Everything's going on all at once...

Another photograph from the Lotus Market in Chengdu.  Every once in a while, I get this revelation that life is going on all over the planet, all the time.  At the same time that I'm typing this, for example, countless huge blue trucks all over China are being stacked full of cardboard boxes and are then probably rumbling off to countless marketplaces full of countless people.  Meanwhile, most of the people that I have known for more than three years (i.e., most everyone I know who's in North America right now) is either getting ready for bed or already asleep. Life is going on more or less as usual in all of the places that I've lived or visited, even if I haven't been there in the last twenty years...

Simplistic?  Obvious?  Nostalgic?  Or incredibly cool that we make the connections that we do as we go about the world?  In any case, welcome to my brain, everyone.

But back to Chengdu - the guy in the bottom center of the photo who just noticed me and the camera?  He makes the shot happen, don't you think...?

Honoring the tradition

Was at the sprawling Lotus Market near Chengdu's North Train Station yesterday, which has no Lotuses to speak of, but darn near everything else.  I was looking for a new Christmas tree, which I found in a remote forest clearing market stall next to 3-D Buddha posters; chopped down with my hatchet bargained down with the vendor from 60 RMB down to 45, hauled home through the drifting snow crowds of people and electric motorcycles; and sawed the trunk down took it out of its cardboard box so that I could fit it into the stand. 

Then I sat on the couch for 45 minutes, untangling snarled masses of Christmas lights and trying to figure out which bulbs were broken so that I could get the darn things to work, while the rest of the family dug stuff out of boxes and decorated the rest of the house.  Some traditions are universal, after all...

Glossolalia

Doing some errands in the nearby town of Xipu, I came across the vegetable market there, which is a bit bigger than the local market near our house in Hongguang.  To distinguish themselves, vendors often record a short sales pitch of a word or phrase or two, on a little hand-held digital recorder that loops the sentence constantly.  The recording ("Fresh fresh spinach!" or "Bananas, bananas, two kuai, two kuai", for example) is then played back very loudly through a battery powered megaphone, and, if you have two or three of them playing together in the same market...  Well, just watch the video below, with the sound turned up and your headphones on.

 

The vegetable sellers, Xipu

Was fortunate to be able to borrow a camera last Friday and over the weekend, and lucky enough to get some good pictures out of the deal.  My favorite pictures are generally the ones that require the least amount of verbal explanation, and this batch is no exception.  I'll be posting some of what I think are the best of the lot in the next couple of days.

Look, Honey, it's our friends the Mangosteens!

...and the Rambutans, and the Dragonfruits....why all sorts of our friends from China and Southeast Asia are here!  What are you all doing in Canada?



Seems like I took these photos in Toronto's Chinatown back during a visit there in the summer of 2008 - right about the time when we were considering a volunteer position open in Egypt.  That would have been interesting, would it not? 

(Spoiler alert:  The Egypt thing didn't work out.)



Now that I look at the photos, I do remember thinking "What the heck are these strange mutant things?", and we talked to a Chinese guy who was really excited to find what I now know are longans (the little brown ones in the photo above), which didn't make it to Toronto that often, apparently. 

 

Wow, a sign that our whole Asian adventure was predestined after all! 

Or, more likely, a sign that I've always been attracted to strange-looking tropical fruit...

Two Years Ago - settling in

Some of the first shots of our university that Jane took out of the car window as we first came on to campus to drop off our stuff before heading off to language training, followed by what they look like now:

2009:


2011:


2009:


2011:


Here, the change in the photos aren't terribly big, but the changes in our minds are huge. The first picture from 2009 is of a random building. The first picture from 2011 is the 西华大学第三食堂.（Xihua Daxue di san shitang - Xihua University cafeteria #3, which, according to students, is the cafeteria with the best food, though it's a bit more expensive.)

The next picture from 2009 is a fence with some bikes in the foreground and some buildings behind it. The corresponding image from 2011, on the other hand, is nothing other than the University's side gate, which is:

• where we pick up our organic vegetables twice weekly,
• where we're 95% likely to run into a friend or a student if we stand there for more than five minutes,
• our passage to cheap restaurants if we're too lazy to cook,
• the way to the market, the stationary store, the hair salon and the bus,
• and, in the words of a previous foreign teacher who blogged before we got here, "the place where the University ends and the Real China begins".

What a difference two years makes, huh?

Oh, and speaking of Endangered Species...

I always used to like to look at bugs under glass. You know, the little shadow boxes that you can see at the State Fair with the way cool iridescent beetles that are as big as your fist? (Okay, they were at the Wisconsin State Fair about ten years ago, anyway...)

Then I ran into this booth in the Chatuchak Market in Bangkok...



The booth was about twenty by twenty feet, and was piled floor to ceiling with bugs in plastic. Framed bugs, encased bugs, mounted bugs, you name it. And underneath the display shelves, more and more stacks of boxes. Full of bugs.





Now, I'm no expert in the beetle keychain industry, but I've got to wonder - how sustainable is this, exactly...? And for what purpose? (Besides still looking cool in a creepy kind of State Fair science geek Raiders of the Lost Ark kind of way, that is.) And what will the archaeologists think a couple of thousand years from now? Ah, the dilemmas of our modern rain forest-straight-to-WalMart existence...

Fortunately, there will always be pictures of lenticular puppies once the beetles go extinct:

The So Muchness of it All

This is about the time lapsed after a trip where I start thinking of, well, everything. As in everything that I could write about, but haven't yet, and probably won't. Also everything that exists in the world and the impossibility (fortunately or not) of fully describing one person's journey through it. And instead of getting maudlin or navel-gazing about it, the best thing to do is to pick out what's meaningful at the given moment, appreciate it for a bit, and send it out into the world already. Which is what I'm doing right...





...now.

Ordinary Stuff - life on our street

Or, to be more exact, the street right outside the side gate of the university, caught in a moment of sunshine a week or three ago.

Ordinary Stuff - M is for Mantou

Mmmm, mantou! Jane took this picture of one of the workers at the new mantou shop that opened up on our market street last fall. Mantou are steamed buns, and a godsend to hungry vegetarians on the way to the bus or running a bit late to teach a class in the morning.

A whole lotta pink

Another picture from the Lotus wholesale market in Chengdu. And yes, pink is a girly girl color over here in China as well.

Incidentally, did you know that in the late 1800s in the US, pink was used for boys and light powder blue was considered a girls' color? As a shade of red, pink had the meaning of energetic, healthy, and powerful - as in the phrase "in the pink" - and therefore masculine. Meanwhile, blue was considered to be a more docile, relaxed, and melancholic, with more feminine overtones.

The original meanings, if my memory serves, faded around the turn of the century, and our current system of pink for girls and blue for boys started to catch on in the twenties and thirties. Anyway, that's what I remember from an incredibly interesting article that I read once and am too lazy to look up at the moment... (Would somebody care to Google it for me and get back to me with the results?)

A photo that turned out much better than I thought it would

From the vast region of wholesale markets near the North Train Station in Chengdu.