Eric Demay

Unfortunately, in Shanghai, you see too many of these lil’uns, walking alone among crowds on the street, no parent in sight, begging for money. Sometimes, if you observe the scene for awhile, you’ll maybe see an adult (mother, father, guardian, who knows) waiting, hidden away from sight of the average passer-by, collecting the money the child is soliciting. But many times you don’t, and the young one disappears into the swarm of legs of city folks rushing and you can only wonder why, with so many opulently dressed citizens, with so much wealth to go around, how can this still be?

The fifth day of the Chinese new year is the birthday BAM of the god of wealth or “Money Day” as the local Canadians BAM appropriately renamed it, the night where most restaurant and BAM bars, in the eve of a new year in business, blow up as many fireworks as they BAM can. And when firecrackers go for 2$ per thousand, who’s BAM counting?

It is hard to convey and illustrate BAM with photography how noisy and deafening the whole BAM ordeal was (though I’d reckon jacking the volume of your TV while watching BAM the first 15 minutes of Saving Private Ryan a few times with a paper bag over your head could BAM somewhat simulate the experience); I was running from one side of the street to another, camera BAM in hand, remembering war photographers, being BAM shot at from all sides, not knowing where the next one BAM was coming from.

As for any annual ritual, once BAM you’ve seen it once, you’ve seen them all; obviously quite unexceptional for local BAM taxis drivers: they’d zoom by with passengers while fireworks and crackers are BAM bursting a few feet away.

Food vendors hacking into the flow of potential hungry customers walking between two connecting subway lines.

Stinky beautiful. If Shanghai, once “the most decadent, cultured and glamorous city in China” was called Paris of the East, its neighboring townships, all a few meters below sea level, besieged by swampy swamps and full of canals, should aptly be called Venice of the East. And I have no idea how the act of cleansing something can be done in water so filthy.

In China, they say that the prettiest girls come from Suzhou. I don’t know about the girls as my eyes were elsewere: the monochrome architectural palette, as you dear readers could probably guess, sure does tickle my fancy.

As the Chinese New Year festivities come to an end, more and more lanterns are hung in the street. An apocalyptic final is planned on Monday evening, the 15th day of the new lunar calendar, when lanterns and full moon will together light up the dark nights for the year to come.

“Above is Heaven, below are Suzhou and Hangzhou.” Marco Polo pronounced similar analogies to both cities when traveling across China, declaring Hangzhou most finest and elegant cities of all. Yet, 800 years later, with now over 6 million inhabitants and welcoming tourists in the millions every year, it still manages to enchant, keep its natural scenery impeccable, and somehow remove the burden of time keeping, it’s all forgettable and inconsequential. West Lake is still today a floating cloud.

You see this all over the place, meat hung to dry, in every possible way you can hang 5 lbs pieces of beef. A more conventional method is on the of clothe line, preferably with a few clean pairs of underwear drying near-by.

A Nanjing il fait 22 degres. Et le maillot de bain que j’ai apporte juste-au-cas-ou a enfin servi. Je suis tellement content de manquer (de skipper!) l’hiver au Quebec.

A train ride away, next updates will be live from Beijing, capital of it all. Though less populated that Shanghai, it’s massive in size, unbearably big (the whole municipaility is the size of Belgium — gasp!). See you there.

Though in Beijing, I’m currently out of luck with access to a decent computer to edit and upload a few new shots. So in the meantime, here are a few images which I had uploaded awhile ago that yet never got their own blog primetime (though probably should have).

A small market in Qingcheng, in the outskirts of Chendu, Sichuan. The quake (the capital E May 12th 2008 Earthquake) devasted quite of bit of the local housing, ruins like the field of debris lying behind the truck were easily spotted here and there throughout the village. More disturbingly so, we were told that anything further north in Sichuan was severly hit.

On a more enthousiastic note, it is remarquable to see and witness the overwhelming support that other provinces, organisations and chinese people throughout China have been giving in aid to the Sichuanese. Even now, 10 months after the event, I am still constantly reading newspaper articles on the healing (from infrastructures, housing to personal grief) of the disaster.

One of my fovorites. Whatever fits in the bin, whatever goes, and then again…

An example of camouflage and fakery (both arts the Chinese have mastered): vinyl adhesive faking embossing on stainless steel doors in subway system. The motto is: “do not disrupt the natural order of things, but if you have to make sure it doesn’t (really) show” (in this case un-embossed doors have to match the other embossed original ones). Typical. This idea is especially true in park design; you have no idea how many wooden-tree-trunk-be-trashcans I have seen.

Dernier bout de chemin du voyage en plein coeur de la capitale de l’Empire du milieu. Au centre du monde, quoi.

BTW, les ecrans ici sont mal ajustes et il est difficile de calibrer quoi que ce soit (les tons et la saturation des couleurs surtout), laissez-moi savoir au cours des prochains jours si c’est trop off. Xiexie.

A good indicator of popular—thus usually tasty and cheap—eats: how much has yet been cleaned off the floor. This is the floor of a breakfast joint [around 9 am] where two can both eat bowls of hot sweet bean porridge and a basket full of steamed pork buns for less than a dollar. I love it.

Its little brother, the Mandarin Hotel (aka Burney) isn’t doing so well though:

This is where the white people like to hang out, right next to the usual temples of mass consumption.

All irony aside, the Village is nevertheless a very neat urban cluster of commercial buildings, a much nicer and pleasant way of intergrading a shopping hub in the city scape, rather than dumping a mall or plaza a la 20th century. The site agglomerates a series of multi-level buildings, all formally different, each housing a handfull of boutiques of international brands. The’re connected on upper levels with walkways and bridges, knitting together a stroll among patios and slick hallways of designer restaurant and bars. You know things have changed and converged when sipping a martini by the Apple logo is considered hip.

I love how each province/region/city has its own favorites when it comes to street food. Beijing seems to be stuck on chuanr, aka meat on a stick, usually covered with more than enough cumin and ground spicy pepper; and yogurt, aka Beijing yogurt, heavy, kind of sweet, sour milk. We’ve seen lines go too far for small local joints (think of Montreal’s Schwartz’) wich, like the smokemeat sandwich, is overpriced and though tasting good is never a heavenly revelation. My favorite is the unbranded, unsophisticated kind, selling in a much too heavy ceramic pot with only a paper cover, a rubber elastic to seal it tight. For 60 cents (40 for the yogurt, 20 cents deposit for the container), its a daily dose of dairy I can count on at every corner.

Ahem. When hiring reknown foreign architect firms to design multi-million buildings, you think you can spend a few on the signage too. It doesn’t take a chinese calligrapher to recognize poor typography. Unfortunately not limited to Paul Andreu’s “Egg/Space Shuttle” National Grand Theatre, these caracters must be embeded into millions of computers (or signage factories) for I am spotting these eyesores regularly, slapped over everything as though they were all [still] Stalinist constructions.

Appearances are what are being shined here. Like haircutting, which is basically en vigeur 24/7, getting your car washed falls into the category of rituals one must observe to maintain appearance in bestest mode at all times (intricate to simply being Chinese). Even though the north of the country is trying to find solutions to solve its worst draught in years, car washing seems to be an unquestionable habit.

Ma cabane au Canada devant un Bird’s Nest. Avec ces Chinois, c’est a n’y rien comprendre.

130 km north east of Beijing, between Jinshanling and Simatai villages, lies a section of the chinese Great Wall kept under a minimum of care, with more than a few strechs much destroyed by time and history, yet still accessible and enjoyable for an day’s worth of fresh air out of the city. Still authentic in its form (compared to other renovated sections of the wall elsewere) and barely ridden by tourists, the hike is 10 km long and takes about 4 hours. Probalby the best toursity activity done so far, walking right on the crest of the mountains, with a view that streched far across Hebei and Beijing provinces.

Like walking on clouds.

Instead of heading back to Beijing after walking the Great Wall from Jinshanling to Simatai, we had arranged to stay in a nearby village, granting us a few hot meals, a place to crash for the night and the opportunity to climb up the next morning to the inaccessible 16th tower of the wall in Simatai, perched at 986m, the highest point of the great wall in all Beijing. It is said that on a clear night, “one can see the lights of Beijing shimmering in the distance”, 130km away.

We set out at 6, the valley still sound asleep, barely discerning the dozen of towers perched atop the crest of the mountain, remembering their silhouettes overshadowing the village the previous afternoon. Only a few roosters had shouted since, the dogs now joined the chorus as we walked past them one behind another between the farm houses. It wasn’t long we abandonned the dirt road and were now walking on a small beaten path making its way through the neighboring corn fields towards the hill.

The burning tabacco from Mr. Liu’s cigarette was crisp and dry, flowing past us as he lead the way. His little feet—the old man was a head and half shorter than I—would shuffle untirelessly, each footstep sound and steady no matter the steepness or slipperyness of the terrain. Following close second behind him, I was trying to mimic his ability, stepping exactly in his yet instant footprints betting it would assure an easy climb. But as snow covered more and more of the path on the North side of the mountain and as the hill became steeper, the walk slowly turned to ascension and gripping to rocks and branches of neighboring shrubs became necessity—even Liu seemed to struggle from time to time, sometimes even taking his hands out of his wool coat pockets.

The chosen tower, our final destination, was patiently awaiting us, hanging up there defying gravity like it has done for the last 1500 years. Mr. Liu stopped and turned around:

“Lei bu lei?”, inquiring if we were tired or not yet.
“Bu lei”, I answered slightly panting, but still quite enthousiast about it all.
“Zuo ba”, replied Liu, gesturing us to sit awhile.

Sitting on a rock and looking back to what we had climbed up to now was out of proportion, we were much higher than I expected, the village now lost afar buried in the valley. However, looking up towards the tower now lingering only a few hundred feet above our head quickly readjusted my sense of scale, it seemed all almost vertical from here… But before we knew it, we had managed the rest of the mountain, negociating around cliffs and other vertigo laden areas of the path.

Tower number 15 in the morning sun overshadowed by its tall neighbor.

The sun had beaten us to it by only a few minutes, its rays flowing horizontally throughout the mountainous country side, hitting the east facade of the tower with all its mighty warmth. We sat silently gazing at the view, our backs leaning on the tower, Mr. Liu’s dry tobacco burning in the morning sun.