always remains…
2:07 am Thursday, 22 May, 2008
I just turned on my Airport on the off chance I could pick up a network from the shore and here I am! Hurrah. So:
Alrighty. I know, I know, I keep trying to think of something else to start my posts with but pretty much everytime I sit down that’s all I got.
I’m on the good boat Sissi cruising down the Yanghzee river. How awesome is that? Its been nice for a whole number of reasons. To start with it’s been on a river moving away from the earthquake zone. About the only chance an earthquake has to kill me is if it’s strong enough to break the Three Gorges Dam. Now to be fair from what I understand that’s probably only a 4.something in the right area but that’s neither here nor there (well it’s here but you know what I mean!).
I’m still trying to get my head around the quake warning. Nothing happened (at least nothing that I know of as I type this) but I have never been in a situation where there was actually panic in the streets. I mean really panic in the streets. I was on the tube when the London bombings happened but there wasn’t any sense of panic. There was a degree of British stiff upper lipness but it wasn’t quite the same as a government warning and people just didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t until several hours later and I was caught on the very periphery.
Panic in the streets. I’m not sure it’s something that I understood until now. I could never have imagined in the three cities that I’ve lived in anything happening that would cause the government to warn people to get outside or anything remotely approaching that. It just doesn’t happen. I have nothing to compare it to so while it’s easy to judge reactions by the fact that nothing happened, it’s pretty hard having been on the ground to be anything but glad that I’m not on that ground anymore.
To a degree it’s left me, actually I should say to a small degree as the language barrier here is so extreme and such an extra complication, wondering what I’d do in such an event in my home (where-ever that next be!). And I just don’t know. It’s an alien concept or at least it was. I guess that it makes sense in some way to take some of the, seriously mainly bullshit it must be said, government advice about having a emergency kit happening.
I mean lets face it I was seriously lucky. What was I to do in a situation where I don’t know where I am, I don’t know where I’m going, I don’t know how to get there and I can’t speak the language? That’s pretty scary. I was lucky that I was in an expat bar and there were English and Chinese speakers. I was lucky that someone was there to give me a lift to my hotel and I was lucky that I was with a group where I could wake someone to literally be my translator at going on 2am in the morning. Had I been in a Chinese bar without anyone to help and with taxi’s not stopping, what was I to do? It’s a sobering thought.
Now one thing to do back to. On Monday afternoon I was faffing around online. It was 14.37. The reason that I can tell you that so precisely is that I was on BBC News (via a proxy) and I was reading an article about how China had declared three days of official mourning for the victims of the earthquake. It had struck at 14.38 seven days beforehand. I read, at 37 minutes past that there was to be a 3 minute silence at 38 to pay respects.
What I was not expecting was every siren in the city to sound. Every store alarm, every car horn and most of all every boat horn began within seconds and grew to this astounding wall of noise. People stopped, traffic stopped, boats stopped and for a moment the city was both silent and impossibly loud. I later found out the sirens included old air raid sirens. Walls and walls of noise - amazing.
Anyways it’s now Wednesday and the boat is great. Things are going really well. It’s an easy going cruise with a good chunk of free time. We have just spent the afternoon and indeed evening drinking and chatting then I introduced Werewolf to the group and then we ended up playing Dark Murder with the crew. Huge amounts of fun. I usually (and still do) dismiss most silly games out of hand but I’ll admit they can work pretty well in a disparate group of folks who don’t really know each other and most importantly after a couple of drinks.
I’ve also taken the chance to catch up on some more TV. House is always the same but that makes it fairly reliable and Hugh Laurie remains hugely watchable. Battlestar Galactica remains just so uneven that it’s a shame. If it managed to stop having just such brief moments of being really good and keeping the pace up then it could reach the heights that so many folks seem to ascribe.
I finished reading Atonement and it improved significantly. The last half in particular the last quarter reached a whole new level of quality and I enjoyed it. I’m now looking forward to watching the movie at some point. I’ve moved onto a total opposite, Cowl by Neal Asher. I’ve been meaning to read him for a while now and I grabbed this in Dee Dee’s. I’m only about 3 pages in so I have nothing to report just yet.
This morning we went to see the Ghost City which was pretty cool. It’s certainly a good point for China to pull a bit of a recovery on us. It’s pretty churlish to complain about the past week but it’s really put a dampener on my China adventure and I’m hoping the next week or so brings it back up to scratch. At the same time I think it’s pretty safe to say the entire experience will be unforgettable though if not for all the right reasons. It’s all me me me here huh?
23.24 on the Yangtze River Wednesday 21 May
And the next morning arrives. Today we are due to sail through the Three Gorges before going through the lock this evening. There is a trip somewhere this afternoon, a local village I think and then tomorrow morning (I assume) we visit the Three Gorges Dam. That should be quite cool, I’m looking forward to it. In fact I think the whole thing is pretty cool and working well.
I know that we just went through some downtime in Chongqing but it doesn’t really feel like that to any of us. It just wasn’t a nice city and then with the earthquake threat hanging over us, I don’t think that anyone had a good time there at all. So getting out of the city and somewhere that we can sit and read and laze around and play silly games is quite a relief.
It’s raining outside though which isn’t great. When I say raining, it’s more drizzle from the mist. It does mean that I’ve had to take refuge inside to type this up. Then the karaoke started and I’ve had to take refuge in my cabin.
09.48 on the Yangtze River Thursday 22 May
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