Wandering around hovelage used to be my favourite part of any trip to mainland China.Ĭhinese tourists apparently love Rome, Paris and London because of the atmosphere that only old buildings can give. I have a term for the handful of beautiful and interesting dignified relics from a time of excellent workmanship that still haven’t been destroyed: Hovelage. Now the whole country looks exactly, drearily the same, and so grotesquely bad taste one would think they had lost a whole generation to communism. I used to know where I was in the country just by looking at the buildings grey bricks in the north, packed amber-coloured clay in the west and of course the elegant town houses of the south with their dizzyingly high ceilings and tall, stained-glass windows. I think traditional Chinese architecture is among the most beautiful and functional in the world. To a shithole place where all the outside walls were covered in tiles
I saw mainland China go from beautiful, traditional architecture:
I am particularly obsessed with the topic of tiles. However, my friends from Hong Kong, now expats, or rather, re-expatted again like me (most people I know who have left Hong Kong have gone back to their country of birth, not to yet another foreign-dom) told me the tiles weren't there because of some cultural quirk, but rather because the houses were so badly made, the tiles served to cover the cracks.ĭid the Moors learn about glazing, tiles and ceramics from the Chinese? The Chinese claim to have invented the method of glazing ten thousand years ago or more, so I'd say definitely! Also, the Chinese invented everything, so there's that. Some of the tiles were beautiful elaborately painted, and even I thought, not bad. But there they were all over southern Portugal and Lisbon: Tiled houses. Especially not the outside walls of houses. Places where I think tiles don't belong: Everywhere else. Those places are: Bathroom walls, kitchen walls, floors - and morgues. I wonder why? Must be something about colonialism, or football, or something.īefore they became Portugal and Spain, both had been invaded by the Moors, who left behind a legacy of tiles, among other things. It turns out Portugal is not a fan of Spain. I tried to speak Spanish in Portugal but whoa! Big no-no. What I wanted to say was I eventually ended up in another country, Portugal, where I actually knew people from Hong Kong, both former students and friends from the old village.
I should have predicted there would be one or two other people travelling in Spain at Easter, but I was so hungry for travel I didn't care. That's how I ended up paying five star prices for minus two star hotels, but let those sleeping flea-ridden death coffins lie. Well, it wasn't the other day but at Easter. The other day I suddenly travelled through Spain by train.
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