The Beijing World Park Tour: around the world in 80 minutes

Beijing World Park is one of a number of Asian theme parks that attempt to represent the world to the visitor. As such, a tour of this place is not only a tour around a corner of Beijing, it is also, in miniature, a tour of the world through its iconic tourist attractions. 

The front entrance has distinct echoes of Disney, which itself was modelled on some of the sites that await the visitor inside the park, such as Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria. The references are jumbled but the effect is fine: it looks historic and Western. There's a further bit of history here too, I visited during the national day holidays which marked the 65th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. Visitor numbers were up because of the holidays and good weather but still the place was far from packed: World Park is a 2nd tier Beijing attraction located in the South West suburbs and doesn't have the pull (and crowds) of The Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square or Great Wall.

The audio tour turned out to be broken and the machines were at the factory getting repaired. There were no guides offering tours and the only alternative was a land train that wizzed you round or an overly fancy horse drawn carriage designed to dazzle from a distance. Walking seemed like the best option, and this quickly brought me to a Thai Elephant and Crocodile Show. The Thai angle seemed to me slight; it is a type of show that is apparently popular with tourists visiting Thailand... but more to the point, with tourists in Beijing too. This show was the start of a tour then, that was not so much a tour of the world in all its raw vastness but rather a tour of the world's tourist traps and popular attractions. Happy hunting ground for The Tour of All Tours.

I had never seen an elephant show before and found myself warming to it when I put aside the question of the animal's welfare. The elephants managed to do all manner of tricks like kicking footballs and dancing to The Macarena. Around the side of the arena this man pushed a cart of bananas which he sold to the public. At certain points the elephants would approach the seating and those with bananas could feed them. This was a smart way of making a bit of extra money out of something that would happen anyway. Indeed there were quite a number of ways the show managed to make extra money: children were lifted up high in the elephant's trunks for photo opportunities, there were live photos for a price with the crocodiles too, which struck me as playing with fire. 

With the animal show over a new entertainment in the adjacent arena began. This was a dance show that I have never seen anything quite the like of before. They attempted to show the world through dance. They began with a Brazilian carnival display and moved onto a Spanish fiesta, an American Indian ritual and fire dance, a ballet cum acrobatics turn, an Indian Bollywood number and so on. At this point they arrived at Egypt with a pharaoh striding out of the set in the background followed by this team in blue and white. When the veil flew off this turned into a belly dance routine collapsing ancient and modern Middle East into one. The dancing was often far from good but that only added to the thrill of seeing this novel and slightly bad taste spectacle unfold. I wouldn't be able to see something quite as blunt as this in the UK, there would be too many objections from the people it depicts. Not here! They really went for it and gave their best shot at doing each of these dances in turn.

This immediately brought to mind the film The World (2004) of Jia Zhangke as it is set in this same theme park and begins with a scene featuring dancers doing routines very similar to those I witnessed. The film shows a backstory to this spectacle and the human cost of contemporary Chinese development. It is well worth watching and it hovered over the place as a parallel and darker narrative throughout this tour of World Park.

The apex for me was when we got to Chinese Riverdance. I had been warmed up already and this was an icing on the cake moment. That might be because, culturally speaking, Irish dance is more known to me than most of the other things I had seen so far, so there was the amusement of having the familiar made strange and not to say, slightly naff. All of the different routines were, in a way, familiar in the sense that they all belonged to the imagery of big spectacles. This was like a low-budget Olympic opening ceremony showcasing not just the host nation's dances but those of the whole world. I'm going to have to let this experience settle a little but I suspect there is an avant-garde remake of this lurking in the depths of the imagination. 

The section of the park behind me is called Grand Canyon and I am standing on a model Golden Gate Bridge. Yes, this is America. The big country made small. Alongside the sites there are stalls selling food and souvenirs and I was hoping that these would reflect the locations they were paired with but sadly not. I think it was a missed opportunity. That said, a McDonalds would be of little interest to me as I don't eat meat and when I come to think about it, the food is only part of the ambiance, the people are what really make a place feel located. Installing some representative Americans in a McDonalds who would eat and talk in an authentic way would be tricky as they would rapidly balloon in weight more or less replicating the documentary Super Size Me. Similarly, having a British drunk sitting under the model Tower Bridge drinking super strength lager would give it a more authentic edge but this feeling of being in the location is not what's really called for here. The point is to condense the world into a series of photo opportunities. 

The park shows its age by retaining the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in its Manhattan section. I suppose it would hardly do to knock them down in solidarity with the real ones following the 9/11 attacks, but standing there today they stick out like a sore thumb. It is ironic that these towers are probably the most contemporary buildings that are featured in the entire park and they are also the only ones that no longer exist in reality but only as these scale models.

Having recently covered Stonehenge on this blog, I was amused to find a scaled down version of it here in the park that was serving as a playground. I read that in 2008, World Park was one of the three officially designated protest sites and I tried to imagine a Free Tibet rally taking place on this Stonehenge model. I think the official who came up with the idea of making this one of the protest sites must have had a sharp sense of humour.

Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria was one of the spots favoured by the many wedding photographers that were operating in the park. When researching Chinese coach tours of Europe for the Stuttgart Tour of All Tours I noticed that this castle was a point on most tour itineraries. That may be because it not only is iconic but is also well located for transport routes, but nonetheless, it is quite probably the most well known castle in Europe to Chinese tourists. Wedding photography is a boom industry and no standard wedding is complete without some fancy images such as these. Somehow the preferred spots for these photographs are not the sites of the ceremony itself but are instead tourist locations at home and even abroad where the pictures are taken some time before the wedding day. In this way the tourist imagination spreads into all sorts of areas beyond the strict preserve of the holiday itself.  

Hello Brussels! The man who stood here after me underneath the Mannekin Pis managed to take a photo that would not have been possible at the real fountain as it is surrounded by a fence and is perched some way up on a wall. Standing on the far side of the fountain he squeezed his finger and thumb around the little statue's willy. It is probably for the best that the fence exists in Brussels.

I read that Chinese tourists are increasingly suffering from the affliction Paris Syndrome which was previously reserved to Japanese tourists only. Put simply, it is a psychological condition brought about in a small number of visitors who arrive in the City of Light and find it far from the city of their dreams provoking, in some, a state of mental collapse. No such problems here in World Park! You can stay well and truly in a Chinese bubble where no rude waiters or pickpockets are going to puncture the dream. Even if the visitor does encounter a problem, it is a Chinese problem that does not touch Paris, which exists in another world above and beyond that of raucous Chinese children or pushy groups muscling you out of the way.

Dressing up in period costumes for photographs is a bit of a thing at tourist spots in China and this normally means classical Chinese costumes. A few days ago a woman running one such stall in a park suggested I put on her emperor's costume and the incongruity of it nearly persuaded me to do it but, sadly for her, I thought twice and thought better of it. This being World Park the costumes are not just classical Chinese, they are Westerners' outfits like this dress here. Whether or not it really fits with St Peter's Square in The Vatican is beside the point, that's a technicality for historians of costume. It's all about dreams created by the movies and media and in this corner of Beijing it's possible to touch those dreams and have a little piece of them for yourself.  

Of all the sites I saw the most singularly underwhelming of them was The Pyramids. The real Egyptian structure is impressive, I am guessing, on account of its size, age and location. Here however, it was reduced to the size of a house, dates from 1993 when the park opened, and is in a nondescript suburb of Beijing. Of the five continents represented,  Africa and Oceania were the least prominent with Europe being the most featured.

Finally there was a corner of the park that depicted China. There was a copy of the Great Wall but then there was also this garden which was one of the more tasteful areas as it did not try to copy a famous site and end up scaling it down. My enduring feeling about the park is that it lacks ambition to be anything more than a mass tourist attraction. It succeeds in this basic function but I felt it could also potentially serve as an educational site helping to introduce Chinese people to other cultures in a more than superficial way. I also have the feeling that I will one day have to make a tour performance for a site such as this as they have such enormous potential to serve as art locations, so loaded are they with symbols and histories. I suspect that will come at a later point once I've been to a few more of the iconic sites themselves and made studies and performances of my own with them. That said, if someone turned around tomorrow and offered this as a set to play with I'd jump at the chance. Beijing World Park is a gift to the experimental tourist.

PS: this Saturday there will be a further performance of The Tour of All Tours in Beijing Sanilitun, starting at 2PM from The Bookworm. 100rmb. 

The Waylosing Tour

The meeting location for the Waylosing Tour was Birmingham New Street Signal Box which, handily enough, is not located on New Street at all, but is instead round the corner on Navigation Street. What's more, the sign marking this brutalist classic is located in a position facing the train line and is only visible from the street when seen above a wall in a few locations, none of which are actually on Navigation Street itself. This made it a familiar yet mysterious building in the very heart of the city and a prefect place to begin.

It had been raining all morning and the afternoon tour looked like it would be a wet and lonely one. Come 1PM, however, most of the people who had reserved showed up, ready for 5 hours of getting lost on the Birmingham streets in the rain. This was a hardy bunch. We began by establishing which areas of the city we knew best. The general consensus was that the South, West, and centre were the most familiar parts of the city, though there were some hardened urban explorers amongst us who had made it their business to see all points of the compass. While it would be easy enough for me to get lost in Birmingham as I don't know the city, showing this group something none had seen before was going to be a challenge.

With the East as our direction of choice, we set off into the drizzle which obligingly cleared in minutes to leave a mostly bright afternoon. A rhythm established itself whereby we'd walk a few hundred metres, sometimes a few hundred more, stop, look at our new location and consider the choices we had ahead of us.

When we stopped at intersections to discuss the respective waylosing merits of the different paths ahead, we also looked for things that could act as signs. This one for a solicitor is quite literally a sign, albeit one that was placed upside down. As often as not, a building, colour or object could do equally well as our waylosing sign. I like this business plate very much because it is a sign that poses more questions than it answers. Another early find was the sign 'Ask Italian' which was simply the name of a restaurant which sat beside one of the forks ahead of us. These simple observations were allowed to be what they were, i.e. they didn't have to be immediately smart or significant, but every now and then I'd bring previous ones back by mentioning them in case they could help us develop a narrative around the tour as it unfolded. 

These cones looked for the world like clues too. What they were pointing to or what underwater geography they marked was unclear but that did not stop them being signs all the same. A walk unfolds in time as well as space so there is always a going to be some element of narrative, but when we deliberately lay our mental traces as we go, this capacity to see it as a journey with a theme and logic of its own is greatly enhanced. When I made my trial waylosing tour in the city some 3 or 4 weeks ago, the walk came to its conclusion at the Ulysses Kebab Shop. Even though I don't eat meat, I was happy with the reference to both The Odyssey and Joyce as that rounded the walk off very nicely. I was hoping today's walk would start to make sense a bit earlier and not only come together at the end but I also wanted to genuinely work with what we saw and not impose a pre-determined meaning upon it. This meant we had to be patient and trust it would become clearer the more lost we got. It sort of did. 

At the same time as thinking about a story or theme to the tour there remained the very practical task of losing our way. One technique that was helpful was to switch levels from street to canal and back to street again. The canal is great as it has a different navigational logic to the street, what's more, you don't always see the surrounding roads when you are on this lower level so you can cut through otherwise easy to understand routes. You can only have so much of a good thing, however, as canals can also become predictable after a while as they are usually quite straight. 

We walked some real distance and the group was fine with this with no moaners. When trying to get lost distance matters. Thoreau's notion of a 10 mile radius from your home being a suitable distance for an afternoon's walk and at the same time corresponding to the area you can survey in a lifetime and still always find something unfamiliar, came to mind. That requires a conscious search for the fuzzy areas of the mental map and while we began with this idea which propelled us East, we then went through a number of other techniques to help us stumble upon the unknown. If I can imagine two different approaches to way losing I can see one as the search for the North West Passage whereby you have a known start and end point and try to connect them through unfamiliar territory, whereas a second model is to head off into the uncharted periphery with no defined destination. We were more the latter sort of explorers today, though we did have an end point of sorts: I had said we'd aim to be back in the city centre by 6. 

The ambient foods on this sign is what caught my attention. Not being in the catering business I immediately imagined it as food to munch on or suck discretely through a straw whilst listening to Brian Eno albums. We simply had to take a look inside. 

Instead of the large warehouse I was expecting, the doors opened into a single, modestly sized room with a man and a woman sitting behind a glass counter at the far end. Two freezers displayed some non-ambient weekly offers such as this 10-kilo pack of frozen squid tubes. Good value though they were, I regarded them more as an art installation than as serious foodstuffs. 

They had a remarkably good and inexpensive coffee machine so, with espressos in hand, we used the space as if it were a cafe rather than the order room of a warehouse. The staff were bemused but tolerant about us getting lost and finding them.

This alarming sign popped out though thankfully none of us were pulled over and strip searched for concealed squid tubes.

Refreshed and back on the road again we had managed to more or less lose sight of the landmark BT Tower that tethered us to the city-centre but, having made great efforts to remove that landmark, another replaced it in the form of these gas storage tanks.

We came to a large Chinese supermarket and restaurant which we entered as it was time for some refreshment. As we were no longer in the city centre and they had ample space they were fine with us just drinking tea in a way that would not be the case in Chinatown where a meal would have been required. I remember talking about the significance of the compass to Chinese cities and people's sense of orientation. It seems to me that in the UK we are less aware of this as the cities rarely follow grids but instead twist and snake according to the contours of the land with little unified order.

We walked some more and just as we arrived at Spaghetti Junction and looked all set to explore the nation's most iconic car structure as pedestrians, we changed track and dived into a bus. While the junction was no doubt impressive, it was also familiar to several of the group and exploring it would really be the work of a different sort of tour. I also thought about the sign we had seen earlier and made sense of at least one of them: 'Ask Italian' = Spaghetti Junction. On the bus we settled at the top and I asked the group to close their eyes.

Closing the eyes was strangely addictive. I had thought I'd keep mine open so I could oversee the situation and maybe take a picture of this decidedly odd looking group. Once I had closed them however, I found that it became quite compelling and instead started talking about what we could sense and where we might be passing through. In spy movies you see scenes of blindfolded men in the backs of cars being driven round cities to secret destinations; this was a budget version in which we made do with a West Midlands Bus day ticket. We came to a halt after some minutes and I was not sure if we were at the terminus or were taking a long stop. We waited till finally it was clear we were not moving and reluctantly opened our eyes and descended. The bus driver could not work us out at all.  

From there we crossed a park and entered a housing estate and finally were getting properly lost with no clear sense of where we were or how it connected to where we had come from. A large guard dog jumped at me from behind a fence, its bark and bite both scary but thankfully separated from me by metal mesh. While this would not have had such impact elsewhere, having the dog jump out at me once we had entered the lost zone made it more of a shock. I didn't know what sort of place we were in, how exactly to get out of there or indeed what precisely to expect. I won't exaggerate and say I was in a state of fear, but my emotional reaction was stronger as I certainly was that little bit less in control. We then stumbled upon this graffiti 'Hi bill'. I posed for the picture but as you can see, I was uncomfortable, expecting another vicious dog to launch itself at me from behind the black door on the right that bears a 'beware of the dog' sign.  

From the dog estate I then saw what looked like an informal entrance to a green space. We entered and found this semi-desolate location, the site of former construction that had been raised to the ground. I do not deliberately seek such places in the way some urban explorers do, but I do value them all the same as their official neglect permits all manner of unofficial activities to coexist making them paradoxically rich and diverse spaces. 

We saw a steady trickle of people passing through here, mostly young men on their way somewhere else. We, however, were occupying this space: this was our destination. As it was now 5.15PM and I sensed this would be the point in the day when we would be the most lost, it made sense to savour its character. I understand that Birmingham is quite rich in such spaces and this makes me wonder if this experiment were repeated would it be to a similar sort of location that we would be led or would the dynamics of the group lead us somewhere very different?

And here is a group photo of the merry waylosers from Birmingham basking in the warm sunlight. I was lucky to be accompanied by such a great group on this experiment as everybody was very easy to talk to and curious about the urban environment. I think we had pretty much all got talking to one another at some point in the 4 or 5 hours and those conversations make up an essential part of the experience transforming something that was a curious proposition into a genuinely fun afternoon out. It all had to come to an end however, and from here we switched mode from waylosing to wayfinding. We quickly found a bus back into the city centre, a ride which retraced our steps uncannily well. From an elevated position on the top deck of the bus it gave us an overview of the route we had taken and allowed us to review the day's adventure in 10 minutes flat.

We were swiftly delivered to The Woodsman where we drank some well deserved beer. We stayed for a long time (several hours) unpacking the experience and more generally unwinding. Thank you Still Walking and thank you Birmingham for entertaining this notion. It gives me an appetite to go further into waylosing and perhaps even expand the frame of it so that it could take in a whole weekend and take place in a foreign city, which would of course greatly aid getting lost. These are all ideas to turn over and develop at a later date but one thing I am quite sure of is that there will more tours like this in the future, though they will of course be quite different too, as they are all steps into the unknown.  

The Victoria Park Memoryscape Tour

I have neglected audio tours on this blog up till now so it is time to put that right. I therefore took a free audio tour around Victoria Park in East London a tour that you can download HERE. It is just one of several that have been produced for different sites around London by Memoryscape. 

To take the walk you need to have the map which indicates the points where each of the 11 tracks should be played. It begins at the south entrance of the park with some legal notices about not accepting responsibility for any harm that might befall the listener. It is a peculiar start that made me wonder if there was some likelihood of trouble, teenage gangs picking out solitary walkers, rupturing their historical reflections at knifepoint with demands for money, phone and credit card. This opening could even provide the inspiration for an audio tour of its own, an audio tour on knife crimes and violent assaults that have taken place on the route of the tour. An audio tour complete with heartbeats, footsteps, Psycho violin sounds and gunshots. It presents itself as a local history tour with a crime focus but is actually just using this as a pretext and is simply trying to scare people witless. I even know the perfect location for this tour: The Murder Mile Tour of Clapton.  

The listening points are not fixed in the way they are when you have a live guide to direct your attention. Instead you press play when you get to what looks like the right location on the map. Here for example I listened to the proprietor of the cafe talking about, and more or less welcoming, the gentrification of the Hackney yet the cafe was shut for the evening and there were some drunks knocking back cans of Special Brew and Super K cider stood in front of the cafe. This disjunction between the sound and image was funny but it made the recording slightly ridiculous as it was unplanned and outside its frame. This more general problem of focal point was a recurrent one because a great deal of the commentary was about what was there in the past and not what is there now. This meant the descriptions often wafted over the landscape not settling anywhere in particular while the park remained buoyant. The one aspect of the tour that was however more connected to the landscape was the sound design which mirrored existing ambient sounds, added some others for effect, and sometimes created genuine confusion whether what you heard was the recording or the actual park.     

I was listening to it on my not overly smart phone that placed the sound files in different places. The tracks were all there however and with the walking time added on the whole thing took about an hour and twenty minutes, the classic sort of tour duration: 75-90 minutes. For those without their own means of listening it is possible to borrow devices from the park hub. 

One thing that struck me about listening to a tour on headphones rather than being given one by a guide is that this format is suitable for controversial content. Where it might not be acceptable to say certain things out loud someone listening to them on an audio tour can hear this information unbeknownst to those around. The Tate a Tate audio tours made in protest at the Tate's acceptance of BP sponsorship is an example of this. These offer a very alternative and unofficial commentary to the gallery's standard audio tour. 

The way the recordings work is the narrator carries the bulk of the work and the physical guiding responsibilities. He introduces the different people who relate their memories of the park saying, for example, "the lake in front of you was used for model boats." He then says, "Norman Lara" and we hear Norman saying, "I'm the chairman of the Victoria model steamboat club. Been the chairman for at least 20 years." 

There were a great many people who shared their memories and the structural difficulty of this audio tour is that people's memories obey neither the logic of the walking route nor any chronological or thematic logic. This meant that the interviews were heavily cut and pasted, but even then it was impossible to organise the tour according to one central principle. It was instead pieced together according to effect.

There is a purpose to these oral history audio tours and this one did a competent job at capturing different memories and putting them together with enough narration to give them some context. It maintained an upright and respectful tone, like that of a teacher or some other sort of minor authority figure. All the time I was listening to it however I was thinking about how it could subvert itself and become a little less upright. Maybe that is just my schoolboy imagination or maybe there really is a need for us to be able to construct our own mythologies about the places we occupy rather than accepting those of the council's.  

As I was coming to the end of the tour I saw the three towers of The Lockton Estate, an unglamorous council estate that I had re-imagined in a previous performance of mine as the site of weapons of mass destruction threatening the Olympic Park. Sensationalist fear mongering whose purpose was to look at where the quite genuine fear came from. If history can help us understand what happened and how we came to where we are, so too can art which, as Picasso puts it, "is a lie that helps us see the truth. 

The Wilhelma Tour: educational botany in Stuttgart

Today the weather finally turned warm so I and half of the city, it seemed, went to Wilhelma, Stuttgart's zoo and botanical garden. 

There was quite a queue but then again this is one of the city's main attractions, bettered only by the Mercedes Benz Museum on the tourist to do list.

My guide on this tour was Michael. There were about 15 of us who followed him and he spoke in German so I observed more the mechanics of this tour rather than following the content closely. He was friendly but still serious in tone, kind of like a science teacher I had in the early 80s, beard and all. He spoke for as much as 7 or 8 minutes at a go and only made one joke in the 45 minutes I followed him. This seemed rather slow, also like the early 80s .

There were about 15 of us in the group and there were two children. He made a point of connecting with the children from the start by asking them questions in order to warm up the group as a whole. He had clearly done this before. It worked, it turned many of the adults into kids too, following their kind teacher around the park.

We spent some time on the architecture and history of Wilhelma, moved onto the plants and then arrived at the monkeys. He had the habit of always talking in front of an empty cage about an animal that might appear at any moment but never did. This would have been fine but while he was talking about the invisible gorilla, two chimpanzees were raising a storm in the next cage which sort of stole his glory. While this was not so ideal on this tour it is the sort of thing that I might be able to borrow and use deliberately. After a while I felt I had got the best out of this tour and so I left them to it.

I took these pictures of the different monkey buildings in anticipation of a visit I will make in the next day or two to Weissenhof Estate where they run daily tours. The buildings look strangely similar...

Finally I couldn't go to the Wilhelma and not take at least one bona fide tourist picture. So here it is: penguins.