bleungberg.com

New year’s greetings from Hong Kong.

The week before, it was Japan and everything great about it. To follow up – China. But first, allow us to make one thing clear - we were there for less than 72 hours, saw about 0.00000001% of the country - the port city of Qingdao (a day), Ji’nan (a whole afternoon), Guangzhou (much longer that anyone would want) and Shenzhen (barely five minutes) - and encountered a mere fraction of its billion-plus people. Our views are thus completely inaccurate, biased and not at all bitter and which many of you will no doubt disagree with. So, here goes: China is the most uncivilised, disgusting and unscrupulous place Bleungberg’s ever, ever been to. Period.

In our opinion, people who spit everywhere on the streets, blow their noses into the air, pick their noses in public are uncivilised. When people are doing these en masse, into your direction, onto your pathway, right in front of you – well, that’s beyond despicable. When walking along the street, we shouldn’t have to duck violently left or right because a new spit suddenly lands in our pathways, right? Unfortunately, people didn’t care – this is normal!

This wasn’t unexpected - we’d been repeatedly warned about these by people in Hong Kong - but to see it all on such a widespread, carefree and indiscriminate scale was both disturbing and bitterly disappointing. We’d thought that China had dragged itself into the 21st century - at least in urban areas - but it clearly hadn’t. These ’secondary’ cities were nothing but a series of ’shitholes’ – people’s phlegm everywhere – even frozen ones after a frosty night – along with dog shit, human waste, industrial pollutants, black fumes from cars and factories alike - all there for us to see and breathe in. No wonder we found the place to be so intolerable.

Added to these were utter chaos and unruly behaviour at the various train stations, dirty restaurants, unscrupulous hoteliers (some masseuses mysteriously appeared outside my hotel bedroom on New Year’s Eve), Nazi-like railway staff, counterfeit money being bandied around and everyone else seemingly trying to screw you over and we’d soon decided enough was enough. For the first time ever, Bleungberg curtailed a trip and headed straight for the border with Hong Kong – a 24-hour ride away by train. We could’ve stopped off in Shanghai or Nanjing along the way but by then, we’d seen, heard, smelt, experienced enough, and we were desperate to get out. Honestly, we’d never ever been so happy to see Hong Kong before. “Civilisation!”, we exclaimed.

For sure, Hong Kong’s people can be a little haughty when it comes to discussing relations with their mainland cousins, and we desperately wanted to like what we saw in China. But we’re just struggling to have anything nice to say about the country where we welcomed in 2009. In future, as we visit the bigger cities or more remote parts of China, our views will change, and we have no doubt that we will only grow to like it. But for immediate comparisons with the cleanliness and faux-politeness of Japan (many spitters there) and the rough-and-rustic charms of the South Koreans (who also spat everywhere but at least they were civilised), going to China requires too much of an effort, and is best left for another time.

Sadly, all these leave no room for South Korea, which was outstanding, cheap, fun, safe, tasty and decent. The cities aren’t particularly attractive, but its people were very agreeable and we have no hesitation in saying they are a solid bunch of individuals, who’ve been dealt rather too harshly by history.