SECTION 1: Leaving the UK
On August 27th my second son Max Steven (Good god we actually chose his middle name based upon a cartoon show) Hopkins was born. The following day I saw him and Katy one more time before taking off for, presumably China. Things did not go entirely according to plan. Although you probably know that already. I haven’t actually posted here for quite a few months, Katy’s been far more reliable with that. So I thought I ought to cover what I’ve been up to since I left the UK over 3 months ago. The journey to London was fairly uneventful with arriving in the evening and visiting The Maple Leaf. The Maple Leaf is the preeminent Canadian sports bar in London and about as close to Canada as I’ve been for over a year. The Poutine was not disappointing as somewhere along the line they’ve managed to get their hands on actual Mozzarella cheese curds! Well I say uneventful, but I did kind of take the keys to the Adams’ garage with me. This would be the first of many ordeals on the way back to China.
I had an early night and the next day made my way to China town as quickly as possible to get my first Covid-19 PCR and IBM test done. IBM is an additional test that most countries do not require, it’s blood based and few clinics actually offer it. Making things more complicated was the fact that the Chinese Consulate in the UK only accepts the results of tests done in a select few clinics (Generally clinics which practice Chinese medicine) This makes the test prohibitively expensive at 425 Great British Pounds. The test was quick and painless enough albeit done in a dark and shady half-lit corridor of a side street of China town…so that was weird. Then all I had to do was wait for the results. I dragged my luggage across the city before deciding to just head to the airport and my airport hotel to rest as I knew I wouldn’t be getting much sleep at all for the next few hours. But before this I tried to mail back Robert Adams’ garage key…this did not go well, due to the fact that every post office I dragged myself to was totally shut on a Sunday! I considered going to a Hermes courier station but these were all shut as well. Altogether I spent 3 and a half hours hauling my luggage (Which grew progressively more damaged) across central London before I just gave up and took the train to the airport.
At the airport I checked into my hotel, a fairly small but comfortable room and wandered around the various terminals until finally I found a post box. I managed to find a Boots which sold stamps and bought a ton of them to layer all over the envelope…then I had to find a post box that it could fit into. After several attempts I managed to squeeze it in. I understand that the key eventually made it back to Katy’s family so…winning? Attempts to sleep largely failed as I waited stress-fully for my results from the test to come back. You see to get aboard a flight to China you need to send your negative results to the consulate and fill out a bit of online paper work. They then (Eventually) get to your submission look at the documents and then if it all checks out they give you an animated green QR code which lets you board the flight. I have heard of and experienced this code coming in minutes before boarding the flight. On top of that the code is only good for about 48 hours from when you tested negative. Luckily enough I eventually got my results, submitted them to the consulate in London and began the wait…I was flying out at 7:30 am the next day so I knew I’d be getting up crazy early. In the end I didn’t really sleep but did get my animated health code at about midnight so, all good so far!
Then things went bad.
I got to the airport 3 hours before boarding (fairly easy to do as I was in the right airport already) I went to check in annnd I was told to stand on the side. For about 40 minutes. Eventually I got up the nerve to demand what the heck was going on and I was told I couldn’t fly to my transiting country of Germany because I had no recognized covid-vaccine. In addition my flight was broken across two un-linked airlines. Now I had known this could be a problem and I had called Lufthansa (The first airline I was flying with) several times confirming that I could fly with them to Frankfurt Germany and then transfer (24 hours later) to Shanghai with China Eastern Airlines. The complication is that as I am unvaccinated (Well I had 2 doses of Sinopharm but that doesn’t seem to count) if it’s not the same airline or an airline with a ‘code share’ (alliance) I need to go get my luggage, which I couldn’t possibly do since that would require me to exit the transiting area. Long story short the flight was leaving in an hour and I was being told that I couldn’t fly with them to Germany and that I couldn’t have my flight refunded either. So. That was bad.
I hurriedly contacted a Chinese travel agent and within an hour managed to secure a flight the next day (A bit shocking given the fact that there were no flights online until early October!) at the cost of 38,000 RMB (About 3800 GBP) all with one airline. With a slowly counting down Health Code I took the flight. Luckily I was able to get the second leg of the journey (And far more expensive. Germany – China, about 1,000 GBP vs the 65GBP London to Frankfurt flight) refunded with the clever help of a colleague one Tysone Scott! I left the airport utterly exhausted and checked in at a much cheaper airport hotel not in the terminal but with a shuttle which could get me on the plane in time.
I stayed in a charming little town just outside of Heathrow airport and wandered into town to get snacks for the flight and to kill time. The whole time I did have an overwhelming sense of dread. So far much had gone wrong, I knew that once I got to Coppenhagen Denmark (My new transit hub) I would need to be tested for covid again (With the exact same expensive test as before). What if I caught it by walking into a pub (Which at this point I very much wanted to do). At this point the UK was getting over 30,000 covid cases a day! I wandered into a local pub, saw how packed it was and immediately turned and walked out. To be honest another factor may have been the fact that the only beers they had on offer were Budweiser, Stella and cider…come to think of it, how could that place call itself a pub! I chose to order food via a delivery app and eat like a sad sack in my room. I tried to sleep again. It didn’t take.
The next day I travelled to the airport early as I could, repeated much of the process of the day before and this time, MADE IT ONTO THE PLANE (With about 5 hours left to my health code). The plane was almost entirely Chinese students returning from the UK and I got asked more than a few times if I was in the right line. This became more noticeable when we landed in Copenhagen and the few non-Chinese wandered off to other flights or home. I got into a massive queue of students stretching back and winding around the transit area, all waiting to get our second covid test. This one was a bit cheaper than the one in london’s China Town and a lot less dodgy looking. Albeit still 300 Euros. This was the real danger zone however. Whereas before I had done the test 23 hours before needing the green code, this time I had about 6 hours. Still they were efficient and I did my best to settle my nerves by shelling out another 30 GBP to stay in the first class lounge. Pretty worth it. They had a free shower, a small buffet of food, good internet and a self service beer tap. I summoned up my will power and after having one Carlsberg IPA (They do those in Denmark apparently) I stuck to the juices. I wasn’t going to let intoxication stop me from getting on the next flight. In retrospective it may not have made a difference.
The test results came back about 2 hours before the flight and I uploaded them. Now the wait began. I lined up with the rest of the crowd 50 minutes before departure (Early boarding due to expected issues) and waited still for my green code. In the end I got a call from the Chinese Consulate in Coppenhagen pointing out that I had accidentally not changed the auto-fill for my transit journey which still read Frankfurt! I changed this and within about 30 seconds my green code came in! And then…I was told to wait to board…along with another pair of non-Chinese . Slowly the plane filled up and eventually a kind Danish man approached us. The plane was full. Although we should have boarded already, (About 50 other Chinese people boarded after us) our seats had to be given up due to the complicated fact that nearly none of the Chinese students/passengers had the ability to enter Denmark Visa-Free. Technically speaking if they had booted off Chinese passengers things would have gotten complicated.
I was given 500 Euros cash (A bit over 400 GBP which countered the cost of the test I did which couldn’t be used anymore) and given a bunch of vouchers for free meals in a 4-Star hotel attached to the airport. I was also promised that I would not be booted on the next flight between Copenhagen and Shanghai. Which was in exactly 7 days.
PART 2: STRANDED IN COPENHAGEN
All things considered (And I’ve been told this by multiple people now…) I could have ended up stranded in a far worse place. I managed to land just on the day that all Covid-19 restrictions in Denmark came to an end. So I was presented with the jarring image/reality of no one wearing masks. Or any other sort of minimal restrictions you would have seen in the UK. I had never really made plans to visit Copenhagen before this and thus did the only thing I really knew the city for. The Little Mermaid Statue in Copenhagen harbor. Hans Christian Anderson was a native of this city (The author of the Little Mermaid) and they put this statue up in honor of him and I guess Ariel as well back in the early 1900s. The statue has been defaced/used as a form of protest multiple times including being decapitated…so it sits a bit further out into the water now.
I actually found numerous Little Mermaid sculptures throughout Copenhagen…some better than others.
I was also vaguely aware that Denmark still had an active royal family…mostly due to the slogan for Carlsberg being ‘Under Charter of the Danish Royal Court’. I was not at all prepared for the massiveness and splendor of the Danish Royal Palaces in Copenhagen. The Palace has been rebuilt twice and remodelled three times. First it was a literal defensive castle founded by a warring Bishop of all things. After the current royal family took it over it was heavily renovated into a proper Renaissance-ish castle. Then it kind of caught fire and during the 1600s it was rebuilt again into it’s current design. This place is massive, it makes Buckingham Palace look like a country home. The palace occupies an entire island and features several grand halls, a massive kitchen, a horse track, horse rearing facilities (The Dutch Kings reaaaally loved their horses. So much that they stuffed some of them)
The place was so large that Charles the 4th (Different Charles from the British one) had a smaller castle/mansion built for him a few kms away, Rosenborg castle. It looks like something out of a fantasy film/novel and is quite compact.
That said it houses the Danish royal families crown jewels along with a lot of important relics/collections of stuff the royal family collected at the height of their power in the 17th-18th centuries. Including 3 rather strange silver lions which guard the coronation throne and eventually the remains of the deceased monarch whilst laying in state.
I was also gobsmacked by how much early Qing Dynasty and late ming Porcelain they had. For those not in the know, China at this time was all but utterly shut to the outside world, allowing just a few boats to park in Canton (todays Guangzhou) Only a few dozen ships from all of the western nations made it every year, until that is the industrial revolution kicked into high gear. Thus just having a few plates of ‘Fine China’ as we in the west tend to call it was a great display of wealth. This guy had a dinner set for two dozen people.
After visiting a few royal palaces, I made my way to another one of Copenhagens original touristy landmarks (By touristy I mean the things Europeans from other nations would stop by to go: “Oh my isn’t that nice, I ought to write about that in my diary!” The round tower. It like the current palaces was built in the 17th century and at the time was quite an interesting feat of engineering keeping in mind this thing is 114 meters tall and was built while Shakespeare was still alive.
The insides are particularly fun to walk up. Instead of the stairs you’d expect the path way up is a bunch of cobble stones forming a spiraling walking path to the top.
Interestingly it was built attached to a church (Still operating today), at the time Danish clergy were quite interested in astronomy and constructed it to help further their own and other fledgling astronomers studies. Infact today it is still used by amateur astronomers and features a working modern telescope at the time. I mean, it’s not going to let you see outside our solar system like more potent professional telescopes, but its still pretty cool!
Copenhagen reminded me a lot of Amsterdam. Probably due to two main things. 1. It’s full of beautiful canals and long boats (Albeit not as many canals as Amsterdam), with a big focus on social activities taking place in and/or on the water. 2. It’s full of burned out hippies. More on the second point in a bit.
As Denmark is basically a bunch of islands out on the north sea, it shouldn’t be that shocking that the locals have a love for seafood colorful buildings built along canals. A popular activity to do in Copenhagen is to take a canal boat ride….I passed on this. I had more fun renting an electric bike and scootering alongside the waterways myself. One cool thing I discovered was this public concrete beach/board walk running along the river.
It was about a km of people sunbathing, swimming in closed off portions of the river (using nets), going down water slides, using public exercise equipment, jogging and generally behaving as if they were at the beach. Me and Katy saw something similar in Krakow, but this felt much more developed. My favorite sight had to be the Floating Bar/Restaurant. This place wasn’t only on the water, but the individual tables were on these rafts, which were motorized! So people could get their food and drinks and then kick off from the restaurants main dock and putter up and down the river. If I had come with a group I would have done this for sure, sadly there was no sad-lonely-mans mini-barge.
Another funny anecdote which occured in Denmark was me going to see Shang-Chi, a Marvel film which had just opened up the day after I landed. The film had been banned in China for…nebulous reasons? The oft-referenced reason is that the main actor Sima Liu who is Chinese-Canadian, said some bad things about China. 5 years ago. In an interview with the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company). What did he say? That he was grateful that he grew up in Canada because his parents had described growing up in China (During the 1960s/70s) as being third world. Given the variety of problems plaguing china at the time this probably isn’t too far from the truth and most people in China today feel proud that China has developed so quickly in the last 30 years but…eh? Honestly Black Widow got banned here too and it doesn’t even have a director attached to it (Like Eternals) who has actively attacked the Chinese Government Multiple times. Anyway the point is that I knew this was my one chance to see this movie in a theater so I went! Annnnnd then found out that about a third of the movies dialogue is in Chinese (Mandarin), and of course the subtitles were all in Danish. Kind of ironic given the fact that the vast majority of Mandarin speakers will only ever see this film through piracy. I managed to make sense of it anyway, my very basic Chinese allowed me to understand more than the subtitles could.
Meanwhile about those burned out hippies. Christiana Town is a weird, semi-autonomous district in Copenhagen. It occupies what was once a massive ring of defensive buildings designed to protect the city
As time went on and the 19th century creeped in the functional uselessness of these defensive walls became apparent the land atop of them was converted into factories, warehouses and depots. But by the middle of the 20th century they had fallen into disuse and were decaying rapidly. Enter the Danish hippies. After many conflicts with the local police they converged on the slowly mouldering ruins and claimed them as their own. In an unexpected turn of events the cities government threw up their hands and said. “Fine, your on your own.” Most services were cut from the district and it became an anarchist/hippies dreamland. To their credit, they repurposed old factories, warehouses and shipping buildings into communes, houses, markets and grow ops. Slowly an entire society/community grew there throughout the 1970s and 80s. By the 1990s a strange pseudo mini state had arisen, mind you one that was habitually stoned.
Today the dream seems to have moldered and died a bit. I saw a lot of what I presumed to be homeless or just really strung out people around. A lot of the street art is incomprehensible and/or just bad and a lot of the structures seem to be rotting/falling apart. Its rather overgrown, with many of the playgrounds made for the first generation born in this community rotting and falling apart. Still, Christiania gets by through the constant influx of students and tourists who come to visit out or curiosity, with some choosing to stay. I personally found it a bit unnerving/creepy and didn’t enjoy being offered drugs about 8 times whilst strolling around.
I also remembered something, shortly after landing and seeing these adorable Lego Brick Security scanners for kids
That I was in Denmark! The home of Lego! So I booked a ticket to visit Lego House ‘The Home of the Brick’. I considered going to Lego Land, but it was already a 3 hour journey each way from Copenhagen to Billund (Home of Lego), largely by train which quite fantastically zips across ocean bridges. I feared I could only really do one or the other, Lego Land or a slightly newer attraction called The Brick House. I elected to do the Brick House. I guess I could have stayed in Billund but….free hotel is best hotel.
The Brick House is a fantastic piece of architecture in its own right. Looking like a pile of lego bricks stacked together, each ‘brick’ houses a different colored room themed around a different aspect of lego. Creativity, exploration, engineering, recreating life etc. Each colored area has different fun activities for kids (And amazing adults like me) to engage with. Many involve games/building. One entire section was dedicated to building mini-figures (Lego People).
The massive pool of random mini-figure pieces is a bit like the build-a-figure activities you find in most Lego Stores but dialed to 11. There were literally thousands of different pieces in this massive dump. Best of all, your ticket allowed you to build and keep 6 of your own unique figures. I built one that looked a bit like a stewardess on my Scandinavian Airlines Flight.
What really drew me to The Brick House however was two things. Firstly the Lego Museum, this section on the ‘Black Floor’ features nearly every single kit ever designed by the lego company, all of them the very first to come off of the production line and then swept aside for this museum. It was really cool to see how Lego developed from just a toy to build little houses into the incredibly elaborate and varied sets you can get today. The second thing that drew me was the Lego Cafe.
The Lego Cafe is really fun. Basically you get a packet of lego bricks, every single brick/piece corresponds to a menu item. Thus you need to ‘build your meal’. You take the 4 components you want for your meal (Yes you get 4 different items for your meal) build something with them and then feed it into a scanning device at every table. The device scans the bricks and replicates a 3D rendering of your design on the screen which a bunch of animated mini-figures then take and before your eyes turn the pieces into the food items you’ve ordered.
It’s a bit silly, but also quite fun. The menu was surprisingly varied with about 16 different options, which meant you got quite a few spare random bits of lego to take home with you. Perhaps coolest of all is the fact that when your order is ready you go up to the counter and two massive lego-brick robots (They are entirely made of Duplo and Lego Technic pieces) serve you an over-sized lego brick within which is your 4 food items you ordered. Throw in the fact that all of the decor is a lego brick (Salt and pepper shakers for instance) and you have a very cool dining experience that I dare say exceeds even what the restaurants at Disney resorts accomplish.
Overall it was a very enjoyable experience. The entire building has a giant lego tree rising up in the center, each branch decorated with an entirely differently themed lego series. The Lego House is also home to some of the largest lego constructions ever built. For someone who’s really into Lego as a hobby, it’s a great place to spend a few hours. It’s not a theme park, it’s more like a big interactive museum.
Speaking of excursions from the big city, I also visited Roskilde, Viking Ship Museum. The islands which now comprise Denmark during the 8th to 10th centuries were home to people whom we would today identify as norse or vikings. This is particularly evident in Roskilde, a small city built around a fjord wherein some fantastic Viking ships have been uncovered.
Intentionally sunk, at least 7 large viking vessels littered the natural harbor this city was built around. Intentionally sunk or scuttled ships were a part of a defensive strategy which Roskildians deployed about a thousand years ago. Basically you put a bunch of track on the bottom of the harbor along with wooden posts so that if an enemy fleet approach you they get stuck on the wrecks, whilst, you knowing exactly where they are can sail around them. As these derelict ships sank into the mud they became preserved and during the 1960s Danish archaeologists located the ships and then set up a barrier to block off the ocean water and completely expose the wrecks.
It took decades, but eventually they pieced the ships back together and they are now housed in a museum facing the harbor they were drawn out from. Most of reassembled ships are 60-70% original pieces. The long boats design was also mapped down and then rebuilt by Danish boat builders today, and now when you visit the museum you can see dozens of re-created Viking long boats. They even managed to recreate the construction process of the boats, using only the tools which were available in the 9th century.
Some intrepid adventurers used these re-built boats to sail across the North Sea to Ireland and then onto Iceland and Greenland just to see if they could reproduce what their ancestors had done. Unsurprisingly (Aided by modern day GPS) they succeeded. Today what this means for tourists is that attached to the museum is an active harbor full of viking boats. Some of which you can board and actually row out into the harbor for an hour or so. Which is exactly what I did. Honestly it was not that much different to rowing a canoe…just a really big one.
Those were the two main excursions I took from Copenhagen. To be honest I was so busy within Copenhagen itself, I’m not sure if I could have taken too many more trips away from it. I feel a bit guilty for having previously not thought much of Copenhagen. It’s a very interesting city featuring such things as forts built in World War 1 to fend off the Germans only to be taken by the Nazis early on in WW2.
What I really didn’t expect was the world’s second oldest still functioning amusement park. Built in 1843, Tivolli is really something. It’s smack dab in the middle of the city, occupying a fairly small amount of land, and yet fitting in 42 different rides. Some of which were built before the first world war, such as their wooden rollercoaster which opened in 1913 and is still running. It’s a fairly simple ride ripping through a fake mountain and then out the other side, but knowing that you’re sitting on an over 100 year old roller coaster is in itself quite an experience.
They also have somehow managed to fit in 2 big steel roller coasters as well. One of the great things about Tivolli was how short the lines were, there are so many rides and they tend to carry so many riders that it’s a very efficient theme park.
One perhaps unfortunate aspect of Tivolli is the fact that it is largely preserved from how it was in the 1880s-1890s. There are a number of new rides, but in this period when Europe was gripped by Sinomania (Obsession with generally eastern culture) a very ‘oriental’ design aesthetic fell upon the park. You need to understand that in the final decades of the 19th century, many Europeans were utterly fascinated by the Orient (Eastern Countries) the wealthy at this point could fairly easily travel to these far off places, but for the common people it was still just something you read about (unless you had a surly sailor uncle who went to Shanghai to unload boxes). So a huge chunk of the park is full of very lets say…stylized representations of India, China and Japan.
It is a strange thing to see, pressed up against more realistic Nordic features.
Overall I had a great time in Copenhagen and I could go on and on about it, but really it’s time to move on. Before that though I should mention that the head chef in the hotel I was stuck in took some pity on me. He realized I’d be there for an entire week (Something pretty much unheard of, it wasn’t uncommon for someone to have to stay one night or maybe two in this hotel). The vouchers for meals I was given were technically just for a hamburger and soft drink. Taking pity on me, he allowed me to use the vouchers for any item on the menu, which worked out pretty well for me.
Finally though it was time to go. Accompanied by the other people who had been kicked off by the last flight, we retested, submitted to the consulate, dealt with random questions from the consulate 1 hour before flight departure and finally got approval from China to fly about 20 minutes before boarding began. At least this time we were not pulled aside. The flight was fairly uneventful. Then upon arriving in Shanghai….it….began.
SECTION 4: Quarantine
Honestly the process of going from plane to quarantine was more horrendous than the quarantine itself. We were tested twice, pushed through long lines, made to wait 3 hours in a line for a bus, sprayed with disinfectant every 20 minutes (From a plant watering like implement) and then finally loaded onto a bus. The bus drove across the city for an hour or so before arriving in the assigned district. I had been told that I could do 3 days in Shanghai and then the rest of the quarantine in Hangzhou. I was told this by the HR department at BASIS as well as several Chinese government websites. Thus I was a bit dismayed to find myself in a very strange Shanghai hotel. On the plus side the room I was put into for 2 weeks had two floors! I know crazy right? It was kind of like a loft. One floor which had a bed on it, a desk and a bit of lounge space and then a set of stairs leading up to 2 more double sized beds, a TV and another desk. At the very least it made the space feel less confined. In the end I intended to spend about 1/3 of the time in each bed since I knew I would never get a cleaning service in. Yeah thats another sucky part of 2 weeks of hotel quarantine, you never once get your sheets cleaned. So I figured I ought to make the best of the situation and spend about 5 days in each bed.
Lucky me though, a huge storm hit Shanghai. So at around day 8 the room began to leak. In a big way. As in I put a bucket under the water coming in, about a 10 liter bucket and it was filling every 20 minutes. As the hours ticked on and I kept dumping the water out I kept contacting the front desk, sending images of what was basically a tap on in the hotel rooms ceiling. Eventually they got back to me and told me to wait till noon the next day. It was around 2am I decided. To hell with it. I opened the bathroom door and blocked the room door with towers under the hope that water flowing towards it would shift into the bathroom and down the drain and went to sleep. When I woke up my plan had….kind of worked. Apparently the water leaking down had increased somehow because there was about 10 inches of water when I descended the stairs to the bottom floor.
On the plus side when the hotel staff finally came by and saw the state the room was in they immediately moved me to an empty room which hadn’t been flooded. So a week into my quarantine I got a new set of three beds to cover in the shockingly large amount of dirt which gathered in the hotel room.
Quarantine went by somewhat quickly with days bleeding into one another. I got a lot of reading done and built some lego. One frustrating thing was how hungry being in quarantine made me. The only food you got was delivered to you three times a day and it was pretty hit and miss in quality, with more emphasis on the miss.
I still felt compelled to eat it though, especially since it was the only food I was going to get for 14 days.
I was tested every two days at the door and it all felt rather serious. That was until I finished the 14 nights. After doing 14 nights in a hotel you have to quarantine for a further 7 days and nights either at home (If you have an apartment) or in the hotel you are already in. I was told it was time to leave the hotel and fully expected to be escorted by people in hazmat suits as I was to my room 2 weeks earlier. I then fully expected to be ushered into a private car or bus driven by someone in a hazmat suit. Instead I was told to just leave the hotel and find my own way back home.
So in what can only be described as satire, I wandered out of the hotel. Proceeded to go to a near by convenience store and buy some snacks. Ride the metro to the train station, get lunch at burger king and then proceed to ride a train back to Hangzhou. You never would have known that I was still considered a high risk vector for a disease which shuts down entire cities in China when 2-3 cases occur per day. Upon arriving in Hangzhou and going to the parking lot to be picked up by a bus the staged super-seriousness resumed. The escort was in a hazmat suit and myself and my belongings were once more showered in disinfectant from a spray hose. I was taken to my apartment, escorted by 2 hazmat suit wearing guards. A webcam was fixed infront of my door to ensure I didn’t leave and I was confined to my apartment for another 7 days. Although I was now allowed to have food delivered to my door by maskless delivery guys and gals. After 7 days I was permitted to leave the apartment but I had to update my health status daily and was restricted from returning to work.
So I made the most of it and traveled around Hangzhou on my electric scooter, visiting an animation museum, a huge pagoda I had been meaning to visit and generally doing touristy things. My re-entry to China and bi-daily testing finally ended just over a month after I landed. Even after the 21 days of quarantine and 7 days of health monitoring I still had to get another test. All said I had to do about 26 covid tests in 36 days.
So what do I think of the entry requirements into China? It’s a joke and no wonder that the country is bleeding expats like a severed arterial vein. It’s incredibly long, cumbersome and at times really-really redundant. Of the people travelling with my flight only 3 other foreigners were onboard a very packed flight, consisting mostly of Chinese students returning from their studies in Europe.
SECTION 5: Beijing
Frustatingly/lucky me, the day I was finally able to return to work, I could not, as Golden Week had begun. This is a week long holiday in China celebrating both the Autumn Festival and the establishment of the PRC as the defacto government of mainland China. I probably shouldn’t have traveled so soon, but I figured to hell with it. I had spent the last month more or less locked up in an apartment or hotel, so I took to the rails and headed straight to Beijing. Why Beijing? I mean surely I had already done that! Well the primary reason was that Universal Studios Beijing had only opened a month ago and I wanted to check it out! The secondary reason was that there were a few things I had missed out on the last time we visited Beijing as a family. Namely the Summer Palace and the National Museum of China
Universal Studios is a theme park brand I’ve never actually visited before. In recent years the main theme parks I have visited have been Disney Parks. As Disney’s primary rival Universal has a lot to live up to. I’ve never really been motivated to visit the Universal Parks primarily because they look rather boring. Sure they have some good roller coasters/thrill rides, but you can get that at any theme park. I am much more interested in visiting a park with excellent theming. I mean, that’s what the theme in theme park is all about right? Universal Beijing certainly did not disappoint. For a decade now Universal has been acquiring more and more IP (Intellectual Properties) and been actively trying to compete with Disney. This is most notable with the newly added Wizarding World of Harry Potter attractions/lands they have been building since the film franchise ended.
Unlike previous themed lands the Wizarding World of Harry Potter is meant to be immersive. The streets replicate Hogsmeade or Diagon Alley (depending on which Universal park you’re in) and Hogwarts Castle (Taking a page out of Disney’s book) looms over the area with forced perspective used to make it look life sized. Further aping Disney, the queue for the lands main attraction Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey runs through some of the main classrooms/sections of Hogwarts. You go through Hogwarts Green House.
Through Gryffindor Tower, Dumbledore’s office, the potions classroom, the moving staircases (Which in this case don’t move much, but the paintings do!), past the Fat Woman’s portrait, through the great hall etc. It’s almost a shame that I managed to get onto the ride before lines got really busy as I kind of breezed through most of it. I should mention at this point that I kind of lucked out. I knew that Universal was going to offer a queue jumping pass (At nearly the same price as a day ticket) but couldn’t figure out how to get it as the app wouldn’t let you buy one. When I got to the park super early I noticed something strange. A long queue forming at the ticket gate, but all tickets had to bought online right? I asked and found out that this was the line for Universal Express (The line jumping pass) and that it was limited to just 500 passes per day. Naturally I jumped into the line, which I was stuck in a full hour after the park had opened, but boy was it worth it.
As I said before this was a national holiday and lines for rides commonly ranged from 90 to 250 minutes. With Universal Express I was able to join a special queue just for Universal Express pass holders. As there were only 499 other people in the park that day with said pass and given the fact that the park has about 35 rides. I rarely saw more than 2 or 4 people ahead of me.
One downside of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter being so immersive was the grim reality of crowd sizes. The area is quite tight and compact to try and mimic a British high street. Which normally is fairly wide, but not by themepark standards. This area of the park was by far the most popular as well. There was a queue just to enter it! So I did the things I wanted to do there. Do the rides, get a Butterbeer, try to find things for Katy and I got the hell out.
Similar effort has gone into most of the lands to at least have some kind of story or theming going on. Transformers Metro Base is one of the unique lands for Universal Beijing. The Transformers films were incredibly popular in China and Universal has the IP. The premise is that the Transformers have set up a base just outside of Beijing, one of their gargantuan Transformers shifting into it’s base mode. The thing goes deep into the earth and the section humans are on is just a tiny little top layer of what is a very extensive setting.
So a cool feature is the occaisonally oversized tools, seats, equipment littering the place as this is meant to be a place for 15-30 foot tall robots as well as humans. Thankfully the theming and the appearance of many of the bots more closely resembles classic transformers and not the walking pile of knives and sharp things that Michael Bay crafted in his god awful movies. They must have gotten someone who was a big transformers fan to help design this land because there are so many references to the IDW Transformers comic books which…most people have not read. The land features a small bar run by Swerve (An Autobot) a bar which exists in the comics (Yes Transformers go to bars and get drunk in the comics/animated series). I was also surprised to see fan favorite Windblade making an appearance at a meet and greet area.
Windblade started out as a comic book character but has progressively become more popular appearing in animated shows. She’s become something of the female face for the autobots (Sorry Arcee). I had fully expected this land to be based around the Michael Bay films since all previous Universal Parks featuring the Transformers (As rides) have. The biggest ride in the park is also in the metrobase. The premise is that it’s a big mining drill meant to help the Autobots harvest energon. Unfortunately said drill is infact a Decepticon infiltrating the base. What follows is a wild ride on what is called (appropriately) the Decepticoaster. The best part of the experience for me had to be the soundtrack which accompanies the ride, blaring out of speakers in the coaster train. It’s something of a remix of the classic Transformers theme.
Other unique lands include a Kungfu Panda Land (Mostly for little kids), as this is also a very popular property in China. The rides were….mostly skippable but the land does feature a very impressive soft play area for small children. What drew me in most of all was a recreation of Mr Pings Noodle Shop (Po’s ‘father’). I watched Kungfu Panda just before going to the park and I was impressed by how well they replicated and expanded on that Gooses’ humble noodle shop.
The final unique land worth mentioning is Minion Land, based upon various locations from the Despicable Me franchise and…actually, you know what. No. No it’s not worth talking about. Here are some pictures though.
Overall Universal Beijing is a big step up from what has come before. There is a real effort made to theme every land as well as many of the restaurants. I’m definitely happy I went.
I won’t go into too much detail about the rest of my time in Beijing. Basically went to the National Museum which is…kind of underwhelming actually. Since I was there last they have added this kind of awesome painting celebrating the heroes of the Covid-19 Pandemic. Museums in China can be pretty hit and miss, with many of them being more about propaganda than actually educating people. One particularly outrageous aspect of this has to be the much repeated (And entirely fictional) claim that humans evolved originally in China. One way they do this is by showing a map of all discovered hominids (ape like humans).
This map places emphasis on China and completely ignores about 118 discoveries outside of China (Mostly in Africa). They also make the fun claim that humans evolved in China 2,000,000 years ago. Which is, you know, factually wrong. Most of these claims come from human remains consisting largely of teeth and a single thigh bone, all discovered suspiciously after Mao came to power. I guess claiming 5,000 years of continuous history (Also wrong) wasn’t enough for them. “China has glorious 2,000,000 year history, do you know it?” Another remarkable aspect of Chinese museums and most tourist sites is how awful translations are. They tend to be stilted and/or read as a list of numbers and facts. I’m not sure if this is just how Chinese people describe history or if they can’t be bothered to hire actual translators. One final consistent and strange thing in Chinese museums is the constant insistence upon the greatness of Chinese people as a distinct race and all other countries as simply ‘Foreign or Foreigners’. A description of a historical event will often read like this: “Wood Block printing was first cultivated in the 740 AD by Lu Yidao a Chinese man who living in Tang Dynasty. This Chinese invention pre-dates Foreign printing techniques by over 1000 years and cause China to be most educated country in the world. The strong literacy culture flourish and the prospher (Typo intentional). Many foreigner historians today marvel at unique genius of Chinese people so long ago.” This is of course factually incorrect on a number of levels, but it doesn’t matter. Sometimes I wonder why they even include English translations. But enough ranting for now.
Section 6: Back to Work
Returning to work was rather unceremonious. It was definitely a bit strange to step back into the role of teaching 3 groups of students who had been taught my course content but by three different teachers. The most challenging thing however has been being told after leaving quarantine that I’d be teaching a set of Grade 12 students World History. Oddly most of them have already done this course and are applying to universities with that score and will not even attend the end of year exams. Out of a group of 16 only 3 actually need to be there. This results in an awful lot of students outright ignoring me, playing on their laptops, doing homework for other classes and/or applying for universities whilst I’m trying to teach. It’s not very fun, but I suppose it will at least look good on a resume. I’ve been explicitly told to try and make the course fun/light and project based. This has produced mixed results. To be honest it’s probably the second worst part of the job right now. The worst part of the job definitely goes to staff meetings. It’s really hard to get invested in the success of the school and renovations when you know you’re leaving at the end of the year. Doubly so when you can’t stop thinking about the unnecessary pain said speech deliverer has given you and your family. I guess that leads into the next topic.
Section 7: Hunting for Jobs
I started job hunting while stuck in Copenhagen and continued to job hunt throughout September and October. Despite having nearly a decade of teaching experience, I found out that this is definitely not a great time to be job hunting. There were jobs sure, but they mostly seemed to go to more experienced teachers with many more years teaching abroad. Another challenge me and Katy faced was finding a school which was good and not an IB school (International Baccalaureate). IB schools are weird. Unlike other international schools which tend to derive their curriculum from the American, British or more rarely Australian or Canadian system, IB isn’t based on any particular countries curriculum. This makes them notoriously difficult to apply for as to get experience in an IB school you need to work in an IB school, to work in an IB school you need experience working in an IB school. It’s a Catch-22 sort of situation. If me and Katy had waited until after Christmas we probably would have had more success as schools grow increasingly desperate. Alas we didn’t have the patience for this, particularly Katy who could barely find the time to apply for jobs anyway. So when an IB school in Mongolia offered us both roles (At considerably less money than what we make in China) we accepted the roles. We were warned of the high pollution levels (Up to 85 in the winter!) and we just laughed as Hangzhou regularly goes about a 100.
Well this post has been exceptionally long and delayed. Since I got back to Hangzhou I’ve gone off on 3 more adventures and I will be sure to post about them much quicker than I have been with this one!
The Hopkins of Hangzhou 