on her.  She wasn’t on the island during the initial eruption but she spent a lot of time in the deserted town afterwards while the lava was still flowing and the salvaging was going on. She told me interesting things – how slowly the lava moved – you could be swimming in a pool and have reluctantly to get out as the lava crept towards the other end. She told me how prosperous the island had been because of fishing and how the houses were very good solid buildings and the enormous loss their slow interment represented. She told me how the American soldiers took part in emptying houses  before they were buried and how you could pick up your goods on the mainland by finding the address on the bundles.  When asked if the experience had changed her Aldiss  said “Yes, I am not at all materialistic now. I know that all you own can go, just like that”

In the early two thousands an enterprising islander had the idea  of creating a “Pompeii of the North” by excavating some of the houses that had been buried in ash.  Those under the lava were beyond recovery but the ash, like that at Pompeii proper would have had a preservative effect.  The museum is both a memorial to the lost part of the town and a record of what happened.  It is built over the first of the houses to be unearthed which stands damaged and shabby and naked in the smart main hall of the modern building  It reminds me of my childhood in post war London when bombsites were such fascinating places to play with random abandoned household items to be found amongst the rubble. A mirror, a baby bottle maybe and grimy bits of cloth.  There was a film showing where people talked about the night of the eruption and the silly choices they made about what to take with them when they fled.  “We took the cake but not the plate” laughed one man.  Valued new kitchen appliances were rescued instead of irreplaceable family photos..  A photo shows a young girl with a cat inside her coat arguing on the quayside.  Apparently  a lot of animals had to be put down when the population was evacuated.  The shock and heartbreak are palpable as you watch footage of rocking boats with lines of faces leaving their homes behind. 

After seeing the museum the little town seemed very vulnerable to me. I wondered how people living there were able to sleep easy but apparently warning systems are better now.

I was sorry to board the ferry again after a couple of days.  The beauty and sadness had got under my skin somehow, but the promise of the fleshpots of Rejkavik and the comfort of a bed in the Peace Centre were a consolation.  However I will never forget our time in that strange place.