tbaroundtheworld

Qiānshān National Park lies about 10 kilometers outside of the northern Liaoning Province City of Ānshān. The city is known for its bad air and prodigious amounts of coal dust, it being the home of huge steel plant and coal mines. With the defeat of the Japanese at the end of the Second World War and following the triumph of the People’s Liberation Army over the final remnants of the Kuomintang, the region quickly evolved into one of industrializing China’s heavy manufacturing zones. Fifty years later it’s recovering from the end of that cycle and trying to re-invent itself as a technology zone. Qiānshān though has a much different origin. The name is short for “Thousand Lotus Flower Mountains” and was formed when a kindly goddess covered the sun with rocks in order to protect the people living below. One fell to earth and like a pebble falling into sand dozens of tiny mountains were raised up taking the form of the petals of a Lotus flower. Today the area is one of the premier scenic ...

Today I went to Anshan, 鞍山, the third largest city in Liaoning Province. One knows it's third because the provincial license plates have a letter that designates what city the car is from based on size. Shenyang cars have an “A” because it’s the biggest city. Dalian has “B” and Anshan, “C.” And so on. In more clever use of signs, we drove up on the Shenda Expressway whose name is a concatenation of the first couple of letters of the terminus at each end. As in Shen(yang) – Da(lian.) I suppose there is some flexibility here as Shendal doesn’t sound so great, nor does Shedali. In fact that one doesn’t sound good at all. The Shenda is a really nice road, having been built to allow the easy movement of weapons and materials down the peninsula in the event of a war. It’s wide, it has a great surface and as Jiang pointed out it is specifically designed to have long, flat stretches that provide adequate take off and landing space for jet fighters. It seems sort of anachronistic to me thou...

There is a wall containing a construction site just up the block from my house. It’s covered with banners that change from time to time, listing the events at the Dalian Development Theatre which happens to lie a bit further up Jinma Lu. Funny building, it’s designed to look like an accordion fan and it stands out against the sky at a point where the road curves off to the right giving you the impression that a giant Geisha has stuck her fan in the earth and walked away. While the writing is in Chinese and without any English translation I can usually guess what’s on the program. Sometimes there are cartoon characters that advertise a musical aimed at families. Or there might be a Chinese couple drenched in rain depicting some sort of melodrama. But mostly the banners advertise classical music ensembles using those doubly twee photos of the members of a troupe staring longingly into each other’s eyes, autumn foliage in the background. Or maybe a trio posing in an elevator in some Berli...

Shot this a couple of weeks ago at the height of the bug noise season. Was figuring this would be a "video about nothing" but then a little surprise showed up at the end.

I’ve been storing up these photographs for a couple of weeks. The first set is a nice depiction of the swing in air quality that I get out my window that faces the sea. Some days it’s crystal clear, and others you can barely make out the ocean. Once last week I could literally see the horizon way out on the sea; this morning it was so foggy that I could not see the building behind me. Some days when I wake up bleary eyed I forget that much of the visibility problems I have is due to the condensation on the outside of my window. Down by the sea front there is a manmade tidal basin that serves as a reflecting pool for the high-rises behind it. We call it “Stinky Pond” because it is. I often ride down there for the purpose of cooling off after a long bike ride. It adds a couple of miles to my total and allows me to lower my heart rate before heading home. At present there is a big rubber bladder blocking the entrance from the sea, there for who knows why. When the tide is high, water flow...

I had to have my plumbing fixed the other day. Over the course of the month and a half I’ve been in this apartment more and more water has appeared on the floor of my bathroom with each shower I’ve taken. While it would not be completely unusual for this to be the correct operation of a shower here in China, I suspected that something was not quite right so I called my relocation specialist lest the ceiling in the downstairs apartment cave in. Since none of us possess the Chinese necessary to interact with our landlords on such matters, our relocation specialists act as the first line of communications, relaying problems, negotiating agreements and reading our utility meters. Maria, who has worked with me from the very beginning arranged to bring by the landlord’s agent on Wednesday. When I selected this apartment back in January there was no bath tub or shower in the main bathroom, just rosy beige tile covering the floor, walls and ceiling. This is pretty common in the newer apartment...

I've talked about them before and I've decided that a bit of education is in order. The Mangosteen is believed to have originated in the general area of Indonesia, and perhaps specifically the Sunda Islands. Garcinia mangostana as it is known botanically is an ultra-tropical evergreen found very locally in the equatorial regions of Southeast Asia. At maturity it stands between 20 and 80 feet tall. It is named for Laurentiers Garcin, a French explorer who is generally acknowledged as the first westerner to obtain and describe the plant bu it has been known regionally for thousands of years both as a food and as an element in traditional medicine. The edible seed is not so much a fruit, but rather an aril , or a highly specialized, fleshy covering of the seed of a plant. Pomegranates are probably the most commonly recognized arils in the west. There is a story, perhaps apocryphal that Queen Victoria offered a handsome reward to whomever could deliver a fresh Mangosteen for Her M...

I have been making do with a kitchen towel to drain my dishes. I don’t have a dishwasher – in China you generally get a “dish sanitizer” which is a heated drying rack located where a dishwasher should be. I have one of those, it’s not heated and it’s on the other side of the kitchen. So I don’t bother, I wash them and pile them up on the towel. I’ve looked high and low and I’ve found some things that sort of look like dish drainers but they really are little more than a plastic tray with a catch pan underneath. In other words a suspended version of the kitchen towel method. But tonight when I went to IKEA to pick up some shower curtain rings, I stopped by the kitchen towel bin to see if they had any that might be more absorbent than the ones I have and looking up, what did I find? A display of countertop dish drainers. And not one, but three! One pretty weak looking cheap wood version and two made of steel. In that moment I knew true happiness for only the third or fourth time in my sh...

Yesterday was the 8th of August, and 08/08 is a very lucky day in China. It’s funny, they have their own traditional lunar calendar and then they have the modern Gregorian calendar. They’re crafty; they pick lucky days on both so no day is ever very far from an auspicious date if you’re looking for the right moment to marry off your kids or christen a ship or building. 八月八号 as it’s known is a good day for weddings and yesterday was no exception with three scheduled at the hotel across the street. They were literally arranged right on top of each other which made the arrangements something of a three-ring circus. Before the party arrives one or more big red inflatable arches are erected in front of the hotel. Golden cannons full of confetti are placed at the strategic corners of the parking lot and sometimes big boxes of rockets are placed alongside. The Inn Fine trademark is a long rope of firecrackers laid out in the shape of a heart. I suppose the grandeur depends on how much the fat...

Of the building up the street. Turn down your volume, it's noisy on Jinma Lu.

Ha ha, stupid pop-culture pun, I know. But it's the truth. Took a walk tonight just to get out of the apartment, waiting until dark because I wanted to go down the street and shoot some video of this building at the entrance to Kai Fa Qu that puts on quite a light show. Lots of people out on the street, many walking and playing with their little yappy dogs. One woman had brought along a plant sprayer to cool off her Pomeranian. It would stop, she would spray its little orange face. Two blocks up the road, the street back by my place the sky erupted with fireworks celebrating the opening of a new apartment building. Just my luck, had I waited 10 minutes to leave I would have been right under them satisfying my wish to try some explosion shots with my new camera. Nothing lost, I'll be surprised if I don't end up with 10 dozen more opportunities the way they love them around here. Lots Chinese spend their evenings sitting out on the sidewalk. Given their disdain for air condit...

Because we are not allowed to drive in China we have to rely on our drivers for just about everything related to travel. While it’s nice to be chauffeured around it does mean sacrificing a great deal of personal freedom. This is the reason I chose a house so close to services - I didn’t want to have to get in the car and drive somewhere to do a small shopping or to buy a cup of coffee. I really wanted to maintain at least the tiniest fantasy that I was capable of doing things on my own. Making this level of dependency work to your advantage comes at a high cost – developing and maintaining a relationship with another person with whom you can barely communicate. Not someone who you might pick as a friend, rather more like a family member that doesn’t speak your native tongue. Some take the path of sitting in the back seat and keeping the wall up between employee and boss with no intention of moving beyond “Take me here, take me there, and go pay my phone bill.” Others dive in head first...

Not much of a blog tonight, just a couple of things worth sharing. Had dinner with friends and walked down to the park by the bay to see the fan dancers again. Their numbers have grown with the warm weather and it was nice to see them dancing precisely, pink and green fans waving in the waning light. Tonight many of the women were dressed in white uniforms designating some sort of dancing club I suspect. I took this photo of an apartment building reflecting in what I like to call Stinky Pond. It's a catchment basin built for scenic effect and when it's hot, it is foul. Tonight it was completely still and although it was deep dusk, a 2 second exposure did the trick. The pink on the building is a reflection from the neon across the street. Finally, I managed to capture a few seconds of the nightly Tai Chi gathering in the neighborhood behind my building. It was dark, and I wanted to be surreptitious so the video is not ideal. But I think you get the idea.