Naples: Rome and Milan's mildly psychotic younger brother

Naples gets a lot of bad press.  Almost everybody I spoke to prior to leaving had a profoundly negative opinion of the city, citing the usual complaints about “dirty,” “crowded,” “noisy,” “violent,” so on and so forth.  Having spent a fair amount of time in places that are actually dirty, crowded, noisy, and fairly violent, I was rather skeptical; besides, hearing everyone trash Naples (no pun intended) made me like the place right off the bat.  The fact that it’s the gateway to the major tourist magnets of Capri and the Amalfi Coast and yet has remained staunchly un-prettified appealed to my inner contrarianism, so I deliberately carved out time between returning on the hydrofoil and going to Pompeii to experience its dirty, crowded noise for myself (not so keen on the violence).

I had had this idea that, after I had landed from my transatlantic flight and gotten a decent night’s sleep, I would be able to roam the streets for a while before departing for Capri around noon; however, my aunt had very kindly arranged for a driver to not only pick me up from Capodichino and bring me to my bed and breakfast but to pick me up the next morning and take me to the port.  As he passed my bag off to the b&b owner, who was clearly rather disgruntled about having to wait up until 12.30am, my driver smiled and said he would see me at 8.30 the next morning so I could get to the island nice and early.  I negotiated this back to 9 because I was starting to get that “I’m so tired I feel like I’ve been clubbed in the head” sensation, and the idea of prying myself off a soft, warm, non-airline seat bed a mere eight hours down the line was not particularly appealing.

So 9 it was, and my aunt had called it—being picked up by the same smiley driver and having my luggage and dress carried straight onto the hydrofoil was infinitely more pleasant than arguing with a grizzled taxi driver and waiting in line with the hordes of day trippers.

There’s also a part of me that wonders if, given my history of ending up in foreign police stations and other situations that become funny once a few years have passed, she wanted to leave as little room as possible for me to end up squealing at gunpoint in some Neopolitan back alley and texting “can’t make the wedding, being held captive by local gang members lol.”  Not an un-valid concern, to tell the truth.  As such, I figured I would have to do my Naples exploring when I got back.

First off, it’s hard not to like a place with the stereotypical Mediterranean climate where the sun rises over a string of mountains and reflects off a picturesquely curving bay.  Around 7am, the air still has a slight crispness, which burns off as the day slips into the summer balminess that continues well into the evening and lets people take to the streets and piazzas for dining and drinking al fresco.  The weather here is pretty close to perfect, and even the summer thunderstorms, like the one I caught the night I landed, are very mild, and have the added benefit of clearing any lingering haze.  We were probably lucky, but it was perfectly, flawlessly clear while we were there, with not a trace of the oft-referenced pollution.  Maybe it’s vestigial from those years in the UK where a day over 70F was a rare, rare gift to be cherished and reveled in, but I can’t entirely hate any place where you can assume the sun will be out and it will be warm enough to wear open-toed shoes (I even feel this way about our office in the San Francisco suburb of Pleasanton, which depresses me in a lot of ways but regularly gets up to 90F in the summer).

Weather aside, I’m kind of shocked that no one mentions how stunning the city is architecturally.  Not only is it blessed with this amazing location on a wide gulf with a perfectly framed view of Mount Vesuvius, the multicolored buildings of central  Naples are so picturesque that walking down streets like Via Toledo feels like being in a 1920s film.  Yes, there’s a bit of peeling paint, a few shabby awnings, the occasional mess of weeds growing between roof tiles, and, if you find this kind of thing “dirty” and offensive, myriad clotheslines strung with drying laundry, but there is an undeniable elegance about the tall windows and ornate iron balustrades set against their backdrops of burnt sienna, ochre, terra cotta, and kelly green. 

One of many handsome facades

The lungomare, the promenade along the bay that stretches north of the port, is particularly distinguished-looking, consisting mostly of stately hotels fronted with cafes that look out onto the water, and even in the early morning, you will be joined on your stroll by at least a handful of other people doing the same.  There are also numerous piazzas, including the absolutely enormous Piazza del Plebiscito (named for the 1863 plebiscite that brought Naples under the Savoys’ rule as part of a shiny, happy, unified Italy), which resembles a slightly smaller, newer, dingier, and less gilded version of the Vatican courtyard.  Admittedly, the base of the central horse statue is squiggled with graffiti, as are some of the columns forming the half moon that flank the church of San Francesco di Paola behind it, but the space is vast enough that it in no way diminishes the effect.

You have to give Naples points for its very large castle.

Galeria Umberto, thing of splendor

I never said it wasn't a dense city...but look at that amazing weather!

While we’re on the topic, yes, there is a lot of graffiti in Naples.  It is definitely one of the features that one notices straight away; it would be hard to ignore the sheer volume (which, I imagine, also makes it hard to remove).  It’s rather striking, though, how much graffiti there is that simply says “ti amo” (I love you).  Kind of touching, right?  I personally would not choose to memorialize my love that way, but I guess the sentiment is there.  Quite a bit of it is political in nature as well.  The wall where I took the below photo (“se non cambierà, come in Grecia”; rough translation: if things don’t change we’ll turn into Greece) covered immigration, homophobia, corruption, and the role of the church, and it was less than a block long.

As for the noise, Neapolitans are famous for being loud (we have a Lucchese family friend who sniffs that they run around yelling like their heads are on fire and then does her “Neapolitan impression,” which consists of sticking her tongue out and waving her hands in the air), but I imagine that a person would have to be really, really uptight for it to be a genuine problem.  We were able to hold conversations over dinner without any problem and didn’t have to yell out the window at any boisterous youths to keep it down because respectable people were trying to sleep at this hour or anything.  In the evenings, the street is simply a place to talk or eat or smoke or gamble or whatever, and it lends the city a distinctly buoyant air that you simply won’t find in a place where the entertaining is done in someone’s sitting room.  Everyone seemed to be in a good mood, enjoying the warm summer night, and instead of being mugged, cursed, or pelted with rocks, I was offered several cheerful “buona sera”s.  Mmm, yes, truly dreadful. 

There’s a fairly constant and raucous symphony of horns going during the day, which is also quite easy to ignore and is a phenomenon hardly unique to Naples.  As in most of urban Italy, driving and crossing the street are both adrenaline sports, and all you really have to keep in mind is that no one is actually going to run you over so long as you aren’t a complete and total moron about it.  A few mopeds came unexpectedly close to flattening my toes, but once I stepped into the pedestrian crossings, the traffic had no qualms about slamming on the brakes to let me cross, the drivers transformed into docile Midwestern soccer moms for a few seconds before flooring the gas pedal once again and screeching off into the distance.  A Times article from a while back described driving in the Naples area as “the least relaxing activity on earth”; in the end, though, it all seems to work out.  

One of the first things that piqued my interest in Naples was the “camorra merda” scrawled on a concrete barrier to a construction site, which translates literally to “shitty Camorra” but is closer to saying “fuck the Camorra” in English.  I spied this with my nose pressed against the window of my black car on the way to get the hydrofoil and promised myself I’d photograph it on my return.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember exactly where it was; fortunately, I soon came across many more “camorra merda” graffiti.  This one is on the side of a bank.

The flyer on the left says something about a personal mantra for
inner tranquility; not sure if they're related.

As literally every reputable source will tell you, it is very, very unlikely that the Camorra will have anything to do with you as a tourist.  There are still regular murders and extortion remains an issue, but unless you use your vacation to start your own rival ring of organized crime, they will leave you well enough alone.  Contrary to popular belief, Naples no longer exists in the 90s, and even the much-maligned sanitation situation has improved.  I caught sight of both street cleaners and garbage trucks doing their jobs, and fairly efficiently at that.  There’s rubbish on the streets (a lot more than you’ll find in Positano or Capri, that’s for sure), and there are still issues with landfill capacity, as the Camorra has sold a bunch of the space for a fat and dirty profit, but I actually found Naples to be generally cleaner than San Francisco.  If you can’t move past this, I recommend just looking upwards the whole time, because again, the architecture is gorgeous.  There is also no stench of human urine emanating from the sidewalk nor any feces to worry about stepping in, which I liked.

Waste collection is still rife with problems, but I can personally
vouch that the streets get scrubbed on the regular.

Back to the Camorra, briefly, because I find them fascinating—nowadays you’ll actually see businesses with anti-pizzo stickers in their windows, pizzo being the money paid to mafiosi to not burn down the building, break people’s knees, etc.  The anti-pizzo movement kicked off in 1991, when Libero Grassi, a Palermo businessman, got royally fed up and wrote an open letter to the Giornale di Sicilia that opened with “Dear Extortionist.”  I think we can all agree that that takes some serious cojones.  Because this was really the first time that anyone had provided any kind of pushback, there was a huge public uproar, and, not entirely surprisingly, Grasso was offed nine months later.  Still, the letter got the ball rolling, and 2004 saw the formation of Addiopizzo, a grassroots movement led by a generation of Sicilians who had grown up with the Cosa Nostra murdering anti-Mafia judges, journalists, and businessmen as a matter of course.  Today Addiopizzo is still quite active throughout the South and Sicily, though I’m not sure if this speaks more to the shifting attitudes towards the Mafia or to the fact that the Camorra, ‘Ndrangheta, and Cosa Nostra are still a colossal problem.  Apparently pizzo is a €30bn per year industry; the organized crime groups in Italy are estimated to have a €90bn turnover annually, which comes out to roughly 7% of GDP.  Welp.

Anyway, Naples.  It is still extremely improbable that you will suffer any ill treatment at the hands of a mafia thug if you’re strolling around for a few days, and it is still a very attractive city.

So after my morning walking along the lungomare, down Via Toledo, through the Galeria Umberto, and across the Piazza di Plebiscito, I was really wondering why everyone said Naples was that terrible.  I mean, when I think of the terrible places I’ve personally experienced, I think of Guatemala City, a polluted, grey concrete hellhole with a staggering murder rate and absolutely nothing in the way of attractions, unless you count murder as an attraction (I arrived at 6am on a packed to the gills overnight bus from Petén and spent two hours in the station holding my bag, trying not to look like an easily muggable 19-year-old blonde girl while I waited for a connecting bus up to Lake Atitlán; mission accomplished, but my memories aren’t particularly fond).  A lot of people consider Delhi to be terrible, which, although I found it exciting and fun and full of delicious food, is much more understandable.  Few places on earth can rival Delhi’s noise, chaos, and open sewage ditches, and there is the added benefit of either sweltering heat or damp, smoky cold depending on the season.  Detroit, from what I am told, is also genuinely terrible.  But certainly not this ancient city full of outdoor cafes and Art Nouveau masterpieces basking in the Mediterranean sun between the mountains and the sea, right?  I really didn’t get it.  Sure, there are nasty parts of Naples, I reasoned, but even Marin County has its nasty parts.

Then I got on the train to Pompeii and got a better idea of why good old Naples has this reputation.  I literally had to stifle my laughter because oh my God, this train made everything I'd ridden in India look like the Oriental Express and Scotrail look like a bloody private jet.  While the metro is clean, frequent, and easy, the trains going to the outlying towns (including Sorrento) appear to be a 1980s hand-me-down from a particularly grim city, perhaps somewhere in Romania or the Baltic states, made all the less comfortable by the crush of humans who are all inevitably going to (you guessed it) your same destination.  There isn’t any air-conditioning (ha!), so the solution is to crack open the four-inch wide vents at the tops of the windows and hope (in vain) that some semblance of a breeze circulates its way between the sweaty torsos all pressed up against one another.  The train moves at a top speed of about 30mph, so putting any considerable distance between yourself and central Naples is quite the time commitment, and on the way, if there is room to turn your head and see out the window, you will be treated to a visual feast of graffiti ranging from hastily scrawled “ti amo”s to a 30-foot high portrait of Bob Marley complete with individually detailed dreads and highly realistic-looking smoke pouring out of his joint.   Should you be so lucky as to get a seat, you will find yourself peeling the backs of your legs off the hard orange plastic and shifting from side to side to mitigate the searing pain that will start to radiate through your tailbone, though I’ll admit I find sitting on hard surfaces more uncomfortable than most.  Needless to say, by the time we reached Pompeii and I crawled off the train, I was quite happy to breathe in the fresh air and not be touching a clammy stranger.

(Pompeii itself was great as well.  Saddest part was the mummified dog; it just looked so frightened. There are a lot of other people who have written things about Pompeii that are far more interesting than anything I could hope to produce, so I recommend looking one of them up.)

The ride back to Naples was less crowded, which improved the experience somewhat, and was quickly eclipsed by yet another fantastic meal of veal with porcini and insalata caprese, which confirmed for me that the city is pretty alright.  Had I not had an overnight ferry to board post-veal, I would have gladly spent another day there.  I mean, really, if we’re going to start judging cities based on their worst neighborhoods, they we might as well condemn New York, Paris, London, and San Francisco, all of which are positively fawned over by tourists, as shitholes too.  Go if you have the chance, and if you want to visit somewhere that’s actually dirty, crowded, noisy, and violent, I can supply you with a list that most definitely does not include Naples.

I’d also like to take a brief moment to discourage referring to it as “Napoli” when speaking English.  Until you start referring to Switzerland as “die Schwiez” or Bangkok as “Krung Thep,” it’s generally pretentious and irritating.  Public service announcement over.

"I had the most amazing time in Athína.  I mean, Athens.  Sorry, the locals call it
Athína and I just got used to calling it that too in the 72 hours I was there."

You can't spell 'team' without 'tea'

Forgive the really stupid title of this post. I'm sure there are better puns about tea or about Sri Lanka in general, but I can't think of them right now and I'm trying not to run up an astronomical tab here in this Nuwara Eliya internet cafe. Though considering it costs all of 400 Sri Lankan rupees an hour (about a pound fifty or so) that would be difficult.

I've always wanted to come to Sri Lanka; first, because I liked the name, and then later, because in spite of its decades-long civil war, the spirit of the island seemed so beautifully zen. There it was, hanging off southern India like an earring or a tear, just quietly existing in all its tropical satisfaction in one of the world's most beautiful oceans beneath its much larger and brasher neighbour. The war ended, Natasha and I were in desperate need of a break from the soul-wrenching dampness and greyness of Scotland, and lo and behold, here we are. We landed in the damp heat of Colombo at about 4am on the..erm...26th? 27th? Things are so laid-back here I don't even remember; needless to say, I am slowly being restored from my late March-self, which is pasty, exhausted, and fed up with all things St Andrews, to my mid-April self, which is usually tanner, more energetic, and generally likes life better.

After a gloriously languid day spent drinking iced coffee and wandering through the cracked and leafy streets of Colombo, we hopped a train up to Nuwara Eliya, Sri Lanka's highest town. The moist and heavy air cooled as the old colonial-era train snaked its way up into the hill country, and the palms and grasses of the lowlands gave way to eucalyptus trees so tall as to be surreal and sweeping valleys coated in tea bushes. Hanging out the side of the train (the doors are just left swinging open because some countries aren't slaves to health and safety), I could feel my eyes bug out more and more with every bend we rounded. It is stupidly beautiful up here, ethereal in the afternoon clouds that fringe the peaks, festooned with flowers of all shapes and colours, and so verdant as to look unreal. Were the garden of Eden real, it would look like the Sri Lankan hill country. My dad, a genuine gardening fanatic, would have a field day up here (no pun intended).







The reason for coming all the way up here was because of the tea plantations. To state the obvious, tea is a big thing here. The mountains are positively covered in it; the velvety green slopes are broken only by reddish dirt footpaths, the occasional towering, spindly tree and white-clad tea pickers filling the sacks strapped to their shoulders. We caught a local bus about 20km down the road to Labookelie to a local factory, where I finally learned the difference between white tea and green tea and silver tips and golden tips and all that, and then proceeded to have our minds blown by the utter gorgeousness of the surrounding hills. As far as the eye could see, tea grew and lent the mountains such a vivid colour that they appeared to be glowing in the soft afternoon light that filtered through the clouds. We walked back up the winding road to Nuwara Eliya with our mouths agape at how unreal it all looked, which of course made the locals piss themselves with laughter. Apparently they love weird Westerners.





















Ceci and Natasha: providing roadside entertainment in South Asia since 2010

Walking through the giant teabag that is Sri Lankan hill country, it's easy to see why everyone here is so relaxed and indeed why this place is one of the last strongholds of Buddhism. When you have all this amazingness to look at and very probably the world's best cup of tea right out your doorstep, what's not to love?



















Your morning cup of Orange Pekoe in its infancy









































The hills are alive with the sound of...erm...tea

For those of you without an imagination, if you find this all really boring, there will be pictures added later.

Edit: see?

Ruminations on my 24 hours away from St Andrews, part I

Last Thursday I went down to Durham for the night to attend a Bain & Company recruitment presentation, as working for Bain would pretty much be my dream job. Why they choose to hold an event at Durham and not at St Andrews I will never understand, but it did give me a chance to get out of the bubble, albeit briefly.

In spite of the vast majority of my train travel in the UK, it’s one of my favourite ways to get around. At the moment, I’m en route to Durham for the night—just a hop, skip and a jump down the east coast—and while I may have the mild urge to drop kick the pair of squalling Scottish children seated in front of me, the two that keep screeching ‘ticket, please!’ like they’re Mohammed receiving the f***ing Koran, I am for the most part enjoying watching autumnal Britain go past.

Part of this no doubt comes from being raised in California, a state whose expanse remains very much umarked by reliable passenger trains. If you want to get from San Francisco to LA, you have two options: fly or drive. If you want to get from San Francisco to pretty much anywhere else, your options are narrowed to driving. For the past twenty years, the mythical high-speed rail link between the two major cities has been debated, put on the ballot, and abandoned in a cycle that repeats itself over and over with absolutely no results (I haven’t been in California for four months now, though, and I’ve done a poor job of keeping up with the state politics—apart from Proposition 19 in the upcoming election—so I’m not sure what’s going on right now).
There is the much-hyped Coast Starlight Express, but I’ve never known anyone apart from tourists to take it because it’s usually delayed by about nineteen hours (not even an exaggeration; the freight trains have priority over the passenger trains or something like that). Hardly an efficient way to go from Norcal to Socal. It’s also possible to get the train up to Tahoe—the tracks run alongside Highway 80, carved so that they cling to the rugged sides of mountains and then laid to run through the meadow directly beneath the Sugar Bowl gondola—but again, it’s wildly inefficient, and the only people I’ve ever known to take it were my mom and brother back in the early nineties, when Ted was going through the same ‘train stage’ as every other little boy (unless they’re going through a dinosaur, airplane, car or other heavy machinery phase). I couldn’t begin to count the number of times I’ve wished there were a fast, direct ski train to Tahoe, the sort in those vintage posters from the 1920s (probably the best time to have been white and rich, in my opinion).

So I can recall pressing my face against train windows to look out at the Highlands, and twining through the fields of Tuscany on a slow train when Italy still used the lira, and being whipped past the vineyards outside of Bordeaux by the TGV. But, as for most Californians, trains do not feature very prominently in my childhood memories, and I came to associate them not just with going on holiday, but with a sort of comforting old world quaintness. Hence my fondness for them, quite apart from the fact that I just like going places. The journey up to St Andrews is particularly nice, as you get to go by the sea, across the oft-photographed Firth of Forth, through lots of picturesque bucolic fields, so on and so forth.

That’s not to say, however, that there haven’t been moments in my three-odd years of residence in Britain that have seriously tested my patience with the whole thing. Moments where I’ve wanted to tear up all of my little orange and white tickets and shout, ‘Forget the whole thing! I’ll take a taxi! I’ll hitchhike! I’ll crawl!’ Moments where the urge to drop kick noisy children in my carriage has been, shall we say, somewhat greater than ‘mild’. We’ve all experienced more than our share of delays, fat chavvy seatmates, broken heating, and dickish attendants, of course, but my journey back up to Leuchars from Sheffield last April was a veritable comedy of errors.

I wasn’t of the fittest of states to begin with, as I’d just come back from India a few days ago and was still recovering from a vicious bout of food poisoning that had left me weakened and bony (thanks to the disgusting-sounding shigella, I later found out). Plus I was still adjusting back to the brisk and chilling British climate after a fortnight of gloriously roastingly hot 40-degree sunshine in Rajasthan and was suffering from the cold even more so than usual. So I was content to let a man in an overcoat heave my backpack to the top shelf of the luggage rack and curl up in my coat for a nap until we reached Edinburgh. All was going to plan when, just south of Newcastle, the train began to slow ominously—the carriage held its collective breath—and then, to everyone’s acute despair, shuddered to a halt. We had sat there for about twenty minutes, rock-still, when the intercom came to life and the conductor told us, with fatigue in his voice, that the train had stopped. After delivering that earth-shattering piece of news, he said that the train had stopped due to ‘an unfortunate situation’. Again, absolutely shocking. Finally, we were told that we would have more information in a bit, and the utterly pointless announcement was over.
A few minutes later, the conductor told the passengers that we were stopped because not one but two people had thrown themselves in front of speeding trains just north of Newcastle. I don’t mean to be nasty here, but if I lived just north of Newcastle, I would probably be inclined to do the same.* Still, I have very little patience for people that choose to end it by standing in front of trains. I find it tremendously selfish—it’s terrible to be that depressed, of course, but why do they feel the need to ruin everyone else’s day in addition to their own? Apparently these two twits had buggered up the rail lines all over the northeast. Plus, I had no water left, which made my tongue feel like sandpaper, and the restaurant car had decided it couldn’t be bothered to sell things anymore. So I was ready to get home.

The train crawled into the Newcastle station, where we were meant to wait until the mess got sorted out. It would be at least an hour, the conductor informed us. I wouldn’t make my train from Edinburgh to Leuchars at this point, but it didn’t particularly worry me as I could just get the later one. But the hour came and went, and ninety minutes later, I was not only doubting that I would be able to make it home that night, I was dying of thirst. At this point the conductor came on the intercom again and gravely informed us that it would be at least another hour. Groans all around.

A crowd of people streamed out the carriage, myself amongst them and now slightly mad with thirst. I crossed over the tracks to the only shops that were still open—it was about half ten by this point—bought my water, cracked open the bottle and started guzzling right there. Feeling a bit better, I began to make my way back to the other platform. I was just ascending the stairs when my train made that funny puffing sound, came to life and began to pull out of the station.

There are few feelings worse than the one that comes over you as you watch your train leave without you. First off, you’re utterly powerless, unless you’re some kind of superhuman and sprint behind the thing, leap into the air and grab onto the outside of the carriage (not in the cards for yours truly). Second, you’re stranded in a place you don’t exactly want to be, with, as of now, no means of getting to the place you do want to be. To make matters worse, my backpack was still safely tucked away, right where the overcoat-wearing man had put it, and that particular train wasn’t terminating at Edinburgh. No, its final destination was Glasgow. Things didn’t look good for either me or the backpack, which would probably end up in the hands of some Weegie chav who would rifle through the thin, brightly coloured tunics and tiny marble elephant figurines, all coated with the ubiquitous layer of Indian dust, and wonder why he had stolen something so useless.

So, immobilised by shock and the nausea-inducing wave of dread that rolled over me, I watched my ride home and my luggage continue on their way north, the distance between us increasing with every chug. When it had disappeared from view, my legs came back to life and I went to find the nearest person who could help me sort out my rather crappy situation, a string of expletives running through my head. I found a very put out-looking man who resembled a large egg that someone had outfitted in an East Coast jacket for a laugh and spilled my story—the thirst! the multiple suicides! the one-hour delay that never happened! the backpack!—in one great rush and capped it all off by squeaking out a sufficiently pathetic ‘please, sir, what should I do?’

‘Jesus, there are like, six of you that did this,’ he grumbled. ‘Don’t you know you should never get off the train?’

Well, now I did.

The egg-shaped man spoke into his radio a few times. ‘Wait here,’ he instructed. I obeyed, rubbing my arms to try and keep warm and shifting my weight from foot to foot for the next twenty minutes. Egg Man returned just as a train rolled into the station and told me, ‘Just get on that one!’

‘Is it going to Edinburgh?’ I asked, no doubt sounding like a moron. I didn’t care, though; the last thing I wanted was to end up in Carlisle or something.

‘Yes! Yes! Just get on it! Quickly!’ he shouted, all but bodily shoving me towards it.

‘Erm, what about my luggage?’ I called after the man as he departed to have a fag.

‘You’ll have to ask once you get on that train,’ he yelled over his shoulder. And so I stopped asking questions and hopped onto the very empty and silent train that was supposedly going to Edinburgh.

For the next fifteen minutes, I wobbled my way up and down the length of the train like an unsteady foal, searching for someone—anyone—who appeared to work for the rail company and providing much amusement for all the seated passengers. Eventually I gave up and curled up on a pair of empty seats, wondering if I would have to pay for another ticket, how I would get back to St Andrews, if I would get back to St Andrews (as, at this rate, I would arrive in Edinburgh well past midnight), and when/if I would ever see that backpack again. I was mentally preparing myself to spend the night in Waverly Station—it would be cold, but I always carry a decent supply of sleeping pills in my handbag—when an attendant miraculously appeared. I scrambled up out of my seat and once again relayed my pathetic situation to this slightly less egg-shaped man.

The response was the same—I was an idiot for getting off the train, as were those five other people—but I was reassured that I would not have to buy a new ticket, my luggage would be offloaded and waiting for me, I would be sent up to St Andrews in a taxi, and no, I would not have to sleep on the floor of the station. My knees went weak with relief. By two am, I was soundly asleep under my goose-feather duvet back in St Andrews, clad in my mom’s old Berkeley jumper and no doubt dreaming of pleasant things like skiing and Starbucks frappuccinos.

And that is how I managed to get a taxi ride from Edinburgh straight to my front door and pay absolutely nothing for the privilege. I could have done without the near-coronary, though.

*I was typing this just before my train pulled into Newcastle and noticed the lady sitting next to me peer over my shoulder. She of course ended up disembarking at Newcastle and made sure to hit me with her handbag on the way out. I think I might have offended her.

Beijing, take two

I should have posted this weeks ago, really-I've been back from Beijing for some time now. Sigh. Such is life.

The first time I went to Beijing, and indeed my very first time on the Asian continent, I was seventeen. The year was 2007-China's much-talked about coming out party of the Olympics was still a while away, Sarkozy, Obama and Cameron weren't yet in office, the financial crisis was only just brewing and my little mind hadn't yet been blown wide open by the sensory smorgasbord of the Far East. Needless to say, I loved my brief time in the capital and am still immensely grateful to the Buies for making it possible and for our Mandarin class at Branson for making it so much fun. Landing at SFO, though, I couldn't help but feel genuinely sad-and normally I love coming back to its silent sterile emptiness (not sure why, but I do). When, I wondered, would I get the chance to come back? I could have easily stayed in Beijing for months more and felt that I had barely scratched the surface of the behemoth of the People's Republic, and the UK-which would be my new home in a few months' time-was just as far away as California.

Really, I have such amazing memories of that first visit, and they've hardly faded since then. I still remember how the late winter air felt, the dusky early morning light over Tiananmen Square at the flag raising ceremony, the gritty black tickle in my throat I developed after just a few days and, at the foot of the Great Wall, laughing over something that was distinctly un-funny so hard that we were all in tears. Plus, I brought back loads of STUFF-souvenirs, I guess, but not much in the way of 'I went to Beijing and all I bought was this stupid t-shirt!' sort of things. The massive brass Tibetan ceremonial dagger still resides on my mother's coffee table, the Cultural Revolution-era propaganda posters are folded up in storage boxes in St Andrews as I type this and I still lounge around in my mint green and navy silk bathrobes. In short, that trip to Beijing has stayed with me, and I couldn't wait to go back. I just didn't know when I would be able to; as hard as I tried to think like General Patton ('I shall return'), it's not easy when you're a just a dumb seventeen-year-old.

So fast forward a bit to me in Shanghai Hongqiao train station, getting ready to board the night train to the capital, and you can imagine that I was rather excited. The train, first off, was so pristine and white that it kind of looked like a mental hospital-a bit different from the lovable but grimy third class cars in which Natasha and I trundled around Rajasthan. I could wax poetic about the downy white comforters and bottled water in our private compartment, but, so as not to sound like a country bumpkin/weird train afficionado, I won't. Despite having lived in Britain for three years, in which the trains are overpriced, often delayed and generally a bit crap, I still find train travel novel, which I suppose comes from growing up in California. The sleeper train had me excited enough as it was, and when I opened my eyes to the early morning fog, birch trees and low blocky buildings, it brought to mind my first glimpse of northern China from the plane and had me raring to go.




















Yours truly getting way too excited over how clean the train was

Beijing and I have both changed a lot since 2007-they had the Olympics, and I moved to a tiny wind-blasted town in Scotland (though I suppose some other stuff has happened too). Anyone who's experienced pre- and post-Olympics Beijing will tell you this, but it really is striking how much cleaner the whole city is-the air, the sidewalks, the streets, the buildings. In my Chinese politics module last spring, our tutor (the famous Marc Lanteigne) told us that, in the months leading up to the opening ceremony, the government kept running tally of all the 'blue sky' days in the capital. 'Blue sky' didn't actually mean perky blue expanses with puffy white clouds; 'blue sky' meant looking at the pavement and being able to see a faint shadow. Kind of misleading. When we were there three years ago, we had quite a clear first morning, but mostly it was mottled grey haze of varying thickness. Even out by the Great Wall at Mutianyu the sky was the colour of dust. By the time we headed back to California, most everyone had a low hacking cough that sounded terrible, which was particularly unfortunate considering that this was the height of the avian flu epidemic. US customs is notorious for holding people for hours at a time, and I think that the combination of death-cough and 'I've just been in China' would have set off some alarm bells. (Ahh, the memories.)

So when that early morning haze burned off to reveal crystal-blue skies overhead, I was pleasantly shocked. No more black lung for me! Up at the Great Wall at Simatai, the difference was even more pronounced. Up in the lush and verdant mountains, I felt as though I was in Tahoe-not the country that boasts seven of the world's ten most polluted cities. Not to digress, but I'm looking over a list of the planet's most polluted places right now, and it's making my stomach turn over (though that might also be last night taking its toll, oops). When I did a paper on the impact of environmental problems in China, I looked over a photo essay of some of the cities in the rust belt up north. And let me tell you, Jesus Christ, it simultaneously made the bile rise in my throat and brought tears to my eyes. Photos of places like Linfen make Guatemala City look like a garden spot. Very distressing.

Anyway-it wasn't just the air that seemed so much cleaner; everything generally looked as though it had been hosed off and given a new coat of paint. Even the hutongs looked as though they'd been spruced up a bit...which, to be honest, made me a bit sad. I really do love the sleek, spotless efficiency of Geneva and Singapore, but I'm a big fan of chaos as well. I love hectic markets with monkeys running around and people selling mysterious meat on sticks and haggling and dilapidated buildings festooned with clotheslines. The Beijing government certainly did what it set out to do for China's coming out party, but I hope they leave the hutongs alone now.

It's also a lot quieter in Beijing now, as people actually seem to be taking notice of the no horn signs all over the city (yes, the ones that I first thought meant 'no playing trumpets here'...embarrassing). Rather than the cacophonous symphony I remember, it just seems to be occasional beeps now. My mother, who literally jumps when she hears loud or sudden noises because I've 'shattered her nerves', will be relieved to know this (because I WILL drag you to Beijing one day, Mom).

Another difference is that the streets are no longer mobbed by the same throngs of bicycles anymore. There are still loads, of course, but it's nothing compared to the swarms I remember. Our flat in Embassy House back in 2007 looked out onto a massive intersection, and I remember that we could watch the frenzied dance of trucks, cars, people and bicycles for a good twenty minutes at a time. The bicycles were like locusts, threading in and out of cars and somehow avoiding getting flattened. I suppose it's not just Beijing, though-China is going car-crazy at the moment. Think 1950s America, but with 1.3 billion people. Kind of frightening, actually.

But so much of Beijing is exactly the same-the stunning monuments of the imperial past, the wholly delicious kao ya (roast duck!), the heavy curly sound of the northern accent. It's impossible not to be blown away by the splendour of the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace or the Great Wall. Tiananmen Square-the very very first emblematic place I went in China-was just as I remembered it, which is to say HUGE. Pictures can't capture the scale of the place. And looking at Mao's portrait gave me history-geek chills-another thing that was just the same. Oh, Mao-'cult of personality' doesn't do him justice. Even after doing a lot of really stupid s*** and being dead for 30 years, he's got a larger-than-life portrait in the nerve centre of the world's burgeoning superpower. It sort of floors me that one guy with poufy hair and poor dental hygiene was able to alter the course of human history this much. Historiography as an academic discipline tends to sneer at using individuals as the primary unit of analysis-you know, the whole idea that history has been determined by a succession of kings and emperors-but when you look at people like Mao Zedong, it makes you think. And in Beijing, you definitely feel his presence more than you do in Shanghai (though I'm sure there's a less creepy way to say that).



















There he is!

One nice difference about this time around? It was a lot easier to say goodbye, because I know for sure, like General Patton, that I shall return.