Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

Yesterday I was locked out of my room, only dressed in a towel.

What happened was, I’d gone to the communal shower next door and the key card wouldn’t let me back in because it was after twelve and I hadn’t paid for that day. So I had to schlep down three sets of stairs and past the bar and over the little bridge in the courtyard to reception.

Sometimes in hotels, they have the reception staff on a raised step, so they’re that little bit taller. Well when I first got in here, I assumed that the receptionists were all standing in a ditch, they looked that titchy. But no, they really are, all three of them, about four foot five.

So I’m looking down over the desk and put on a bemused/embarrassed expression, expecting hilarity or, worse, sympathy, but they’re like, oh right, towelled foreigner, locked out, go follow that guy. It would seem it happens all the time.

The reason I’d left it so late to shower was cause I went out the night before with my friend, a journo with the CHINA DAILY, and I was a bit hungover.

He took me to his neighbourhood bar, on the way underlining the fact that we were only going there because the landlord gave him free beer. It was called THE EAGER BEAVER and there was ultimate fighting on the TV and the bar was lined with haggard ex-pats and a couple of bargirls tried to keep things lively.

A cheap and easy conversation starter is weird Chinese English, Chinglish. I told him I’d just eaten a packet of nuts labelled CASHEW SAVAGENESS, and described my bemusement at seeing a sign outside Citibank saying VAN GOGH PREFERRED BANKING (did he? Really? Was he, in fact, frustrated by the hidebound life of a painter and yearned for the self expression provided by office work?).

He told me of a CHINA DAILY story concerning a guy whose fiance had been put into a coma by a car crash and he went ahead and married her anyway. The CHINA DAILY reported this moving human interest tale under the headline MAN MARRIES VEGETABLE.

Of course, it happens the other way around too. Britney Spears wanted to get ‘mysterious’ tattooed in Chinese characters on her stomach but what it actually says is qiguai – weird.

He’s had enough of Chinese journalism but doesn’t know what to do instead. They give you a flat and a decent wedge but it’s not exactly satisfying, not with the communist party rep breathing down your neck all the time. He looked at this worn out guy across the bar, who was in there every night, and said he didn’t want to look like that in twenty years time. The ex-pat life, he said with acid understatement, does not breed contentment.

***

Right in the middle of the city there’s a swanky skyscraper hotel, the Marriott, and its shaped just like Saruman’s castle off Lord of the Rings, a big spiked claw, and it’s got a Ferrari dealership and the lobby is all steel pillars and gleaming floor. But just behind it there’s a shabby alleyway where the old folk shuffle about in their pyjamas and you can buy steamed buns or a fighting cricket in a bamboo cage. And my youth hostel is in this alley.

I’ve got a nice little room. I can’t believe I used to do all this living in dormitories. I must be getting old, I need some privacy, and I’ve got so much stuff, it explodes all over the place. I added to it today by buying a phone and yet more maps and notebooks. I also bought a bike, but the staff said I could keep it in the ‘self kitchen’. I got it at Carrefour, it’s yellow and it folds up so, in theory, I can put it in a cab when I get knackered. I’ll test the theory tomorrow.