Visas and Kinmen

When we planned to come to China, I was delighted to see that there was a one year, multiple entry visa available that wasn’t there the year before.  We applied for that and heard nothing for quite a long time.  

 Natasha phoned the embassy and asked why we hadn’t heard from them.  They told us that they did not want to give us a one year visa but we could have a six month visa.  I asked therefore for double entry six month visa just in case I had to go back to Coleraine for any reason.  Last time I had a double entry visa, I was able to go out of China any time I wanted and then come back in (but only once).  When we got our visas, we found that what we had was a double entry visa that stated explicitly that we had to be out of China in 90 days, though we could come back.  Well, it wasn’t what I wanted but it was better than a smack round the head with a wet fish.  

So, yesterday we have been in China for 90 days and so we have to go out of the country leaving Naryan behind (he has a student visa) to look after the homestead.  As it happens, when we look out to sea, we see an island seven miles away called Kinmen//Jinmen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinmen ) which is a small island (22x15km) not part of Mainland China.  The explanation for this is complex so I won’t/can’t explain but you can look it up in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_China ..  Enough to say that Kinmen is an arsenal and makes the troubles NI look like a picnic.  So Kinmen is not China and going there constitutes being out of China, we decided to visit the island and as I had heard that Kinmen was a place well worth visiting we decided to go for a couple of days.  We can stay in RoC for 30 days without a visa so that’s cool.   

We took a morning ferry to the island and found accommodation in a traditional village 1km from the ferry terminal.  The house was traditional hutong Chinese style with an inner courtyard with rooms coming from that courtyard.  The house was beautiful, cool, stone building with round timbers in the roof.  Yet it was also modernised so had up to date emergency lighting and wifi (not blocked).   The lady came and opened the place up for us and showed us where everything was.  We had the whole place to ourselves.  She then took us to a place where we could get bicycles.  She then had a better idea and went and got a car and took us into the town bus station where we could get one of four guided tours around the island.  This cost about £3 and given that two days was not long enough, we thought this would be our best option. 

There are three main aspects to the tourism on the island.  There is the war, the history and the nature reserves.   The tour started at the bus station because the bus station is an entrance to a network of tunnels that run right through the town, emerging at various gun emplacements around the town.  We walked for about 1km through these narrow tunnels with sounds of shelling being played to us.  Then to a military museum where we had a battle of 1949 presented to us.  Some 10000 Communist troops invaded the island but were defeated.  The last shelling from China took place in 1979.  So many shells landed on Kinmen that the island has its own steel deposits and there is a local industry based on the recycling of the shells into high quality knives.  Finally marshal law finished on the island in 1998 (I think) but the island is still a kind of military base.   Later in the morning we were given bicycles and rode round a nature reserve.

As it happens, the ticket for £3 turned out to be a 24 hour ticket that allowed us to get on any bus on the island, tour bus or regular bus.  So the next morning we thought we would go on another tour on the same ticket.   This tour included the village where we were living and our accommodation was part of the guided tour.  We also went to see some tunnels that were cut under the hill to accommodate about 40 landing craft and keep them safe from shelling.

So what to say about the island.  After Xiamen, it reminded us of Ireland.  There were very few cars.  Why would you need one; there is nowhere to go.  There are scooters but unlike China (PRC) scooters are proper vehicles with licence plates and they have to obey regulations like driving on the right.  On the whole the place was very quiet with few people and very peaceful.  Walking along the main road 5 minutes may pass between seeing a scooter. The village was also silent except for occasional animals – like one of those western movies.  Another spurious comparison with Northern Ireland was when local people asked where we are from, we told them that we are from NI and their response was that we are alike, Kinmen and Northern Ireland.  I don’t know what they have heard about NI that gave them that idea.

Now, to end up with, here is a quiz.  Spot the difference between these two girls.

The girl1 was on the Friday tour and Girl2 was on the Saturday tour.  They were both from Taiwan, both travelling alone, both had exactly the same behaviour and could say the same words in english.  Both spent the entire tour photographing themselves and asking others to photograph them.  They reminded me of the Life of Brian scene chorus “yes, we are all different”

Shopping

Well, Xiamen is a city and I have visited cities before but I have never lived in one.  Cities are quite exciting and that is the way Xiamen is.  There are lots of things to look at and do and thousands of shops that are open from early morning to late at night.  Viny and Natasha like shopping and I go along to make sure they don’t get lost – something they do really well.  The first thing to know is that the more major the street, the less interesting it is.  There are lots of fashion boutiques and big shops.  Not a tig welder in sight.  There are also lots of supermarkets and the ones that are of particular interest are the western ones.  There is a glimmer of hope that they may sell marmite but I have never seen it.  Some sell real cheese but at 4 times the price of UK.   The western supermarkets do sell milk and yoghurt, processed cheese and a thing that they call bread.  It is sweet, more like cake and often is oily and/or has things inside it.  Sometimes you can be really surprised by having something like a piece of meat or something else quite incompatible with the like cakey stuff.  Interestingly, since the diet is not bread-based, there are few things that you would eat with bread.    Then there are also all the other things that make up our diet, like cornflakes and other cereals that are nothing like what we have at home. 

There are a number of western style supermarkets, Tesco, WalMart, TrustMart, RTMart, Rainbow, Carrefour and the big one METRO.  However, they all sell pretty much the same things and at much the same prices. (also some independent ones).  Also there are shopping Malls that have hundreds of independent stalls. 

Some of these supermarkets are pretty darn big.  200m x 150m but as a vegetarian (something you acquire when you see the meat here) there is very little that you would want to buy.  It’s meat with everything.  Even if you go to a restaurant and explain that you do not want any meat, you find bits of pork in your noodles cos they cannot conceive of anyone not wanting meat.  Either that or it was something left over in the bottom of the pan.

The next thing I learned is that there seems no legal requirement for a product to do what it says on the tin.  Or at least not the English bit.  For example, here is a pillow.  It removes liver heat and improves your eyesight.  In the UK there would need to be some sort of justification for this; a sort of first order causality.

Other things, like 100% orange juice one would expect to be 100% orange, but you only have to taste it to know that this is not the case.  Maybe they meant that 100% of the orange was dissolved into a soup of chemicals.  It would be interesting to know what the Chinese says.  This is another issue.  You have a packaging that is opaque and covered in Chinese characters.  What is it?  What kind of food is it?  If I bought it, how should I cook it?  (silly question: you deep fat fry it, like everything else here.)  Then there is the packaging.  On the whole, china is very environmentally aware.  All lights are high efficiency, many of the busses are LPG, all motor bikes are electric – at least in the city.  But many of the foods are double or triple packed.  The biscuits that I am eating at the moment for example; the outer packaging is thick plastic and as strong as polycarbonate.  No hope of getting through that even with your teeth.  The next layer is thinner clear plastic and then inside that, every biscuit is individually wrapped but the wrapping is quite tough. You start by trying to tear it, and then you try with your teeth, then more extreme measures until you eventually succeed and a pile of crumbs falls out.   On the positive side all our rubbish is sorted and recycled.   

Last year I bought a 32Gb pen drive.  I kind of didn’t believe it but it was £4 so I thought, what the heck.  At home, the computer confirmed that it was 32Gb.  I tried reformatting it and 32Gb of it was formatted.  So, the big test.  Stick 32Gb of stuff on it.  After 16Gb it kept going but after that the first 18Gb was garbage.   Well, it was 16Gb of memory, with a controller that told the computer it was 32Gb.  I thought that even as 16Gb it was worth £4.  However, being a messer, I thought I could write to the memory controller and tell it that it was 16Gb.  I did this but it never squeeked again.

The point is that a great deal of effort goes into fraudulent products but some products are both fraudulent and crap  (Viny has authorised the use of this word).  Natasha tried 10 headsets before finding one that worked and a power supply that didn’t work.  They all look like top brands but when you read the small print that says that they are authentic, you see spelling mistakes that tell you that it is a fake.  However, if it is cheap enough and it has a warranty, then why not. 

Here is another interesting thing.  In some mega shops – that is shops that have floor areas of just under a square mile, there are no customers!  One such shop for instance is B&Q though not big by Xiamen standards; it is about twice as big as the one in Coleraine.  There were no customers but many uniformed staff.   It seems like there is no need for the staff to pretend that they are busy.  They just sit round playing cards and chatting.  However, if you divert you eyes from straight ahead to look at some item, the staff rush to you to be of assistance.  They must be bored out of their minds.  Other places like a shop called Oriental Homes has a floor area of maybe 200m x 200m and three stories high.  The bottom floor is things like tools and building materials and the next two floors are exquisite and very expensive furniture.  But there were no customers; the whole place was empty except for us and the staff.   How do they justify their existence? An amazing coincidence though, just as we were leaving, a friend of ours arrived.  This is about 10 miles from where we all live.

Another kind of shopping is the old town.  You can find bits of the old town interleaved with the new town.  In these ancient alleys there are all kinds of shops selling stuff.  Food can be bought either to take away or to eat in.  An egg noodle could be as little as 50p but a proper meal maybe £1 - £1.50.  The shop and the houses are sort of the same thing.  The shop will sort of be in the living room with the granny propped up in the corner and the kids eating their supper watching the telly, and you browsing through the fruit stall.  This is not really that unusual even if the house isn’t a shop.  Many people would have their evening meal on the pavement.

So not much more to say about shopping at the moment.