A Danger From The Middle Ages

Shanghai seems to be a swish place for expats these days: flash clubs, company accounts and villa complexes. Many of the expats are also quite tragic though – or those coming into the bar I worked at certainly were. Like many English teachers with a lot of time to themselves, I’ve recorded various scenes and moods from the world of odd bods I move in. The TEFL world is a basket case, and well, China TEFLERS are the crumbs at the bottom of the basket. I looked back on some of my jottings recently, most of them are embarrassingly badly written, but, I’m still quite fond of this little fragment:

A December day, a man in a black windbreaker hurries along: he is under dressed for the cold. At an intersection he has the green cross signal but waits for several turning taxis, which ignore the red-light as the city’s custom demands. He crosses in a half-run; he is stiff from lack of exercise, although at thirty-odd he knows this still can be remedied. He tells himself this will not be a night for much alcohol - that effective stiffener of the hamstrings. Through the door of a bar not visited before, he cannot see within; the glass window in the upper half of the door features a spray painted Santa-Claus. That Santa-Claus will be here in June the same as December he thinks to himself.

After entering, he negotiates the haphazardly placed, heavily lacquered, incredibly square tables with low, undoubtedly uncomfortable seats. The place is rather empty, this is disappointing. Before he can reach the bar he stops in surprise: a young westerner is tending – as he takes a seat the westerner beats the usual quotient of bar girls to ask him what he wants…

He tells him.

The young bartender free pours vodka – taking scant interest in whether it’s a double, a triple or more. Finished he leans against the wall – he is freed of the usual glass cleaning responsibilities that come with working in a bar by the one efficient bar girl.

‘A bit cold out’, begins the lonely customer.

‘Winter is here’ remarks the bartender without enthusiasm. He sucks his cheeks in – partly because he likes the idea of looking gaunt, partly to stop himself clenching his teeth. Apart from this, there is nothing to suggest an odd-ball character. His customer, however, hopes for conversation of the eccentric type:

‘Let me tell you a story to really give you a laugh… Had I come in here last night at a similar time you might have detected a rather unpleasant odour about me, or you would have simply suspected sewerage leaking out of somewhere – how long did you say you’d been here? (The bartender had yet to say anything much) – Ah, over a year, you would know then! Myself? Well about 5 years…’

The bartender is bored, but it’s his job to listen to the beer-soaked, English teachers that make the majority of his customers. He pushes off the wall and stoops over to put his elbows on the bar – he is a tall man – and the floor behind the bar is raised – perhaps to enhance the image of the vertically challenged bar girls?

‘Well it wasn’t much fun for me…but it will give YOU a laugh’

He can’t quite place this customer’s accent: a scruffy looking type, already showing signs of trailing off all the time – one of those people who can’t get anything said quickly. The locals tolerate these circular monologues, anxious for any morsel of English they can get – more in Remora than Hyena fashion.

His customer begins the allegedly funny tale in earnest; the style of speech showing that he usually conducts his conversations alone:

‘I was wandering along Pudong South Road – yes I dislike that area too, the ridiculous shopping malls, the hawker filled pavements, a silly way of doing things: shops for leisure, pavement for commerce – anyway I have a friend, an American, who swears that one of the greatest pleasures of living in Shanghai is that you can piss on the street...
‘I was quite sober. I had been eating at a cheap pizza place over the river, near Zhongshan Park. I hopped off the Subway a couple of stops before I usually do; I wanted to burn off a little energy, but I simply had to go for a piss before I could do any walking. As I searched out a place for its inoffensiveness, I imagine I looked rather like an animal selecting a place to leave its mark – and there was the mark of many human animals in the place I chose, pungent even to our weak human nostrils. The fact I wasn’t the first to piss in this place that day lead me to feel I was using an informal toilet, and so in some way vindicated in my public urination.

‘As I said, I was absolutely busting; luckily dusk had just fallen and so it was possible to go behind some wall, bush or vehicle. The place I found was just off the street behind an iron fence and up against the wall of a six story apartment building. Now it’s hard to figure out how old these six-storey numbers are some of the time…you can’t have seven storeys without an elevator – and so it makes sense that there are not many buildings more than seven and less then twenty storeys…

‘No that’s not the case’, interrupts the bartender, ‘concrete must be reinforced over six stories and that’s more expensive – that’s why there are not many seven or eight storey apartment buildings in Shanghai.’

‘Hmm perhaps…’ The customer takes a drink, his eyes cloud over, drift way somewhere else.

The bartender fears the man will now begin a completely different story. But the other seems to find his way back on track:

‘Anyway these buildings age fast, I figure most of them this side of the river are from the late nineties…

‘No sooner had I begun to relieve myself, than I got the shock of my life. From the window above a foul liquid was poured upon me, some on my hair, most on my jacket. None went in my mouth thank God, but one drop hit my top lip – and that was enough to give me an idea of the acrid flavour of the stuff. It was a mixed brew, the waste of several people. Who now in our magnificent Shanghai has an apartment without a flush?

'I looked up and caught a glimpse of someone clutching a bucket ducking back into a second storey window. The villain was trying to teach me a lesson? But who has a bucket of urine at the ready? Did he even see me? I could have gone to the second floor and bashed somebody. But what point? It took me quite some time to decide it was urine that I was covered with – what diseases could I get? I couldn’t work it out at all – it’s strange what shock does to the brain. I seem to be OK anyway. I had to chuck the jacket – there was no getting the smell out and the girlfriend would have been asking questions.

‘As I eventually calmed down I decided that I had just been unlucky. The guy had a broken toilet and was getting rid of things the old fashioned way. He may have seen me but that would not have stopped him – it was not malice that made him go ahead, more a commitment to routine…’

The customer’s eyes glaze over again, other customers arrive at the bar and the barman moves off to serve them. The oddball storyteller receives a text message, finishes his drink and shuffles out; his Chinese girlfriend has been expecting him home for hours.

A New Teaching Gig At The French Embassy, And Usual Ravings About Shanghai

Henry!...One Chinese lad still has a Frenchman as his hero (taken at Tongchuan market Shanghai).


I have a gig teaching at the French embassy, Wellington, NZ. Starting last week, I teach the secretary, the consul and the visa officer every Tuesday. The secretary is a well-groomed woman of about 29, who wants to work on phrasal verbs. Her English is good, but abrupt, she has questions like: “what should I say when someone asks to buy me a drink?”… 'I got one'?" I can’t help chuckling – “maybe 'I’m good thanks' would be a little less direct” I suggest.

Next we have the consul – “good afternoon” and he reaches out to shake hands with the palm faced down, trying to establish his dominance. He is 29 or 30, young for that job. His English is great, but... he wants to be able to go to a bar and have a conversation, the problem is he is locked into a diplomatic way of speaking. He’s never said “see you later” in 20 years of English. Are you smart or just educated?

Along comes the visa officer – a strong French accent, and more at a level I’m used to teaching.

Hey, you know what? The French are ok. I admire the fact that Sarkozy and the boys have given the Dalai Lama honorary citizenship and talked about boycotting the Olympic opening ceremony. I’ve heard that anti-French feeling is really exploding in China as a result of this however. In the central backwater of Henan, an American was reportedly attacked – the mob shouting: ‘kill the Frenchman’. This is shocking and sad news, but some of the details have been a bit sensationalised.

One country commits a perceived wrong against China, and then all foreigners suffer. This is pretty nice for solidarity amongst the foreign community: suddenly it doesn’t matter if you are a fat cat from Texas or a refugee from Freetown – you are both laowai outsiders.

Although, for much of my time in China, the French never seemed to be into this brotherhood of the foreigner: When I lived in Wuhan, the majority of foreigners were French, as Wuhan is where they make Citron cars. At the local pub male French engineers in their 30s and 40s were the mass, and you felt like an interloper.

How will this new (overnight) anti-French feeling map out for the thousands of French in Shanghai? The French like Shanghai because of the former French concession area. Among some they have a bad rep for being a bit snooty; but of course they bring a lot to the city. I hope the tensions caused by near fascist nationalism on the side of the Chinese soon die down.

I, myself, have held a kind of half joking anti-French position, which I am now getting rid of.

It was born out of my stint with those Citron men in Wuhan and then being in Europe in 2004. I got sick of people saying how much they hated America – and so I decided not to like the French and the Swiss. I think I was just jealous of the education of the Swiss and the culture of the French. The fact that the French bombed the Rainbow Warrior in NZ way back in ‘84 may also have something to do with it.

There is a bar now in Shanghai where the French youth do mix well with others. It's called the Shelter, and it's hopefully the last dingy bar I fall in love with, unless I make to English teacher X’s House of Pain in this lifetime. The (bomb) Shelter – seemingly a real one; has a interesting entrance, a long dark tunnel, with a low roof, that then opens up into a cavernous room with a long bar with cheap drinks. The liquor is said to be fake, so you'd better stick to beer. The music will be reggae or drum and bass, hip-hop or something ‘alternative’ –in the back there is a corridor with two long rooms on either side, people sit and smoke weed. I wonder when the Chinese authorities will crack down on this kind of behavior? We’ve already seen it in Beijing.

A couple of shots of The Shelter




One Thursday night I couldn’t get to sleep until 4am. Friday I got up at 8am and worked till about 4pm, and then crashed till 10:30. The friend I was meant to meet for a drink was now long at home. It was cold outside, but I needed to get out, it was Friday after all. At least at 10:30 the Shanghai rush hour had finally finished and I could go through the Yan An tunnel with my taxi. I love sitting in the back of a taxi, having a beer as the much hyped Shanghai skyline whizzes by – those rows and rows of thirty story apartment buildings mostly with the lights already off. They go to bed early in China.

Heading from my place into town at about 7pm was another matter – taxis were out due to congestion. I’d get a bottle of huangjiu (a kind of Chinese Port) and mix it with coke for the walk and subway ride. The walk to the subway took me past a huge red brick school. That place has money. The architecture is horrible mock something, but bricks beat the usual toilet tiles. Most schools in China have small rectangular dirty white tiles placed vertically on all surfaces. This makes them look like great big urinals. Another reason I know that school's rich is that I’ve seen cops picking their kids up there;). But, during the day, you’ll still see grannies sitting outside on newspapers waiting for the kids to finish class. I like that, the parents are noveau riche, but the oldies are not going to put on airs.

On my walk maybe I’ll take a break in the park, if it’s summer and still light that is. Because of the air pollution, the skyscrapers in the distance merge into the apartment blocks in the foreground. I have no trouble looking directly at the sun; alcohol in my mouth and construction dust in my nose.

And some evenings I’ve got an errand to run before I can start drinking like I did that Friday night – I had to drop off some hotel receipts, and I’d lost some of them: I felt guilt like I did as a kid of 13 when I lost some borrowed gumboots. But if I had the absent-minded disease as a kid, I sure can’t kick it now...

The Friday in question I go to the Big Bamboo Bar and watch some cricket (West Indies vs South Africa, boring stuff). When the cricket is over I dunno what to do, I catch a taxi to the Eager Beaver Bar, but it's closed already. I wander along Yueyang lu and then up Yongjia lu, to Mural Bar. It’s full inside – not many people over 20 though: a good cross section of international high school students. The future rulers of the world are on the dance floor, international school students have language skills and connections nobody else can catch up on.

I stay at Mural as it's 50 RMB all you can drink until 2am. I slam five weak vodka and red bulls and it's off to the Shelter... A Canadian girl starts talking to me, she’s complaining about some French singing patriotic songs – I tend to agree with her complaints. I do several laps to get the FEEEL of the place. In the back, a couple of guys in their early 20s are arm wrestling – one has his hand on the table, cheating. I step in and referee. And then I am arm wrestling too, and then smoking a joint with these guys: French and Belgian. And then the most beautiful Belgian girl I’ve ever seen turns up – she’s 18. Shanghai, what a place to be in when you're 18.

But the Shelter is closing, it's 5am – don’t ask me where the time went – I don’t want to go home: home means the outskirts of bleak Shanghai, a cold dark place in Pudong. So I go on to the after-hours Dragon club. It's a dive. I talk to a Chinese girl who's blatantly a whore, and not even a charming or smart one – I drink a beer for 50 RMB and realize I’m almost outta money.

I end up having breakfast with the Belgian and a French girl at City Diner (a tradition for expats pulling an all-nighter) – they turned up in Dragon too. The Belgian girl has macaroni cheese. And I love the way she pronounces cheese. Shanghai is the same for her as for me – “you wake up its dark and you go out again” she says. She's right - maybe you can handle that stuff when you're young, but I'm over it - I have to get out of Shanghai, I've formed too many bad habits. She also says would never let her future husband come here with all these little Asian girls around "it's disgusting". What do these European girls do in Shanghai? they are following the new craze: studying Chinese. I part company with them, and so ends another night in Shanghai…one good night amongst all the horrible ones, those nights when you feel like this...

'That night, like many other nights, I was alone as consequence of my own failings, my own depravity. At such times the world seemed despicable, even though I know I am necessarily part of it. Then a frenzy to obliterate everything sweeps over me; I let myself be seduced by the temptation of suicide; I get drunk; I look for prostitutes. I receive a certain satisfaction from proving my own baseness, in confirming I am no better than the lowest of the low around me.' (El Tunel)

...And the days you slumber with horrible hangover dreams – cows have evolved into a kind of living butter – cats are licking.

You are on a jungle gym; you fall off, women with anaconda teeth bite you.

A military leader claims you can only have power through oppression.

You wake up and there’s nothing in the fridge – and so you need to go and face Shanghai again.

Right before I get anymore melodramatic – I better call it quits for now.

Bums I Have Known: The Professor

As I entered a hostel kitchen in Buenos Aires one evening, I came across a white-haired Argentine man of about sixty.
‘Would you like to have a drink with me? He asked, even before I could get to the fridge. He seemed to find no other form of introduction necessary.
‘Sure’, I said.
He produced a half full litre bottle of Quilmes, the very same beer that I‘d come to retrieve.

I later found out that this was the Professor, who stayed in a twin room on the mezzanine floor of the hostel. A friend of mine who’d been at the hostel for some time had dubbed him the Professor. This friend of mine, John, often cooked with the Professor, from ingredients they ‘skimmed’ out of the hostel fridge. Their rooms were close together, John, a bit of an insomniac, often heard the Professor’s soft tread on the metal grid of the mezzanine floor at around 3am. The Professor would shuffle off toward the toilet but stop, shuffle, stop, like he had forgotten where he was going. After our initial meeting, I often saw the Professor alone on the kitchen balcony staring into space; he was a man whose thoughts could take him very far away.

I don’t doubt that many people have met eccentrics who proclaim to be professors of some sort and have been unimpressed. For a number of reasons, however, this particular incarnation of the mad professor eccentric seemed plausible. What had me on his side was his appearance: no bowtie or tweed coat, he dressed strictly in worn pale-coloured shirts and dress trousers; on trying his glasses, they really were of a prescription for the near blind. His one possession was a battered black leather case, which from time to time he opened to pull out remnants from a life both broken and irrelevant (to anything anyone was talking about at the given time). The Professor profiled himself as a physicist who had worked at some very prominent universities both in Argentina and abroad. The problem was, for one reason or another; he no longer had many of his marbles left. In fact, one evening he cornered me and told me with tears in his eyes how sorry he was
‘Sorry for what?’
‘For what I said, I say foolish things when get confused’
‘I didn’t notice’
‘It is this thing inside my head – a kind of receiver – they send me signals…I hear a buzzing in my ears and cannot control what I say. I make such a fool of myself that I have to stay in my room for days.’
He was not joking, and his English was very good, so that was the problem. The Professor although a real character that everyone liked to have round when they were drunk…was also a real schizophrenic.

Eventually he got turfed out of the hostel, as he hadn’t been paying. I had visions of him on the street, perhaps becoming a cardboard collector – a cartonero, living in a villa miseria shantytown. I wondered how the uneducated people of that area would treat him. I was drinking so much and taking so many drugs there in B.A. that any romantically tragic end seemed possible for the Professor.
I even wrote down a kind of suicide note on his behalf.

It was silly stuff.

Luckily, walking to a job interview for a teaching gig I ran into him again. He was staying at a different hostel it turned out, on Calle Suipacha.
He looked extremely pale; it took several moments for him to react and shake my hand: a sign, I realised, of a man who had not spoken to another for some time. I arranged to have dinner with him that night.

John, the Professor and I, ended up eating at an Egyptian-themed dive on the corner of the Nueve de Julio and Juncal; Egyptian-themed only in decoration, the menu consisted of the same pizza, pasta and sandwiches of everywhere else. The Prof, not one for making ordering an easy feat, first refused to eat, and when we eventually convinced him to have a sandwich, he promptly changed the order to what he originally wanted. We had mozzarella-topped pizza, with one bland olive per slice and a plate of greasy fries accompanied by a rough red. After a few good mouthfuls, the Prof put down his knife and fork and a faint smile touched his lips. All annoyance I felt from listening to his disjointed monologues fell away as I watched him. The blood rushed to his face and his movements flowed. The dithering (so odious to an impatient young man) stopped:

'How long is it since you last ate?’ I asked.
'Three days,’ he replied somewhat sheepishly.
The transformation! A direct answer!
And then after one cup of wine, he was quickly a drunken man--sitting back in his chair relaxed and smiling. I think he sensed the softening of my mood: never being one to let an opportunity to sentimentalize pass by, he produced two photos from a non-descript black wallet. Important they must have been, as he had scant other reason to carry a wallet.
'My mother’ He handed over an austere black and white portrait.
The next picture was of the Professor at 26 looking as vague, sorrowful and formal as ever; his gammy eye was more evident than usual as his thick glasses had been put aside for the portrait. He was staring off into eternity, no doubt considering some great scientific problem.

As we were about to get up from the table and go our separate ways, I handed him twenty pesos, ‘Here is some money for groceries.’
'Thank you’, he said with emotion, I prayed that he wouldn’t start to cry.

Eventually I let the Professor down, it had to happen. He wanted to apply for a visa to Australia. I was to go along with him to the embassy and help, as the Prof thought Australians were my people, and somehow this meant I’d be able to get him the visa…

Well, I didn’t get out of bed on time, and the Prof - dropping by the hostel to fetch me – was too polite to wake me.

Recently I heard, through facebook no less, the Prof has been seen sleeping on a bench in Parque Recoleta. Dunno, I have the feeling the Prof is a little more resourceful…

Stray Dogs and Los Cartoneros

Different cities have different underbellies, different sights to be seen wandering the streets after dark. Stray dogs are common to many places, but never have I seen so many dogs chasing cars as in Santiago, Chile. Many of these dogs had lovely personalities, but when a car went by they turned completely savage, hurtling down the road in pursuit of the offending vehicle. They did not just chase for fun, as dogs elsewhere, but actually looked to cut the car off and bite it - thus risking being run over. Watching these Kamakase Canines gave me a flicker of faith in a divine being: the dogs, knowing somehow that their lives would end in starvation or disease on the streets, instead chose death fighting a mortal enemy, the invader of their night-time kingdom. Among the dogs of Santiago, San Rodrigo is the patron saint; it is said in his one short year of life he made no less than five cars swerve and crash.

The death of an aged street dog in not a pleasant thing. I remember going to drink a few beers in a plaza in Santiago’s Barrio Brasil. Quite a few Gothic teenagers were hanging out there, as was a very mangy dog: big and brown with possibly Boxer and Alsatian in him

When I was a kid I had a hand-me-down toy dog, which I liked riding on. It had threadbare fur and only one eye. The real dog in front of me was remarkably similar, except that ribs jutted out of its flanks. The dog wandered up and looked at me imploringly. I had the feeling it wasn’t asking for food, just attention. Before I could decide whether to pat or throw something at this brute, it left me to the call of the teenagers sitting on the adjacent bench. These teenagers, decked out in their best Siouxsie and the Banshees black, lavished the mutt with attention. The dog put on quite a show: first swaying gently from side to side, then its head would drop, and just when it seemed about to fall over it suddenly roused itsself and straightened its neck with pride as the youths egged it on. This cycle repeated itself countless times. The dog was obviously dying.

At this stage the police (carabineros) arrived on the scene. The police advised us that you couldn’t drink in a public place and poured out the beer. The dog began barking, angry with the policemen for ruining the vibe, which led to cheers from the teenagers.

I now had no beer and the dog, tired from its anti establishment heroics, was back on the sway. It was time to move on. I headed back up town by bus along the Alameda: as usual I had a full day of teaching to look forward to. That dog, I decided, should have chased more cars.

In Buenos Aires, walking home from late night revels, it was the Cartoneros...

Cartoneros scourge the streets of Buenos Aires, usually from dusk to dawn, in search of cardboard and other rubbish, which they sell to middlemen at warehouses, who in turn sell the stuff to milling companies, apparently rubbish is now big business. The cartoneros are well organised: They arrive into the city centre from the villas emergencias and barrios where they live by way of a free train. The train, which has no seats, is variously called El Tren Blanco (I think in reference to its Spartan interior) or the Tren de Las Fantasmas (the cartoneros being ghosts who only come out at night).

This caste of scavenger emerged after the financial crisis of 2001. There really does seem to be a lot of them, now some reports claim there are around 30 000. Sometimes whole families can be seen wheeling round trolleys of flattened cardboard boxes. Which leads me to a question: does Buenos Aires somehow have more cardboard than the rest of the world’s large cities? The thought that this many people can be employed in recycling waste does raise the eye brows and make you think: this phenomenon has reduced the waste needing to go into landfill in Buenos Aires by 25%

Checking the web about the cartoneros, there seems to be a great increase in the number of reports about them. There is even a film about the cartoneros, which I am just about to check youtube for…

15 min later: just had a look on youtube - found the trailer of Los Cartoneros ('Cardboard People' as the English title). Didn't learn anything too new from it. I admire the filmmaker's aim of humanising the cartoneros and pointing out they are not vagrants, but I'm not sure the problem can be blamed solely on globalisation - surely Argentina has to take responsibility for internal mismanagement of the economy. Interestingly there is another documentary trailer about how 'Los Chinos' in Buenos Aires have suffered since the 2001 crash...hmmm, not sure about this. More info on these two films at the makers' blog

A Hospital Visit

I have been reading, basically as light entertainment, William S Burroughs's 'The Western Lands'. One of the book's many fragmented dialogues deals with what happens when the public finds out the medical establishment has been suppressing the cure for cancer:

'And mutiny in the ranks: Doctor X a respected oncologist practising in a Midwestern city asks that his name be withheld: "I have seen it with my own eyes...the remission and complete cure of hitherto incurably cancerous conditions."'

...'with the threat of cancer removed the medical centre seems a vast waste "Fifty years the fucking croakers kept the cure from the people."'

I had the 'opportunity' July last year to go to a hospital in Shanghai that Burroughs would have been quite interested to hear about.

I had an infection, a bladder infection - STOP RIGHT THERE - it was not proven to be venereal (although it possibly could have been), and this is not meant to be a gross out post. Anyway, I had a similar condition (again) in Shanghai some years earlier for which I had been prescribed a long course of antibiotics. The doctor's split second diagnosis had been prostatitus. The antibiotics didn't work, but I eventually came right. Some time later I was reading about hospitals in Hangzhou prescribing antibiotics to anybody to make money. Some reporter went in, gave green tea for his urine test and was still prescribed antibiotics for a bladder infection!
After reading this, I wasn't too keen just to go to any old doctor or hospital. To cut a long story short, I found a foreign doctor through a friend. I don't want to talk about the doctor, but to say he was a great guy - and a big help to me.

I was put on an antibiotic drip for a few days. Sitting in the same room were cancer patients, getting a kind of chemotherapy medicine not marketed in some countries, as, apparently, big drug companies couldn't see money in it.

The dilemma of sitting in that room, with the other patients thinking(initially at least) I had cancer too, was this: They were on death's door and I had (possibly) a social disease. What to do, tell them or lap up their sympathy?

After the antibiotics in the drip didn't work, I went on to another kind of antibiotics (taken orally this time), purchased in a western country. There is much talk of the watered down antibiotics in China and their possible effect on the human race - imagine WW III with people dying of minor infections like in WW I - well unfortunately I think I can. This second course of antibiotics saw me right.

I bought amoxicillin in the pharmacy below my apartment in Shanghai once. The translation wasn't too hard, the pinyin being 'a mo xi lin', Chinese is wonderful when it surprises you with something simple like this. Another time trying to buy the same drug at the supermarket the woman at the drug counter told me to get a prescription. She was looking at me like I was some kind of morphine junky. Morality and its inconsistencies...

Bums I have known: James

I plan to talk a bit more about this in a future post, but last December I flew to Budapest for a whirlwind visit. On the Saturday morning, having completed the business that had brought me to Hungary, I caught a taxi to Astoria Square and walked up Rakoczi Avenue to a hostel I knew from a previous visit.

Walking into a dormitory around 11am, I was struck by the smell of stale sweat. I checked my underarms - nope not me. At the table, which faced a row of six or so bunks, sat a young Asian and old bearded white guy. I walked by and said hi, the old guy just stared at me, then sprung up and followed me as I went to put my things on a bed. I was on the top bunk - bed number 12, he told me he was below me, number 11. Great I thought. His name was James, he was from New Zealand, same as me - but he didn't give any of the signifiers that this would have to be the normal NZ conversation, like Rugby or whatever; he certainly could talk:
"Yea I'm going to Belgrade tomorrow just been to the train station to see if they can help me...yea, yea, yea”
"Just got this phone, have to go back to the shop to get her to help me learn how to use it...yea yea”
As he spoke he seemed to get more nervous, and the smell of stale sweat increased. We sat together at the table; the young Asian had escaped off somewhere or other.

The table was littered with what looked to be little scraps of paper with Chinese characters written on them, I asked James about these:
“Yes yes, we were discussing Japanese grammar - now that guys name was ...oh I've forgotten, your name is Brewman, I better write that down...Brewman...”
Another scrap of paper was put on the table, it joined with other pieces bearing names of other people staying in the room - everything needed to be written down so James could remember...

James was an obvious madman, and when he started writing out peoples’ names for the second time I left him to take a shower. James took off to find some more paper, fix his phone and buy a Magyar-Angol dictionary.

I spent the day up around Heroes' Square and returned to the hostel in the evening with three green 750-mil cans of Dreher beer. James was there again: his bearded, wrinkled NZ pioneer come little boy face staring into space. He was still wearing the same ridiculous garb he had been that morning. Of course, why should somebody change between morning and evening? I had the idea, however, that James never changed at all. Given the smell of stale sweat, which still permeated the whole dorm, this was hardly a brilliant deduction. It was winter in Budapest – the outside temp about one or two degrees C. Inside the hostel it was uncomfortably hot. James wore a yellow windbreaker over a woollen jersey; he also had on a red cap with Oklahoma woodturning or some shit written on it. He never took the cap off, so I never found out if he was bald. I offered him a beer; he took it, opened it and then smelt it. He declared he wouldn't drink it and poured it out in the bathroom sink. I wasn't amused. It was easy enough to guess an ex-alki. He went on to talk about travelling in The States – getting on and off buses and trains in places like Boise, Idaho. All the names of towns had to be written on paper, as did the conversations he had with people. The details were tedious especially as he jumped in fragmented fashion from one story to another.

“I got to Bosie, it was late, I thought hmm I'll just look at this hotel, I didn't like it, so so so I found a taxi to take me to the airport I slept there, the airport was open and I had some food..."

No doubt the food taken from the free breakfast of his last hotel. He was munching a pastry from the hostel’s morning spread as he spoke.

James had the money from somewhere to be getting round the world like this, but he looked like and had the habits of a common bum. Meeting him on the street, he could have passed for a Roma gypsy, maybe the husband of the woman I saw on the bus with the gold tooth and dirty headscarf – obviously not a Magyar Hungarian.

I found it interesting that James liked to sleep in airports. It wasn’t cost efficient, getting off at a bus or train station and then getting a taxi to the airport, only to come back into town the next day. I have always wondered why bums sleep in the inner city. Did James go to the airport to be part of the action? Maybe some flight would arrive and there would be somebody to talk to, or if the shops were 24 hrs he could bug some store assistant. In my native Wellington (NZ) where there are countless comfortable parks outside the city you could sleep in all night without being disturbed, bums still stick to the inner city. I figure one of the reasons is this: bums are often drinkers (not the most brilliant observation) or think like drinkers, they always want action. Take Wellington’s blanket man – he always wants to party – so is always in the middle of town, it his fear of missing party action which prevents him ever getting a job perhaps.

That evening with much back and forth and sideways I got a good picture of James's life –he made wine in NZ – got divorced – lost his vineyard – moved to China to find a wife because he thought there would be someone who could put up with him in that country of millions. He wrote Chinese characters well, but couldn't speak it much; he had been based in Beijing for 10 years but was quite peripatetic. Beijing came into the conversation, as it was getting dark so early in Budapest, around 3:30pm,
“Yea Budapest is at the same longitude as Beijing but gets dark much earlier because of the tilt of the earth” – James was a knowledgeable guy when everything in his brain linked up. Or maybe this sentence was just the one in a thousand that William S. Burroughs cut up that made sense…

James had bought another dictionary, English-Hungarian this time – but was off to Serbia the next day. The girl on reception asked me if he was serious about learning Hungarian. “Well he’s bought three dictionaries,” I answered. I noted a lot of selfishness and self pity in his talk, he like to dominate conversations and made full use of the receptionist, who had no choice but to listen to him. He looked on his travels for those who could help him he informed me without shame.

That night he snored like hell. The next day he was off to the train station, but no train to Serbia apparently. Upset that people were not nice enough to him in the hostel, he went to the airport by taxi on the Sunday night. The airport was shut so he got no sleep.

Monday morning I met him by chance on the street. He was on his way to the train station again morbidly wheeling along two suitcases. He was almost crying. The self-pity was evident.

“How am I going to get home?.... Yea, perhaps I can”

And with that utterance he wandered off. He hadn’t looked me in the eye, hadn’t said bye…

I hadn't left my China address with the young receptionist as he had requested, (he would have actually turned up in Shanghai no doubt) so maybe he was upset with me. I could have been kinder, though, to him whom could be my ghost of Christmas future: a travel addict, based in China, never alive without the buzz, wanting to know all, but not able to follow through, parasitic, sensitive – a wannabe explorer of urban landscapes – yea yea, a bit like me