Back in Weifang. Back at The Farrington. Fuhua Amusement Park, once again, outside,
this time covered in blustery snow, still empty. This our overnight way station on the pathway home. This will be the last day of our
Chinese New Year break travel through in Shandong. Tonight we’ll be home, in Beijing.
A good thing, that.
Emails and to-do’s and must-do’s and ought to-do’s have all began to
pile up, increasingly stale. For this
family-style drive about, tied as it is to familial obligations I just surrender
control. Normally I have the agenda well
researched. But certainly there is a
certain calm to just deciding what to do, each day, as we rise, slowly
broadening our understanding of this enormous province.
Packing up in yet another hotel room. Empty water bottles, mandarin orange rinds
gathered up, chucked into the waste bin. I followed a link on Rdio from Mulatu
Astatke to some other contemporary African funk. Karl Hector and the Malcouns drew my eye.
Cool. They’re fabulous. Two or three
tunes in, I realized I’ve heard some of the cuts from this album “Sahara Swing”
before. Most of the album however is
fresh and new. Indeed, though the sound
is classic seventies Afrobeat, and I’d otherwise assumed it was from the 70’s, but
it was recorded recently in 2008. The
title song, Sahara Swing, is a lovely cacophony of activity with the vintage
organ and the baritone sax gives it
this basement level support that holds up the architecture so effortlessly on
the melodic horn runs. I hope we get a
chance to see these Malcouns somewhere live, before too long. None of the material I found on them could
tell me where it is they hail from. http://fleamarketfunk.com/2008/06/06/karl-hector-the-malcouns-sahara-swing/
Packed, with some time waiting for my wife to return to the
room I came across this rather appropriate article for DustyBrine: “China’s future energy security will depend
on water?” https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/6693-China-s-future-energy-security-will-depend-on-water?utm_source=Chinadialogue+Update&utm_campaign=531c959193-A_B_TEST_Polluted_farmland&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5db8c84b96-531c959193-46388490 Coal mining, we learn within, is a
exceptionally water intensive form of fuel extraction, and production. China’s burgeoning coal demand will further
deplete the fragile water table in the northern plain. It is not merely the dust and pollution from
coal mining we need to worry about in and around Beijing, but the acceleration
of the aridity, as well:
“It takes 24 bathtubs full of
water to extract and wash one tonne of coal. China’s top coal producing
provinces produced 2.6 billion tonnes of coal in 2011, but only have water
resources equivalent to 4.8 to 23.2 bathtubs of water per person per day. Given this, surely it is time to ask if
China has enough water to fuel its power expansion plans?”
As noted earlier there has been quite a bit of TV on this
trip. Stuffed hotel rooms seem to lend
themselves to people warming the cathode ray. I just give up at some point, I
suppose. Two nights back my kids watched
what must have been the next instalment of China’s “American Idol” called “I'm
a Singer” “wo shi ge shou” (我是歌手). No one to my eyes or ears did anything
remotely captivating. Worse, it would
seem, no one was eliminated from the last episode! They were all back again. We had to watch each one as they watched the
other’s perform, and pretend to worry and pretend to cheer. Finally after an excruciating hour with
absolutely no dramatic tension, some guy with thick glasses was finally,
decisively told he was finished and shown to an awaiting car outside and seen
to depart. “I was a singer” I commented.
This was not my only comment. Like a reasonably intelligent house dog, I spoke
back to the TV intermittently, while everyone else remained silent. Every time I saw something that felt
painfully disingenuous, milked with a long shot for emphasized veracity I’d
bark “fake.” My daughter’s took
exception with this. Surely, that girl
wringing her hands is truly and utterly surprised by that decision. His enthusiasm hasn’t been stage-managed. Everyone wants everyone to win!
Later they were surfing and I had them pause on CNN for the
opening night of the Olympics. Kristina
Amanpour had an interview with the two members of Pussy Riot who’d recently been
released from prison. “What did they
think of Putin?” “What did they think of the Olympics?” Despite some annoying translation lag, they
were, characteristically brave and inspiring in their answers, commenting on
the slave labor conditions in Russian prisons that sound no better than those
in China. “Real” I shouted. “Real.”
“These girls are brave. That is
the ‘real’ spirit of rock and roll.
That’s punk. That is hip-hop. That is in the tradition of MLK and Malcolm X. They are courageous and genuine.” Two points for TV.
It was not until last night though, that we actually got to
see any of the actual Olympics. Once we settled in to the Farrington last night
and word got out that we were in town an old friend of my wife’s called,
insisting I head out with him and him mates drinking. Oh dear.
That would be a comedy, until it was a tragedy. “I am terribly sorry old friend, but I have a
call with America in an hour which I must get ready for and I’ve another call
first thing in the morning . . . and I have a back ache. My wife got an ear lashing for what he
assumed was her effort to keep me leashed.
Then, oddly, she got suckered in to heading out to join this fella and
another few business partners for ‘just one drink.’ She’d almost certainly fare better than I
would have.
The girls and I settled in for an evening of CCTV’s coverage
of the Sochi Olympics. Infinitely
preferable path to the first of sixteen or seventeen toasts. They had the female short mogul and jump run
on. Amazing to watch these ladies knees
absorb that hill. Bang, bang, bang,
bang. I might have once been able to do
something like that. And then, the leap,
rotating a full three-hundred-and-sixty degrees in air. I could never even begin to do that. “Real!”
The men’s biathlon now, with Chinese narration. It is an odd one to watch as they seem to
need to keep cutting from this shot, to that.
Nordic gents running the board here.
Going all out in the final dash to the finish line and then, nearly
every guy, collapsed in the snow as they exerted the last of their best efforts. Once you give it all you ain’t got nothing
left.
But it was the female figure skaters that always seems to
win everyone’s heart. They simply look
beautiful and move as if they are supernatural or some highly evolved new life
form. And it was a remarkable group of
finalists that competed. Each one 尽善尽美[1]. Without the skills to score what precisely
was simply great vs. utterly unbelievable, we all just sat agape watching each
of the finalists. And it was the petite
fifteen-year-old Russian girl, one Julia Lipnitskaia who won. Certainly, she seemed to laugh at the
idea of gravity or dizziness as she leapt into her incomprehensible spin. Good
for the home team. Go Russia.
Speaking of which, doesn’t Sochi look beautiful? I must say the east coast of the Black Sea is
a bit of a mental void for me. I’ve read
about Georgia, I’ve read about Odessa, and Sevastopol but what exactly does it look like over
there in the space between? I was in Istanbul on the south
west side of the Black Sea last summer and that was symphonic. So I took a quick peek at an online map and told
my girls to come have a look. Surely
that coast with all those mountains, must be extraordinary. How important it must be for Russians all to consider
this moment with the world’s attention fixed, when they used to hold the world’s
attention without question and now struggle, one and all to redefine what the
world’s largest country really is.
Midway through a five-hour journey.
We’re driving along the
G18 highway now, and the city of Dongying is off to he right. There must be fourteen or more buildings over
thirty stories tall. You ever heard of
Dongying? Didn’t think so. It’s an oil town. Big U.S. investments, far bigger Chinese
investments packed over there on that blunt peninsula not far from my wife’s
ancestral village. What is the coast
like there on that promontory that forms an elbow for the province, into the
sea? No mountains there, though, just
flat plains. Oil towns in Shandong, like
oil towns in Texas, out in the flats. The
last time we made our way through this road a few days ago, the air was thick
and polluted. This time, blue skies and
puffy clouds. How different it would be
if every day were like this. Thank goodness
for the precipitation and for the wind.
[1] jìnshànjìnměi: perfect (idiom); perfection /
the best of all possible worlds / as good as it gets
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