Letters from China, Part 5

Hi rabbits, I'm back now! Back in beautiful Haringey, but I will not neglect my responsibilities, so here is the final chapter of our exciting tale:
We left Macau after I finally got a visa. If you are English here you have to pay more for a visa, but you can get it on demand. They make it cheaper for Americans, but you got to wait. First stop was the shopping centre just outside Macau. My bargaining skills have been honed to perfection and I buy some bits. Woes betide those who think to barter with me now, I came to the People’s Republic a stupid westerner, and I leave a master haggler. Florence has bought 4 swords in addition to the one I got her, and a big spear. People glance nervously at us as we stride like barbarians through shu hi's great shopping mall. Perhaps the fact that we are armed to the teeth has something to do with the ease at which we barter. Who knows?
We catch a buss back to Guan Zhou, when we get there I am less affected by the curious stares of the locals etc. We eat at many fine restaurants, the food here is far better that that in Macau, with the exception of dim sum, which the Macanese do nicely, and cheaper. I feast upon proper sushuan food for the first time, the quinine Florence misses most. Sushuan food usually consists of bits of meat buried under mounds of chillies. It's not for those who can't take the spicy- it is for the stout of toulng only, but it is the best food in the world. Period. Sinjin food comes in a close second. Sinjin is the Muslim province in the west of china, the singing people often look quite western and wear little white Muslim hats. They make noodles out of dough before your very eyes and mix 'em up with stuff in an almost Turkish style. Words cannot do justice to the tastiness of the food here. So I will waste no more of them in futile attempts to describe the indescribable. Why the Chinese withhold their best food from the restaurants in the west is a mystery to me.
We meet up with this friend of flo's I know from London on the first night we eat fish and frogs he picked out personally from the aquarium at the restaurant. Yummy. Then we check into the hotel, Loy Young gets us a good deal, good man. The hotel is run by the people’s army, though there are no solders about. The people’s army is a funny thing. They function like a business, it's like reverse privatisation. If you got a nightclub and you don't want to be bugged by gangsters, sell the people’s army a 10 or 20 percent share in the place and if the Gambino brothers come by with beef, it's their ass. They also do a lot of charitable type stuff. I like the people’s army.
Next day we meet up with Tien, he's looking for a practice space for his band so we tag along as he calls up numbers on walls and meets landlords on the spot for a look see. Everything is tiled in china. Outsides of buildings, floors, walls everything. It's like the world's biggest shower. We're looking at cheap apartments basically, I tell tien there ain't a chance in hell he's goanna not get complaints about the noise in these places, he doesn't seem to care. We meet one landlord he's met before, she says 'I remember you; you're that guy with the noisy band. No room for you sucker' or something to that extent. Apparently when Florence was in the band with him they went through loads of places, at one point being kicked out by a landlord who wielded an axe. Places like this go for about twenty quid a month so I guess tien doesn't really care though. It's interesting to go around all these high-rise tenement buildings and see stuff. Every room has a big steel door. Very secure, and the bathrooms are about as basic as you can get. A hole in the floor that flushes and a tap with cold water. That's it. I guess you get what you pay for. 
The landlady at the place he gets says he can't bring any black people in. I'm a bit shocked to say the least. There are a lot of Nigerians in Guan Zhou, and I ask tien and flo about the whole raceie situation, From what I gather the Nigerians are a new addition to guan zhou, and they tend to freak out the locals because a) Nigerians are big dudes, and Chinese are tiny dudes and b) the locals recon they are too horny. No excuse for skin colour prejudice, but I find it interesting all the same. 
That night we meet up with Tien, Fey and this other dude and go to this undergrounded club. First act is a big fat Chinese drag queen singing heavy metal. Fey (another dude who used to play music with Florence) is mortified. The next act is a couple rough Pilipino girls singing Christina Aguilera covers. Shameful. By this time we are playing this drinking game with dice and getting steadily more drunk. These are the first china men I've met who hang out like me, and their English is good enough for conversation. They remind me of the guys I know from Bracknell. Another American is in the bar, a middle aged guy he sits alone. When the girls start singing 'it's raining men' he grabs the mike and sings along, altering the words to 'it's raining me' he brings much shame to my people. I am as embarrassed as fey now.
Apart from the shameful acts this is a cool place. They have a drum kit a base and a guitar for whoever to play and after the freak show is over my Chinese friends start playing brit pop covers. They love brit pop, especially Radiohead, and they play tight, especially for people who haven't jammed as a group before. At this point my memories of the night start to get fuzzy due to the booze, we leave the club, eat some street barbeque at like three in the morning and stumble off to bed. 
Next night we meet up with fey again and Florence is left to sit looking bored as we discuss the tactics of street fighter two and other boyish things. Fey used to mug kids for their reeboks when he was younger and he recons Japanese women eat human foetuses to keep their skin looking young. We're hanging out in this street cafe' type place in a forgotten alley in  a forgotten part of guan zhou eating sushuan food and downing big bottles of tsing tau for 3 yen a pop. Fey doesn't like Japanese people. He tells me details of their crimes in Nanjing and when he goes at like four in the morning he says he's going to dream about killing them. I like fey, he talks loads of shit has long hair and a villainous goatee and a fonzie like cool to him. Good lad. I can see why flo misses these guys.
Our last day we go to this neighboring city to see flo's old drummer and his girl. We dine on pigs feet at a beautiful Cantonese restaurant and go back to his to chill and check out his tunes. He does nice trance music now. His girl works at an English language newspaper and I ask her about censorship. She says yea, there's a team that reads things over. Basically they only want good news about the government. One editor lost his job for having dung Shau Mings head under someone’s feet, an innocent mistake but apparently an unforgivable one. We talk about politics, Chinese, like the rest of the world, also think ole' W is a cunt. They also want Taiwan back and are appalled by the audacity of the Japanese and the Americans who seek to keep it from them. My advise to the west is but out and respect china or there's goanna be trouble. One china two systems works in Hong Kong and Macau, it'll work in Taiwan.
I'm nervous about all our pirate dvds, kung fu weapons and the big sack of Chinese biltong getting through customs, but we get away with our petty smuggling. I'm almost denied entry into the UK because I don't have my permanent entry stamp in my new passport. We have a lot of stuff to carry; we came with little rucksacks and leave with many big bags. I'm gonna miss china, I'll be back next year I think though. 
So there it is. The peoples republic gets a big thumbs up from me both as a society and a place to visit. As I got out of the train at manor house I said to Florence 'who-how, back in the land of people who are more than for feet high!' and some random dude turned around and said 'don't take the piss mate, I'm short'