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Wake up to the mid-morning bustle of the vegetable market in the alley outside your window, and the dull drone of the kong tiao (air conditioner). Do not lie in further. You could; the invasive hammering of the drill on the main road until late, the intermittent squeals of a dog spanning the night, a subsequent, aggravated series of yells, the impassioned chorus of several roosters at dawn, the crash of stalls being set up soon after and the babble of the early morning, all leave you in a fug. Fall out of bed, and drag somnambulantly to the shower. Don’t linger. The hot water will fade within a couple of minutes, and if you’re unfortunate the passage of your neighbours’ waste through your semi-open, communal drain will suffuse the 4 foot square chamber with an acrid tang of sh*t and piss.

Dry up, dress as you like but be aware that its the peak of summer, and having been out of the focus of the kong tiao for 5 minutes, a skein of sweat covers your forehead and back. Cleaning day is tomorrow, so dextrously pick out your keys and money from the bric a brac of business cards (you will be given one by a local at least once a drinking-night), souveneirs ready to be packaged home, sheets of teaching materials, a water pistol and a dart board (also teaching materials), stacks of filthy crockery streaked with oil (the central ingredient of Sichuanese cuisine) and drifts of jiao. A single jiao, being worth much less than a penny, is not worth your while taking out, resulting in your accumulation of hundreds of them. If a day should arise when you’re feeling particularly perky, meticulously pay for everything in single jiao, to the delight of shopkeepers. Unlatch your heavy, unwieldy door, and slam it hard behind. Insert your fingers in the sharp ridge of the cut-away handle, and pull it four times for assurance. Question why you feel the need to pull it more than once, and be fearful that the number of checks has tapered to an specific figure. You lost yourself a little there, so 4 more pulls, but now you have committed to 2 series of 4, so you have to commit another 2 for parity. Interrogate youself harshly about the onset of OCD concerning the act of closing your door, but don’t linger as that may impell you to initiate a series of series of 4. Resolve to have a conversation with someone, anybody, today.

Someone has just passed through the iron gate of your apartment building, so rush for it before it springs back, but don’t anticptae it being held for you. Hold it open for a rushing middle-aged man, but don’t anticipate a thankyou. Your suspicion of clositering humidity was right. The sky is covered with thick, grimy clumps of cloud, though you can just about discern the pale intensity of the formless sun. The gate snaps hard a few seconds behind you both. Walk past the guards’ booth, and exchange a cheery Ni Hao! Thin-face and Fat-face are on duty, in their sky-blue shirts and coarse grey trousers. Fat-face, his protuding upper lip and plump cheeks raised in mild exertion, leans back on his chair, a newspaper folded on his lap, picking at a thin length of copper wire with pliers. Thin face is playing badminton with his small daughter, and grins toothily to her yip of helloo! A small, tawny Pomeranian wanders around sneezing, probably belonging to the old woman padding around by the enclosure’s gardens. An old man is kneeling by the bins, picking out sheets of cardboard and inserting them into one of the two half-full baskets attached to the back of his bike by a wooden pole.

Step out to the alley. You will notice a static barbershop pole with faded blue spirals inside a broken plastic encasing. You cannot get a haircut here, which is perhaps confusing. Adjacently, the fogged screen door of the hooker den with faded red characters is slid half-open. The girls are klacking mah-jong tiles on ragged green felt, one is lounging on the couch watching soaps, while another is outside, hanging her smalls on a small plastic hanging rack. Offer a non-committal simper. Their competitors to your left are also open, and equally languid. Turn right, and head into the vegetable market. The old concrete surface has hosted countless feet, and dark pools of water reside in its craterous surface. To your right is a single storied row of small dilipataed concrete dwellings, lying in the shadow of your apartment building. At this time, they are all open, so you can watch morning TV over granny’s shoulder, or check who has the best Dodizhou hand. Legs of meat hang intermingled with clothes on the washing lines. Later, wizened, though stubborn planks of wood grafted together and called a door will be pulled across the enclave, any rifts covered with tarp sheets. Rusty sheets of corrugated iron will be balanced incongrously over the jagged, uneven walls. Though realtively new, the cream/orange exterior of your overarching apartment building is tracked with pollution. Each window is topped by sooty ragged awnings and enclosed by bars, from which the straggling shoots of potted plants escape.

China Ettiquete # 1 - Kids
Countless gangs of children will be running around this alley, and most places where families operate stalls or shops in such a cramped space. The boys will most likely have footballs or be rampaging in toy-gun squads, girls may be more involved with their parents, awkwardly pushing a brush around the border of the stand or capriciously re-arranging the produce. You will notice that they are assertive and playful, which would transmute to intensely annoying if you actually owned the things. This has been put down to the One Child Policy. These children are, and only can be, the apple of their parent’s eye.

You are different (see Ettiquete point # 3), which will variously fascinate, appall, enliven or terrify them. You may play jokes on them or chase them, but remember that if you are fresh from the west this will make you feel like a filthy, stinking paedophile.

To your left, a row of stalls are loaded with egg-plants, cucumbers, cabbage, or cuts of meat and trotters, and are governed to a one by fierce old women. You cannot buy these things at anything less than a laowai price; they spot you, categorise you and will not budge. One shoots you a hard look as she turns from moistening a pile of cucumbers with a squeezy bottle of water. Follow the dogleg around to your right, where you will pass cramped cages stuffed with grumbling chickens, and large plastic bowls swimming with eels and small fish.

China Ettiquete # 2 - Animal Cruelty
Don’t send any pictures home to your mother.

Wave to the DVD man, whose business is directly under the window of your apartment. Consider that you could have set up a pulley system several months ago and saved yourself a five minute stroll every other day. When you come to what you suspect as a 24 hour gambling den, turn right again.

China Ettiquete # 3 - I, Laowai
People will be staring at you, sniping the occassional hello or laowai, and giggling. If this befuddles you, remember you are a caucasian, there is every possibility that you’re physically bigger, and have a double eye-lid.

Wave hello to Potato Man. who is rolling pastry in preparation for frying it in a vast, nauseating vat of oil. You may then hear the familar dull, reverberating jingle of Nougat Man, ting ting bong ting bong, crafted from his squat, sharply curved cutter and mini-hammer. If you fancy some, he will remove the large whicker basket strapped to his back, and produce a powdery yellow slab covered in a grimy wizened plastic sheet. Trace your desired amount with your fingers, he will then cut it and charge you according to the reading on the small set of scales and counterweight he pulls out. Should Nougat Man’s nemesis, Nougat Man 2, turn the corner and intone his slightly more up-tempo ting ting bong t - t - bong, scarper fast to avoid turf wars. Pick up 3 baozi (steamed bread buns containing a pocket of mince) and leave the alley, turning right again.

Leaving the snaking chasm of the market, you can spot the needle of the TV Tower, the thick lozenge of the control section halfway up, extending far above anything else. Use this to navigate north of the river. Maps are useless, as not only do street names tend to change every block, but conflicting signs metres apart proclaim differing names.

The pavement is tiled, but they are shattered and fragmented, jutting out at crazed, disparate angles, mired in earth. Some are static, others shift like see-saws, so be prepared for your sandaled feet to be caked in filth from a pool of water that has lain stagnant and hidden since the last rainfall. On the opposite side of the road is the glaring red shop front of the Chain Store. Old women sit outside whittling water chestnuts, piling the shorn, milky ones into a basket and the shavings onto the ground.

A further right turn. Guanto (skin-head), responsible for the safe parking and arrival of guests to his large Hotpot restaurant, will stride up to you beaming, shake your right hand with both of his for emphasis, you will then struggle to occupy 10 seconds with your available Chinese, and then wander off, slightly sheepish at the dissipation of this well-meant gesture. A similar conversation will follow with Cigarette Man, whom you have refused cigarettes from everyday for the last 6 months. Check yourself out, he has an A5 picture of the two of you hung on his back wall. The sharp-faced, mischievous young girl, dressed perpestually in a mini wedding-dress may yell laowai at you and run back into her father’s photo shop, or she could just be terrorising her parents instead. An image of her beaming angellically is the current screensaver on the shop’s principal computer.

The central lanes of the road ahead sink sharply into the mouth of an underpass. It is fringed by freshly painted navy blue railings. The outside lanes flanking it and leading to the intersection 50 metres away, are being resurfaced. This process is further advanced on the far side of the road. A mixture of dark pebbles and wan, dirty sand is being levelled by a rusty panelled, dull yellow roller that grumbles langurously, shuddering heavily through the whole street and your feet. Though several warning signs fringe the area of redevelopment, they have been subtly parted, and traffic proceeds in a somewhat laboured fashion. The signs are indechiperable anyway; formerly bold yellow plates are infested with red brown rust, which veils the meaning of the shapeless red characters and distorts the simple diagrams. An old man with a faded wan orange bib and a gnarled straw hat sweeps dust langurously with the long, stiff bristles of his broom.

Your side of the road is is experiencing far greater disruption. The majority of cyclists still pass through the partition in the signs, but only taxis too urgent or avaricious join them in their attempts to pass through these inconsistent plateaus. The redevlopment is at it its most nascent stage, the juddering drill repulsing your ears with its tumourous sound as it piles through the weathered road-surface. A few steps on, amid piles of rubble, shattered sticks of varying lengths and a torn length of muddy white cloth, a hemisphere of old men in singlets sit on stacks of fresh-red bricks, tapping in collusive rhythm as they chisel rivulets out where they imagine the network of pipes to be below.

Steep canyons have been completely cut out further down, and are bridged by clumps of bound bamboo. Workers squat inside picking away at the old concrete coating the manhole emplacements. Men in flushed red bibs gesture authoratitively to shirtless peasant workers as they shift large rectangular stone slabs into the narrow trenches, to support the network of eight white tubes, which dock intermittently in squat pillars of masonry, decked with copper webbing in anticipation of the manhole-plate. The path of the network is beneath the pavement, so stacks of new tiles sit patiently by the wayside, as well as rolls of 6 foot plastic white tubes, clumps of sand and stacks of red brick.

As you near the intersection, the dry infrastructure of the new road is complete, so concrete surges forward to adhere to it. Some of the brick emplacements are already slathered and dry, and some of the trenches too, though consistently tracked by bike trails. Slowly churning mixers drone by the underpass, as workers scramble back and forth with swilling wheelbarrows, unsure on the uneven surface.

A terrace of huts fringes the nearest corner of the intersection. They are constructed from rigid blue sheets of corrugated metal, and topped with gnarled, thick red and white striped tarpaulin sheets weighted down on the corners by concrete blocks ripped from the old road. You will see an awful lot of tarpaulin during the course of this day

There is a traffic official on duty at each of the intersection’s 4 corners. Dressed in sickly tangerine baseball caps and jackets, bottoms and shoes of choice, a rasping whistle attached by a red string, snug white gloves and hold small red flags, they stand in the shade of a large parasol. A small, foot high red and white barrier, set diagonally against the course of the road, traces the shape of an inner diamond within the larger square of the intersection. The road is indecipherably decorated with intermittent cross-hatching.

China Ettiquete # 4 - Intersections
Red lights are little more than suggestions, even when the stewards are present. As you wait by the red and white barrier, a cavlacade of bicycles will creep up behind you. Though the road may be empty, should you try to cross you will be met with at least two squealing whistles of castigation, a vigorously shaken red flag and possible man-handling. Upon the signal for crossing be given, you will be first out of the blocks. Even the bikes will stall behind you. This is due to the Laowai Margin. Motorists will drive cautiously when they spot you, becuase they can get in to far more trouble for crippling whitey, or they doubt your co-ordination and receptive skills and so allow you to lumber as you like across the road, or their car will judder to near stand-still out of mere shock. Should you make it past the first lane of traffic, you have confirmed that the coast is clear for your fellow pedestrians and cyclists. This will result in you being swamped by bicycles rushing past you, the majority of riders rotating their heads 180 degrees to stare at the freak. Astonished children, either curled before the handlebars, clinging to their parent’s back or saddle surfing, will murmur laowai or waiguren and cling harder. Tinkling pedicabs warn you of their impending bulk, and probably jar your leg on the way past. Traffic is still able to turn right, and will aggressively nose into the flow of bikes. Should it spot you, it will near enough stop dead, causing some hard words from the bikes that have had to squeal to a stop. You will also be meeting oncoming pedestrians and bicycles. The two streams will filter effortlessly save for the odd abrupt stop and yell, but you will be useless at avoiding collisions, and will be advancing like the UFO’s from Space Invaders, shifting laterally left and right, with the occassional forward step. Should you observe a rare car - crash, you will be astounded at the primal rage, jabbering and aggressive posturing. Should you see a downed pedestrian, then you will be surprised at the neglect; though they lie in the middle of the road, cars will veer sharply around them and continue. They could have been there for days. Don’t f*ck with public buses. They scud around regardless with the occassional blast of the horn. Don’t rely on the Laowai Margin at this point.

The point of crossing was to experience a bit of the ethnic. Old women will be performing slow, elegant Daoist ballet on the street corner, to the rising and falling strains of a traditional arhu (Chinese violin) instrumental. Despite registering your avid tourist-eyes, they will persit unself-consciously.

Was it worth the bother? Now you must re-cross. Turn left on the corner, and wait at the bus-stop. Should you have walked 200 metres right, you would have came to a KFC, McDonalds and Carrefour, a French Department Store. Instead, wait for the No.4. Its a double-decker, so the height of the lower storey is about 5 feet. Walk hunchbacked to the small alcove and straighten out. Red seats near the door are for the old only. Sitting rights follow the same pattern as at home, but are enforced rigorously. If a Taipo should alight onto a full bus, she will locate the nearest young man, dodder to his seat, hold the passenger railing and lean over him. If the young man doesn’t want the shame of not giving his seat up, or having his face stuck in an old woman’s chest for 10 minutes, he will move. In such a confined space, you will have to confront some bugbears. Staring unabashedly at the roundeye for starters. Hocking and spitting. Mobile phones, ringing with a tinny Aul Lynge Syne, and answered raspingly with Wei! [informal Chinese greeting], the conversation continuing at length at this volume. The ticket collector may decide to impress Honkey, so she may announce Next stop… Welcome to get off over the PA for your benefit. Had this not been said, you may have been so unfamiliar with the overwhelming complexity of the public transport system, as to have lingered past your stop to the terminus, as you would have considered it distasteful to have disembarked without the requisite invitation.

Thank the lady effusively for her invitation, and get off at the nearest stop to a large unnecessairly six-rooved arch leading to a wide semi-pedestrian street. This is Qin Tai Liu, and having been built with tourists in mind, it would be unthinkably disrespectful not to go. A display board displaying the legend Qin Tai Liu: National Level Model street without any fake product greets you as you walk in, so feel free from the pangs of conscience and blow your budget on the most expensive street in Western China. A later board explains that the street is constructed with the blind in mind. Spend more out of respect for this selfless philanthropy. The street is modelled on ancient Han Dynasty architecture. This means uniformly dusky-grey brickwork infrequently punctuated by coulouful elliptical patterns, brassy plates and carvings set into the road depicting traditional modes of life and myth, curved pavillion rooves that copetitively protude out against their neighbours and so sharply as to be a sultan’s slipper, tawny fringes of mottled paint, venerable barber poles (the first functional ones you’ve seen, and the first place you could get a haircut), a western restaurant serving the staple diet of the Warring States Period, burgers and pizzas, eaves cut into grid-like patterns, and further authentic architectural touches typical of Dynastic China such as English translations of Chinese myths and archaic clothes stores stocking contemporary fashions.

Each building is sentried by two lions. Oriental lions glower aggressively, wear bulbous pendants, two protuding incisors, squat claws aggressively bared and their hair tasseled in warlike styling. The less common western lions are sculpted from glossy pale marble. They have small noses, deep soulful eyes and a comically prominent droopy palate. Their mane is well kempt and downy, with large, clawless paws.

Lanterns hang from the corners of every roof, nauseatingly effervescent orange to faded red, limp and turgid, meanly cylandrical and plumply circular, alone or one of many, adorned with burnished characters, hiostorical figures, hanging tassels like jellyfish, pictoral hangings, lined with gold, or cut away like snowflakes.

The ridges of the pavillions rooves are decorated with dormant pandas, gamboling monkeys, diving fish, swooping birds and raging dragons, white, red and blue curlews depicting wind, fire and water respectively.

3 dark glossy marble statues mark the concourse, a creeping dragon, a man driving a horse and a Guzheng player (a stringed sound-box, similar in look to an old-style keyboard on platform) in creative ecstasy bound in the living whirl of what surfaces variously as a woman, rooster and dragon.

At the end of the street you reach the JinJiang river for the first time. On the opposite side of the river is Baihuatan Park, veiled from you by masses of willows that lurch over the riverside. Viscuous brown water pours over an inflatable, pocked blue weir, and crashes back on itself. Papers and bottles dance in the clashing waters. On one side of the bridge leading to the park is a traditional 4 storied tower. Underneath is Lavazza Coffee. To the other side is the Rainbow Pub. Don’t visit the park. They’re all the same, and once you’ve been to Renmin Gongyuan, you won’t be arsed going to another anyway. Retrace your footsteps up Qin Tai Liu, turn right, walk 10 minutes past a string of shops selling military apparel, and enter the main gate of Renmin Gongyuan, directly opposite the KFC.

The park is heavily treed, with pleasing variations of colour, size, shape and condition. Particularly prominent are outcrops of bamboo, shoots huddled together, and overflowing with dark green bunches of thin, rounded needle-like leaves. Rising high above the trees in every direction is a rim of high-rise bank headquarters, their design contadicting the standard crossword-puzzle office block at every turn, looking more like a 3 year old’s lego experiment. It is a befuddling hotchpotch of granite, marble, metal, trad. brick, curves, Roman columns, jutting blocks, turrets and towers, apses, alcoves, cavities, indentations. The reflection of the midday sun from windows tinted aqamarine and bright blue is blinding. The very tops of these buildings are decorated with burnished letters, sattelite dishes and communication towers.

The path is still being retiled. A shirtless pot-bellied man dragging a wheelbarrow behind him, enquires How do yoooou doooooo? Occassionally he will lug one of the rough slabs from the wheelbarrow and lay it down. Several steps ahead, another labourer hacks at the churned earth with a pick. A small stream acompanies the path leading to an immense artificial lake surrounded by a teahouse. The water is densely stagnant, coloured incandescent green. In the centre, a jagged, artificially weathered rock formation is streaked with a clean mossy patina. A hose protudes from one of the indentations, spurting water into the pond. A boy holds a flimsy fishing rod in, and jerks it out impatiently. Families drift in boats, impelled only by the soft churn of a tiny motor or one of their children labouring two-armed at an oar.

In the tea-house, a man wanders clacking two metal rods and murmuring Amoi [massage]. In glasses filled with pale yellow water, translucent Jasmine flowers float languidly to the bottom amid the mire of spiky tea leaves, as the water turns imperceptibly rich brown. The fringes of most tables are bordered by bone white Mah Jong tiles and furtive, alert eyes. Others play Dodhizhou, participants comfortably reclining in their bamboo seats, save for the slap of an unbeatable run or bomb on the table. All around their feet are the scattered husks of sunflower seeds. Some read papers. Most smoke. A baby is held over the muddy roots of a bamboo outcrop, cradled in the arms of his mother, as she splays its legs and it sh*ts from his split-pants. She accompanies it with a whistle to enforce Pavlovian control over his bowels.

Continuing from the tea-house, you come to a small amusement area; every park has such an ersatz funfair. There is a traditional Victorian Merry-Go-Round, tightly enclosed dodgems, a centripedal swinger with the choice of rockets, tanks and fighter pilots, a fixed course track that winds between palm trees and seals, triceratops, gazelles, tigers, kangaroos, their bulky crafts complete with the flickering red lights of guns on the dash. A typical Jungle Jim Funhouse. A massive stone slide emerging from a Kangaroo’s pouch. Gently rolling simulations for toddlers, shaped variously as clowns, fish, monkeys and girrafes, with jaunty play-pen music. Pellet gun stalls shooting balloons. Crossbows to fire at pictorial representations of invading Mongols. Finger painting, pottery, caricatures and toy shops. An old man crafts fragile lollies in the shape of Zodiac animals from a pot of melted sugar. Bounding the area is a mini-railway line set at double your height, a replicated steam engine pouring out stirring Dan-Dare escapades music as it judders harshly round corners.

The distorted blare of karaoke sounds from a nearby pavillion. A middle aged women covered with a tasselled sash and layers of beaded necklaces, juts alternate shoulders, nods her head voluptously and jerks her pelvis distinctly from the rest of her body. It seems to be a lustrous song from the Silk Road, a Chinese replica of Arabic tradition. The compere, singing a song of age-old passion as smoothly as a lounge singer, grabs the dancer and imposes a ball-room step on her. Outside the hut, a man plays an arhu as his wife sings into a microphone connected to a tiny amp.

A man is hosing the grass, while his companion wheels round a cart bearing a spluttering cylancdrical machine that pressurises the stream of water.

Another steam train as you leave, this time on the grand obelisk commemorating the 1911 railway uprising.

The torpid early hours of the afternoon have set in as you leave the park. Most shops have their shutters down, the owners of those still open lounge in chairs reluctant to accept custom. Others muster energy to play a lifeless game of Dodizhou or trawl through a paper. Fields of pastel parasols mass at each intersection. Children begin to tire, and hang their ballast off their parent’s hands until they relent and carry them. Men over 25 all dress formally but their suit-trouser are rolled above their knees and shirts hitched up and tied in effeminate knots just below their chest. Many are shirtless. Though naturally lean, beer is as cheap as water, so there a surprising number of paunches. Youths wander round in baggy NBA gear. Women wear light floral dresses or hot pants according to their inclination. Kong-tiao boxes whine and drip into fine pools of moisture that spread thinly across the pavement.

Entering Tianfu square, you pass the tan functionality of the Exhibition Buildings, outside which sentries dressed in shades of military green stand stiffly on stubby red and white podiums, whie-gloved hands still and primed by their side. They shift into action to open the gate and salute when a bulky, jet-black 4WD approaches. Steps on, you come to the statue of Mao, the heart of the city, the head of the square, the raindrop at the centre of the 4 rippling ring roads. Behind the statue you can hear the crashes of a construction site, shrouded in luminescent jade netting and affixed with grids of scaffolding. Mao stands on a small plinth set on an immense base of glossy pink marble. A sea of yellow and scarlet flowers tended by women in bright-red bibs spell out Chinese characters. The base is hemmed by 5 bright flags of yellow, blue, red, pink and green. Parents crouch and shift their perspective so that their children can be photographed by Mao’s side, under his protective arm.

His face is venerable though not wrinkled, and his half-bowl of hair is thick. Elevated on a gleaming red plinth, his simper is shallow though confident. A stiff right arm and perfectly straight fingers wave staticly down the rows of conifers and high-rise of Renmin Nanliu, towards the South China Sea. His barrelling chest is drug out of alignment by the force of the gesture. The left is clenched impatiently behing his back. He has been hailing a taxi for 40 years without success. His limbs are massively over-proportioned. Two trunks of legs extend from his long coat, with squat buttons and cavernous pockets..

The road in front of his feet lies on the hollow of an underpass. Further ahead is a vast, ridged construction pit attended by cranes and diggers. The site is shielded by gleaming, prismatic advertising boardings, proclaiming a clean, modern Chengdu and various natural sites within a short journey.

To Mao’s restrained left hand is a McDonalds and a billboard for China Mobile. Directly facing is a billboard for Beijiu [56 abv clear spirit]. Following the left road out of the square for 50 metres, a KFC faces the lurid tattered curtain of a sex-shop. Walk further, and you come to the turning for Chun Xi Liu, a pedestrian only commercial street. A huge platform straddles the road as it turns, 4 pairs of split legs allowing access. The stairs in front ascend via KFC, further in-front via McDonalds, the nearest set on the opposite side via Dicos [Chinese version of KFC] and the furthest via Pizza Hut. You pass the street by for now, but glancing down past the masses of people, the most prominent thing is the drab sight of neon by day, dull, near colourless panelling, cobwebs of black supporting rods and wan electrical leads imprinted with small black bulbs.

You will see your first beggar here. There are several that suffer from types of palsy, either shaking as they converge on you bowing their head and murmuring a pre-empitve xie xie [thakyou], or juddering helplessly on the ground. Several have deformed, cripled legs, and either rest on sacking or have constructed sleds. Again, being white and therefore being thought of as the richest person in China, you will be picked off. A dwarf with mangled legs will propel himself with his money pot and stick alongside you on the sled and reel off a guttural hello hello hello complementing the squeaky jars of his sled. Further down, an old man scrapes woefully at an arhu and wearing earmuffs, lacking the will even to listen to himself, it seems. Barely steps later, the opposite is true, as another arhu player caterwauls into a hands-free mike.

You glance clandestinely at a beautiful woman, walking elegantly in the opposite direction and wearing a tasteful, hugging dress. She shatters this reverie by scraping the residual phlegm from her oesophagas into her mouth with an abrupt ear-rending hock, then spits the moist pile near your feet.

China Ettiquete # 5 - Spitting
Don’t anticipate that the appearance of the spitter will in anyway correlate to your perceived abhorrence of the act itself.

Pick up the No. 4 from the right side of the road and catch it back to where you took it from initially. A fat-faced, plasma cheeked baby will stare unblinkingly at you, aware you are different, but uncomprehending why. Should you affect any facial movement it will explode into tears.

Catch the 60 south. Should you have took it north, you would pass your work. This gives you shudders. The south-bound bus passes a street dedidacted solely to house lighting, then crosses the JinJiang. Looking right on the bridge, you will spot a further, ornate pagoda bridge to your right. This is an ultra-expensive restaurant. Continuing south, you pass the North Gate of Sichuan University, where delighted, plug-faced foreigners are hanging round groups of beautiful young Chinese women arising from their astoundingly merititious ability to speak English like natives. Because they are.

As the bus enters the shadow of a soaring overpass, disembark. You will be on Technology & Science Street, where family-run outlets strive in the shadow of multi-storied department stores. There will be numerous promotional stands, not only for technology, but iced tea, cosmetics and so forth, and large temporary stages where comperes drag up teens to ask them questions or to play games, or troupes trying to DJ, break-dance, rap or make like a boy-band. Take your ironic snap-shot, bustle through the crowd, and when you reach a sculpture of a cutaway human brain, displaying shooting networks of synapses, you are back on Renmin Nanliu. You can’t see him, but Mao is waving to you a couple of miles away to your right.

Turn left. The ramshackle Reggae Bar is almost immediately to your left, and the bowl of the Sports Stadium to your right. Just past the stadium, a string of Chinese Bars initiate, soley stocking western beers advertised by posters of semi-naked western women. These too have the dourness of day-neon. A tinny, overly vigorous August rendition of Jingle Bells draws your attention, the warning signal for a truck power washing the streets. 2 small pipes fire laterally from the front axle, with a large cannon affixed to the back. You get a special warning honk however, as you’re a feckless laowai.

A few minutes further, you pass Carols Too, a Mexicana themed bar, then the final Western bar on this strip, The Shamrock. These places are all dead in the daytime, so why come? A structural conceit? Should you head east from here, you would come to the gaudy Babi / Mix nightclub complex, slightly north of that the Tibetan quarter of town. Instead, when you reach a large modern building named Western Tower and affixed with a large splayed fan, head west. You immediately pass the American Consulate, simple and secretive, the preceding sidewalk blocked off, then a string of Chinese boutiques, given enigmatic (or puzzling and pretentious, should you be an English speaker) single word monikers like Goodness, Hansdome, Key and Ladystyle. The last one is two words, but it just sounded good.

You reach yi kwan liu. Turning left, you run the gauntlet of Western style restaurants, Ristorante Italiana, Vanilla Sky, Red Vrick Pizzeria, Grandma’s Kitchen, Pete’s Tex-Mex, Good-Wood Cafe etc. To enter, you will have to navigate past the entreaties of a desperate looking woman cradling a througoughly bored young boy who is notecably growing out of the sympathetic role of starving toddler.

Chinese restaurants will be adorned with sparklingly bearded Santas persisting from Christmas, and cartoon roosters celebrating Spring Festival 6 months past.

Looking up, the late afternoon sky has bruised and the first few prophetic drops of rain slap the dry pavement. Unfortunately, this is also time for restaurant staff to be drilled. They line up in ranks, waiters, greeters, kitchen staff, parking attendants, march on the spot in unison crying yi! er! san! si! (1 2 3 4) in vigorous responce to the vengeful exhortations of their yelling superior, and are often forced to jog round a few blocks chanting. Of course, this would offend the sensibilities of western-themed restaurant’s dumpy American clientelle, so it only applies to the native eateries. Duck into whatever place you fancy, but avoid the squalling rain and tumorous thunder as the day collapses. After a 30kwai hamburger or 5 kwai noodles, continue in the same direction. You will pass several Chinese nightclubs, again decked in posters of alluring westerners advertising foreign beers.

You return to the bridge that you passed on the bus heading south. To your right is a vast construction site, bare concrete skeletons webbed in green canvas netting and zig zagging unbound stairwells, all encircled by billboards proclaiming some nasty Chinglish amalgamation like Easternity Gardens, a confident, gleaming finished product of shimmering steel and reflective banks of windows, the sultry, air-brushed visage of some westerner vicariously embellishing the site’s esteem, all bathed in a very un-Chengdu like sunset of unsullied reds and yellows. Look past the site, and you spot the charcoal scratches of industrial towers, the only such glimpse possible from the city-centre.

Looking left, the bruised weight of thew sky has dissipated, and amid rifts in the cloud-bank, fading reds beam through and impose themselves on the lethargic viscuousity of the river, the semi-clearness of the sky allowing the arches of bridges to be reflected perfectly and create ovals. It is a very un-Chengdu like sunset of……

Follow the river left. Dusk sets in, and the elliptical symmetry of the riverside fence alights in pure whites, punctuated by yellow pillars bearing traditional calligraphy. At this time, the wide pavillions of the river will host lissome exhibtions of Tai Chi, rhythmic processions of flag dances and drum beats, squares of OAPs ballroom-dancing to crackling Pan-Pipes or Celine Dion. Stop to watch any of this, and you will relegate these events to the status of side-show, as people gaggle around you. Playgrounds of brightly painted yellow, red and blue machines are again dominated by the old, who set themselves in and perform the swinging motions with surprising muster. Some spurn the ease of the playground, and strecth their legs lithely upon the riverside fence, swing their arms in violent windmills and jog backwards with shuffling footsteps and occassional squats.

Continue until Chengdu Tourist Transportation and Service Center is represented in a large cursive red neon sprawl atop a large building on the opposite bank. The clangour of daytime is absent now, but the entire top floor is lit up by a huge internet cafe. Stop in at Dave’s Oasis, a cosy cafe that a walkthrough for any feckless laowai can’t avoid mentioning. As you leave, take the next right, an innocuous side road. You will come to the southern end of Chun Xi Liu, now invigorated by the effervescent pulse of neon. The similarities to Qin Tai Liu are evident. Brassy placques 4 metres square and an immense carved wall depict traditional China, deep forests, austere mountains and temples, women carrying baskets of fish and stirring vast cauldrons, men reading scrolls, piloting galloping horses and driving densely haunched oxen. Whereas protuding pavillion rooves strived for attention on Qin Tai Liu, here it is the neon sign. The Golden arches, the 3 stripes, the swoosh, the hut, the Colonel’s overbearing grin, Beckham’s taut 1000 mile squint (the one where he’s trying to look sophisticated) are all familiar. Like something out of Gatsby, a vein-blue pair of sunglasses jut furthest out in vigilance, with shimmering dawn-yellow lenses. Behind you can see the ambling gait of a faceless cowboy decked soley in denim, a cocktail glass whose level rises and falls with a diverse range of colours, jagged peaks of icy-blue mountains that symbolise a local brand of beer, a horse and cart hurtling from the side of an Olde English Pub, a preternaturally custard-yellow burst of vapour from a cup of coffee, the kaleidoscopic path of an exhalation through a saxamaphone and a jet of foam erupting every other second from a champegne bottle. Dizzying polychrome tracks horizontally and vertically in thick bars, sometimes replicating a logical chase of neon trailing back and forth, sometimes in itermittent patterning of varying pace, fading and emboldening, mostly at messy blinking random. Around most signs there is a glaring white border of emphatic, blinking pebbledash. Harder to discern at night are the various billboards for skin-whitening cosmetics, the most striking of which is a Nivea ad depicting a tanned face being unzipped revealing a milky pallor, or the symbolic gesture of a face mask being ripped off a la American Psycho. There is also a large billboard of a beaming nurse holding a bunch of flowers at the Sunshine Gynaecological Hospital.

Turn right at the top of the road, and pass recently constructed buildings named amongst other things, Champegne Plaza, Times Plaza, Prime Hotel, Sydney Stylistic Coffee and Goodwood Coffee.

When you reach the Funan river intersection, the difference in character is startling. A man will approach you enquiring Girls? and pass you a business card with a half-naked, pouting local. Neon palm trees, in bold shades of orange and green are rooted by the fence. An immnese edifice of neon prclaimns a KTV complex (Karaoke). Couples linger with illicit secrecy on benches in the shadows of riverside trees, as the river lamps curve away into the distance, hazed by a thin late-night mist. High above, confirming that you are back North-side, is the TV Tower, visible for the rings of flashing red lights that thicken at the control tower, but quickly resume tapering until the lone blink at the point of the needle. Several other high-rise are distinguished by similar flashing red points. The flat-planed constellations of warning lights set onto cranes, abound. On the same construction sites, green canvas is suddenly lit up by the soft fall of sparks from a welder’s torch. Outside an apartment complex, a straggle of Xmas lights set into a bush herald Santa’s arrival 5 months early.

You can largely avoid the traffic lights at this time, but this also holds true for taxis, who will blare their horn at you in warning or reprimand. Should the taxi have bold red characters lit on the dash, they are probably scouting for business too. Pedicab riders, lounging in the passenger enclave, will lean forward, tinkle the bell and gesture towards the comfort of their seats.

Coming to your intersection, you must pass the saokao stands. Though the easy night-time setting in the temperate early hours of morning is appealing, remember that a piece of undercooked pork gave you sever food-poisoning 4 months ago and you still tremble at the smell of skewered meat and veg being barbecued on these portable grills, drizzled in MSG and slathered in oil and chili. Drunken, shirtless Chinese jump up from their plastic kiddie chairs and demand to make your acquaintance and know your name.

You turn the corner, and a dusty red dump truck piled with fine stones lumbers across the grimy sandy surface, shepherded by men in orange jackets. Men still chisel away in trenches lit liminally by a string of infrequent, small electric bulbs, the glow of the truck’s beams, the intermittent flash of a welder’s torch metres away, and the soft orange glow of the mouth of the underpass.

Enter the Noodle shop, where Grandma will pre-empt your order upon seeing you by uttering san lien neuro jaozi (3 measures of beef dumplings). Give her the thumbs up and a hao! [good]. You will play Dodhizhou with her and a waitress, though the only way to win is to be on her team. Should she or you accept the role of landlord, you will lose. As you tackle the plate of jaozi, she will enquire about the existence of a neur pengyou [girl-friend], to which you must respond with a facetious ting bu dong! [hear but don’t understand]. As you exit, you notice that the internet bar is completely full. The fusty, claustrophobic afternoon hours have been displaced to the more temperate early morning. Check the internet if you like, but at this time the custom is heavily male, meaning incessant hocking and spitting, tuneless warbling of pop songs, fist-bitingly loud conversations on QQ (Chinese MSN equivalent) through microphones and common, ostentatious farting enhanced by their reverberative release on leather seats. Next door, 3 men lie on sheets of cardboard in the shop-front of the Chain Store, shielded by parasols. The prostitutes have pulled across the boards for the night, and the iron gates of your apartment complex are closed. Reach through the bars, and pull the padlock open, quietly letting yourself in as two guards slumber across chairs. Another resident follows you in. Unlock the front door of your building, hold it open and receive no thanks. Climb three flights to your apartment, flick on the kong tiao and fall asleep wandering what drove you to traverse the city centre with no discernible purpose, save details for an excessively long, turgid travelogue, and vow to never write another word about Chengdu. You should at least have waxed about the traces of eternity in the eyes of a crooked old man, or the inexorable cycles of life evinced by grandma holding a defecating baby in split-pants over a bush, but it really wasn’t that kind of day. You did, however, up the pretension quota by using the words lozenge, fusty and a la amongst others, so it hasn’t been a total waste.

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