Size Matters (Sunday, 10th July)

You may have heard that China is the next big thing. This is not completely true. From my limited experience, it seems quite clear that China is the current biggest thing, it’s just that not many people outside China know it yet.

I arrived in Changsha yesterday afternoon and was greeted at the airport by a teacher from the school at which I will be working. As we drove towards our hotel, the first thing that struck me was the number of skyscrapers in various states of construction surrounding us on all sides. Huge skyscrapers, everywhere, standing next to huge roads with hundreds upon hundreds of cars.  What surprised me even more, however, was that the teacher I was with kept describing it as the ‘countryside’. I thought, at first, that it was a mistranslation but it turns out that the district in southern Changsha in which we are staying is miles from the city centre and is, by the estimation of the local population, “rural”. Rural shopping centres, rural stadiums and rural main roads, as far as the eye can see in either direction. Apparently, compared to central Changsha, the miles of heavily developed urban sprawl that surrounds me on all sides is positively rustic. And this, a city of some 9 million people, is considered small. China is not the next big thing, it is the current big thing and the next global superpower.

“Rural”: A view of the slightly-less-developed side of Changsha from my hotel room. (I live in a house, a very big house in the country).

As I was the first to arrive, the school were kind enough to buy me dinner and we went to a humble local restaurant to sample some of Changsha’s famously tasty cuisine. Unluckily for me, as well as being famously tasty, the cuisine here is famously spicy and the starter, when it arrived consisted of cucumber coated in chopped red chillies. Marshalling the stiff upper lip of the British, I readied my chopsticks and ploughed forward but the acute pain that washed over my tongue must have shown in my expression. My host, slightly puzzled, asked if the food was too hot. Apparently she could not taste the slathering of  raw chillis at all, and rushed off to warn the chief of my delicate constitution. The subsequent dishes were by and large chilli free, though still hot enough to make you gasp.

Cucumber and chilli seeds: “Not hot.”

I could go on to tell you about Chinese table manners and how fish heads are a delicacy, but I’m starting to feel the ill effects of the jetlag and might take this chance to catch 40 winks. Interestingly, its very rude to move communal dishes in China and so all the food is placed on a rotating glass surface in the middle of the table (Above). When you want something, you simply spin the table around and grab what you want with your chopsticks. I leave you with a picture of someone from the school eating a fish head. The fish was, of course, covered in chillis.

Head first