Coming out

Oh, all right, then, I admit it - I'm in China. The capital, Beijing, to be exact.

I've been describing it as 'an exotic city' in my 'blogger profile' for the past 6 months, but that is perhaps over-glamourising it. I'm not sure that it is all that exotic, really; not in the way that you associate with many other East Asian cities, anyway. No - weird, engaging, exasperating, constantly changing, but perhaps not really 'exotic'.

There are reasons why I have chosen to keep my location a secret until now. Fear of attracting the attention of the censors was a small part of it (not that I have any expectation that my tiny, unread blog could ever deserve their wrath.... but I'm sure that if I become too openly a 'China blog', they will start monitoring me now and then, and that will be plenty irritating enough).

I am deeply wary of becoming a 'China blog', anyway. It can, I think, be rather too easy a ploy to boost site traffic, such is the intensity of interest in all things China around much of the rest of the world. And nearly all 'China blogs' from time to time (even the best of them; and there are some - not many - that I like) get a little drunk on this largely unmerited attention and veer towards self-importance. I don't want that to happen to me (though it probably will do, at some point).

Above all, I just don't want this to become a blog about where I am; it's almost always been so far a blog about what's going on in my head. And that rarely has very much to do with where I am; far more to do with what time of the year it is, what I've been reading or watching or listening to, who I've been hanging out with, what substances I'm under the influence of.

And such it will, I hope, continue to be.

However, though laying to rest the popular 'Where in the world am I?' strand, I will from time to time offer some observations on life in China. I'm not sure what category label I'll give them yet; we'll wait and see until I've written one or two of them.

And for those of you who were skim-reading...... I'M IN BEIJING.

The view from my window

Well, from my balcony, anyway. If I open the sliding windows, lean over the railing, crane my neck a little.

The architectural style is quite distinctive. And these twin watchtowers - just inside what would have been the main north gate of the old Imperial city - are quite a famous local landmark. This is a great neighbourhood to live in, only three-quarters of a mile or so away from those towers, and from the trio of small lakes that lie to the west of them (my regular jogging route).

Does anybody recognise this? Was anybody sharp-eyed enough to decipher the name of the city on the GoogleEarth photo I posted yesterday?

Oh, all right, all right, I'll come clean. In a minute.....

Playing with the switches....

The Kafka Boys are still playing silly buggers with our Internet here. Or at least, they were yesterday.

On Monday morning, shortly after the Boys arrived back at work - after a weekend of dreaming fondly of what new irritations they might inflict on the country's netizens - Blogspot was unblocked (again). Blogger, however, was blocked in its stead.

Except..... that they forgot about me! I had remained logged on to Blogger throughout the weekend, and that connection was still in place, unaffected by whatever new filter they had implemented down at Kafka Central. All I had to do, it seemed, was to leave my computer permanently switched on, permanently connected to the Net..... and I would be able to thumb my nose at the dratted Kafka Boys. Yes, I was really rather looking forward to the prospect of being the last person in the country who could use Blogger.

But then, the Kafka Boys tired of their little game, and unblocked Blogger again in the afternoon. At the moment - after two weeks of teeth-gnashing and scouring the Internet for hacker tips to bypass the blockade - we have 'normal service' once again.

They really were just twiddling all the knobs for the hell of it. "Now, I wonder what this one does...."

Come, friendly bombs.....

Thanks to the wonders of GoogleEarth, I can now offer you some aerial views of my home.

Froog Towers is the flat-roofed, U-shaped building in the middle of the bottom picture, looking out over the little park ('Weird Stone Park', I'm told it is called!). Well, it's not all mine, of course; I have the top-floor apartment in the south-east corner.

Anyone recognise this? You do need very sharp eyes to read the name of the city on the top picture. I'm such a tease.....

Here in the world am I

Haven't you worked it out yet?

Inane government censorship, a childlike unsophistication of taste, an obsession with 'lucky numbers', a remarkable ability to get through life without kitchen towels, bin bags, or can-openers.....

Yes, it could only be......

Well, perhaps I'll keep you all hanging on a day or so longer.

Any guesses??

Ominous, ominous (Where in the world am I? [44])

I couldn't resist throwing out one last little 'Where in the world am I?' with the number 44 on it.

It's a very BAD number in these parts, you see. Oh yes, it's terribly ill-starred, a passport to disaster. The locals are great believers in numerology.

Almost all of them succumb to the age-old superstition to some extent (I suppose most Westerners are a bit hung up about the number 13), and a great many let it rule their lives - to the extent that mobile phone SIM cards here are priced according to the desirability of their number combinations. Anything with 4s in it is considered bad juju, and will sell for next-to-nothing. Most foreigners here (well, the compulsive cheapskates I mostly hang out with, anyway) have at least three or four 4s in their eleven-digit number. True.

Can you guess where it is yet?

Pyjamas in the daytime (Where in the world am I? [43])

I am supposed to be heading out to a friend's house party in a little while.

It is to be a Pyjama Party.

This is quite a popular theme for foreigners' parties in this country. I threw one myself a couple of years ago. [If you're really nice to me, I might one day soon publish the link to my Yahoo Photos page, so that you can see what it was like.]

The reason for the popularity of the pyjama theme here is that one of the charming and distinctive quirks of the local populace is their penchant for wearing pyjamas in public. Yep, in the street, in the middle of the day, without an ounce of shame. It is considered quite natty outdoor attire throughout the summer months. Since the summers can be brutally hot, I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense. It does look funny though.

[The title here is, of course, another line from the Crash Test Dummies.]

Childish things (Where in the world am I? [42])

As a corollary to my earlier observations on the sorry lack of taste or musical awareness we typically encounter here in The Unnameable (though soon to be named?) Country, I feel I must add that the locals do suffer from a kind of arrested development in almost every respect.

Take the cinema. Grown men and women will happily tell you that their favourite films are cartoons. The men will quite often tell you that their favourite cartoon is 'Tom & Jerry' (those feature-length jobs make such demands on the attention-span).

The only live-action films most people seem to have any time for are the occasional Hollywood blockbuster and trivial rom-coms. Oh yes, to go alongside their quaint adherence to the cult of Michael Jackson, they insist that Julia Roberts is THE BIGGEST FILM STAR IN THE WORLD. And this isn't the Julia Roberts of 'Erin Brockovich' we're talking about here, or even 'Pretty Woman'..... or even (god help me!) 'Notting Hill'. No, 'Runaway Bride' is more their level.

For a hardcore film buff like myself, it is deeply depressing.

Ah yes, amongst the reasons I don't think I could ever date a local...... well, I'm not going out with a 28-yr-old woman who carries a Hello Kitty pencil-case around with her everywhere, and that's that!!

Make it stop! (Where in the world am I? [41b])

One of my correspondents (the renewed Blogspot ban here in **** has made relatively little difference to my 'comment' traffic, since most of my blog-averse friends send me their comments by e-mail or SMS anyway) has pointed out that in that last post on the limited tastes in Western music we have to suffer here, I strangely omitted to mention one of the most egregious examples.

All right, then - Richard Clayderman. Yes, the simpering hybrid-clone of David Cassidy and Liberace is still BIG here, long after his career faded into deserved obscurity in the civilized world. Did I say BIG? I meant HUGE! COLOSSAL! His plinky-plonky pop classics are EVERYWHERE. It's as if the whole country were ONE HUGE ELEVATOR. (That whirring you hear in the background is Chopin and Schumann rotating in their graves.)

Oh, and Kenny G. They LOVE him too. Of course they do - he is the only saxophonist they have ever heard.

(I think that if I ever put out a 'lonely hearts' ad for a local girlfriend, I would have to add the proviso: "Must know who Lester Young and Charlie Parker are." Amongst the many reasons I've never dated a local girl..... But that is perhaps a topic for a later post.)

There is a good reason why I did not mention Richard Clayderman and Kenny G in the earlier post. It is because I had completely forgotten about them.

The reason I had forgotten about them is that I have developed a very useful protective mechanism for blocking noxious thoughts out of my mind.

I am going to re-engage that mechanism now. Please, let us draw a veil over such unpleasant matters.

The Country That Taste Forgot (Where in the world am I? [41])

This country was for many years almost completely cut off from the outside world. Even when contact with foreign cultures did become more common, the effects of this were slow to disseminate, and were still closely monitored and restricted by the central government. Only the most unobjectionable, middle-of-the-road musical performers could get any significant airplay here in the '70s, and even today the level of exposure to Western popular music is minuscule. Most people haven't even heard of the classic performers of yesteryear like Sinatra or Presley.

Really. It beggars belief, but there it is.

No, The 3 Greatest Songs In The History Of Popular Music (if you are a citizen of The Unnameable Country) are:

Yesterday Once More - by Karen Carpenter

Country Roads - by John Denver

Hotel California - by The Eagles (undoubtedly the most daring and surprising of the three; basically, people here recognise the word 'California' and they like the twiddly guitar bits; they have no inkling that it's about drug-induced fever dreams and hallucinations)

I have tried to explain to students in my University classes that I like Yesterday Once More, I really do, it's a pretty song, I really enjoy it when I hear it on the radio back home - because I only hear it 2 or 3 times a year, at most; but, you know, anything can get a bit boring, a bit irritating, a bit SANITY-CHALLENGING when you hear it every f***ing day for 4 years. It's a bit of an ordeal for the foreign teacher here, honestly: students always expect to do a 'skit show' for the last class of the semester, and most of them want to do some karaoke as their 'skit', and at least a third of them will want to do Yesterday Once More. I explain to them that this is a lovely choice, and I am sure their classmates will very much enjoy their performance, but I hope they won't mind if I miss it because I really have to step outside just now and bang my head against a wall for a few minutes.

It used to be really difficult to avoid The Carpenters in this town. You'd have to avoid CD shops that would always be blaring muzak at enormous volume out into the street, you'd have to avoid restaurants that you knew always played that ONE incredibly popular foreign 'rock music' compilation tape that included Karen as the highlight near the end (and Celine f***ing Dion, My Heart Will Go On, and on and on and on....), you'd have to ask taxi drivers to turn their radios off, you'd have to always take the stairs instead of using elevators.... and you'd still be lucky to get through 72 hours without hearing the bitch once somewhere.

Then, a funny thing happened. She got bumped off the playlists by an infinitely more annoying song. There was a dreadfully cheesy European soft-rock outfit (Danish, I think) called Michael Learns To Rock (the name should be enough of a warning: most of us expats who had to suffer their 6 months of ubiquity here came to know them as Michael Kinda Sucks) who came out with an insipid, plodding love ballad called Take Me To Your Heart. It was just atrocious: syrupy, repetitive, grating; one of those songs where, just when you think it can't get any worse, they have another key change. Aaaaarrgghh, aaaaarrgghh, aaaaarrgghh! I'm sure nobody's ever heard of them outside of this country - not even in Denmark; they are so obviously a third-rate band who have cynically decided to target the Asian market by sinking a few notches even lower in quality. Anyway, for several months this was a huge hit, and was played everywhere in music shops, restaurants, elevators. Then, mercifully, it disappeared (although equally dire local cover versions have started to come out). The strange thing was that Karen Carpenter never really came back. You still hear her once in a while, but there's nothing like the overkill we suffered a few years back. A very curious cultural phenomenon, that.

Ah, and The Eagles. Every kid in this town who wants to play guitar learns Hotel California. Often, it seems, that is the only song they learn, and they don't learn it all that well. You don't hear The Eagles' recording of it being played all that often here, but you're quite likely to hear some local picker murdering it in any number of bars and music shops.

One of my more difficult moments in the recording studio came when I was asked to read a ridiculously fulsome account of The Eagles' career that went something like this:

"The Eagles were the greatest rock band in recording history. [Oh, not the Beatles, then? Or Queen? Or Pink Floyd? Or Led Zeppelin? Or The Rolling Stones? Even amongst American bands, you'd think The Beach Boys, The Grateful Dead, Lynyrd Skyrnyrd, even bleedin' Aerosmith would have a rival claim...] Their classic song Hotel California was followed by dozens of other hits. [Dozens? They've got quite an impressive catalogue, but dozens??] Many of their fans wept openly in the streets at the news that they had broken up [They broke up? News to me! Somehow passed me by; I must have been too busy having a life.], but great was the rejoicing when they re-formed 8 years later. [No - must have missed the memo on that as well.]" And there was more in the same vein. I felt dirtied by having to read that garbage. Luckily it hasn't come up again (most of the scripts we do are endlessly recycled - another strain on my fragile sanity!).

Even today, those three artists, those three songs are pretty much it as far as most people's knowledge of Western music goes. The only more recent performer to force his way into the canon is....... Michael Jackson! Yup, this country is still in a time-warp in many ways. Nearly every high school or University student you ask will insist that Wacko Jacko is still the undisputed King of Pop. If pressed for evidence, they will cite Thriller.... and maybe Bad. They seem blithely unaware of the fact that he hasn't really released much music in the past decade or so and that his career is, how shall we say, under a cloud.

Contemporary artists? Hmmm, let's see. Norah Jones is safe enough (although I suspect a lot of people are playing her music without having the slightest idea who she is). Eminem seems to have only a very small and somewhat 'avant garde' following. Marilyn Manson? No, this country isn't ready for Marilyn Manson yet.

It is a very strange place, to be sure. Don't even get me started on the local pop music......

The Post Office: Conspiracy or Cock-Up? (Where in the world am I? [40])

The performance of the postal service here is worryingly erratic. Sometimes whole strings of letters and parcels from overseas will arrive in quick succession, and I'll be lulled into thinking there's no problem. Then I'll get an e-mail from a friend asking why I didn't thank them for the package they sent a couple of months ago, and I'll think, "Oh SHIT, not again!"

Sometimes, I concede, delivery problems might possibly have 'legitimate' reasons. One or two of my friends do have atrocious handwriting; and it's hard enough for the locals to recognise Western script as it is! My good friend Lizzie, my (former) No 1 E-Penpal, claims to have sent several parcels which failed to get through; I suspect it might be because she naively admitted on the customs declaration slips that they contained food products (which are, of course, not allowed). However, it's not as though you receive a polite notice from the International Post Office saying "Sorry, we had to confiscate a parcel addressed to you because it contained banned items" or "We regret that we have had to remove forbidden foodstuffs from your parcel; please come to this office to collect the remainder of the contents." Oh no - the parcel just never arrives. And somewhere in a back room at the International Post Office, the boys are pigging out on Walker's Crisps, Creme Eggs, and Twiglets.

The other thing that quite often seems to 'go astray' is books. It was particularly annoying when, last autumn, an American writer friend sent me an advance copy of her 1st novel, and that disappeared. I wonder if the censors are trying to read all the 'printed matter' that gets sent to me before they allow it to be delivered?? That could result in some long delays!

I am particularly anxious about this at the moment because when I was visiting my family home in Wales last month I cherry-picked 5 or 6 favourite paperbacks from my huge mothballed library to bring back with me; then, realising, the day before my flight home, that my luggage was dangerously in excess of my weight allowance, I decided to post them to myself. That was 5 weeks ago, and there's still no sign of them. Do 'printed matter' packages go by surface mail? I had thought it was a 'less express' form of airmail; I could have sworn I'd received this form of mail in the past within only 2 or 3 weeks of posting (regular airmail letters typically take 10-12 days to get here from Europe or America; usually slightly longer from America, which I take to be the result of some sort of nose-thumbing obstructionism targeted at The Great Satan).

Very, very anxious just now. I love those books. I had the feeling as I handed them over the counter in a post office in West London that it was a bit like waving goodbye to family members boarding the Titanic: there was an awful foreboding, an agonising apprehension that I might never see them again.

But..... is it really censorship or persecution.... or even theft..... or is it just the rampant incompetence that we see in almost every other area of public and commercial life in this country? That is THE QUESTION.

The Curse of the Klutzy Cleaning Lady?

I don't f***ing believe this!!

At around 9.30 this morning Blogspot was blocked again.

I am hoping that it is just a temporary glitch, a local problem.... or that darned cleaning lady dusting the switches again.

If it is deliberate censorship - resumed after less than 36 hours of remission - then.... heads are going to roll! I am going to find out where Kafka Central is and picket the bloody place!!

What I say to the crackpot government of this crackpot country is this: Leave Blogspot alone, you ninnies! You are already universally mocked as one of the great playground bullies of the world - this kind of pettiness only tarnishes your international image still further. GROW UP!!!

The Kafka Boys relent

Hooray, hooray!

Late last night, Blogspot was suddenly "unblocked" again.

Just when I was on the point of switching over to the Firefox browser and doing some arcane tinkering with the settings to try to set up a 'remote host' workaround - scary stuff for someone as technologically 'challenged' as me!

It would seem that the Kafka Boys, or their tyrannical masters, have got over whatever little snit they were in with the blogging community and returned things to normal.

Or maybe the cleaning lady jogged a switch in the control room and put us back online accidentally? It could happen.

But no, the consensus here seems to be that the government was testing out some new filtering techniques, and - now that it is confident it can shut us down at a moment's notice - it has decided to be nice and enlightened and forward-looking again..... for a while.

It's not all good news, though. Proxyline now appears to be completely blocked! (At first, only access to Blogspot via this proxy was being blocked; then Wikipedia was excluded too; then....)

Anyone want to start placing bets on when they'll crack down on Blogspot again??

Yes, but WHO are you? (Where in the world am I? [39])

Today was going so well, it really was. Gorgeous weather. I got a lot of things done. I was even starting to make some, ever-so-slight progress towards crow-barring another contract out of my last employer, the suddenly uncommunicative IT company.

I was feeling in a very positive frame of mind. Nothing about The Unnameable Country was going to bug me today! Nothing!

And then I got a phone call. This phone call:


Me: "Hello."

Caller: "Hello."

[Silence]

Me: "Who is that?"

Caller: "Is that Mr Froog?"

Me: "Well, Froog is my first name, so you don't need to call me 'Mr Froog'. Just 'Froog' will do. But yes, I am. And who are you?"

Caller: "Are you an English teacher?"

Me: "Well, sometimes, yes. But who are you?

Caller: "I am from ABC Company."

Me: "What?"

Caller: "ABC Company."

Me: "But who are you?"

Caller: "I am from ABC Company."

Me: "Yes, but what is your name?"

Caller: [Pause] "I am Janet."

Me: "Hi, Janet. Nice to meet you. Why are you calling me?"

Caller: "I am from ABC Company."

Me: "Well, that's nice. But why are you calling me?"

Caller: "You are an English teacher!"

Me: "Well, yes, I am. But how do you know that? Who gave you my name?"

Caller: "I am from ABC Company. Don't you know us?"

Me: "No, I don't. I've never worked for you before. I don't know anyone who works for you. I've never heard of you. You must have been given my name by someone. Who told you to call me?"

Caller: [Pause, audible flummox] "Er, er, one of your friends told us about you. Don't you know?"

Me: "No, I don't. Could you tell me who it was?"

Caller: "Er..... um..... do you know [deliberately inaudible]?"

Me: "Sorry. What was that? I didn't hear the name you said."

Caller: "Er, er, [mumbling again] Dakar. Don't you know Dakar?"

Me: "Dakar?"

Caller: "Yes!"

Me: "No, I don't. I think Dakar is a place, not a person."

Caller: "Oh. [Audible crest falling] You don't know Dakar?"

Me: "No. No, I definitely don't know anyone by that name. Never mind. Why are you calling me?"

Caller: "I am from ABC Company!"

Me: "Yes, yes, I got that. What kind of company is that?"

Caller: "You haven't heard of us?"

Me: "No, I'm afraid I haven't."

Caller: "We are very famous company."

Me: "Well, I'm sorry, but I haven't heard of you. I don't know a single thing about this company. I can't even begin to imagine what they do. Please - enlighten me."

Caller: "ABC Company?"

Me: "Yes."

Caller: "You don't know ABC Company?"

Me: "No, I don't. Please tell me what they do."

Caller: "They are a company of architects."

Me: [Suddenly perking up - sniffing prospect of some English for Special Purposes work, aka English at Enhanced Rates] "Oh, that's interesting. How big is your company?"

Caller: "You don't know us? Oh, very big. We have offices all over the world!"

Me: "Well, how big is your office here, in The Unnameable City?"

Caller: "Oh, very small."

Me: "But you want to have some English training?"

Caller: "Yes."

Me: "Well, I might be able to help with that. How many people do you want to provide English training for?"

Caller: "Why do you ask so many questions?"

Me: [Thinks: Because you won't bloody well tell me anything.] "Well, it's kind of my job, you know. I have to find out what kind of class you want, how many students, how many hours per week, for how many weeks, and why they want to learn. Then I can decide if it's something I can do or not, and quote you a price."

Caller: "Oh. [Sound of crest falling even further.] Do you really need to know all that?"

Me: "Er, yes I do."

Now, this was not a language problem. This lady had great English. I could understand her fine, and I don't think she was having any problems understanding me.

This was purely a cultural thing. In this country, telephone technique is almost entirely unknown. People do not introduce themselves. They do not explain why they are calling. They do not explain how they got your contact details. They are reluctant to volunteer any information at all. They are reluctant to give out information even when questioned. They behave as if knowledge is power and they don't want to cede any of that power to you: they will only tell you what they think is the absolute minimum amount of information required to get you to agree to something. That minimum is usually far less than what is actually required in order for you to have the slightest notion of what they're talking about.

Finding out why someone is calling you is like getting blood from a stone in this country. And yes, I'm sorry to say, even after all these years, it still gets my goat. There is just no good reason for it.

After taking nearly 10 minutes to find out why the f*** Janet was calling me, I at last discovered that she was trying to set up a 1-to-1 class for her boss..... and I flipped rather. That kind of lesson is a complete waste of time for both parties: it's an ineffective learning environment for the student, and the teacher invariably has to suffer the class being cancelled at least 2 weeks out of every 3 (and thus not being paid). Complete waste of time. No, thank you!!

Conversation terminated at 5.18pm.

A very BIG hint (Where in the world am I? [38])

I have just learned that it is now only 500 days until....

The Biggest Event In The History Of The World Ever.

At least, in the eyes of this oh-so-rapidly expanding, ruthlessly modernizing, exceedingly aspirant city that I live in.

A huge clue! Colossal! I've given the game away, really.

But please, don't all write in to unmask me just yet. This lonely luchador of the blogzone will hang on to his anonymity for a few more days at least, thank you very much.

How much do I hate the trees? (Where in the world am I? [37b])

Another thing about the trees...... (And this ties in to my earlier observations on the impassability of most of the sidewalks in this town.)

They are so numerous along many of the sidewalks that they leave no room for the people. Really. The typical spacing is about one every 2 or 3 yards, sometimes less; and, as I said yesterday, each of them is obligatorily surrounded at its base by a sunken rectangle of bone-dry dust about a yard or so square. Many of the narrower sidewalks are not much more than a yard wide..... but that doesn't stop the city authorities planting trees in the middle of them! Like I said before, people mostly walk in the bicycle lanes. There's nowhere else.

Moreover, they tend to plant youngish trees, and not sink them very deep. Result: within 2 or 3 months the root systems of new trees are churning up the paving on the sidewalk, and often the adjoining road surface too. If there is space to walk on the sidewalk, it's still often awkward to do so because of all the cracks, holes, undulations, and shattered paving slabs. Bloody trees!

The amount of money and manpower the city expends on the tree problem is colossal. Watering them. Trimming them. Repairing storm damage. Repairing roads & sidewalks every few months. Watering them. Removing and replanting them whenever there's a road widening or some other public improvement scheme. Watering them.

It's such an appalling, unnecessary waste of resources. But that is something this country tends to excel in!

I can imagine myself getting deported one day for heading out in the middle of the night, drunk and maudlin, with a nice sharp saw to bring a few of these superfluous trees down. Yes, I've always seen myself as Paul Newman in 'Cool Hand Luke'.....

Death to the trees! (Where in the world am I? [37])

Originality of thought is not commonplace in this country.

People at all levels of society eagerly and unquestioningly parrot fatuous, unsupported ideas that have been planted in their heads by the frighteningly thorough state progaganda apparatus.

Take trees. If you ask anyone in this city what can be done to improve their environment, they will unhesitatingly respond, "Plant more trees!"

I've had this from my students many times: undergraduates, post-graduates, mid-level managers from local government and state-run industries. They all say the same thing: "Plant more trees!"

That's about all they say. They don't really have any other ideas on the environment. But they're very enthusiastic on the trees issue. They don't really know why. They can't remember where this idea came from. They struggle to come up with any arguments in support of the suggestion. But they're absolutely certain it would be a good idea to plant more trees.

I remain a sceptic. "Where would you put the f***ing things?"

I have posed this question (minus the exasperated expletive) to various groups of students. On one occasion I led them over to the window to demonstrate my point: on the narrow strip of parched grass between our classroom block and the next there were a good half a dozen trees. "Tell me," I said, "can you show me 20 sq. m of open space anywhere on this campus that doesn't already have a tree on it? And what about the sidewalks? Do not most of the sidewalks in this city already have trees planted regularly along them, often at a spacing of only 1.5m or 2m, on both sides of the road? And the parks - are the parks without trees? No, there are plenty of trees in the parks. If you were to plant more trees, if you were to replace all the grass, and all the flowerbeds, and all the ponds, and all the playgrounds with trees - which is what some of you seem to want to do - then you would not have a park any more, but A FOREST."

You may suspect me of exaggerating for comic effect, but no. This is really how it is. I'd be willing to have a little bet that this city has more trees per square mile (the locals use the metric system; I do not, except when I'm humouring them) than any other on earth. In parts of the city, at least, there seem to be very nearly as many trees as people.

And it's actually, I think, a major cause of the ecological crisis here. This city is desperately short of water; the water-table beneath us is sinking dramatically year-by-year; our city, in fact, clings to existence in a borderline desert. Washing is an irregular habit for most people here; providing enough water to drink is quite enough of a challenge for the city authorities, without encouraging people to take showers every day. How much water does a tree suck out of the ground every day? How much water do 5 million trees suck up? It's frightening. What's even more frightening is that I really don't think anyone in the government here has ever tried to do that calculation (I used to teach the deputy director of the water department, and she hadn't got a clue).

The city suffers from suffocating humidity in the summer. The climate is quite intolerable throughout July and August. The humidity tends to get trapped under the lavish foliage of our many, many trees. And where does most of that moisture come from in the first place? The only real argument most people make in favour of the trees (apart from their looking pretty) is that they provide welcome shade in the summer. Oh, please. Scoot from one shop-awning to the next. Wear a hat. The direct sunlight is not so bad. It's the f***ing humidity that kills you! I'd happily accept a bit less shade if we could reduce that humidity problem.

This city also suffers appallingly high rates of particulate air pollution, and is plagued by dust storms in the Spring and Autumn. The government likes to foster a myth that these dust storms all originate far to the west, a long, long way from here; but in fact most of them arise right here on our own doorstep. Almost every one of those leafy, beautiful, shade-giving trees that crowd our parks and line our streets is surrounded by 1 sq. yard of dustbowl. The trees suck every last drop of water out of the ground, the grass dies, the earth becomes dry and hard and dusty..... and that dust gets airborne. And the people choke.

I am perfectly serious. The zeal for tree-planting long ago got completely out of proportion here. What we need now is FEWER TREES. And SOON.

Pass me that axe.

Why can't I watch the game?? (Where in the world am I? [36])

TV coverage of sport out here on the local channels is not very foreigner-friendly. Well, it's probably not very local-friendly either. It's just not very good, in fact.

The scheduling is incredibly rigid. For example, if you're trying to enjoy a semi-final match in the US Open Tennis, you can guarantee that the programme will change to a crappy motorsport magazine show just as the third set tie-break starts.

The scheduling is incredibly nationalistic. Major European football games are always likely to get bumped if there's a provincial ping-pong or volleyball tournament going on somewhere.

The scheduling is incredibly arbitrary and inconsistent. Just because the English Premier Football League is now acknowledged as the strongest in the world, and just because its games have been shown live on Saturday nights for the last few years here..... doesn't mean that we won't suddenly subscribe to the lumpen German Bundesliga instead. Just because we showed an English game at 1am last Monday doesn't mean that we won't go for some f***ing Italian Serie B match this week. Just because we showed all the Champions League quarter-finals live, doesn't mean that we will show the semi-finals or the final live. You never know. And I really don't think being able to read the TV schedules would be any help (although, obviously I can't).

When you can find an event you want to watch, the presentation is often hugely irritating - especially for football games. They frequently omit to display the current score (or the match clock) from live games (or obscure it with their channel ident). However, they will almost invariably display the final score during recorded highlights - which rather spoils the fun! Coverage always finishes the second the final whistle is blown: there are NO HIGHLIGHTS shown at the end of matches (and very limited replays during matches). Thus, it is often possible to sit through a game and not know the result (because you missed the start, dozed off for 10 minutes, went to loo when there was a big crowd roar about something...).

Roundups of action are edited together on obscure principles. I don't think I have ever seen all the goals from one match shown in the order in which they occurred. Often there are extended montages of goals, featuring random recent examples mixed in with others from months or years back. Grrrrr.

And then there's the commentary. Usually they're taking the pictures off a TV station with an English-language commentary track, but they remove that, of course (or, even more annoyingly, reduce the the volume to a level where it is just audible but no longer comprehensible). At least with something like American Football, the local commentators have some small residual functionality: because nobody else plays the game, the local language doesn't have any of its own terms for the technical vocabulary, so every few seconds you get a key word you can actually understand - "rhubarbrhubarbrhubarbquarterbackrhubarbrhubarbshotgunrhubarbrhubarbrhubarbrhubarbrunningbackrhubarbrhubarbfumblerhubarbrhubarbrhubarbturnoverrhubarbrhubarb."

No such luck with football, tennis, golf. You just get a continuous barrage of frantic gibberish (it's a tonal language: so, to Western ears, people sound terribly agitated pretty much the whole time!). In fact, what you mostly get is laughter. Giggling, chortling, guffawing. Hoots of wild derision. Schadenfreude is a national pastime here (I once had a 'mature' student - hoping to go overseas to do a Master's in Public Administration - who told me his favourite thing was, "Watching people fall down in the street. And then laughing at them." "Thank you for being so honest," I said, "but please do not mention this when interviewed by the University. In fact, please do not ever mention this again to any foreigner you meet."). If a player misses a 4' putt, overhits a lob, or misdirects a pass to an opponent - the local commentators will positively wet their pants jeering at him for a good 30 seconds. It's quite fun when you first get here; but it gets old really quickly; in fact, I find, it gets somewhat depressing.

So..... you turn the sound down, and hope you can recognise the players, keep track of the score.

Or.... you steel yourself to endure a raucous and expensive evening watching an 'illegal' Filipino satellite-feed (apparently the only way to get the best sporting events with English commentaries) in one of the expat sports bars. Sigh.

All the world seems in tune....

On a Spring afternoon....

I was wary of greeting the arrival of Spring this weekend. I mentioned last week that Spring arrives here infallibly on the last weekend of March each year; but I wasn't sure about the status of next weekend, since it straddles March and April. How would that affect the rule-of-thumb I've developed over these last four years here? Would it be tempting Fate to express the hope that Spring might show up on the last full weekend of March? I feared it would.

It seems I was being too pessimistic. I don't know quite what it is, but when Spring comes here, you know. We've had plenty of sunny days over the last month, but somehow they just didn't feel like it; there was always the lingering sensation that more chilly days might be lying in wait for us, and so there were. This time - this time it's for real. The sky may not be any bluer than it's been before, the sunshine may not be any warmer; but there's something, something in the air that reassures us the chilly days are gone now.

The trees sense it. In the past few days, they have put forth their blossoms as one, exhaling their fragrance into the air like a huge collective sigh of relief - after so many false starts and frost-nipped buds.

This is a very fine city when the skies are clear and the sun shines. It doesn't happen nearly often enough, but we are grateful for it when it does - especially after months of grey and gloom.

And everywhere today, I see people smiling. That doesn't happen nearly often enough either.

The Wall of Silence (Where in the world am I? [35])

In a couple of recent posts about some of the more negative aspects of life in this country, I alluded to the tradition of 'saving face', the national obsession with always maintaining the outward appearance of dignity and respect (without the inner reality!). It is, I'm sorry to say, one aspect of the 'culture' here which I find to be utterly without merit (and that's putting it mildly).

One of the most exasperating manifestations of this phenomenon is the compulsive avoidance of delivering 'bad news'. People here (and I mean everyone: even - especially - educated people, people who work with foreigners a lot, people with high-level management positions in Western companies...) would rather give the appearance of being lazy, incompetent, inconsiderate, RUDE, by not talking to you at all, by breaking off a 'conversation' or a correspondence unfinished, than risk a possible 'scene' by telling you something disappointing. When business relationships break down here - as they all seem to, sooner or later, usually sooner - you generally find out only through the fact that they don't return your calls or e-mails any more.

Since I am working mostly on short-term contracts as an English teacher or business trainer, this is happening to me all the time. I ought to have developed some immunity to the irritation by now, but somehow this is one area where my usual saintly tolerance deserts me: it still hurts every time, it still rankles, it still pisses me off big time!

Last autumn I signed a 4-month training contract with a big American IT company. It was one of the nicest and best-paying gigs I've ever had here. Although I don't like to become too dependent on any single employer, this set-up was too good to turn my back on, so I did try to start cultivating them with a view to establishing a regular, semi-permanent relationship. And they said, "Yes, yes, we love you. You're a great trainer. We'd definitely like you to come back. We're thinking of running trainings through 6-9 months of the year. We'll let you know in March."

That's what they said a month or two ago. Now, they're not returning my e-mails.

I would just like to be told that it's not now going to happen. That I can deal with. Oh, and I suppose a reason would be nice too. Any old reason, really: I don't insist on it being the truth.

The likely, or possible reasons include:

1) We think our English is fantastic already, so we don't need any more training.

2) We realise our English is shite, but we're comfortable with that. (Even perhaps, We've decided it's unpatriotic to learn English.)

3) We've realised we don't in fact need our staff to have a high level of English, because they have hardly any interaction with English speakers in their working life. (This is probably what I told them myself at the outset of my training - but of course, they couldn't possibly ever admit that. I was right, and they were mistaken? Major 'loss of face'!)

4) Actually, we think you're a shit teacher: all the students complained about you.

5) We thought we'd try another teacher, just to give the students some variety. (= We thought we'd try another teacher who charges less than you.)

6) We don't have the budget for any more training this month/quarter/half/year/ever.

In practice, it's almost always either 5) or 6) (perhaps with a slight subtext of 1) or 2)), but they just never want to tell you that. WHY not?? What's so difficult about that??

Oh, yes, from time to time, there are even more annoying variations like: We've assigned our training contracts to a big-name company because they gave us a nice little kickback, or We're just so disorganized around here it takes us 6 months or so to decide to go to the bathroom, or...

Deep breaths.

Usually it's just 5) or 6). I know this. It would just be nice, JUST ONCE, to be told - rather than having to infer it from the sudden SILENCE.