Holidays at Grand Mags: Discoveries from the Orient

Five weeks of field research has led me to draw the following five conclusions:

The Chinaman loves to gamble. You might think Glasgow's bad – and if you go into any of those disreputable establishments, you'll likely find a lone Chinaman, furiously swearing at the televisions and making weird annotations on the form guides – but it's got nothing on Actual China. Morning, noon and night the Chinaman gambles on chess, mahjong, innumerable card games, dice... And it's not just old men either, it's women, boys, girls – everyone.
The average Chinaman would, if continuing to live a Chinese lifestyle, be fined heavily and/or arrested within a few hours of being in the UK, whether for canicide, laughably theatrical spitting, endless polluting of the environment on a personal and industrial level, astonishingly reckless driving, or – as we witnessed on the hard seater train to Yunnan – holding babies over bins and encouraging them to shit in the middle of the carriage, despite the ready availability of toilets throughout the train.
The Chinaman is, in a number of ways, pretty useless when it comes to tourism. From the organisational side, they opt for high prices and making a carbuncle of natural beauty e.g. bodging an enormous plastic butterfly on the outside of a cave and charging a fiver to look at its awfulness. There are horror stories of Mickey Mouse making an appearance on the bizarre rollercoaster that takes you to the Great Wall too. The consumers, meanwhile, unable and unwilling to travel to easily travel to foreign countries, lap all this shit up. You know the barely competent photographers that hang around outside the likes of the Colosseum, being uniformly ignored by thousands of tourists who, in this day and age, may be shite with a camera but are unlikely to chop heads and feet off like some Armenian hitman when they can take a near infinite number of previewable pictures on their shiny digital camera? You know those bastards? Well in China, they have queues of idiots, desperate to hand over their cash for a naff snapshot of themselves looking like a prick in faux traditional clothing while standing next to a peacock. Mercifully, however, there are two glorious exceptions to this rule. Firstly, there is Zhijin Cave in Guizhou Province, a labyrinthine netherworld that takes two hours to navigate and is by turns amazing, disturbing and often frightening.

Only a few hours away there are the spectacular Huangguoshu Falls, Asia's largest and the only ones in the world that can be viewed from any angle – as well as behind, thanks to an ingenious cave walkway.
The Chinaman seems to rate the intelligence and learning capacity of the average foreign visitor very highly indeed. Only this would explain why, rather than give in, they shout Mandarin louder and louder, presumably hoping the visitor will immediately unravel the complexities of one of the world's most difficult languages. To help matters, the Chinaman will sometimes also write down what they are trying to say, in Chinese.
For reasons unknown, the Chinaman treats every Whiteman as a preposterous fucking novelty. As a result, there is a fair bit of this:

And quite a lot of this:

The sum total of this reaction is that Whiteman is left feeling like as though they have gained some kind of unwanted celebrity: kids stop and stare, girls giggle, men lurch and leer, and the elderly avoid eye contact. Once in a while, a gurning teenage Chinaman will demand to have their photograph taken with Whiteman – if China allowed Facebook, we would surely be all over the bastarding thing. Worse, though, are the ones who try to surreptitiously sneak a picture. What for? “Oh and here's a picture I took of a foreigner.” “Umm, OK – why?” “Well – he's a foreigner!” “And?” “Hahahah. I, er, well – you know...” “No. No I don't fucking know. Explain yourself. It's a bit weird, all this stalking strangers. You want to give yourself a fucking shake, son.”
However, it's not all bad: recently I learned that Chinaman refers to blond, bearded foreigners not as Whiteman, but as White Lion. Considering some of the nicknames I've had over the years, I'll take that one.