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Showing posts from July, 2009

A simple Saturday spin

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A few minutes ago I was sitting in my red chair enjoying a ham and cheese sandwich when a big pink bunny head balloon went rocketing past in a beeline to heaven. No doubt below some child had just burst into tears but the bunny balloon did not care, it was free from its Earthly bonds. It went up and up in a completely straight line until it hit a patch of different air where it moved side to side for a few moments before catching another express elevator and continuing upward passing behind the edge of my window and out of sight. I guess I should start to expect more floating objects, given yesterday’s blimp and this one today. My morning was spent out riding my bike, alone, from my place up and across the base of the foothills and then back up through Big Black Mountain Park. It was much the same as last Saturday - people selling food in the morning market, women scrubbing clothes in the stream, men washing cars along the road, a few walkers heading up to the temple - today didn’t bri...

Blimps. Float past my window.......

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I was planning on publishing a blog tomorrow, detailing some interesting little anecdotes from the past week but this was too good to pass up. We saw this guy tethered out in the swamps a couple of weeks ago and today it flew past our office. The Dalian International Beer Festival started last night and I suspect that's why it's here. I came home about 4:30 and walked out of the bedroom just in time to see it fly by my living room. A few minutes later it was on the other side of my place gliding by the dining room window. And then back around again. The pilot had a very strange way of going up and down, making me wonder if he was learning how to fly the thing. The Chinese word for Blimp is Fēitǐng or 飞艇 which translates quite nicely as "flying ship".

Part Two - The journey takes some twists and turns

We made the left off the downhill run, shot past a couple of busses at the corner stop and followed Chung to the curb past the busses; for some reason he wanted to stop again. After fiddling with his phone/GPS/MP3 player he took off his helmet and said “It’s hot.” Well, it was and almost certainly due to his lack of exposed skin. He and Dermott got into a discussion and I decided it was time for a “natural break” as it is known in the parlance of professional bicycle racing. I walked a couple of yards up the road and ducked between a big evergreen shrub to gain a bit of privacy and a lot less exposure. After all, this was a major intersection crawling with cars, busses, trucks and people. Wearing bib shorts presents a bit of a challenge in this particular area, much more so for the fairer sex but still a bit for the boys. We can pull down the front or pull up the leg. I chose the former method and was trying to make it fast when some rustling in the bushes turned my attention to a woma...

Part One - An epic day in the saddle, Chinese Style

Sunday morning rolled around and I decided that I would make a second attempt at exploring the back route to 大黑山 having failed the day before. On Saturday night I had exchanged a couple of texts with my riding partner Dermott and he was interested and was planning to bring along one of the riders he had met on some locally organized ride to Jinshitan that he had accidentally hooked up with some time in the past month or two. I have a standing invitation to join them but trying to put together a 2 hour ride on a work night was simply something I would never be able to do. Especially since participating almost certainly meant that the finishing leg would be done in the dark. So I was looking forward to meeting this guy and having a ride to a different place. Getting up on time but burning my spare time by puttering around, I realized I was only 30 minutes from our planned meeting time so I got serious and quickly got ready. We were planning to meet across the street from my place so whil...

Making sense of it all

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I woke up early on Saturday morning planning to take a bike ride up to 大黒山, Big Black Mountain. One look out the window at 6AM though told me that the weather was not in a cooperating frame of mind – the residential streets that run from my place down to the sea were wet with rain. So I went back to bed figuring I’d spend my day another way. At 7 I checked again, still wet but looking out the front it was clear that I had miscalculated – Jinma Lu, the main drag, was pretty dry. It must have rained in the night and the side streets were not drying simply because of their lack of use while the boulevards had been dried by the cars. Coming from the desert where the streets dry moments after a rainstorm one forgets that they don’t do so in this climate. I dropped into hyper-speed and made plans to go out for a ride. I’d been browsing Google Maps throughout the week to see if I could find a way up to the mountain that didn’t involve one of the very busy boulevards. It appeared that there wa...

Dragon devours the Sun

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Having seen all those Earth Science teachers on my Beijing flight last week I did a little research and was surprised to discover that this year’s big solar eclipse was taking place along a path right through the center of China. With a better bit of planning I might have made my way to Shanghai or out to our plant in Chengdu but since Dalian is just 200 miles north of the path of totality staying put promised a decent show. The special thing about this one is the duration – more than 6 minutes and not to be repeated until 2132. Figuring I’d miss the next one I made plans to spend as much time as possible viewing it. Were I at home I would have dragged out my telescope and sun filter and enjoyed a nice view but here I was going to have to improvise. I figured that at a minimum I could make a pinhole camera and do a projection, far better than nothing but some exposed film would have been wonderful. Who knows where to get a roll of film in 2009, I certainly don’t. Before heading out to ...

You get in that kitchen and make some noise with those pots and pans.

Monday called for a trip to IKEA and so I arranged with Jiang to pick me up at 4 for the trip into town. IKEA is located right next door to Metro on the very edge of Dalian proper. Today though the weather was not threatening as it was on Friday when the sky opened up and we spent 2 hours making the 20 minute trip back to Kai Fa Qu. I really had no interest in repeating that experience as interesting as it was, watching the cars float down the rivers flowing down the streets. I was curious how Jiang had made out on his trip back to the city after dropping me off in the storm. By the time we had arrived at my place the rain had significantly dissipated but there was still an awful lot of water on the streets. One of the unfortunate things about the whole driver program is that 95% of them live 25 miles away in town. And that fact was the #1 reason why I chose to live where I do seeing no romance in waiting for an hour or more for my chauffeur to drive an hour to collect me to go and buy...

We went in search of art, and came away naught to the better.

I was feeling pretty wrecked after my bike excursion so I figured I’d take it easy for the rest of the day with a trip to town to try and find a certain artist for the Walters and then some quality time tuning up their family bicycles. Around here we expats have developed sort of friendly barter economy – I trade my wrenching skills for dinner every Tuesday night. So after a shower and some clean clothes I went out and down the street to meet them at Starbucks. When you live in the tropics you develop little second nature behaviors that make being outside as pleasant as possible and walking along I realized that I had forgotten one of the critical ones that I learned in Shanghai – hugging the shade patches. In the cities of China most of the big boulevards have sidewalks commensurate with their stature. A four lane “road” will often have a parallel bike/scooter lane on both sides and a marble sidewalk that is about 2 lanes wide. They look very grand and they do provide a nice alternati...

I finally get that ride in and I wonder how people do it.

After an expat style dinner of Italian sausage panini and a couple of decent pale ales, I headed home to watch Le Tour on my computer until my eyes simply refused to stay open. The results are funny when you move your body clock 12+ hours. The whole of my waking hours has shifted from a US schedule of 7AM until around midnight to wide awake around 5AM and completely unable to do anything after about 10PM. And when I say do anything, I mean getting settled into bed with a NY Times crossword puzzle and then waking up an hour or so later with the pencil in my hand and the paper propped up against my knees. If I’m out with friends or actively engaged in something at home, I can keep rolling. But the minute I put myself in a place of relaxation, I’m gone. I had a good night’s sleep and got out of bed at 6, forcing myself to stay in bed for about an extra hour. It felt good even though it was very bright outside my drapes as it is every morning here where the sun seems to come up at 4. China...