Warsaw to Bangkok

I was pretty excited to get rolling to Nanning. First, I was reinvigourated by my four days of R&R in Yangshuo. I’d biked 80km in two days so I was feeling quite fit. With a full variety of Western and local food at my disposal, I’d eaten better than at any point on the trip (albeit rather expensively). Furthermore, Nanning lies just south of the Tropic of Cancer, so it was my first official stop in the tropics. And, it is one of the few places left on my itinerary where I can truly get away from the tourist trail. China especially seems to have specific designated tourist spots and outside of those rather little to offer besides uniform industrial cities and endless small-scale farms.

I’d arranged travel through the hostel in Yangshuo. I had a train ticket for 8:26 in Guilin, at the North Train Station. There were buses leaving at 6am from Yangshuo they said. Except that when I got to the bus station at 5:30, the first bus wasn’t leaving until 7. Given that the bus drops you off at the main (ie south) train station, this was cutting it really close.

But I’ve done this before. Central Asia prepared me for this. I headed out of the bus station to find the minibus. As soon as I started getting hassled by taxi drivers, I knew I was close. Sure enough, by 6am I was on the minibus, well on my way.

I got to the south station and grabbed a taxi. Intuitively, I knew something was amiss. Why would a train going south leave from the north station? I got to the north station at 7:45 and within ten minutes boarding had commenced. A little early, n’est-ce pas? Well, at five past 8 we left the station. Ten minutes later, we arrived at the south station and a horde of people piled on. So my ticket gave the time for the south station, but listed the north. That’s the sort of thing that could have ended in disaster. Fortunately, I had enough experience to know there would be a minibus, and also to be early for everything. Still, that taxi fare from the south to the north station really didn’t need to happen.

The trip was five hours, almost exclusively through fields of sugar cane. I must single out the wagon steward for special mention for being the most patient, friendly, service-minded individual I’ve come across in China.

I grabbed a bowl of noodles – the official Chinese train food, and had breakfast. I finished off with tea and very fresh peanuts (never had them this good back home), so I was quite full when lunch arrived. Unbeknownst to me, my ticket included a meal, much like what you’d find on an airplane. Though, aside from the infamous Hindu meal debacle, I’ve never had airplane food quite this bad. There was a beef & unknown vegetable dish where the beef was mostly fat. The rice had been steamed for the past several weeks and was distinctly inedible. Some other disgusting unrecognizable vegetable was present, as were sausage candies (they have the audacity to call them sausages, despite consisting mainly of sugar and artificial flavouring). There at least was an egg, though I promptly dropped this sole piece of edible food on the floor. I’m glad I didn’t know in advance about this meal, or I might have relied on it!

Excuse Me, do You Speak Chinglish?
The butchering of the English language in speech is quite understandable. I butcher any language I attempt to speak. The Chinese have a similar background to me – growing up thousands of kilometres from the nearest other language, with no second language instruction at an early age, and having one of the world’s most widely spoken tongues as my native one. So they are very much forgiven for only speaking Mandarin. But you’d think that there would be sufficient translational skills in China to avoid some of the disastrous signage I’ve seen here. Like the condo development in Guilin called “Reviralization Garden”.

The Chinese National Railway is a huge operation, but the best their crack team could come up with is the immortal “No Occupying While Stabling”, or on one train “No Occpuying While Stabling”. This is the definitive Chinglish phrase for most travellers. We all love it and use it as the punchline in jokes. It translates, by the way, to “Do not use the restroom while the train is in the station”. Fortunately, such wonderfully baffling signs are in such proliferation that before long, any gibberish makes sense as long as there’s at least one word that belongs.
Nanning

Chinese cities are rather uniform. They’ve all sprung up so quickly in the past couple of decades that it’s a rare pleasure to encounter one with a unique look (like Chongqing). Nanning looks like any other city, however. The differences are in the details, and it takes some wandering to notice them.

In Nanning, the streets are lined with a myriad of palms. Even a Chinese industrial city feels a little more laid back when there are palm trees everywhere. The fruit vendors offer prickly jackfruits, bright dragonfruits and a multitude of things I’ve never seen before. The food streets (streets lined with small restaurants and vendors offering simple dishes in a spartan, al fresco setting) are freakier here. In the south of China, they eat anything that moves. They’ve apparently pushed the “canine cuisine district” out of the downtown area so as not to offend Westerners, but evidence of dog-dining was unavoidable. For example, I went into the Wal-Mart to try and find some new beers and they sell whole skinned dog carcasses. Like you need another reason not to shop at Wal-Mart.

They don’t seem to eat cats, at least I didn’t see any evidence of it. Probably owing to their usefulness in pest control. Hopefully the rise of pet ownership here will see a reduction of eating dogs and turtles (which are popular all over and would probably be extinct if they weren’t so expensive).

Nanning isn’t that far from the Gulf of Tonkin, so seafood is in more abundance here. Not that buying oysters from unrefrigerated street stalls is such a genius plan. They barbeque oysters here, by the way. Doves are popular, as are crabs and snakes. Old standbys like chicken and duck enjoy much popularity but you see less pork than in other parts of China. To give you a hint as to the ubiquity of pork, the word for “pork” in Mandarin is the same as the word for “meat”. Lay’s offers Beijing Duck flavoured potato chips, which along with onion flavour in Europe I would like to see introduced to enliven the moribund North American potato chip scene. Beef has been slow to take off in China. Apparently the Chinese find the taste too strong, which seems strange given how much they love duck.

I failed to locate the Guangxi Provincial Museum. My orientation skills in general have been on the downslide lately. I think after some early successes in China I’ve become too cocky. Ultimately, without the museum, I was left with nothing “touristy” to do. Then again, I got along just fine in Toronto for five years without climbing the CN Tower or visiting Casa Loma. So I spent my two days in Nanning just bumming around.

It’s one of those places where you see things, think about things and learn things. Where you take the time to compare the merits of pop music around the world. Chinese is definitely better than Russian (except the Oi Oi Oi Oi song – I liked that one), but the only North American stuff they ever seem to play is extra saccharine crap from the 80’s. I’ve heard “Say You, Say Me” and “I Just Called to Say I Love You” so many times my ears bleed just at the thought of them.

Nanning doesn’t seem to get too many foreigners. I stopped at a restaurant for a beer and within minutes a large crowd had gathered to critique every last thing about me. They found the concept of drinking a beer without food to be quite ridiculous. At one point, there were ten people there just watching everything I did. Of course, I contorted my face a lot and made many silly noises. How could I not?

Cold Dead Chicken
The next day I had more food and beer fun. I went into a restaurant specifically because they had signs for a beer I’d never seen before. Sure enough, they had several beers that were new to me. Yay! I tried to order some lunch. Not so yay. My rather unexceptional Mandarin vocabulary was far beyond the 20+ staff members’ combined English vocabulary. Let the games begin. This lot was especially dense. No matter how I tried to explain what I wanted, they couldn’t figure it out. Oh man, they couldn’t sort out gongbao jiding. I mean, everybody in China knows this dish and I’ve said it so many times I pronounce it properly. So I tried to draw them a picture. “ji” “Sichuan”. So Sichuan-style chicken, you’d think. Oh boy did they not grasp this. Eventually, after I finally conveyed to them that I wanted some chicken, a cooked but cold whole chicken arrived. Well, at least it was memorable.

Chinese Money
On Chinese money, there are five languages. Mandarin is used in both traditional and pinyin (Roman script). Uygher (which is written in Arabic script) and Tibetan (coolest alphabet ever!) are two of the other ones. Another is a Roman-script language with many consonants and unusual letter combinations. This one is on street signs in Nanning. Guangxi province, of which Nanning is capital, is well over 50% minority, the largest of which are the Zhuang people. Their language is related to Thai, so I’m not sure about the Roman alphabet thing, but as they are the largest ethnic minority in China my guess is that it is their language on the money. The last language, in a very unusual script (running vertically, and very tiny) I still don’t know. My guess is Mongolian, since Chinese Mongolians wouldn’t have converted to Cyrillic the way the actual country of Mongolia did, but that’s just a guess. I’ll have to do some research on this.

Another oddity of Chinese money is the slang. Yuan is the basic unit, and this is colloquially known as “kuai”. Each yuan is made up of ten “jiao”, which are known as “mao”. I find this very odd because Mao is not on the jiao notes, but is on every yuan note. When I first arrived, I actually nicknamed the yuan notes “maos” because he’s always there staring at me. So I probably confused some folks by doing that.