...um, yeah, where was I, last week? Or was it the week before?
Moscow, wasn't it?
Yes, Moscow. Very roughly, about 75 degrees longitude, fifteen degrees latitude and twenty degrees celsius away from our current position. The weather has swung from being unseasonably cold in Russia to being slightly on the warm side in China, so we can at least console ourselves that at least our we packed for the right mean temperature, if not the full range.
...urgh. Beijing is a very frustrating place to try and recover from a six day train journey. Russia felt like a slow and steady slog - Beijing, though, is a different order of speed, and right now I feel rather outpaced by it all. the problem is, I think, that i haven't fully reconciled myself to feeling (a) like I'm leaking money all over the place like the ridiculous laowei tourist that I am, and (b) that the actual sums involved are ones that I wouldn't concern myself over if I was back home. Right now, I can't help focusing more on (a), so I am grumpy.
So, anyway, this will be another brief-oh-so-brief update, as I am tapping away about two feet from Summer Girl's head as she is trying to sleep. It is about 10pm here, and we are tired. I am beginning to recover from a streaming head cold (another reaon why I feel grumpy and slow), and Summer Girl is only a couple of days' recovery ahead of me having got the bug first.
So, a few words about the train... take my advice and fly to Irkutsk. The scenery between Moscow and Irkutsk is basically silver birches, with a bit of industry and unloved concrete thrown in occasionally, just for a change. We mostly ate what we could buy at the platforms, having been warned off the buffet car (although i have a sneaking suspicion it wasn't that bad, really).
...
Okay, so that was a few days ago now, and we're now in Chengdu after a pretty tiring 30-hour train trip from Beijing. Looking back, I was a little downbeat in the above paragraphs and sort of implied we haven't had any fun at all. That isn't the case, of course. The train trip managed to be both unvarying and at the same time not at all boring, if that makes any sense - Russia has a vast, vast hinterland which seems to trail along behind the European end of the country like the tail of a comet, seemingly unloved. And then Mongolia I found surprisingly distinct - I expected it to be more overshadowed by its powerful neighbours, but it is a profoundly unique place. Crossing it meant crossing desert, which on the train made a very welcome change from forest - at least until we began running low on water...
Beijing...
Sorry, my impressions are all jumbled up - it's been too long between updates, and knowing I don't have long on this computer my brain struggles to get things into a sensible order. If I could fathom Picasa enough to downscale some photos I would post them but even that seems to be beyond my capabilities right now, so again, you'll probably have to wait until we get home now - sorree! Not what I'd hoped, either.
Anyhow.
There are two quotations which i've been reminded of while we've been in China, and in Beijing in particular. One is Paul Theroux, in his book Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, who referred disparagingly to the new China as a peasant's version of modernity - and almost every day I've seen something which has reminded me of that. Modern China is brutal in its use of concrete; neon signs partially obscure the painted slogans of the communist era, which seem to have been left alone to bury themselves in the ever-present dust of the metropolis.
At the same time, there's a quote which I think is Yeats, who described Rome (yes, the Italian city) as being like a man who made a living selling tickets to see his dead grandmother. Beijing has the same embarrassment of riches when it comes to the ancient - but there's no suggestion that this is Beijing's main source of income. At the same time, though, you get the impression that not only are they selling tickets, but they've dressed her up in her best clothes, plumped her up a bit, put on a bit of makeup... in short, there were Toyotas in the dusty streets of the hutong we stayed in that had more of a feeling of antiquity than the bit of the Great Wall that we walked on.
It's all still impressive, all right - especially when you remember that it was all done by human hands, thousands of them, under an imperial regime careless of their lives... it's a massive achievement. No, that's not right - it's a relentless stream of massive achievements. But it's the scale, rather than the age, which is what impresses, even now.
And talking of scale... Beijing has the same feeling of vastness as St Petersburg, that same sense of having been built at a slightly-larger-than-human scale - but in Beijing the effect is multiplied because it is a relentlessly sprawling place. Don't try to walk anywhere - the nice, neat grid pattern looks appealing on a map, but it's just too damn big. And the effect is heightened by the pollution, which means the vast buildings fade rapidly and then simply loom in the haze.
Anyway. We are now in Chengdu, after a 30-hour train ride (did I mention that?), and we go to start work at the Panda Reservation here tomorrow. Our fellow volunteers seem a motley bunch - the usual teenagers and post-teenagers, but we're starting at the same time as a mother with her teenage son, so who knows what we'll be doing?
