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Name: Scott
Country: China
Birthday: 6/29/1984
Gender: Male
Interests: Writing, Journalism, Fencing, Kendo, Various other martial arts, annoying people who really deserve it, Roleplaying, Masquerading as a responsible member of adult society while still clinging to the last vestiges of a student lifestyle
Expertise: Area of expertise? making a fool of myself in public places, I'd imagine. That and making spontaneous life-changing decisions merely because I can, often taking me to various wild and wacky places in far-flung parts of the world.
Occupation: Teaching, and travelling!
Industry: Media
Message: message meEmail: email me
Member Since:
5/6/2001
 Lifetime
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| China Blog: Day 607
15:55 Beijing Time
Phrase of the Day: Wo de jia shi zhen de tai mang. (My life is far too busy.)
Promises, promises, promises. This blog is full of 'em, and I constantly fail to deliver. So no more promises - I'm finally oing to admit that I can't update this blog regularly, and that as of today, updates will be sporadic. I will try (and I do, honest) but I cannot guarantee any kind of regular posting schedule, at least while I'm in China.
Fio's in the States at the moment, hanging out with her family after Book Expo of America. She's back on Wednesday, but it's the first time we've been apart since we moved in together and I must confess to it being kinda strange. I've gotten so used to having her sharing my living space that our apartment seems huge when I'm there on my own. I've done my usual routine of moving the laptop into the bedroom and living in one room only. It's weird, going back to my bachelor lifestyle again. Anyone who's ever heard Cleatus T. Judd's It's A Great Day To Be A Guy will know how I feel - having the house to myself has been fun, but I'm over it now and just want her to come back.
One thing I will say - I've become a whole lot tidier since I've lived with Fio. The house is spotless right now.
I'm glad she got a holiday. She was getting too stressed being in Beijing, and needed the break. I just wish I could have gone with her. I love her parents, and I still have to meet her sisters. I can't say I'm not jealous of her getting away - I'd rather be anywhere else other than Beijing in the summer. The humidity is killing me. I don't function in the heat - the second the thermometer goes above 30 degrees celsius my brain shuts down, my energy reserves become non-existent and my ability to pay attention to anything disappears faster than the Labour Party's chances of winning the next general election.
Add to that the fact that right now, I'm churning out around 25,000 words of articles and book work a month, plus all my editing and tuition, and it leads to one braindead Scott. I have absolutely no idea where my head is at the moment, and I feel like I'm getting through life on autopilot because higher brain functions such as thought, creativity and sleep don't seem to want to play.
Anyway, enough of my worryingly-deteriorating mental state. The last few months have been a whirl of writing and general insanity - I've met and interviewed Kevin Rudd, the Australian PM, resumed my Naval officer's application after long months of regret, knuckled down to work on my second book,and set up a monthly Book Swap and Board Games event in an attempt to bring the gaming community here together.
News and journalism in China in general is dominated by the Sichuan earthquake. The death toll has almost topped 70,000, and still some places haven't been reached. An estimated 20,000 are still missing. The whole affair is heartbreaking - and for me, it hits a particularly personal level. When I was writing the Sichuan guidebook, I spent a lot of time in Wenchuan county, the epicentre of the quake, and to see places where I'd stayed and met the people get trashed was.... I can't describe. In fact, I really don't want to talk about it right now.
I'm kinda beat, and I'm at the Book Swap now, so I'm gonna cut this short. I'll try and put an update up on Tuesday - I'm headed back to Changchun tomorrow for a few days so I should be much more relaxed and able to write a verbose, witty entry and not just waffle on like I appear to have been guilty of repeatedly over the past few months.
I may also attempt to recount some of my stranger experiences and wacky adventures.
I can't promise.... but I will try.
Zai Jian, guys!
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| China Blog: Day 52810:14 Beijing Time
Phrase Of The Day: Qi guai ji shu yue (A strange few months...)
Hey there, folks! Been a while, huh? In truth, I just seem to have lost the blog bug lately. I think it's a combination of the hassle of breaking through the Great Firewall every time I want to post, and writing for a living anyway. I never thought I'd find myself saying this, but I just couldn't be bothered to blog, and I think this has been a large part of my unhappiness here in Beijing.
So from here on in, I'm going to make a special effort to blog regularly once again. Whether I will succeed has yet to be seen. One thing I do know - this weekend I'll be putting up a bunch of pics on Flickr, and I'll post 'em here.
For a quick summation of my life in the past five months, my co-author and I finished writing the Sichuan book back in October. Since then it's been a nightmare getting the damn thing to publication, and now the final release is caught up in a dispute between Sam and Myra, our publisher. More to come on THAT story later. Once the manuscript was finished I embarked upon a brief career as a freelancer, writing for That's Beijing and a few other places, before landing a job as Editor-in-Chief at Bilingual Time, China's largest bilingual current affairs magazine.
Outside of the professional life, Fio and I got engaged back in December.We've not set a date yet - heck, we don't even know where we'll be in six months - but at the moment we're considering a destination wedding in Thailand.
Okay, I think that's most of the important stuff covered. Now, back to the blogging!
It's odd being in Beijing at the moment, particularly working in the media. In the run-up to the Olympics, the city is developing this almost-palpable aura of excitement and anticipation that seems to be ever-present. Now that the bitter Dongbei winds of the winter months are drawing to a close and we have a brief grace period before the sandstorm season kicks in, Beijing's starting to look really nice.
Except, of course, for the ever-present haze of smog that blankets the place. This weekend we had a rugby tournament and, by some miracle of nature, had the most beautiful clear blue sky I've seen in Beijing, ever:
Y'see what I mean? That's a sky worthy of Somerset, right there. Everyone I spoke to commented on it - there were even a bunch of lads who flew out from London for the tournament who were amazed at how clear the air was. I was chatting to one of the players and he said "All we hear about back home is how dirty and polluted the air in China is. I'm shocked at how clear the weather is today."
This spell of clear weather lasted right up until Tuesday morning, at which point that delightful cloud of particulates came rolling back into town:
And this is a fairly mild case. I swear, the pollution is Beijing's biggest problem, and the main reason why I dislike living here. Beijing is a beautiful city, and on a nice clear day it's a fantastic place for a stroll. Even on the slightly-smoggy days (like today) it's not too bad - I've certainly seen worse in China. But when the smog really settles, this place is hell on earth. Pollution headaches, black snot and runny eyes are all far too common here. It's a shame, because the smog really does kill the beauty of this city. I'd like to see how they deal with it during the Olympics, too.... I'm not sure if even the drastic measures they have in place (taking half the cars off the road, using artillery to lob silver iodide into the sky to make it rain, etc.) are going to be enough to guarantee the month of "blue sky days" China has promised during the Olympics. We can but hope, eh?
Speaking of the Olympics, yet more calls to boycott them from Reporters Sans Frontieres and the French Government, adding their voices to German Athletes and... er... Richard Gere over the clashes in Tibet this week. News from Tibet has been fairly sketchy thanks to the massive crackdown on journalists reporting from the region, but a couple have made it past the police checkpoints and the security cordon around the area. Thing is, despite the claims of heavy-handedness, in a lot the images I've seen it's the Tibetans who are causing the violence. In this series of photographs from The Guardian, there's not a single shot of the reported "heavy-handed military action", but there's plenty of Han Chinese getting beaten with shoes and sticks. I'm pretty certain China's not blameless for the violence, and I'm sure that the full story hasn't been told, but from what I've seen so far, there's a fair amount of responsibility on both sides for what's kicking off.
That said, some of the YouTube films of the riots and the way they're being handled are pretty damn shocking. It's an ugly situation across the board, and it's something that the Chinese government is going to have to handle pretty damn carefully if they want their beloved Olympics to go off without a hitch. Will a boycott help the Tibetan people? Maybe, maybe not. Beijing has shown that it has absolutely no intention of relinquishing Tibet, or even granting it autonomy - but if anything is going to get thair attention, the Olympics are a good place to start. Should they be used to make a political point? The IOC doesn't want the Olympics used to make political statements, and many would agree that they shouldn't be and that a boycott would be unfair to the athletes, but others argue that this is the only way to make China sit up and take notice.
I'm certainly very interested to see how this plays out.
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| China Blog: Day 373.14:08 Beijing Time
Phrase Of The Day: Qing gongsuo, qing jia, qing shenghuo. (New job, new home, new life.)
So, that proposed "Tomorrow or Sunday" update never materialised. In fact, for most of the past week, we've had major trouble trying to set up our internet access at home, and the damn thing just wouldn't connect. Anyway, I'm here now, and can bring you all up to speed.
I'm back in China, but things are a lot different from when I left. Due to an incredibly bizarre chain of events, I left my job in Changchun and moved to Beijing, where I now live and work. Basically, Fiona moved here in July, to get a real job. While I was at home, I also decided it was time to start on my own career as a serious writer so I casually began replying to adverts on various websites for writing and editing jobs in Beijing. After all, Fiona was here, and we wanted to be together. Also, most of the good writing jobs tend to avoid Changchun, it being a freezing cold and frankly rather small (by Chinese standards) provincial capital that no-one really cares about.
After plenty of rejection, I resigned myself to coming back to Changchun and living out another year as a teacher. So imagine my surprise when, while I was at Bootcamp in August brushing up my Chinese, I received an e-mail from a job I'd applied for over a month ago, asking if I wanted it.
The job?
Writing travel guides to China's provinces, for a company sponsored by the provincial tourist boards.
Well, to cut a very long and stressful story short, I accepted, cut my ties to CCUT (after parting with a very large deal of cash to buy off my contract) and came down to the big smog. That was a month ago.Since then I've spent three weeks backpacking Sichuan doing research for the first book, and more importantly, Fiona and I have finally got our own place together. We have an awesome little flat at the end of the subway line, in an apartment complex built on a platform some 30 feet above ground level. It's amazingly cyber-punky, especially at night when the trains roll past, and because of the location it's dead quiet and peaceful. Well, as peaceful as it gets in Beijing.
I'll be brutally honest to start with: I hate it here. I hate the noise, the smog, and the attitude of the people. I hate the lack of green spaces and animals, and I can't stand the fact that my view consists of nothing but high-rises, factories and construction. Beijing is completely faceless, far too crowded, and desperately ugly to look at.
Yet, all the same, I'm warming to it. There's a lot to do here- I've already found two geek groups to game with, and Fiona and I regularly go out to watch live bands and cinema showings. My job is fantastic- not as glamourous as it sounds, and money's quite scarce, but I work mostly from home and the company office is ten minutes away. And most of all, we have our own place, and every night I get to come back to Fiona, which makes life a lot more bearable.
It's been a few months of major upheaval, but things are settling down now. I'll never like Beijing, that much I know. But for now, it's home. And I'm finally doing what I've always wanted to do with my life.
I'm getting paid to write stuff.
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| :O! At Last! I'm Back!About bloody time too!
Okay, it's late here in Beijing, and I need to go to bed, but I've finally found a way to beat the Great Firewall and write my blog, so tomorrow or Sunday I'll have a full update on my uber-busy life for you!
It's good to be back- I've missed you guys!
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| Welcome To The Land Of The Midnight Sun...In this blog's grand tradition of suddenly appearing, after months with no contact, in some of the oddest parts of the planet, I am coming to you LIVE from Tromso in Northern Norway.
Yes, I know that's just a LITTLE different from China, and somewhat unexpected, but it HAS been nearly four months since my last blog, so you have to expect some minor changes. Such as, y'know. Relocation half-way around the planet.
After so long without a post, it feels great to be blogging again! Months of
being denied my beloved piece of Internet real estate thanks to the Omnipresent
Great Firewall are over!... Well, for six weeks or so. For that time, I'll be busy galavanting around the UK and northern Europe, visiting old Uni friends and what have you. That's why I'm here, actually. I finally got in touch with Espen about six months back, and he invited me over to stay with him and his girlfriend Heidi. So, after a couple of days jeting around the UK, visiteing Nate, Rachel, Dom and the gang in Sunderland, I flew over here yesterday.
So now, I'm sat on Espen's couch in the fair city of Tromso,
in northern Norway. In fact, I'm the farthest north I have ever been in
my life. I can testify to this fact because, since my arrival, the sun
has not gone down. And it won't, until mid-August. 24 hour sunshine is certainly a new experience, and apparently most people have trouble getting to sleep. I was so exhausted I passed out around 1, but tonight we'll wait and see what happens.
Espen has possibly the most beautiful view I have ever seen. His front window looks out over a clear blue river, with mountains and pine forests in the distance. It's absolutely gobsmacking, and I can't believe how lucky I am to be here. I was expecting to come up and have to dress up like an eskimo, but apparently we are having one of the best summers they've ever had up here. I honestly can't do it justice in words.
Seeing the guys again has been excellent. I spent four days with Nate and Rachel in Durham, and met up with Dom, Lex, Robyn, and a few other folk from my time in Sunderland. I revisited all my old haunts, drank and ate in Fitzies, wandered around St. Peter's campus, and got rained on a lot. It was just like living there again!
It has been great being back in the UK. The last few weeks in China were a
mad rush of parental visits, exams, and other insanity- all in the midst of a
goddamn heatwave that knocked you for six the minute you stepped out of the
house. In fact, I ended up practically moving in to Fiona’s apartment for a few
weeks, purely on the strength of her having air conditioning.
Mum and Dad came out at the start of May, and they were
amazed at the differences between the sterilised, tourist-friendly China they saw on their tour and the China that I
live my daily life in. In fact, after seeing Mum pale at the insane traffic and
health and safety inspector’s worst nightmares that I call my favourite
restaurants, I thought they were oing to pack their bags and go home.
To their credit, they stuck it out and learned to like, if
not love, my way of life out there.
The last few months have been really hard work. Since the
start of May, I have had to deal with:
*A severe case of shingles
*A damaged ankle ligament, effectively killing Changchun
RFC’s dream of going to Shanghai
in September due to lack of a coach
*Exams and tests for all of my students
*Testing day for the guys going to Sunderland
*Packing
*Two bouts of la douzi,
*Insane heat & no air-con in my apartment
Luckily, the bloody roaches are still nowhere to be seen.
The hardest thing about being back is that Fio’s still
in China, and relocating to Beijing while I’m away. I miss her, and it sucks. But I’ll see her soon
enough, especially if I can get the cash up together to do bootcamp again.
I'll not write a massive entry about what has happened in the past few months. In quick summary, I've hit 23, re-signed my contract for a second year in Changchun, had a massive birthday booze-up and paintball, and then came home.
I'll try and get a photo blog up tomorrow or so, if I can. Anyway, I gotta go. Lord knows what we've got planned for today, but it's gonna be made of awesome.
Pa gjensyn!
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