New gaff

Skiing in China in August

After the summer spent in Xiaoshan doing far too much work teaching kids at summer camp who either didn’t care or didn’t want to be there I finally moved to Wenzhou

The crew were good though, a lot of laughs BBQ and far too much cheap Korean food.  I had a blast and set myself up nicely for my next gig.

So I moved to Wenzhou in southern Zhejiang province.  Its a city with money.  From my desk here to the nearest KFC I passed five Ferraris, a Bentley, multiple Range Rovers and so many Audis and high end Mercs that you stop noticing them.  This is normal for Wenzhou but not really normal for anywhere else outside Dubai.

I moved into my apartment in a random area.  Its easy to spot because there is a Porsche parked outside the door.  Not mine but its not uncommon to see really flash cars parked in pretty ordinary apartment complexes.

Watch this space for developments.

After losing my trusty Nokia out the window of a taxi I coughed up for a Samsung Galaxy mini to see what the Android fuss was all about. Of course the first thing I did was wipe the crapy and restricted Chinese firmware first.

Google maps has got me around places like Hangzhou. It has the train times and the bus routes and has made that part of traveling so much easier. Instead of stumping up 100 quai for a taxi I could get the K327 for 4 quai. The battery life is awful so its always charging and can decide half way through the day that I’ve had enough navigation and thats it. Of course this is restricted here…

Shazam is brilliant for grabbing the name of song thats playing in KTV or in a bar or even in the taxi. Grab the name, email it to myself and play the song with lyrics on Youtube. From this I can hear words and read some characters.

I use the Hanping Pro dictionary and can cut and paste into and out of SMS messages. This is great when you get a place name and try to yell it in all the wrong tones to the taxi driver.

Soon I’ll try to emulate my Chinese speaking friends ability to tell a taxi driver when they ask him what he does in China “A secret agent, 007″ completely po faced. I didn’t get the first part but I heard him saying “ling, ling, chi”.

This song = China to me.

When I was 15 and 16 i went to a French language college and an Irish language college over the summer and got to be able to speak both languages for a brief time. I didn’t get expelled from the Irish college due to a technicality that when I didn’t speak Irish I was actually speaking French.  I wasn’t speaking English so they couldn’t send me home.

After school I slowly realised that French for all its merits and beauty is as relevant and as useful as a fart in a spacesuit.  We hardly trade with France and efforts to speak French in France are greeted with horrified looks or complete dismissal discouraging further efforts.  I have been to France twenty times and I never speak French for this reason alone.

Now Chinese is supposed to be more difficult, more inaccesible and the writing system discourages many from learning it.  However if you make an effort to speak Chinese you get a response which adds to the positive spiral of wanting to learn more and then speaking more and then more until you can have some kind of conversation.

When I came here I knew a few words but got jammed in many easy situations.  I couldn’t understand the students, the announcements on the bus, numbers and things people were saying.  Over the course of time I got to understand some of it and with the positive feedback and the laughter at my crappy tones its getting better and is more accessible that French ever was.

It’s St Patricks day, the day the Irish celebrate how insecure they are by drinking as much as possible and letting Americans with minimal history feel as if they belong to a nation with history.

It rings a bit hollow when you are out here and you can’t get a single person back home to listen.  I have made efforts to contact the letter writer ironically through the Chinese and not the Irish authorities.  I think I can safely say that I would die first before I would get a response from Ireland.  Or do I have to go on the radio and kick up a fuss which seems to be the only way to get anything done in Ireland?

China is huge, China is full of opportunity but we have got to back up our people out here and around the world.

We have all kinds of agencies back home spouting all kinds of wonderful things but being brutally honest you would get more response from a dead person.  Education Ireland has their Chinese links buried under a layer of English and the videos are on Youtube which is blocked and encourages people to follow them on Facebook, blocked, Twitter, blocked, Youtube, blocked, and Blogger, blocked.

We are encouraging educational tourism to Ireland but its incredibly difficult to take this seriously.  The site also makes no concessions whatsoever for english language students or parents who cannot speak English.  The site taunts you with a language option using Google translate so who knows how accurate it is. Completely clueless and sloppy execution.

I bang on about emigrant voting to anyone who listens but for me this is the most tangible manifestation of the “get out, stay out, you weren’t good enough to stay attitude”, closely linked to the “but send money and jobs” mantra.  I’m not asking to be loved or asking for money but when we call it would be nice if someone picked up the phone.  We can do tremendous business out here if we just lost a bit of the attitude and the stop being so stuck in the mud.

I travelled the length of Ireland when I was back and met a lot of people who wanted to “do business with China” which is all well and good but if you don’t know the culture and the language you aren’t going to get anywhere.  I went from Dublin to Donegal and down to Cork in the space of 24 hours.  I went to the China-Ireland business forum where a ‘Dragon’ banged on and on about how much she wanted to fly first class on Etihad and how “everyone on the new season of Dragons Den now has an Chinese supplier”.

Flying over to Beijing or Shanghai and getting bamboozled, well fed and if you are lucky a trip to KTV and believing you can take the Chinese market is naive. Get out into the provinces, learn Chinese, stay for a while and play the guanxi game and you might get somewhere.  Tipperary Crystal has done it so its not beyond our ken.

We have to be committed and build our networks in unfamiliar territory.  We are getting eaten alive by our competition and it breaks my heart to see Austrian and American cheese in the supermarkets and excited and ambitious parents and schoolchildren preparing for life and to step up the social ladder by studying in Australia, the US and the UK.

We don’t even figure and the cowboy visa situation of the early noughties hasn’t helped.

I’m in a fourth tier city in China and “just a teacher” and I can see how flat footed we are regarding any country that we don’t really know but think we should know.  We can’t just rock up over here with our hand out.  I went into the tourist office in Cork city and in  Dublin looking for any material in Chinese.  They had one leaflet and book in Japanese in Dublin and nothing in Chinese.  We dont join the dots.

Helpfully the Irish Times today gives emigrants a kick in the balls because we leave because its a lifestyle choice now which discourages people from selling Ireland abroad.  It encourages emigrants to cut the ties because of the wall of shite and resistance that is the response of official Ireland.  There is no way on earth that you should have to know the right people in Ireland or the official agencies before you get a response.  Thats the way it is now though.

Happy St. Patricks Day wherever you are Irish or not. Raise a glass of Guinness if you can find one and maybe we can move into the future with prosperity if we stop excluding our own people and cutting our nose off to spite our face.  We talk a great game but I wonder if the effort is entirely serious or just playing to the gallery at home to look like we are at the races when it is clear that we are not.

I love my country and I want it to do well but it is made so unnecessarily difficult.

Paddy is back in Ireland.   Paddy is not quite sure what to make of this.

Many things have happened, Ireland is a lot quieter than it was and certainly a lot quieter than a rural Chinese city full of lunatic drivers.  You would miss that and the jet engines.  It sounds like a contradiction that a rural city is noiser than a capital city but trust me it is.

I’ve joined the Ireland China Association and been to the opening of Chinese New Year in Dublin.  A lot of bluster from the Mayor about Dublin and Beijing being twinned.  To be honest I don’t think enough is being done about public safety to be able to put young Chinese in Dublin city centre and be able to sleep at night.  The mayor is more concerned with making traffic go at walking speed to preserve pedestrians long enough to get mugged on the footpath.  You wouldn’t notice it if you live here but if you go and come back you see it.

In positive developments Tipperary Crystal are on a roll and from what I have seen and heard are going to be an Irish brand that will fly in China.  I’m really impressed with what they have done and how they have presented themselves to China.

The only other brands I have ever seen in China have been Guinness, Baileys and Jameson.  I did see Kerrygold cheese once in Hangzhou.  That’s it.  One massive market and in general we aren’t at the races.  I’ve been in supermarkets and stores in nine Chinese cities and pretty much nothing is Irish.  Plenty of EU dairy products, Austria, France, Canada, Germany well represented but not us.  I tweeted about this and got helpful answers like “do it yourself” and “it’s too far”.  Lovely.

So I’m doing things for myself.  I’ve  a big hush hush project in the works that might or might not come off.  Theres a lot of work in it and it will involve travelling all over China eventually.  Its taken me a few days to get my head around the scale of it too.  My bet on China might pay off after all.  I wouldn’t have had a hope if I hadn’t gone to China to see on the ground how to do it and I wouldn’t have the knowledge I have now.

I took a Chinese lesson since I got back with beginner students.  Its great to see Irish people taking an interest.  I also found out how appalling my Chinese is too.  I know the tones to some things and can bluster other things but its nowhere near good enough. I do know that you have to say it like you mean it or else nobody will understand you.  I also learned that in common with the Irish the Chinese I have been hanging out with have the foulest language imaginable.  This includes my students.

I was on TV for the third time which is always funny.  In China you learn to expect the unexpected and having a film crew rock up when you are giving exams is up there.  Not quite up there with the student that climbed out a second floor window to rescue a paper airplane from a tree but up there.

Here is the video.  If you can read Chinese you can tell where I was.