Chinese portraits

- People's Square, Saturday morning. Dozens of Shanghaiese and out-of-towners admire the funny sculpture exhibition and take each others' photos. Sam and Lucy, smiling 20 year olds, pretty good English, ask us to take theirs. We get into conversation - how different from the Japanese ! She's a marketing secretary, he's in his final year of mechanical engineering. They're in Shanghai for the weekend, up from a nearby town, and are visiting more or less the same things as us and loving the big city. We decide to go with them to a tea festival taking place nearby. As we walk along we learn quite a bit about life for young people in China today. When we get there the festival turns out to be an ordinary teahouse, with each cup at an exorbitant price... We were so disappointed at having misjudged (perhaps ?) this interesting and charming couple. They appeared completely puzzled when we got up and said goodbye, explaining politely that the cup was the price of 2 meals for us. Had we been Shanghaied ?

- Tall and pretty Irene or possibly Eileen is in her final year of law at Shanghai international university and was acting as volunteer guide on Sunday morning at the small house where Mao Tse Tung once lived, a free of charge little museum in the leafy former French concession, now a neighbourhood full of boutiques and fashionable cafes. In excellent if rather blurred English she launched into a presentation of Mao's family life from the lifelike scenes on display. She was monitored closely by her teacher. We just hope she won't be penalised for having failed to keep our attention long enough to go through all Mao's publications. We returned to the calm bourgeois neighbourhood outside, a far cry from the streets teeming with those for whom Mao's ideas didn't work.

- The 50-something couple sharing our soft sleeper (couchette) compartment of the 250km/hr overnight train from Shanghai to Xian were seasoned travellers. He was constantly going off for hot water for their tea thermos, took a towel and toothbrush to the washbasins at the end of the carriage, and changed into long johns for the night. I was awoken early morning by a regular tapping noise. I looked down from my couchette (no ladder, just heave yourself up via a tiny footrest) to see him gently but firmly patting the top of his sparsely covered head. The day before we had witnessed a chap in Shanghai sitting under a towel, while a girl carefully battered his bent head from all sides with a fly whisk of soft twigs.

- The six gardeners assigned to the giant potted flower flag in the People's Square had been given an easy task for the day. The poinsettias representing the red section were beginning to produce their attractive yellow seeds. But there are no sprinkles of yellow on China's flag so they were working their way across it, squatting in line on their haunches, scissors in hand, snipping off the offending parts from the pot on their left before putting it back into position on their right. It was 2pm, they'd done about a fifth of the thousand or so pots. Luckily someone had brought along a transistor.

- Lucy or Lu Yufen (4), was sitting at the next table one evening, playing silently and a bit reluctantly with a new toy. A young Englishman next to her was attempting in vain to make conversation. He eventually started checking his emails. Was he looking after her for an hour or two ? Almost. Following her parent's divorce, this was her father's turn to look after her. Since he now teaches IT in Phuket (Thailand) he spends a few days with her each time at the Ibis hotel, in Xian where she lives with her Chinese mother. Yesterday was the first day... but the next day things were more relaxed on all sides with quite a discussion going on in English about when bedtime was.