China is getting just downright weird. Creepily weird. Almost menacingly weird. Imagine having the following conversation with a travel agent in the U.S.
“I’d like to go to Montana.”
“You can’t. Montana is closed.”
“Closed? What do you mean Montana is closed?”
“There is…a problem.”
“What problem?”
“A problem.”
“What problem?”
“Montana is not green. The buses don’t go there.”
Substitute Heavenly Lake for Montana, and this is the exchange I had today with a Chinese travel agent. Language difficulties account for some of the crypticness, but not for the fact that the woman was, I’m pretty sure, telling bald-faced lies. I’ll go to Heavenly Lake tomorrow and find out for certain.
Later in the day, a hotel bellhop led me around the corner to an internet cafe. As we started up the flights of stairs, we met a woman coming down. Abruptly the bellhop turned and told me, “Not open.”
Half an hour later, I was led up the same stairs by a hotel employee who wasn’t in on the giant game of “Trick Whitey” being played by the Chinese populace. The cafe, of course, was open and full of patrons.
The whole country, the whole continent, appears to be frantically ad-libbing. One day, tourists are turned away from the Great Wall. The next day, tourists are allowed in. I have credible first-hand accounts from other travelers that there are no health restrictions in Bangkok; that there are 5-day quarantines in Bangkok; that travelers to Bangkok must undergo mandatory twice-daily check-ups. All is confusion.
And then there are the pet-killing mobs.
I’m lazy, so I’m just going to cut and paste from a recent IM conversation. (Yes, my handle is Steinosaur. Got a problem with that? It started of as an ironically idiotic nickname, and then gradually just became an idiotic nickname.)
| Steinosaur: | Not bad. China is a ghost town. The whole damned country. |
| Andrew: | beijing sounds fairly scary from the news.. roving mobs of people killing pets. |
| Andrew: | yeah. somehow the fact that it’s a virus that transferred from sheeps/cows/what-have-you into humans has led people to assume that means that pets are.. umm.. it’s not clear if it’s:
a) superstition, i.e., kill all pets they’re out to get you, or
b) pets are a vector, get rid of that vector. |
| Steinosaur: | This is just a cultural misunderstanding. Roving, pet-killing mobs are an ancient Chinese tradition. |
| Andrew: | well, it doesn’t help to have videos wandering around of crazed mobs cornering dogs and hanging them, then beating their twitching corpse. not a public relations coup, really. |
| Steinosaur: | “Kill your neighbor’s dog” day is a huge spring festival in China. It’s fun for the kids. |
| Steinosaur: | News never gives an accurate picture, though. I hear from fellow tourists that Beijing, like the rest of China, is a ghost town. |
| Steinosaur: | Empty subways, empty restaurants, empty tourist attractions. |
| Andrew: | well, all the people are concentrated into the mobs. |
| Steinosaur: | Tiananmen Square: empty. Empty except for all the pet-killing mobs, that is. |
| Andrew: | how’s the infrastructure? trains? buses? hotels? |
| Steinosaur: | The trains run slow because the tracks are heaped with the bodies of house cats and parakeets. Otherwise, they’re fine. |
| Andrew: | seriously, though. if everyone is freaked, are the stores open? are the hostels? are all the foreigners just looking around, shaking their heads, and thinking “these idiots?” |
| Steinosaur: | Trains are mostly empty. Everyone freaked out on the last train ride I took because the health officials discovered a woman in my car who came from Beijing and had gone to school with a SARS victim. So they once again hosed the entire car down with bleach. |
| Steinosaur: | Buses are a pain, because they are constantly stopped at health check points, where we are all forced to either have our temperatures taken or fill out little health affidavits. |
| Steinosaur: | Hotels are also empty. I met some tourists who were refused entry at every hotel in town and eventually had to board a train and move on. |
| Steinosaur: | But mostly there are no tourists. Tourists are scared of getting stuck in China or quarantined, but no one is worried about SARS. |
. . .
And that’s all I have to say about that. I’m as sick of writing about SARS as you are of reading about it. Unless something dramatic happens (for example, I contract SARS), I will not mention the disease again. I bought my onward tickets from China today. I reach Bangkok on the 29th of May. Italy on the 1st of June.
