Riding the train to Mongolia

Let's not speak too soon, because I am yet to cross the border into Mongolia, but this has been a remarkably simple trip.
The train station was where the hostel receptionist said it would be. The security check was straight forward. The waiting room was easy to find. The nice Swedish diplomat in my carriage agreed to swap top for bottom bunk.
I am always suspicious when things go according to plan. But fingers crossed my next post will not be from a lonely border town platform as I wave to the departing train.
This fear has been created by the tour guide I met at dinner. To suggest the young man was a little jaded by his career choice would be understatement. He at least did not refer to his tour group as "children" like the nice fellow who had joined us earlier...but this was definitely a young man who has travelled this route too many times!
The story he regaled us with, as we ate fairly mediocre pork and canned mushrooms was of the Russian customs officials depositing a group of Thai monks in the border town between Russia and Mongolia. They were apparently in possession of contraband...tramodol he thinks.
So now I am sitting on the train thinking about what might be in my luggage. There's nothing of course...but just walking past those "Declare it!" signs in Australian airports is enough to have me wondering if there might be a stray raisin in the bottoms my bag. Those little beagles make me nervous. The whole process of crossing borders, bring yelled at by men in uniforms in languages I don't speak - it's all terribly stressful.
And on top of that I have to decide whether to sit on the train for three hours while they change the bogeys at the border or to wander around a border town at what will be way, way past my bed time.
What pleasures can a Chinese border town offer? Cheap beer? Drinking at the moment gives me a headache! Cheap food? Everything I eat just passed straight through. I think three hours in the dark, with no air-conditioning doesn't seem do bad.
Stay tuned.

Drinking beer in Beijing

Big call out to Nick for the Great Leap Brewery recommendation. But instead of finding my way to one of great newer venues, I opted for the original, down a hutong, with directions that will mess with your head.
It's hard to believe you can go all the way to China and find the kind of neighbourhood bar, making fantastic craft beer, that you want on the corner of your street at home.
I managed to make friends with the locals and ended up with a dinner of the ice cream I bought on the way and two huge slices of water melon. The bar tenders humour extended to exclaiming "Happiness!" every time I took a bite. I suggested I reminded him of his grandma and he agreed.
The beer is very good. The Little General IPA is a standout...hoppy and very drinkable. The Honey Ma session ale has a more reasonable ABV and a delicious ginger tang. I finished with the smooth and bitter East City Porter.
Altogether, a fine night out in Beijing!

Getting to Beijing

In what has been termed my AC/DC moment, thunder struck the moment I exited Dondang subway station. I had exited at the wrong exit, I was in a park and for good measure enormous drops of torrential rain had just began to fall.
It had been a trying day.
I did eventually find my rather charming hutong hostel, but not before getting soaked to the skin and having to shelter beneath the overhang of a very official looking guard post. The official looking guard just glared at the damp muffle aged woman, weighed down with her damp backpack.
From the comfort of my enormous bed (no doubles in China only beds big enough for three or four reasonably friendly people) I can reflect on god experience of catching a train in China.
It is easier than expected. The systems are efficient and work. There is some signage in English.
There is also endless queuing and there's always someone who tries to elbow you out of your space in the queue or just steps in front of you. You have to push to get in anywhere.
These things are tiring. They are presumably tiring for Chinese folk too. There's a lot of tired looking people.
But once on the train, it is a marvel! Three hundred and three km for most of the journey. Whizzing past fields, towns and most amazing of all endless enormous cities.
The whole plain between Xi'an and Beijing seems to be a series of huge conglomerations of tower blocks that go on forever and high rise office blocks. Oh, and huge power stations, often in among the tower blocks!
It's not the China of charming paintings, but it is magnificent!
And between these huge cities, whose names I have never heard and where I am unlikely to ever go, there are dirt roads, farm tracks, shirtless men in the fields and little walled farms where bone suspects life had not changed much in generations.
It's the kind of thing you can only see out the window of a train. It makes for queuing and pushing and worrying about directions totally worthwhile.
I am not sure if I like travelling in China. It's hot, it's hard work, there's a lot of uncertainty and having to trust folk. But it's able to dish up some sights you wouldn't get anywhere else.

A funny thing happened

There are lots of not so funny things that have happened on my trip so far and I have been away only a few days. I couldn't find my driver at the airport. I got the squirts and spent most of today in bed or sitting listlessly on the couch. I had to eat mediocre Korean food to find something with no wheat and less than volcanic amounts of chilli.
But there have been some belly laughs. My terracotta warriors guide realising none of us had Wechat so she had no way of finding us if we got list in the ten thousand other visitors to the site. Or her and the driver arguing about where we were to be dropped off. Or her discovering her transmitter was out of charge and having to do a deal with the wheelchair men to find us new headsets. They had new headsets so this must happen often. But I don't think it was a scam...the poor girl had turned the colour of the grey red dragon fruit I've been eating and started mumbling in an odd mixture of mandarin and English. If it was an act, it was a convincing one!
All those things were pretty funny. Her actually losing some of the group and calling out to them ever more desperately over the headset system was also amusing. She found them, which was less amusing but probably for the best.
All slightly unpleasant schadenfreude I guess.
The really genuine laughs though were provided by my second tour. Not just did our guide explain how she married her boyfriend of twenty years not for love, not because of children or elderly parents or social stigma - but because she wanted to buy a parking space and there would be less paperwork if she was married!
Now I am paperwork adverse, but marriage does seem like an extreme action to avoid it.
Her triumph though was the detailed description of her diagnosis of her dogs stomach issues from a careful examination of their poop. This intricate scatological talk delivered as we ate dinner in otherwise salubrious surrounds. Nothing like a bit of poop to put other people off...resulting in more of everything for me!

Travelling light

I think the ultimate in travelling light isn't about the size of your pack, it's about what's in your head. The real baggage we all carry about isn't shoes and sleeping bags and souvenirs, it's all ghat other stuff that travels with us in our heads.
I have lost count box the number of times people have called me brave for heading off alone - and its nice that they think that. I count bravery as being one of the qualities I admire most in people and the one whose lack causes me the most horror. To be too frightened to actually live a full life seems to me to be taking away from that which actually allows us to be human.
The cliche is that bravery is feeling the fear and found it anyway. And it's a cliche because it's true. I hate flying, but I just take a deep breath, accept the two or twelve or fourteen hours of terror and get on that plane.
It took me an hour to work up the courage to try out for Xi'an Metro. I knew there'd be another awkward exchange as I tried to buy a ticket. The difficulty of following a subway map in a language I don't speak and the inevitable crush of humanity. But then you have to tell yourself - what could possibly go wrong? Screw up, find the way back to the starting point. Begin again.
Fear, defeated by logic! Or in this case by thirty three degree heat, sore feet and the need to not walk another five km!
So I am trying to travel light. I've bought my fear along with me, it insists on coming, but it's walking a few paces behind, minding it's own business. I can feel it there, watching for a moment of weakness, but I won't be letting it ride on my shoulders and weigh me down.

Famous Dead People

It's been a tough old month for 70s Rock stars...for a while there it looked like the 69 club was forming...and not in a good way.
It might seem anathema but I liked Bowie a lot AND I liked the Eagles...and yes, quite specifically Glenn Frey. If this doesn't make aesthetic sense let's remember that I also like Wagner and Pucinni never fails to make me cry and I just realised how to enjoy Verdi. I like hard core late 70s punk rock, I like celtic folk music. Oh and I grew up listening to and loving country music of all sorts. Let's just say my tastes are eclectic.
If I now have any regrets in my rather misspent time; its that I never paid the outrageous amount to see the reformed Eagles...because I just don't see any point in seeing them now without the powerhouse of Frey. I told myself that like seeing The Pogues with a Shane McGowan so messed up by booze he can't form a sentence; that seeing the ageing Eagles would be a disappointment when I had all that 70s concert footage in my head. For the record, I think I was wrong. Nonetheless.
I did see Bowie in concert, once, at Western Springs Stadium in Auckland in 1987. It was the Glss Spider Tour and I had just turned 18. I still remember dancing euphorically to Heroes and then having to be passed over the heads of the audience and into the front stage areabecause my boyfriend's little sister had fainted and we all needed to get back stage to check on her. Up close Bowie was a very small man. It's hard to believe that that massive voice, incredible presence; all that power, came out of such a tiny frame.
People might get annoyed...me wanting to talk about the Eagles guitarist and an iconic figure like Bowie in the same breath...or the same blog...but for me they provided some of the most important parts of the soundtrack of my most formative years.
So, favourite Bowie song? No contest! Janine. "...I've got things inside my head that even I can't face." Even at 17 I felt a little like he was singing about me specifically.  I have been caught singing aloud to that while walking with my Walkman (it's was the 80s...everyone had a Walkman...), while


driving in my car alone, while just sitting in the living room. It's a brilliant mix of catchy, upbeat
music and really quite dark lyrics.
Let's see...my first real boyfriend gave me Station to Station to listen to as a gift when we were forced to be apart for several months. It's was a crappy home recording on an old cassette tape and I listened to it till I think I knew every chord. Sitting alone in my room, a long way from where I wanted to be, and powerless to do much about it, that music formed a link for me to a world I wanted to be in.
In the early 90s one of my friends became obsessed with Bowie, specifically with Cygnet Committee which she would listen to on repeat, very, very loudly whenever possible. She was particularly fond of the line "We slit the Catholic throat." And spent a lot of time trying to interpret the lyrics. Of course she was also obsessed with her lecturer who was an ex-Catholic priest. She used to make us drive past his house and park opposite it to see if she could see inside...but that's another story.
So Mr Bowie has been important for me. A couple of years ago when I got to see the Bowie
exhibition at the V & A with another friend and obsessive fan, I had the chance to reflect on just what
an extraordinary artist and man he was. And I wondered at the time...is he sick? Does he know something is up?
Which brings me to the Eagles. In my first year of university I was pretty homesick...I had a tape(yes a cassette tape! And a little mono speaker cassette deck.) and I played the Eagles Greatest Hits to myself every night to fall asleep. The tape would click off at the end and I would wake for a second then fall back to sleep with Glenn Frey's voice going round and round in my head. Because even though everyone thinks Don Henley was the great voice in the Eagles...it's all the songs that Frey fronted that I love...Take it Easy; Lyin' Eyes; Peaceful, Easy Feeling.
It's become fashionable to make fun of the Eagles, to say they sold out or their music was only ever easy listening. But show me anyone my age who doesn't know all the lyrics to Hotel California? And if you still don't believe me...watch some of the 70s footage - four, sometimes five, very stoned guys with bad haircuts just doing their thing. The Eagles were accused of just loitering on stage...and it's kind of true. Frey looks so stoned most of the time that his already heavy lidded eyes are closed more
than they are open. And I think that's what I liked at17 and like now. They weren't posing; they
weren't trying to be clever; the lyrics aren't really very profound "There's a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford, slowing down to take a look at me." Of course Jackson Brown says it's an incredible lyric that manages to combine redemption, girls and the American love of cars - I just hear a young man pretty pleased with himself that girls like him (and why wouldn't they!) and I like that simplicity. Oh and I have always liked that the girl was driving a Ford ute...she is no girly girl...she's some tough farm chick with her own wheels!
You get to a certain age and the people that formed you as a human being...the people who made the music that soundtracks your life; the people who were in the films that changed you; who wrote the contemporary novels and poetry you love; those people start to die...because we all have to eventually. That brings you up smack with your own mortality. It makes you realise that everything human is finite...the number of songs we will write, or poems or stories. The number of paintings we will make...and the number of all those things we will see and experience.
I won't ever see the Eagles live. There will be no more Bowie albums. It's the finiteness that's most frightening. The abyss we all end up having to stare into.

For my friend and comrade

I'm not sure how you go about summing up a man's life. How you put down in finite, bounded words all the things that make a person who they were. My friend and comrade, Dave Silcock, died a week ago. I didn't know till this morning and its taken me all day to decide that a good man's life needs a written tribute.
Just a couple of days ago I was trying to explain to someone that us commies don't believe in a great man theory of history; that the death of Rosa Luxemburg was a small ad endum at the end of the German section's Conference report to the Third International. And I don't think I was wrong.
But our class, the working class, we need to give the respect that's due to our lifelong fighters. To the men and women like my friend Dave who never give up knowing that they are on the right side.
Dave spent time talking to people. He'd argue with anyone who'd listen; and who he thought he might be able to shift. He knew exactly what he thought and he didn't mind saying it. A brazen bravery of position I've always respected.
And he was kind.
I think whenever someone dies, we find in ourselves all the little stories; those moments that its only later we know are as close as it comes to having a profound knowledge of someone. Everytime I've seen Dave, he's talked to me about politics. Once it was me who was the active one - with meetings every night and a new campaign every week. Me trying to convince him to join Workers Power again and later PR. But never hard - I always knew he was a man who made up his own mind. Recently, its been him contacting me about union action; about coming to branch meetings; about being active again. But never once had he tried to make me feel bad or guilty. He just kept quietly reminding me that the struggle is still out there and it still needs good people to be making the good fight.
Its that kindness I'll remember.
I'm not sure how you go about summing up a man's life. You can make all sorts of statements about the people they loved and who love them; about the lives and minds they touched and changed; about the actions they took which made the world just that little bit better a place.
I don't know if in the end we are all more than sums of our parts.
And I don't know if this was one of the Grateful Dead lyrics Dave liked...but its one I've always liked and I thank him for making me listen

There is a road, no simple highway,
Between the dawn and the dark of night,
And if you go no one may follow,
That path is for your steps alone.

Like Trotsky, I'm an intransigent atheist, I don't believe there's anything after death. I'm not sure, but I think when we say that people live on in our memories; we're really only trying to soothe ourselves in our immediate grief. But I will miss you Dave; I will think about you and remember you and try a little harder to be the good person, the good friend, the good comrade you have been.