Have Boa, Will Travel

Then there's this truck, which appeared parked by the side of the road one morning. By the afternoon, it was gone. Really wish I could have seen the show, wherever it was...

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...?

Night on the Town

Eye Contact

I'll be with you in a sec...

I don't know much about art, but I know what I like...

...and what I don't.  And what I don't like so much that it ends up coming all the way around to me liking it again.  Anyway, rather than prejudicing you with any further opinions, here are some finds from a trip into town last Friday.  I'll let you sort out which ones work for you on your own...

The entrance to the kids' primary school

Now with 50% more weeds and trees growing above it.  I think I'm justified if I tell Zekey to run at top speed every time he enters or leaves the building, right?

Mostly about the color, these...

Red, Green, and Orange



Blue with bits of red, purple, and black


A big hunk of pinks, oranges, and yellows, with stars and candy bananas


Chunky blue, gold brown and beige rectangles, and grey.  And a white arrow!

Captain Cynical Strikes Again!

Don't know what it is about a camera, some simple photo editing software, and a crowd of people in a heavily touristed area, but combine me with these three elements and you get (cue theme music) ...


...Captain Cynical!


 Fortunately, Captian Cynical sometimes finds some interesting groupings of people...


... or a funny bit of Chinglish here and there...


...or combinations of things and people that are just plain weird, but in an interesting way.

Good thing that Cpn. Cynical occasionally delivers the goods, isn't it?  Cuz otherwise, I wouldn't dream of posting his stuff online.  (After all, the internet is a very serious place, is it not..?)

Giving the ol' Panda Suit a rest...

People in your neighborhood, part I

Way cooler than you'll ever be, and they want you to know it...

Photographic proof that the young male adolescent semi-sneer is in fact a universal expression.  (Though I like the fact that the second guy in from the right can't help smiling...)

Transects

Right after college, I volunteered as an archaeological assistant for a summer in the Santa Fe National Forest in New Mexico.  A lot of what we did was field survey work, which meant running transects of a given area of the forest.  We'd spread our group out in a line with everyone 20 feet apart, following our compasses as close to due north as possible, and watching the ground for artifacts.  Mostly, we found flakes of chert or obsidian left behind from someone making a spear point about 800 years earlier - the Archaic Tewa Indian equivalent of pencil shavings.  Every once in a while, one of us would find an actual arrowhead.  Or an empty whiskey bottle from the 1920s, or an elk skull, which was always fun.

So now, if you can, imagine the top of a dusty mesa in Rio Arriba county, covered with piñon pine and juniper scrub on the top, and only reachable by a three hours' bouncing drive up a deeply rutted four-wheel Forest Service road.  The sky overhead is eyeball-achingly blue, and the nearest house is about 50 miles away as the crow flies, except that you're not a crow.  Smell the red dirt and the sage yet?  Okay, good.  That experience has Absolutely Nothing to do with the part of China that I'm living in.

For a taste of that, why not take a look through the slide show below.  The photos were all taken on October 1st, which is National Day (the anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic) here in China.  It's a bit long, so you may want to make yourself comfortable.  Grab a beer (or tea, to be more authentic) and settle down for a bit.  On our photo walk last Saturday, I took almost 300 photos, and the slide show has about 130 of them.  They don't all work equally well as perfect photos, but taken together, they make for an interesting sampling of the culture that I've been lucky enough to call home for the past two years.



Oh, and make sure you watch in full screen mode.  (should be a button on the bottom right.)  Happy transecting!

Both Sides Now

Front:


Back:

The photo that (almost) got away...

A surreal moment from last winter, from the archives...

I was going into Chengdu with the kids on the first fast train one Saturday morning.  We lingered around for a bit to watch the other trains coming and going on other platforms - still one of Zekey's favorite things to do.  As we were about to exit the station, the crowd leaving another arriving train caught up with us in the corridor leading out of the station.

Leading the charge were fifteen or twenty people carrying large baskets of vegetables and huge burlap bags.  They were running so fast, I was almost worried that their combined momentum might knock the kids over, especially since many of their bags and baskets were blocking their view.  I moved the kids over to the side, partly out of safety, but mostly because it was so interesting.  It soon became obvious that most of the people leading the charge were vendors, and were hustling out of the station as quickly as possible to grab the best places to set up shop in the plaza outside of the station.

The next wave, however?  Much more puzzling. Again about fifteen or twenty people carrying baskets suspended on shoulder poles, but this time the baskets were full to overflowing cuts of uncooked meat - some still steaming in the cold December air.  It all went by very quickly, and by the time I thought to dig my camera out of my pocket, the last of them was fast approaching.  I snapped one shot, and then they all were gone.  We got out of the station in time to see the last of the meat carriers disappear into the crowds of people waiting for their trains in the plaza outside...

It's Late

but I'm going to post a picture anyway, if only for momentum's sake...



I was taking a bus during rush hour, and at every red light, the driver would lean back, close his eyes, and start snoring gently. When the light turned green and the bus ahead in the line of traffic started moving, he would awake with a start, gun the motor, and drive ahead until traffic was stopped at the next red light, at which point he would tilt his head back, and start the procedure all over again. Seemed like a workable system to me...

People in the neighborhood

More pictures taken around the mining town of Bagou and environs, featuring the residents of the area. I forget the exact statistics, but the town currently has only around 10% of its original peak population still living there.

On the road

By the time this posts, I'll be somewhere over the Pacific on the way back to Chicago, courtesy of Hainan Airlines. I'm setting up a few robo-posts for the next week, and then after that, well, stay tuned for further developments...

Yep, that's gotta be safe...

I'm sure of it. Safer at propping up high-voltage electrical cable than the 15-foot bamboo ladder sticking out of an oil drum that I saw along the same stretch of highway last winter, anyway. Y'see, this contraption has safety stripes...

Can I interest you in an eye care massager?

What I love about China: I can be sitting in my office in the English department, grading papers, and someone can walk in out of the blue and try to sell me a pair of opaque sunglasses with bumps on the back. Thankfully, my Chinese is good enough that I could A: understand the main gist of what she was asking me, and B: politely tell her that I was not interested.