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The first of
October marked the beginning of China's national festival. This holiday
lasts for an entire seven days and is generally employed by families to
visit relatives in different cities.
For me, it meant
little. I had been trying to find employment in an English training college
here called Guan Ya and had
been having little success. I arrived in China on a visitor's visa, which,
I was advised by the Auckland Chinese Consulate, could be exchanged for
a work visa once employment was found. Upon arrival, I was told this was
not the case. If I was to work at Guan Ya, I would have to return to New
Zealand and be invited to return. This, of course, was not an agreeable
option to me, and so before the holiday the staff at Guan Ya were dealing
with the local police to find some legal way around the law. Of course,
the arrival of the holiday served merely to introduce another week-long
delay.
So, I've been
sitting in the apartment, growing a little jaded with daily proceedings.
When you have nothing in particular to do, you tend to drift between two
options - finding something to do or sitting there feeling bored. So it
was with me.
Shenyang's weather
is changing sharply, very quickly. It's becoming cold fast. I'm told it
will snow soon. Shenyang's seasons are very distinct in this way, given
that summers are sweltering. Winter serves in a way to purge the dust,
which gets blown away by strong winds from the north and washed down in
rivulets of melting snow.
I've had a few
meals with the family, given a few Karaoke performances... I decided to
tackle some Wang Fei numbers using Xiao Yun as a prompt, along with the
obligatory soppy English anthems - attempting the higher crooning of
Unchained
Melody after several beers is not an attractive task. I've also tried
asking people what precisely this holiday commemorates - given that most
holidays are actually for something. This one apparently isn't -
the invariable answer is, 'It's the National Festival'. Which is supposed
to be enough. I guess it is.
Another side
effect of not getting out too much is a lethargy in the Mandarin study.
Given that I have mastered the few simple phrases necessary to communicate
with Xiao's family, there's not much call for Chinese when you're not required
to speak eloquently. Teach yourself books are useful, but a terrible bore...
I now know how to label all the items inthe bathroom, which doesn't make
for interesting conversations with strangers on the street...
Driving to Panjin The holiday week was marked by a visit to the nearby Panjin City. I had been expressing an interest in seeing a little more of the province whilst I still had the chance, and so was rudely awoken at 6am on Friday morning for a day trip to visit Wang Jian Hua's sister in Panjin. By now, an early awakening was a demanding ask, and the cold weather made my stumbling around the apartment in pre-coffee stupor all the more difficult. Outside was
perfectly grim, the morning markets stoically braving the cold and smog.
We stopped for bananas and I sat in the back of the minivan with a scowl.
I watched the resilient locals outside, wondering from where they obtained
energy for seven-day working weeks for a pittance in these conditions.
Soon we were back in the stretches of cultivated fields, a thick rug of the corn-like crop extending for miles. It was a great sight, especially since harvest time had clearly arrived, and the paddocks were being divided along visible lines by farmers who had begun to tie the shafts together at their tips forming tents of a meter square each. I was listening to a New Zealand group called the Muttonbirds as we were driving, which lifted my mood somewhat. The singer was describing a road north of Auckland which leads to Whangaparaoa Peninsula upon which, coincidentally, is my own family home, a road which was only constructed within the last ten years. Driving north of Auckland, the singer is intimidated by the freshness of it all, the new tarseal, the barely-dry paint on the signs around him, the need to dig out a place to stand, Outside our minivan, cheeks pink with the cold wind, some young Chinese men were hauling sacks of grain, their boots breaking the wet crust of old Liao Ning soil. The incidence of shacks and barrow markets indicated our arrival back into densely inhabited parts. Before long, we were in amongst the crowds and in the shadow of tall, dank apartment buildings.'And all the time I wanted to be Panjin
My first impressions of Panjin were actually wrong: I had thought it was a dirtier, smaller version of Shenyang. Once we'd had the opportunity to see Wang Jian Hua's sister and her husband and son, we all decided to look around the city. In particular we were to be shown an aviary just outside the city which was apparently a world-class attraction. Panjin is really clean, and it's also quite beautiful. Once we'd crossed the Liao He river to get to the central areas, the squalid apartments seemed to fall off as the newer areas of the city replaced them. Roads are spacious and wide, there's plenty of greenery, it's not so crowded... I wondered why the City wasn't more popular as it seemed a far nicer place to be than Shenyang can be. The reason is really because the city is so young. Panjin was only founded 16 years ago, which makes it a mere foetus in comparison with Shenyang's 2300 year record. It's also a rich area - Panjin is on the delta of over a hundred rivers, which makes the soil particularly moist and ideal for farming. I was told by Xiao's extended family that the crop I'd wondered about is actually reed - used in the production of paper. Panjin claims the largest reed pastureland in the world. The Aviary
Panjin claims to be a haven for freshwater crabs and Japanese cranes, and the latter have their own preserve on the outskirts of the city. So much on the outskirts, in fact, that it was nearly impossible to find. We passed an array of oil pumps amidst the reed fields, and saw nothing that looked like an animal enclosure of any sort. Finally, we spotted an enormous structure in the distance, rising above the harvest - this turned out to be a tent of mesh which housed the cranes. It's an odd
place, this. Although the Panjin wetlands attract thousands of varieties
of birds, cranes are really all they're interested in here, and so cranes
is about as far as the attraction goes. They have a small museum about
cranes, with photographs of them, their roosting grounds, flocks of cranes
in flight (which about their only grace: cranes are hideous in full frontal).
There are crane eggs and even a full digestive system of crane innards
in a solution of methylated spirits. We wandered about the complex, which
was carved into the reed fields; little pathways led to new cages of cranes.
One, surprisingly, enclosed two eagles, which seemed to be rather unsettled
amidst all the cranes.
Above the museum is a lookout that was capped with supports in the shape of cranes. Below flew a huge Chinese flag. From the top could be gained a vantage of the entire plain, miles and miles of reed in every direction. An aviary in the middle of no place seemed an odd attraction for the numerous visitors who had actually made their way to see all the cranes. I, for one, didn't really find cranes worth the effort! |
