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September 2002 |
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Sunday 1 September China trip: Part II [See yesterday's entry for Part I.] After a couple of days of sightseeing in Shanghai, the business part of the trip started. The General Assembly of the International Mathematical Union took place in an ultra-modern conference centre in the Pudong area across the Huangpu River from our hotel. Five years ago, Pudong was an undeveloped swamp. Now, it is full of high-rise office buildings, dominated by the Oriental Pearl TV Tower. For pedestrians, there is a new tunnel under the river, in which you stand in a glass bubble cable car that is pulled through the tunnel. The walls of the tunnel are lined with an amazing variety of stroboscopic lighting effects, which make the journey seem like something out of Star Trek. I'll skip the account of the General Assembly meeting. The agenda was predictably dreary, but there were several old friends among the 200 or so delegates from all over the world. It was good to see them again and to catch up on their gossip. In the evening, we were all taken by coach to a "world gourmet food centre" where we were treated to a magnificent banquet. At the start of the meal, Mary told the waitress about her food intolerances. After that, they brought her a separate small dish for each of the nine or ten courses, specially cooked without MSG or hot spices. The following evening we were taken to an acrobatic display with some incredibly skilful acts. In the final act, a motorcyclist was shut inside a spherical metal cage and started to loop round it at high speed. Then a second motorbike entered the cage, and a third, …, until there were seven of them weaving in and out as they circled the cage in all directions. It was quite scary to watch. I commented to Mary that they can't have much in the way of health and safety at work legislation in Shanghai. I don't believe that such a dangerous act would be allowed in Britain. This being the first day of the month, I have to set up a new journal page for September, as well as making adjustments to the August page and bringing the Archive page and the Contents page up to date. This all takes time, and doesn't leave me with any more time to write this evening. But I think I've said all I want to say about the Shanghai part of the trip, so I'll move on to Beijing in the next entry.
Monday 2 September China trip: Part III Looking back at the previous two entries, I think they look lame and uninspired. Maybe I'm still feeling tired after the journey, but I don't seem to have given any impression of what a vibrant and exciting city Shanghai is. Mary and I both loved our five days there, and wished we could have stayed longer. We'll have to go back there some day. The only negative thing about it was that it was very hot and very wet. We had to take our umbrellas wherever we went, and on one occasion it rained so hard that even the umbrellas couldn't cope, and we had to take refuge in a nearby Starbucks, along with about a hundred other people. But (just in case I haven't got the point across yet) Shanghai is a vibrant and exciting city, and we loved it. We left Shanghai on 19 August, on a flight to Beijing chartered from Shanghai Airlines for our party. The flight was notable for the best meal that I have had on any airline. On arrival in Beijing, we were met by coaches that took us to the Beijing International Convention Centre, where the International Congress of Mathematicians was to take place. We were staying in the Continental Grand Hotel, adjacent to the Convention Centre. Despite its name, this hotel was not nearly as grand as Shanghai's Peace Hotel. In comparison, we felt as though we were slumming it, although in fact it had all the facilities you would expect of a good hotel, including two restaurants serving a lavish breakfast buffet with both Chinese and Western dishes, and cable TV with CNN News and other international channels in the bedroom. Speaking of TV reminds me of something. Soon after we arrived in Beijing, I met a colleague who had been on a pre-Congress tour in western China. Staying overnight in a remote country hotel where there was only one TV channel, he switched it on and found himself watching the news. Not speaking any Chinese, he didn't know what most of the news items were about, but he suddenly realised that he was looking at a picture of me on the screen! The explanation seems to be that the TV news included an item about the meeting of the IMU General Assembly in Shanghai. For this meeting, the UK delegation was seated at the same table as the Chinese delegation. The news coverage obviously concentrated on the Chinese delegates, and that's how I got into the picture. That's not the first time that this has happened to me. I once featured prominently in the lead item on the national TV news in Romania. But that's a whole other story. Maybe I'll tell it some day when I can't think of anything else to write about. Back to Beijing. The Convention Centre and the Continental Grand Hotel are situated quite a long way north of the city centre, beyond the fourth ring road. This area has been designated as the site of the 2008 Olympics, and there is already a lot of building work going on in preparation for the Games. On the afternoon that we arrived in Beijing, I went for a walk round the neighbourhood. One of my jobs on these occasions is to sniff out good restaurants for our group to eat at. I have always been pretty good at this, and I have a reputation to keep up. This time, I struck lucky quite quickly. Near the hotel, there was an area with several restaurants along a main road. Unfortunately, most of them were Western franchise chains (Dominos Pizza, KFC and so on). There were a few Chinese restaurants, and I went in to each of them and asked if they had an English language menu. I wasn't impressed with any of them. Then I noticed that down a side street there was a building with red lanterns hanging outside it (which usually denotes a restaurant in China). Sure enough, it was a restaurant, but its menu did not look promising. (Later, we discovered that this place was famous for its dumplings. Mary and I went for dinner there one evening, and the dumplings were indeed excellent.) But then I saw another restaurant next door. It was a fish restaurant, with several aquaria inside the entrance containing interesting and unusual fish. The menu looked good, so our group went there for dinner that evening, and the food was so good that we went back to the same place almost every evening. If you order a fish dish, they take the fish from its aquarium, bring it to your table in a bag so that you can inspect it, then take it off to the kitchen to prepare it. We had some memorable meals there, and usually the fish dish was the highlight of the evening.
I opened the bottle, poured out a glassful and took a swig of it, and very nearly choked. It wasn't water at all, but some kind of rough vodka. When I looked carefully at the label, I saw that among the Chinese characters there was a line of small print containing the symbols "56%". Wow! 56 percent proof fire-water! That was not what we needed. The stuff was totally undrinkable. We didn't know how to get rid of it. We considered offering it to some Russian colleagues who are fond of vodka, but we thought that they might be insulted to be presented with such crude stuff. In the end, we gave it to the floor manager. (Each floor of this large hotel had a floor manager, in our case a very helpful and friendly young man who was a trainee hotel manager.) He seemed a bit embarrassed by this strange gift, and said that he didn't drink alcohol himself. But I expect he found some friend to give the stuff to.
Tuesday 3 September China trip: Part IV The opening ceremonies for the 2002 International Congress of Mathematicians took place on 20 August. All the participants in the Congress, over 4000 of us, were told to assemble outside the Beijing Convention Centre at 1:00 p.m., and we were given strict instructions not to bring any bags or heavy photographic apparatus like video cameras or zoom lenses. It was clear that this was to be a special occasion, and I went to the lengths of wearing a jacket and tie, something that I very rarely do. Mary wore the beautiful silk dress that she had made for her in Shanghai. We were ushered into a convoy of about 100 coaches for the 10 km journey to the centre of Beijing, where the opening ceremonies were to take place in the Great Hall of the People. Road traffic in Beijing has increased enormously since our last visit there five years ago, and the taxi ride into the city centre takes at least 3/4 hour. So we were surprised to find that the convoy of coaches was moving fast, with no pauses for traffic jams. Then we noticed that there were squads of police at every intersection, who had stopped all the traffic for us. When we reached Tiananmen Square, we saw that half the square had been closed to the public, and our convoy swept into a large parking area in front of the Great Hall. To get into the Hall, we had to present our numbered invitation cards and go through a security check at least as thorough as at an airport. By now it was clear that the Chinese authorities were taking this event very seriously, so it didn't come as a total surprise when there was an announcement that the ceremonies would be attended by the President of China, Jiang Zemin. After all that build up, the opening ceremonies themselves were not so exciting. There were several speeches by various government ministers and other dignitaries, stressing the huge drive that China is making to join the developed world through investment in the sciences and mathematics. The interesting part of the meeting was the announcement of the winners of the Fields Medals (the mathematicians' equivalent of the Nobel Prizes), which were presented by Jiang Zemin himself. The politicians then left the platform before the next part of the proceedings, which consisted of lectures describing the work of the Fields Medallists. Mary and some of the other "accompanying persons" also left the auditorium at this stage, and went off to look at some of the other public parts of the Great Hall. When the lectures were over, the rest of us did the same, and spent some time admiring the marvellous paintings and sculptures that are on display around the Great Hall. Then we were all ushered into the Banqueting Hall, an enormous room that can cater for banquets for up to 5000 people, in round tables of ten. We were seated at table no. 245, which took us quite a while to find. Mary explained her dietary problems to the waitress, and once again she was given special treatment. Each time that a new dish was brought to be passed around the table, Mary was given her own separate bowl containing an MSG- and spice-free version of the dish. We were very impressed that a kitchen catering for over 4000 people should be able to take such care of one awkward individual. The banquet itself was pretty good, though not quite up to the standard of the one that we had enjoyed in Shanghai. The Chinese do not believe in lingering at table after the meal is finished. The meal only lasted about an hour and a quarter, and then we were sent back to the coaches for the drive back to the Convention Centre. The traffic was again stopped for us. At one point the convoy had to negotiate a clover leaf junction between motorways, and we could see an endless line of coaches sweeping round the intersection with hazard lights flashing, past long lines of stationary cars. We hoped that the motorists didn't know who we were. They were probably cursing mathematicians as they sat fuming in their cars. The next morning, as we waited for the lift [elevator, if you prefer] to take us down to the breakfast room, there was a tall elderly American waiting alongside us, talking loudly to his companion (as they do). There was something slightly odd about his manner, and Mary whispered to me that she wouldn't want to have anything to do with him. When we got into the lift, I saw that he was wearing a congress name tag that identified him as John Nash. Jiang Zemin and John Nash within 24 hours! You really get to rub shoulders with the famous when you go to the International Congress of Mathematicians.
Wednesday 4 September China trip: Part V Since all my expenses in China were being paid, I felt under some obligation to do a bit of work in return. I didn't attend many of the lectures at the Congress, because I have learned over the years to be selective, and only to go to a lecture if there is some prospect that I'll understand some of it (or at least stay awake through it). There were a few very interesting lectures that I learned a lot from, but I'm assuming that readers of this journal won't want to hear a detailed report on them. I spent a good deal more time helping to staff the London Math Soc's booth, chatting up the visitors there, handing out our leaflets and encouraging people to buy our books. There was a steady stream of visitors to the stall, and the four of us (plus the occasional spouse) who were staffing it were kept busy most of the time (though you wouldn't think so from this photo, taken on the last day when most of the stock had gone and there was a lull in the number of visitors).
I did manage to take some time off to go sightseeing with Mary. On the Saturday halfway through the Congress, we went on a guided tour of the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven. I found both of these a bit disappointing. We had seen them before, five years ago when we were on vacation in Beijing (a wonderful trip, in which we also visited the Great Wall, and the terracotta army in Xian). This time round, there were far more tourists than on that previous trip. Since it was the weekend, there were also thousands (literally) of locals visiting these places. In fact, the crowds were so dense that it was quite hard to get to see the sights. The next day, Sunday, Mary wanted to go shopping in the silk market. There are some great bargains to be had here, but only if you are prepared to haggle. That is something I just loathe. Mary relishes it, and to the Chinese it's almost a national sport, offering to pay something far below the asking price and then bargaining towards a price that both sides think is fair. But it doesn't appeal to me one little bit. I'd much rather see a clearly marked, non-negotiable price, so that I can decide for myself whether I think it's worth paying. It was very hot, the market was seething with people, and both of us were running low on cash, which meant that we couldn't buy nearly as much as Mary would have liked. I started to get a bit ratty, and we were reduced to going to an air-conditioned Macdonalds in order to cool down. After that, I managed to find an ATM to replenish our funds, and things improved a bit. The excursions that I most enjoyed were to some of the lesser known parts of the city. We spent a morning in the botanical gardens, which are some way outside the city, in the foothills of the Fragrant Hills. This was quiet, peaceful, and cooler than the city. I particularly liked the pen jing garden (pen jing is the Chinese version of bonsai). On another morning, we went to the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park, quite near our hotel. The Lonely Planet guide to Beijing is a bit sniffy about this park, calling it "Beijing's answer to Disneyland". In fact, it is a very well laid out and extensive park, containing areas re-creating the way of life of each of the 56 minority ethnic groups in China. I would have liked to stay there longer, but I had to get back to the Congress for one of the few lectures that I really needed to hear. We stayed on in Beijing for an extra day after the end of the Congress, and used it for a visit to the Summer Palace. This was another of the places that we had enjoyed five years ago, and again I found it disappointing in comparison with then. I think the main reason is that Beijing in August is too hot, humid, hazy and polluted to be really enjoyable. If you're thinking of going, autumn is the time to see it at its best. The return journey was one of the highlights of the whole trip. We were given a business class upgrade for the flight to Amsterdam. As we travelled in style in the front section of the Boeing 747, we had wonderful views of the whole of northern Asia. Soon after the plane took off, we climbed above the haze, and could see against the horizon the brown cloud of pollution that covers that whole part of the world. It really is brown, and it kept the sun from shining for the whole time that we were in China (which means that nearly all our photographs look dull and dingy). But we soon left the cloud behind us as we crossed the Gobi desert and saw Ulan Bator (the capital of Mongolia) below us. Then we flew over Lake Baikal and across the endless wastes of Siberia, passing somewhere north of Moscow, and we had a perfect bird's eye view of the whole city of St Petersburg before following the Baltic Sea, crossing Denmark a little way south of Copenhagen and finally coming down to Amsterdam.
In business class, you don't have just the one in-flight movie to watch, you have your own individual video screen with a choice of a dozen movies. But I didn't watch any of them, I tuned in to the channel that monitors the plane's progress, and spent most of the flight looking out of the window at the country below. They fed us pretty well, of course, and towards the end of the ten hour flight Mary and I started complaining that the flight was much too short and we wanted this pampering to continue for a few more hours. You could easily get used to travelling business class. But all good things have to come to an end, and the remainder of the journey was an anticlimax, with a four hour wait in Amsterdam airport for the connecting flight home to Leeds.
No sooner do we get back back home from China, make a fuss of the cats, do the laundry, pay the monthly bills and catch up on the email, than it's time to be off on our travels again. We're going to Spain for a week to see the family and to stay a couple of days in Seville. We leave tomorrow and get back on the 15th. In a sense, this trip is free, or at least the airfare is free. We have collected enough "rewards points" on the Visa card to qualify for two flights to Seville. But of course nothing is truly free. The only qualifying flight on Air Iberia leaves from Manchester, and involves changing planes in Barcelona. So we'll have to drive to Manchester and leave the car in the very expensive long stay car park there (we also have to pay the airport departure tax, which isn't covered by the free offer). From Barcelona we fly to Seville, where the discount car rental agency that we normally use in Málaga doesn't have a branch, so we'll have to rent a more expensive car from Hertz. The return flight from Seville leaves at the crack of dawn. So instead of staying with Steve and Jo for the whole week we decided to spend the last couple of nights in Seville so as to be nearer the airport for an early start on the 15th. Since this was a "free holiday", we decided to splash out on an expensive hotel in Seville. Thus the total cost of the trip is likely to be a good deal more than if we had paid for the flight from Leeds to Málaga as we usually do. I keep thinking of extra details about the China trip that I should have mentioned here. Maybe I'll have time to write about them after we get back from Spain. The fact that I'll be away from the internet all next week absolves me from the duty to write a thoughtful anniversary entry about last year's dreadful events on the 11th. Instead, I'll leave you with this little story. Some time after 11 September last year, a group of British tourists from Wolverhampton were visiting New York. Naturally they made a trip to Ground Zero to pay their respects. They arrived there just as President Bush was visiting to inspect the site. Seeing the tourists, he went over to them and asked where they came from. President: Ah doan' know Wolver-hampton. What State is it in? Tourist: Oh, pretty much like this, really.
Usually, when I'm on holiday, I make a note of things that I want to mention in the journal when I get home. But this past week in Spain I didn't do that at all. It felt like a time to relax with the family and forget completely about the internet for a few days. The only time I started mentally composing a journal entry was on the return trip yesterday, when it seemed for a while as though our flight was going to be cancelled and I passed the time thinking of vitriolic comments that I could make about Iberia Airlines. But it turned out to be a false alarm and the journey passed off uneventfully. So our summer of travel is over, and it's back to the routine of work for the next few months.
The picture of Tom in the previous entry reminds me that, some time before our visit, Steve told Tom that I used to be in a fencing team when I was younger. This gave Tom the idea that I am a "famous swordsman". He wanted to know the difference between a sabre and a scimitar, and he expected me to give him lessons on how to decapitate someone, in the style of Robin Hood. When he grows up, he wants to be a knight. I disapprove of all this belligerence, and did my best to avoid encouraging it. It's just as well that his toy sword is made of very soft and blunt plastic. If it was made of anything sharper then to judge by the picture he would be in serious danger of castrating himself. (I bet that previous paragraph brings a whole host of visitors to this page through a Google search for 'castrating by scimitar'.) For his birthday, Mary and I gave Tom a DVD of Winnie the Pooh (the Disney version). This helped to divert him from warlike activities. He wanted to watch the whole thing at least half a dozen times a day. By the end of our visit we never wanted to see or hear this wretched film again, ever. Poor Steve and Jo will have to put up with it for a while yet, but at least it keeps Tom occupied while they can get on with other things. After staying with Steve and Jo we spent a couple of days in Seville, which is a beautiful city with spectacular Moorish architecture and narrow pedestrian alleys filled with pavement cafes and bars where you can while away the days enjoying tapas with beer or tinto de verano (iced red wine with lemon soda). Best of all, Mary took it all in her stride with very few problems from food allergies or chemical sensitivities. It is exactly a year ago this weekend that she was feeling seriously suicidal and thinking that she would never be able to travel anywhere again. What a change, in just twelve months. Now that we're back home again, I have a lot to do at work, with several meetings in London, and a new lecture course to prepare for when term starts in ten days' time. In fact, I'm quite glad to be kept busy this way - it stops me from feeling a sense of anticlimax after all the travel of the past summer.
I keep thinking about something I saw in Beijing last month. I was going for a walk in the neighbourhood of our hotel, wandering through a housing development consisting of rows of apartment blocks with little lanes between them. Ahead of me on the other side of the lane I saw two young men walking together. They looked like teenagers, maybe 16 or 17. But most Chinese look much younger than they really are, so I suppose they could have been in their 20s. One of them had his arm round the other one's shoulder. There's nothing unusual about this in China. I noticed in both Shanghai and Beijing that men both young and old habitually walk around in this way. But then I saw the second boy put his arm around the first one's waist in a very friendly way. They walked on like this for some while, and when they turned a corner I decided to follow them. After a while they released their hold on each other, although their arms seemed to brush together quite a bit as they talked. But then I was surprised and delighted to see them holding hands. They walked along hand in hand until they reached a main road, where they separated again and I lost them in the crowds. I saw them again a few minutes later at an open air market, looking at pairs of trainers on a second hand shoe stall. Were they gay? I don't think so. In fact, I doubt whether they would even know the concept of 'gay' in that closed, regimented society. In any case, I didn't pick up any gay vibes from them. They seemed totally unself-conscious and relaxed as they walked along hand in hand, as though that was a perfectly natural way for two friends to show their affection for each other. Why can't the English be more like that (or the Americans or other Westerners, for that matter)? Why is it that we are so inhibited about bodily contact of any kind? Wouldn't it be great if it was natural here for friends to hold hands or put their arms round each other as they walk along the street? And I don't just mean gay couples in Canal Street Manchester or Castro Street San Francisco. I mean straight boys, men, women, even in the roughest areas of Glasgow or the most backward parts of small town America. Walt Whitman had the same idea, more than 140 years ago, in one of his Leaves of Grass poems entitled A Leaf for Hand in Hand:
Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to have had any success in his campaign of infusion.
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My other task that afternoon was to buy some bottled water. In China, you definitely don't drink the tap water, and we urgently needed some drinking water for our room. The hotel had a shop selling water, but the price they charged was so outrageous that I wanted to find another source. At best, I expected to find a little local corner store, but I was surprised to find that there was a very large and well stocked supermarket not far from the hotel. I found a large, five litre, plastic bottle which was a good deal cheaper than the hotel's water but still rather more expensive than the water we had been buying in Shanghai. I assumed that this was because prices in the capital were higher than in the South, so I bought it and carried it back to our room.
Home again, after a delightful week in Spain. We had a great time with the family. At three years old, Tom is very sweet and cute, although usually aggressive and warlike in his play. In the picture, he is replacing his sword in its sheath after some skirmish. He gets on particularly well with me, and shows it by always wanting a sword fight, or a contest of firing arrows at each other from pretend bows. He started nursery school today, and Steve has just phoned to say that the first day of school passed off well. Last week, Tom was apprehensive about the prospect of school, but Jo was far more worried than he was. She has always been (in our opinion) rather too over-protective of Tom, and she virtually never lets him out of her sight. We tried to devise ways of separating her from him, if only for a few minutes, but without a great deal of success. On one occasion, Jo and Mary were resting on a park bench while I was supervising Tom's playing. He tripped over as he was running, and fell on his face. I stood there and waited for him to pick himself up and start running again, which he did without any fuss. Mary said afterwards that Jo had been on the point of rushing over to comfort him, which would probably have made him feel sorry for himself and burst into tears. But she was too far away to get to him. Mary thought that this little incident made Jo realise that Tom has reached an age where he doesn't need quite so much protective mothering. I hope so. Anyway, Steve said on the phone today that Jo handled Tom's absence at school without too much trauma.
Walt Whitman, 1860