Rubbed the Wrong Way

        I had never had a professional massage before I left the U.S.  No, that’s not quite right—let me start over.  I’d never paid for a massage before leaving the U.S.  I’d had massages before, of course, but they had all been the efforts of amateur enthusiasts, and so came gratis.  Besides, most of that was way back in my college days.  As far as professional massages go, I’m not sure that I’ve had one of those to this day, but now I have at least paid for a few.  These have all been in Asia, basically because they are cheap enough here to indulge in now and then, and a person would be a fool not to give them a try when the rates are so reasonable.  They can be wonderfully relaxing when done right.

        So far I’ve had paid massages in Thailand (firm up to nearly painful, but ultimately very nice), Vietnam (gentle and very relaxing), Cambodia (gentle, relaxing, and unconscionably cheap--$10), and southern China, where they tended to go for the Thai approach in the establishments I visited.  Basically, however, the treatments have all been pretty similar, with a regional variation here and there.    

        I am in northern China now—Jinan, in Shandong province—and last weekend I decided to see what sort of massages are on tap here.  A whole new experience, is the short answer.  Here’s what happened.

        I found a likely looking business and entered it with a sort of wary confidence.  Every transaction is an adventure when you don’t speak the language, and this goes double when you mean to go into a strange establishment, remove most of your clothing, and let someone you don’t know grope you a while.  So the first hurdle was making sure I was in the right sort of place, and hadn’t, say, wandered into a pet-grooming salon through misapprehension of the Chinese characters outside. I knew the Chinese word for massage, however, and could make the appropriate gestures, so I was soon put at ease on that score:  they did massages here. 

        The menu was all in Chinese, however, so I picked something in the mid-price range and hoped for the best.  The hostess conducted me to a room with about six severely reclined chairs, all empty, and gestured to the middle one.  I believe she told me to make myself at home, but, since it was all in Chinese, I wasn’t entirely sure.

        She left, and I removed my jacket, shoes and socks, hoping that I had taken off enough, but not too much, to make a good impression.  Presently, my masseuse appeared—a plump, pretty woman of 25, as I subsequently learned.  She was carrying a wooden tub of hot water with rose petals floating in it.  She placed this on the floor and motioned for me to roll up my pant cuffs and deposit my feet in the tub.  As I did so, she produced a small foil envelope, from which she extracted a moist, mask-shaped piece of towel.  By gestures she invited me to place this over my face.  I complied, but didn’t feel any more relaxed for it.  The combination of my feet in hot, rosy water and my face under a cold, wet towel wasn’t doing it for me, so I tried to strike up a conversation with my masseuse as a diversion.

        As I expected, she spoke very little English, and I soon exhausted my repertoire of Chinese phrases:  “I am an English teacher;” “I want to get off the bus here;”  “That’s very expensive;” “I like tomatoes.”  But we managed to find out a few things about each other nonetheless.  Her name was Juen, she was a native of Jinan, and although I was twice her age, she insisted on seniority in the partnership because she was masseuse number 59.

        Presently she hauled my feet out of the bucket and then coddled them for a good long while, which seemed to give her great satisfaction, but was wasted effort as far as I was concerned.  I know that for some people a foot massage is heaven, but not me.  Maybe I haven’t been wearing cheap enough shoes, but throughout my life my feet have generally looked after themselves.  I would find an ear massage equally rewarding—ah, but we’ll get to that.  For the moment, however, Juen seemingly could not do enough for my toes.

        “Are you going to paint them or sculpt them when you get home?” I asked finally.

        “Shen me?”

        “You seem to be committing them to memory.  Have you named them all yet?  They feel wonderful now, but shall we move on to other topics, so to speak?”

        She laughed.  “Wo ting bu dom!”  She gave my foot a final rub and reached for a towel to dry them.  It was then that the strangeness first intruded.  From somewhere she brought out a glass globe about half the size of those containing live goldfish that you used to win at carnivals.  But this one was of thicker glass and had a smaller aperture.  Within the globe was a small patch of white cloth.  She sprayed some clear liquid into the globe from a plastic bottle and clicked a lighter, igniting the cloth.  She immediately clapped the globe over the bottom of my foot and, as the flame extinguished itself, a suction was created which grabbed the flesh on the sole of my foot and held on.  She ran this globe up and down my foot a few times and then peeled it away.  It separated with a loud pop as the pressure was released.  She repeated this on my other foot.  “Well that’s new,” thought I.  She then signaled that I could remove the damp mask, which I gratefully did.

        Next came the leg massage, but I could tell Juen’s heart wasn’t in it.  I was still wearing my jeans and neither of us enjoyed it much, so she soon desisted.  She left the room with the tub and returned bearing more equipment.  She now reclined my chair fully and settled on a stool above my head.  “Ah, the head massage,” I thought.  “That’s always good.”  Instead, a bright LED light was snapped on at my temple and Juen was soon running a Q-Tip briskly around the inside of my ear.  This made me squirm a bit—it was too clinical or janitorial to be relaxing—and I began to fear that I had mistakenly contracted for the ladies’ facial treatment or something.  But the other ear had to be done too, of course to maintain balance in the universe, so we got through it while I looked forward hopefully to a brighter future.

        By and by she discarded the Q-Tip and then brought up something that looked like a paper horn such as one might blow at a New Year’s celebration.

        “What’s that?” I asked, shying somewhat as she moved in.  She smiled sweetly but said nothing, and then my fears were confirmed as she began to insert the thin end of the horn into an ear.  “No, I think I’d rather not,” I began.  She hesitated, but then spoke very slowly and clearly in English.

        “It’s all right.”

        I really wanted to believe her.  “You sure?”

        “Yes, it’s all right.”  So there we were.  She finished inserting the horn, held it there, and then, as expected, there came the click of the lighter.  She had lit the other end of the horn.  This was even less relaxing than the globes on the feet.  It sounded as if she were holding an ear trumpet over a bowl of Rice Crispies, and Lord, how big the flame looked in my peripheral vision!  I could feel the heat of it on my cheek, and knew it was burning closer all the time.  After perhaps 15 seconds she blew it out and re-inserted it in the other ear.  This time the flame was even closer, of course, but Juen withdrew it before it could scorch me.

        For some reason the flame refused to be extinguished this time, so Juen placed the horn, still burning, in a thick glass ashtray beside my chair.  She then took up one arm and began to work on that.  I tried to relax, wondering how one might conveniently remove soot marks from the ears.

        Perhaps half a minute later there was a loud crack and tinkling of glass as the ashtray shattered from the heat of the flaming horn.  Juen provided a running commentary in Chinese, and finally smothered the horn by throwing my damp facial mask over the smoldering remains.  Then she tittered, which I found most alarming of all, as if it were the most amusing thing in the world to have an ashtray explode at one’s elbow.  She said something, still giggling, which I can only imagine was along the lines of, “Boy, it’d smart to get a shard of that in your eye, wouldn’t it?”

        But she attended to business now—the normal sort I had come to expect in massages—and I started to relax again.  She had me remove my shirt and flip over, and for a while she did a creditable job soothing tense muscles in my back.  Then she left the room and returned with what looked like a tackle box.  This boded ill.

        Lying face-down, I didn’t see much of what happened after that, so I can only report what it felt and sounded like.  She first put what seemed to be a thick cloth mat over my back, and then draped a lighter cloth on top of that.  Next I heard the ominous sound of her spray bottle as she squeezed the trigger again and again over me—for hours, it seemed.  I thought of Montag, in Fahrenheit 451, hosing down books with kerosene.  Then there came a pause as she weighed her words.

        “When it is hot, tell me.”

        “Uh, what are you—?“ I began.

        “Don’t move your body,” she added, enunciating slowly and clearly.

        “Not a smidge.”

        I heard the click of the lighter, and a bright, quavering glow leapt up in the room, as if a centenarian’s birthday cake had just appeared.  Plainly, some sort of pyre was now alight on my back.  I could have read by the illumination, if I’d had a book. 

        It’s strange, the thoughts you have at times like these—I mean times when absolutely nothing in your previous years of existence gives you any guidance on how to behave.  A random phrase swam up through my consciousness from those faraway years at Cherry Chase Elementary:  “Stop, drop, and roll.”  Well sure, if it comes to that, why not? 

        From the tops of my eyes it looked as if Juen were waving her hands, but I couldn’t tell how or why.  I waited for her to say something (“Oh shit!  Oh shit!”), and was reassured when she didn’t.  Nor had there been a shriek and clatter of fleeing feet—good signs, these.  But then, as my back began to roast a new thought occurred:  “Disgruntled employee?” I asked myself.  What better way to tell the boss to go to hell than by calmly bar-be-queing a foreigner in the main parlor?  (“Let him try to get the smell of that out!  Ha!”)  And there had been that disconcerting giggle when the ashtray went off like a grenade.  Perhaps not an entirely full deck here, young Juen.

        But meanwhile my back was beginning to smoke, and I wondered how long I was expected to hold out.  Newspaper headlines formed themselves unbidden in my imagination:

Massage Business Gutted by Fire:  Foreigner Blamed

“He moved his body,” worker says

        “Uh, it’s getting a bit warm,” I remarked, and Juen instantly flipped the mat up over the flame, snuffing it.  I was enormously relieved, of course, and she, of course, repeated the process twice more.  She wasn’t disgruntled, I decided.  She just wanted to give me my money’s worth, and perhaps she had a marshmallow that she was determined to finish toasting.

        But eventually it ended and I heaved one or perhaps two relieved sighs.  Then I heard the click of the tackle box being opened, and a line from a movie flashed through my mind:  “What fresh new hell is this?”  There was the tinkle of jostling glass, and I turned my head to see Juen extracting hundreds (apparently) of the small globes my feet had met previously.  This was clearly the grand finale, so I turned my face down again and dumbly waited for what was to come. 

        It didn’t take long:  the click of the lighter, and a moment later I felt a very sharp pinch on the lower right side of my back; another click and a matching pinch on the left.  And so on, marching up my back, until there were eight or ten globes, each trying to suck up as much of me as they possibly could.  Now, dear reader, please think back to the tormentor of your childhood—the one who loved to pinch you just to see your reaction.  Maybe it was a teasing uncle, or maybe a sworn enemy at school.  Think how you writhed under their ministrations and tried to get away.  Now imagine that feeling multiplied by eight or ten up and down your back—strong, cruel, tireless pinches that never weaken or move off the spot that they’ve seized.  I shifted slightly—I couldn’t help it—and discovered I now sounded like a woeful wind chime, as the globes clinked against one another.

        “How, uh, long do they stay there?”  I tried to sound conversational, unconcerned.

        “Ten minutes.”

        “Ten minutes!?”

        “Okay, okay.  Five minutes.”

        “Ah, God.”  I took deep breaths and tried to distract myself with memory exercises, but those five minutes still dragged out interminably.

        “It’s very red,” Juen said after a while, just making small talk.  “Very red.”

        “I’m sure it is,” I conceded, and we lapsed into silence again.

        At last, pop, pop, pop, off came the globes, and I heard Juen replacing them in the tackle box.  I turned over and looked wanly at her.  I was as relaxed as a person might be when leaving a bruising but walk-away car wreck.

        “Okay, that’s all,” she told me, and then remembered something.  “Oh, 24 hour, don’t—“ She made scrubbing gestures on her arms.  “It’s not good for your healthy—for your body.”

        “Don’t wash.  Absolutely,” I agreed immediately.  “Give the tissues a chance to re-attach themselves.  No point losing flesh unnecessarily.”

        “Okay, that’s all!” she repeated, smiling.

        The hostess was smiling too, as I paid, and she delivered the speech she had clearly been rehearsing.  “We welcome you back to our massaging!”

        I smiled warmly in return.  “Yes!  Don’t hold your breath!”

        This pleased her.  “Sank you!”

        “You’re most welcome.”

        Back home I stripped off my shirt in front of the mirror to see what hath Juen wrought, and my mouth dropped open.  There on my back were two rows of tennis-ball-sized hickies, the worst the color of ripe bing cherries.  “My God, I’m disfigured!” I sputtered, probing them gingerly to see if they might not be just hideous illusions.  I had seen these marks before, on men in the dressing rooms of other massage establishments, and had assumed they were the symptoms of some horrible disease—perhaps the consequences of a lifetime of debauchery.  But now I had them, and I understood.  I had paid good money for them, moreover.

        That was last week, and these souvenirs are still visible, though mercifully fading now.  Still, I have decided not to contract for any more massages here in Jinan—the practitioners are too addicted to pyrotechnics for my taste.  I’ll save my money for Thailand or Vietnam where the only things they set fire to are perhaps candles for ambience and the occasional stick of sandalwood incense.

Brew-haha!

        Here is a piece of advice if you ever want to do something in China—go out to dinner, say, or buy an electronic gadget, or visit a park or a museum:  multiply the amount of time such an errand would take back home by five, and you should be fine—assuming that “back home” isn’t somewhere else in China.  I say this in light of visa issues that have beset me since September 1st, when the Chinese government changed their policies: I now have to get the more costly and time-consuming Z visa, instead of the one I had previously been told to get.  A Chinese friend once did a study contrasting learning styles and expectations of British and Chinese students.  I can’t remember all her results, but I recall that one of her findings was that Chinese students have a “much higher tolerance for uncertainty” than their British (and, I daresay, American) counterparts.  No argument here!  A Chinese worker, coming to the UK, wouldn’t bat an eye at similar visa tribulations, whereas, for the first time in my life a doctor has recently convinced me to start taking blood-pressure medication.  Coincidence?  Possibly, but it’s still good prophylactic medicine since I apparently will be facing more uncertainty as I head back to China soon—if not quite as soon as anticipated.  Still, the place has some compensations, one of which I wish to touch on now. 

        In an article published the same day as the infamous visa changes referred to above, the BBC world service ran an article calling the U.K. “Europe’s ‘Addictions Capital.’”  And it kind of hit home with me because, frankly, I am part of the problem—I’m an addict.  Moreover, I don’t know if it is an aggravating or extenuating fact to say that I didn’t even acquire my addiction here; I brought it with me from China, along with the means of satisfying it.  To cut it short, I’m hooked on Chinese tea; I adore the stuff.  And no, it isn’t just a myth or a stereotype that a lot of tea is drunk there—it really is true.  When I landed here last November, I was carrying about 2 kgs (4.4 lbs) of various kinds of tea, unsure of its availability here in the U.K.

        In China, shops selling all sorts of tea are still found everywhere, from upscale shopping malls to dusty back streets of every city and town.  In addition to tea proper, there are a number of herbal infusions, as they are sometimes known, made of the dried leaves, bark, and especially the dried flowers of many different plants.  Some of these are drunk merely for the pleasant taste, but most are reputed to have medicinal properties.  Rosebud tea is apparently a big seller, though I haven’t tried it.  My personal favorite among the herbals is chrysanthemum tea, which makes a splendid mug before bedtime.  The same friend who conducted the study above also introduced me to “exploding pod tea.”  That’s not it’s real name—I don’t know what that is—but it is a mixture of various dried flowers, seeds, sugar crystals and whatnot, plus one specimen of what looks like a pecan in the shell.  But when you pour a few pots of boiling water over this “pecan,” it bursts open like the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and releases a gelatinous mass that resembles eel spawn.  But it’s delicious, and it’s also wonderfully soothing to a croaky throat, so we keep a few packets on hand for the winter months.

        There are many varieties and grades of regular tea (Camellia sinensis—the name gives away its Chinese origins, and China is still the world’s leading tea producer), of course, but I lack both the space and the expertise to go into that extensively—mostly I lack the expertise.  But I will just mention a couple of my favorites because, to quote the international credo of the ignorant, “I don’t know much, but I know what I like.”

        First there is green tea, which seems to be preposterously good for you.  According to Wikipedia,

Recent studies suggest that green tea may help reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and some forms of cancer, promote oral health, reduce blood pressure, help with weight control, improve antibacterial and antivirasic activity, provide protection from solar ultraviolet light, increase bone mineral density, and have "anti-fibrotic properties, and neuroprotective power."

Test results are still pending on claims that drinking green tea also increases your odds of winning the lottery and makes you irresistible to would-be lovers.  Me, I just like the mild nutty flavor, especially since I learned how to make it properly.  Apparently the reason my green tea was often bitter in my pre-China days was that the water was too hot.  I found out that the proper way to make it is to boil water and then let it cool to 75 to 80 °C (167 to 176 °F) before pouring it over the tea.

        But as much as I love the green teas, my heart, or at least my palate, belongs to pu’er (or pu-erh) tea, most of which comes from Yunnan province.  How to describe it?  Have you ever held a handful of dark, loamy earth that was so rich—and smelled so rich—that you could almost imagine a bean or a tomato plant sprouting before your eyes and starting to push out leaves?  What would a tea taste like, brewed out of earth such as that?  That’s easy:  it would be horrible, of course—full of muck, and grit, and pebbles, and decomposing cabbage leaves, and bits of earthworms.  But imagine if you could brew a tea that tasted as good and wholesome as that earth smelled.  Well, that’s pu’er.  And unlike green tea, it needs boiling water to bring out its best flavor.  Some people actually throw the tea into the pot and boil it together with the water.  It never goes bitter—at least, I have never tasted bitter pu’er.  Moreover, you can repeatedly pour boiling water into the pot, and pour out cup after cup of delicious tea.

        The pu’er I buy normally comes in disk form, as shown, wrapped in paper. 

Like good wine, it improves with age, or so I am told.  To make the tea you break off a piece from the disk and place it in a teapot of the size that children used to use when hosting play tea parties, and you pour boiling water over it. 

  

This first dousing is merely to “wash” the tea, however, and is instantly poured away.  You then add more boiling water, and this is what you pour into cups for drinking.  This is done immediately—there is no need for steeping the tea, although doing so does no harm; as I say, it does not go bitter.  The Chinese drink this tea in small cups—some the size of an egg cup—but I play the western philistine and have mine in a standard coffee mug.  But you can keep adding boiling water over and over, especially if you are using good-quality pu’er, and pour off mug after mug of splendid tea.

        But it’s not all deliciousness and reduced blood pressure when it comes to Chinese beverages, of course; there must be a dark side, a yin to the tea’s yang.  And this is baijiu—pronounced, with amazing appropriacy, “By Joe!”  It literally means “white liquor” or “white wine,” but really it is simply distilled malevolence, bottled evil.  The Chinese seem to regard it as the pinnacle of alcoholic spirits but in this, as in much else, they are mistaken.  I’ve tried it twice—the first time out of curiosity (I had heard so much about it), and I regretted the experiment for most of the next day. 

        The second time it was part of a special dinner, and I was assured that this was “good baijiu.”  Still, it tasted the same as it had during my first encounter, which is to say as if it had just been decanted from a Coleman fuel can.  My companions made sure my glass was never less than half full, so I got a fair dose.  I never became drunk; all I felt was a sort of increasing dullness or boredom stealing over me, a realization that I didn’t really have anything interesting to say, and was not much interested in the conversation of my dinner companions either.  But I do recall with perfect clarity everything we talked about.  Even so, my friends seemed a bit worried about how much I had taken on board, so they insisted on walking me home, actually taking my arm as we crossed the road.

        The real baijiu adventure was the next day, however, with the most singular hangover I’ve ever experienced.  Its main feature was an incapacitating mental torpidity, as if I had been somehow painlessly concussed.  Just as I hadn’t been drunk the previous night, so now I didn’t feel sick or have a headache.  Instead I just felt as if half of my brain had been removed, and the remaining portion wasn’t up to much.  It was impossible to concentrate on anything, or rather, my mind would just attach itself to one small subject and think three or four simple thoughts about it, refusing to move on to anything else.  And those three or four notions would chase each other around in my brain repetitively like a tedious carousel.  This went on all day; productive work was entirely out of the question.  It was a profoundly disturbing glimpse of what life as a member of congress must be like, and I have given baijiu a very wide berth since then.

        So that’s a brief taste of what’s brewing in China.  I still have a lot of tea left over because when I came away I didn’t know if I would ever be going back.  Now I need to find it an appreciative home, since I do not intend to carry it back with me, coals-to-Newcastle-fashion.

Five Years In – Coming Full Circle…

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." ...

Five years ago next month we left Bainbridge Island, WA our home of 20-years with a plan, or at least guidelines for our new semi-itinerant lifestyle.  Our goal was to live our retirement before retiring and without digging into any retirement savings, to live in interesting places rather than merely visiting as tourists, to work and pay our taxes but to not put down roots.  The latter, of course, meant travelling light and moving-on with reasonable periodicity: a reasonable minimum stay in each country would be one year with a maximum of two.  Five years in, how have we fared in adhering to these guidelines?

On the first two points I think we deserve top marks.  We’ve succeeded in  enjoying a premature retirement having visited some of the wonders of the world, lived for many months of the year under sunny skies, shared some fine cultural experiences, and enjoyed a pretty free and easy life-style, all while keeping our savings account in the black and on a slight upward trajectory.  But what about our third guideline which stipulates a  ‘minimum of one-year, maximum of two’ in each country?  Well here we have been less successful: we spent two years and three months in Australia, then five months in Vietnam followed by eight months in China (me), and fifteen months in China (Steve).   My plan on arriving in England last year was to increase our average by sojourning for two years here but, sadly, it is not to be – so much for plans…  While I was busy planning, others around me were reaching their own conclusions about life - Natasha came to the realisation that her  university supervisor was never going to secure funding for her to complete her PhD at Oxford, while Steve discovered that he doesn’t enjoy living in England.   Too bad because I’m thoroughly enjoying being back in my homeland and love my job at the Jenner Institute!

And so, five years into our adventure we are going to loop back and return to the beginning – to Australia!  (We will follow our daughter who will undertake a CSIRO-funded PhD at Monash University.)  However, we will return measurably altered by our experiences and, inevitably, our second sojourn in this amazing country will be different.  When we arrived in Melbourne in October 2008 it was with a sense of adventure but also anxiety - would we be able to find somewhere to stay?  How did banking work in a foreign country?   How would we file taxes and obtain visas?   How did the health system work?  How would we get around?  I laugh at these trivial concerns now.  Five years on we’ve negotiated a rental in Hanoi (albeit one with decidedly dubious plumbing); managed to get non-convertible currencies (Vietnamese Dong and Chinese Yuan) out of their mother countries; dealt with the tax systems in several countries (or, rather, our fabulous accountant has); managed to secure a series of rabies shots for Steve in Hanoi when he got  bitten by a dog, and ridden in, and on, a huge variety of vehicles from motorbikes to rickety buses to tuk tuks.  Returning to Australia will be easy from the practical perspective!  But how have we changed as people, and how will these changes become manifest on our return?  I’m concerned that we’ve lost the ability to commit to a place.  It’s too easy, once one gets into this peripatetic mindset, to just up sticks and move on when things get difficult eg. when Steve finds himself missing the exoticism of Asia.  We didn’t want to put down tap roots in a place, but it was not our goal to become incapable of establishing rootlets!

On the plus side, travelling has allowed us to establish what is really important to us as individuals.  I’ve learnt that I can’t live in an environment without external intellectual stimulus – I thrive in a city like Oxford where there is easy access to the arts, public lectures and an educated populace.  However, I’ve also learnt that I can’t handle long, grey British winters!  Surprisingly, food is more important to me than I had thought – endless meals of greasy, stringy chicken, rice, and fibrous greens in China got me really depressed.  I know now that food can affect one’s mental well-being and it makes me wonder how any child subsisting on rice alone can focus on their studies in school and be happy at home.  For his part, Steve has learnt that he thrives on the external stimulus of ‘exoticism’.  I’ll let him define in a later blog exactly what this means to him.  Will he be able to cope in staid Melbourne even though it’s an intensely cosmopolitan city?  Will constant interaction with his EFL students be enough to sate his desire for the exotic?  Or will he be forever mourning the absence of excitement and colour in the street and the sights and smells of street vendors?  I worry that he has been alienated from the Western world forever!

In my last blog, written over a year ago, I related my feelings about coming ‘home’ and ended with that timeless Tolkien quote: ‘Not all those who wander are lost.’  Now I’m forced to the realisation that we might be!  It is common knowledge that travel provides the traveller unrivalled insights into the world and, more importantly, into themselves.  (I am reminded again of Tolkien’s oeuvre and of the changes Sam and Frodo underwent during their journey.)  Knowing oneself and one’s personal priorities in life is a key first step, but finding a place where one can live once these personal discoveries have been made is an even bigger second step.  Let’s not forget that in the end Frodo never could settle in the Shire after returning from his adventures  but sailed away with the elves.  Maybe it’s not those who wander that we should worry about, for indeed, they aren’t lost; instead it’s the wanderers who return who need guidance!

What a Long, Strange Trip it’s Turned Into

The man who says, “I’ve got a wife and kids” is far from home; at home he speaks of Japan.  But he does not know—how could he?—that the scenes changing in the train window from Victoria Station to Tokyo Central are nothing compared to the change in himself.  

        And so, back to China. 

        This is Steve once more; it’s extremely unlikely that Kathryn will ever write or utter those five words—she left with such strong dislike for the country.  But changes are afoot again, so it seems a good time to bring things up to date here. 

        I realize that as far as The Herald is concerned I never left China, though in fact I did, in November, 2012.  I have been living in England since then—mostly in Oxford, but with a two-month stint in London while doing the DELTA, a murderous, advanced teaching course from which I am still recovering three months after its conclusion.

        The epigraph above is from The Great Railway Bazaar, by Paul Theroux, my current read, and if you substitute Chinese references for the Japanese, you would have a good thumbnail sketch of my mindset at this point.  The nearly 10 months in the UK have not been a happy time for me:  England and I seem to rub each other the wrong way now.  But I don’t want to dwell on that because it might upset someone—several someones, in fact.

        Instead I’ll write about my best day in England, which was yesterday and began, unpromisingly, with a mild hangover.  But I was determined to get out and indulge in one of the real pleasures of living in Britain, which is the opportunity to go for a long ramble in storybook countryside.

        I don’t know if you could say that the footpaths and bridleways are the unsung glories of Britain, but I would argue that they are at least undersung.  According to beenthere-donethat.org.uk, England and Wales alone contain more than 140,000 miles (225,000 kilometers) of these public rights of way, but if you asked people to identify an attractive feature of Britain I would guess that many more would name Keira Knightley, say, than would mention the footpaths.  I think that’s a shame.

        What splendid encounters these paths provide with the checkerboard English landscape, after all.  The hills are gentle (in Oxfordshire, at any rate), and so the views are generally modest, but what of that?  What you can see is so pleasing to the eye—the deep green of the oaks and beeches; the blazing red of the hawthorn and rowan berries; the dark burgundy of the ripening elderberries; and the tawny mown grass, lying in fragrant rows, waiting to be gathered into hay bales.  And because the vista is never too distant, ramblers are not intimidated by insurmountable miles to cover.  This keeps a spring in the step, and every few minutes one is rewarded with fresh prospects by passing through a gap in a hedge or rounding a stand of trees.  I cannot understand why these paths are not talked up more in the tourist books.

        Here is a network of trails, after all, that would stretch more than halfway to the moon; they give access to some of Britain’s loveliest scenery, and they provide pedestrian connections between remote settlements.  They are a legacy of the days when people went most places by foot or on horseback, and so most of these paths are actually over private land (I’ve been unable to find by what proportion).  But since they have been used for centuries by the tramping commoners, the right to continue doing so has been grandfathered in and codified, much to the credit of British law.

        And because these rights of way pass over private land, you are often walking among grazing cattle or sheep, or across cultivated fields—in fact, the law specifically gives walkers the right to pass through planted crops, provided they (the walkers) stick as closely as possible to the designated rights of way.  This I did yesterday at one point, then had a rest as I sat at the edge of the field and emptied my boots and socks of all the seeds and burrs they had accumulated during the crossing.  It took some time. 

        In other fields I encountered young cattle that were clearly unused to having a human being on their side of the hedge.  The stragglers bolted when they saw me approaching, only to collect some friends and return in my direction at a trot that would have been unsettling if it hadn’t been clear that they were just curious.  Playing the good hosts, they maintained a courteous distance and saw me safely to the stile at the far end of their pasture.  I’ve since had a suspicion confirmed, which is that bulls of a certain age (10 months, it turns out) are banned from fields crossed by these paths. 

        During my 13-mile (21-kilometer) walk yesterday from Thame to Oxford I encountered rabbits, pheasants, quail, kites, and swans, but only one other trekker—a solitary fellow who was some distance ahead of me and soon took a different path.  On the one hand this perplexed me, since the breezy, sunny weather was absolutely made for rambling, and I couldn’t imagine what better use everyone else had found for such a day.  But whatever it was I was glad they were at it, because it left me at large on my own in the countryside, free to astonish the livestock by singing some of my favorite tunes at them as I passed through.

        But I need to get my fill of such things while I can because, as mentioned above, I’m headed back to China—in just over three weeks, as a matter of fact.  This time it is on a two-month contract in Jinan, Shandong province.  Jinan is in the north of China, on the Yellow River and is closer to Beijing than Guangzhou, where I was before.  At 4.4 million people, it is among the top-20 cities in China by population, but only just. My contract ends in mid-December.  “What then?” you ask.  More change, of course:  watch this space.