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Excerpt from the Trip Info Pack: Flying to Russia.
- If you require a special meal (vegetarian, vegan etc.) please order it with the airline directly by phone at least 24 hours in advance. Do not assume that this has been done for you!
- Leave plenty of time for your journey to the airport. Checking in early will leave you a better choice of seats too. Many airlines allow you to check in online before arriving at the airport, and to select the seat of your choice.
- Don’t pack knives, sharp objects or liquids in your hand baggage. If you do, they will be confiscated by the airlines and probably never given back!
- During your flight you will probably be given a Russian Migration Form (note: you will need this!). If not, they are available on arrival.
- Baggage carts at Moscow/Petersburg are now free, but the porters hide them in order to force you to accept their rip-off services (we suggest you give their services a miss!).
We’ve been talking about the Trans-Siberian trip largely from the travellers’ point of view. I’m curious to know how travel and travellers themselves are regarded by the locals. Neil fills me in:
Bloody Tourists
“It’s different in each country. China still restricts its own people from going abroad unless they’ve been pre-vetted by the communist party. So it’s only the fortunate few who have the privilege of foreign travel. The Chinese education system tells people from day one that they live in the best country anyway, so they don’t think they’ve lost anything by not going to others. I’ve never had any negative feedback in China about being a visitor. A reaction you do sometimes get, though, and you have to be quite tactful about this, is: ‘What do you think about our country? It must be quite shaming for you to come here and see that everything is so much better than in your country!’
“And it’s true that most places foreigners go to in China are built up to a very impressive scale, that is if you’re impressed by things like 132-story office buildings with mirror-glass outsides. It all looks like San Francisco these days. Almost all of China’s large cities have been built up in this very aspirational style. What of course you never see as a visitor, is how people are living in their private homes, whether that’s also so much better or not. It might be or it might not be.
“I think the way that China’s managed to keep communism afloat, when it’s failed in most other countries, is to give people something to hope for, and to make them feel proud about what’s been achieved in their country, even if it means having to break the bank to do it. Everybody feels, when they see big wide boulevards all lit up at night, with flashing neon attractions, that it looks like those pictures of other countries they’ve seen. And they don’t feel embarrassed or ashamed of where they are. Whereas in Russia the opposite is true. Russians are absolutely paranoid about how they are looked at by the rest of the world, because they feel that they live so much worse than other Europeans.”
False Expectations:
I ask if there’s a element of China feeding back Western expectations: of taking what we expect of them as a basis for what they then deliver as an outward persona.
“I think that’s quite true. A typical example of that, one I like because you can see the hypocrisy at work, is on the Amur river. The river is the border at that point. There’s effectively this one large conurbation made up of two sides that never touch each other. The Russian side is called Blagoveshchensk and the Chinese side is called Heihe. What’s interesting there is that both sides have built incredibly impressive buildings along the embankment… and then slums behind them! Both sides are trying to put up this pretence of a big, impressive city!”
Neil remembers looking longingly at the gloriously lit Chinese side from the dour Russian slum, only to find even worse slums behind the frontage on the Chinese side when he finally made it over there.
“Although they are proud of their very ancient monuments, they’re not at all proud of their recent history,” says Neil, before qualifying: “The Chinese are proud of new things, and things that they regard as new technical achievements: taller buildings than ever before, wider, bigger, shinier. They love all of that. But they’re not really very happy about the things which we find ‘quaint’, and they find shaming. They don’t like foreigners going off to places that would give the ‘wrong’ idea about China: ‘No you haven’t understood this properly. Those people aren’t poor!’
“It’s that whole Asian thing of ‘face’. I don’t want to sound judgemental, I can see why they want to do it. A classic example would be Xi’an, which in the 17th–18th century was the capital of China: a medieval fortified town with enormous walls. And then Beijing became the capital when the Manchu dynasty took power: it couldn’t not be the capital, it was their home town!”
Fear of washing-up liquid. A family member was host to two Chinese students who visited the language school in our town. I ended up helping to prepare their lunch and tea. They would want to take over washing up afterwards, and just run their plates under the hot tap. Hmm…OK. By chance I beat them to it on one occasion and they became agitated, trying to communicate something to me as I squirted a jot of washing-up liquid into the bowl. In the end one of them pulled out their translator gadget and punched in some Chinese characters. They didn’t want me to wash their plates because I used ‘the liquid’ and it was (they flipped the screen my way) “POISON”. Cue ten minutes of taking every plate and utensil out of the bowl, scrutinising it and rinsing off every last bubble of foam. A true story.
Xi’an
Neil digresses to talk about the ancient former capital:
“Within the walls is the old town area. What used to be there were cobbled streets and quaint little shops. The Chinese don’t like that. Cobbled streets are a symbol of medieval poverty, and they are knocking it all down to build shopping plazas. They’ve realised rather too late that its precisely this medieval town that the tourists are coming to see. So they’ve preserved a little bit of it, but 75% of the old city has been bulldozed. It’s the eternal dilemma of tourism: you can’t expect people to live in quaint medieval poverty just for your sake. They have a right to shopping centres and modern shopping malls too, alhough it’s a pity they’ve been built where they are.
“There’s an unspoken political element here: that things like temples etc. are what China doesn’t want to ‘admit to’ any more. They regard all this as medieval superstition. It’s not just a question of clearing the area for a plaza. It’s also specifically a question of removing the temple. And a further issue that China is terrified about and will never, ever admit, is that in the 17th and 18th centuries the official religion of they country was Islam! There’s a whole Islamic section of town that they’re trying to tear down as fast as they can. They are terrified that Islamic fundamentalism will gain a hold in China, and then they’ll have to deal with it.”
Next time: Tips And Tales (Part 6)
More Xi’an, because it sounds so nice. And, so, what do they think of us? Brace yourselves! Would you like violence with that? (Getting stoned at the rally).
[Photo by travlinman43]
