I think it is my second day in Shanghai. Jet lag coupled with the late night (read: early morning) after the World Cup final has resulted in my biological clock becoming even more messed up.
So let’s start chronologically from Doha where I left all of you last. I left Qatari immigration exhausted from the flight and left Doha even more flustered. The first departures board I read told me that the gate for my flight to PVG had closed and there only being thirty minutes till the scheduled departure time, I thought I’d missed my connection. But no, it turned out that it had been delayed by about an hour and a half. Phew. My second panic came when I went to buy something from Duty Free- the card that I was to depend on for my entire trip decided not to work. Exhausted, flustered, annoyed and scared I made my way to the boarding gate hoping to find a friendly face from Britain. That I found in Ade and Rosie who were also heading on the same flight to PVG for the programme. I told them about my card issues. They obliged with the obligatory “it’ll work in China, don’t worry”. Calmness returned. There were about ten of us on the flight and after the initial awkward “are you on the study china programme?” question directed at youngish people who looked like they were from the UK, they were a good bunch to have the ice broken with.
At Shanghai PVG, we were given a very warm welcome from the student volunteers from East China Normal University (ECNU), where we would by studying. There were video cameras and everything- despite the initial thought of “umm, get the f*** out of my face” it was actually quite sweet of them. The first evening here we got to know each other and Ade and I went out for dinner (see photos below). Eating the shrimp was particularly challenging and seeing us struggle the waiter decided to come over and show us how it was done- Shanghainese style!
Yesterday (Sunday), we had the campus orientation and were shown around the ECNU campus in heavy rain. After the novelty of warm rain wore off, it wasn’t very pleasant. In the evening, some of us decided to head to nearby coffee shop/bar. It was quite dark and dingy reminding me of some of Chinese mafia portrayed in movies. To top it off my hotel neighbour, Liam, discovered that the toilet at this establishment consisted of a hole in the ground. Now I’m all for not viewing everything through a Eurocentric prism but I just don’t understand how squatting to do one’s business can be comfortable at all… :/
Thursday, 15 July 2010
Sunday, 11 July 2010
9th July 2010, Somewhere over Turkey heading towards Iraqi airspace
I think I should start my first post explaining why I hark back to the paradigm that has been out of vogue with the liberal intelligensia since Said wrote his seminal treatise on the subject. Despite his initial consternations in Orientalism concerning the representation of Arabo-Islamic people in Western academia, his ideas can (and have been) extrapolated to encompass not only the Near East but the actual Orient- China, where my travels are taking me.
Whilst my upbringing has been influenced both by, what orientialists call, the Orient and the Occidental world it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge it is the West where I have been raised and where most of my values and notions of justice hail from. I am very much a product of Great Britain (despite my fanciful illusions of being a citizen of The World). And as I begin my travels I can’t help but feel a sense of compulsion to take on the attitude of a nineteenth-century Englishman heading to the land of peoples less civilised than my own.
Irony aside, my alter ego taking over in the previous paragraph was all in the way of making a point. For months I have been asked by other people “why China?”, “why Mandarin?” and to those people I should have answered “why not?”. We in the UK have been plagued too long with the mindset fostered partly through our education system that European languages, languages of the Occidental world, are the only ones that it makes sense to learn. My only regret is sometimes answering these people with justifications expounding the growing role of China in a globalising world and vague allusions to changing geopolitical paradigms. I don’t hear people asking about why I studied French at GCSE and even if they did, explanations exploring the power play between sovereign states would be greeted with confusion by even the most ardent orientalist.
And so my voyage begins with a plane, manbag in hand and a healthy dose of irony.
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There really isn’t much to report on today. As I write, I’m on Qatar Airways flight QR12 from London Heathrow to Doha International from where I will catch a connecting to Shanghai PVG. I’m hoping to meet a couple of people on the Study China Programme at Doha because there are about five of us taking the same flight from there.
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