Author: admin

This is the notice board outside a recruiting agency in Guangzhou on a Saturday morning. The place was packed with people trying to get a glimpse of the notices and hopefully a job. China’s economy is still growing, but not fast enough to provide employment for all the young graduates, and cities are full of these scenes – educated young people desperate for a break. In the Middle East, this same circumstance has had spectacular consequences, but not so far in China.

I eat well when I travel to Guangzhou. The food is cheap, varied and my colleagues there delight in exploring the various options available. Guangzhou is a major international trade city, so the options are considerably more varied than Chinese. In fact, the local food style, Cantonese, is the one I hardly ever eat when I’m there: it tends to the bland and [forgive me] slimy and is heavily reliant on local fish. I’ve seen that river, and what goes on upstream, I’m not eating things that live in it.

This is Korean food, a new restaurant in the city, and it was excellent – spicy and crunchy and tangy, just to my liking. And no, that’s not raw chicken, it’s one of the five or six kinds of cabbage we were served.

The campus in Guangzhou has a large number of sculptures – a garden of them, in fact. My colleagues there joke that they got a job lot of socialist memoriabilia – there are several Marxes (Karls, not the brothers), several Maos, a handful of Chinese heroes (Lao Tzu, Confucius, etc). The effect is rather odd. This knockoff of Rodin is not actually in the sculpture garden itself, but slightly away from it.

Bicycles are still a major form of transport in China, especially on university campuses, where students can’t have cars and staff seldom bother. Every building has a rack of these outside. The favoured bicycle in China is still a traditional beast,upright with a chain guard, a basket and three gears. Some even have a built-in umbrella holder, a useful addition.

Masaka dosas are a staple food in India, and something I miss a lot. They’re a rice pancake (the dosa), thin and crisp, wrapped around a spicy potato filling and served with sambar, a spicy lentil soup, and chutneys (especially coconut chutney). I think I had four in the two and a half days I was in Delhi. This was the last one, from idli.com in the airport food court. Yum.

Masaka dosas are a staple food in India, and something I miss a lot. They’re a rice pancake (the dosa), thin and crisp, wrapped around a spicy potato filling and served with sambar, a spicy lentil soup, and chutneys (especially coconut chutney). I think I had four in the two and a half days I was in Delhi. This was the last one, from idli.com in the airport food court. Yum.

India occasionally reminds you that it had a pretty intimate flirtation with communism over the years. I find it hard to believe this object wasn’t at least partially inspired by some kind of totalitarian mythos. What is it with the ideologues and sand-blasted concrete anyway?

I have no idea what it is, aside from mind-bogglingly ugly and across the road from my hotel. I’ll try to find out tomorrow.

Well, Delhi is something of a bust – I’ve barely taken any pics. Partly it’s because I’m not doing any sightseeing, partly it’s because I’m self-conscious on my own with a camera on the few occasions I have been sightseeing. I had to take this, though – I’ll lighten it when I get home and have a better computer, but it’s the sign for a Freemason’s hall. Having been to London recently, and seen the incredible edifice that is the Freemason’s Hall there, it’s hard not to boggle at the contrast.

Dubai Airport is very shiny. Dubai is very shiny, true, but the airport is REALLY shiny. Of course, nothing is naturally shiny, especially not in a desert, so Dubai has to have an army of people employed to keep things shiny. Not people from Dubai, you realise, but people imported into Dubai from places less shiny and clean and glossy. People who aren’t at all shiny themselves, especially not after years of working here. Naturally, being imported, they sometimes need to go home, and like everyone else, they do that via Dubai International Airport, where they annoy the shiny and perfect denizens of the airport by doing things like this. Pretty much everyone who walked past made tutting noises of disgust.

I suppose if Sheikh Mo had his way, he would have a completely different airport for all the migrant workers and slaves, so people wouldn’t be reminded of what this place actually cost in human misery. Of course, Sheikh Mo has other problems these days.

I’m off. To Delhi and Guangzhou. It’s a work trip, and will give me little time for tourism, but still, it’s pretty cool. I’ve been to Guangzhou before, it’s a pretty regular trip, Delhi is new.

I’m an efficient packer – it took me about 30 minutes to get everything together, with only two things forgotton (tweezers and a hat).

I’ll be in airports for pretty much the rest of the day – I land in Delhi at 9:30 tomorrow morning. Expect picures of airline food and people under flurorescent lights.