Up and Over

Jane shot this video last spring of a fairly normal-sized crowd exiting our local high-speed train and making their way to the exit of North Train Station in Chengdu.  For everyone in China - Happy National Day weekend, and wishing you safe travels (with at least a place to sit for most of the time) should you be going anywhere!

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...

Training

One of the frustrations of blogging, and journaling in general, come to think of it, is the near impossibility of describing everything you want to describe. I've written about this before - how, if you start to retell an event, often, the retelling can seem like it takes more time than the event itself. Hence my respect for good biographers, travel writers, and anybody who can figure out ways to make nonfiction interesting in general...

This also explains why I post a lot about short day trips and one time events - it's not that we don't do anything else, it's just that these little bits are much easier to describe in the time from when I get up at six to when the kids are up and about demanding breakfast at 6:45. So there are always bits that I really want to write about, but stay in the back of my mind because I can't quite get a handle on how to start writing about them.

One such bit is a small steam train located in Jiayang, about a five hour trip on successive buses to the south and east of Chengdu. As the sign promises, it is the world's only out-of-print small steam train still in operation.



The train takes you up an isolated valley to the small mining town of Bagou. It's really an exercise in time travel, as most of the town hasn't changed much since the sixties. The train gets a few tourists, but the town, like most small villages in the Chinese countryside, has lost a great deal of its residents to jobs in the cities. What remains is a bit of a ghost town, and an interesting window into a Mao-era industrial collective.


The view from our guest house.


Another shot of the engine that got us there.


We went with our friends Lei King, a former student, and Jim, who was visiting the campus with a group of students from New York. Here they are at breakfast with a slightly blurry Xander.


The town square and the Chairman Mao Memorial Pavilion. More photos coming in the next post or three.

Happy Fourth of July!

On this, the occasion of the anniversary of the founding of my native land, we here at Slow Boat would like to take this opportunity to share a particularly, ummm..., patriotic (?) moment from about a month ago. God Bless America! (and whatever other country you happen to find yourself in...)

yeah, really, we're starting up the blog again...

A photo allegory of how it feels to be starting up a routine (exercise, painting, learning Chinese, um...blogging) after a long break. Oh, and it's the only Basset Hound I've seen in China to date.

The Dinosaurs Among Us

It started out innocently enough - waiting around at the entrance to the dinosaur museum in Zigong until everyone arrived. And what better way to kill time than to ask everyone to act like a dinosaur for a picture or two? Ah, how little prepared was I for the terror that reigned thereafter...







I'm hesitant to post these pictures because, you know, what is the correct protocol when you now know that some of your friends and colleagues are, in reality, extinct bloodthirsty carnivorous beasts?

However, the impulse to not out everyone I know as secret dinosaurs on the internet on one hand is balanced out by the need for journalistic integrity on the other. The world needs to be warned! Plus, I think the photos are just gosh-darned funny...

(Oh, and ps, if you are one of dinosaurs in this post and you would like to keep your little "secret" private for the time being, let me know and I'll delete your picture from the post. Though you might also want to do something about the large chunks of brontosaurus meat you've got stashed in your closet...)

A room with a view

Another thing that I've seen for the first time in China, again from our trip to Zigong: A hotel bathroom with a glass wall facing the room. You can (and we did) lower the blind for privacy, but its translucence meant that it made leaving the bathroom light on for the kids problematic. As the old saying goes, "People who live in glass houses should dress in the basement."

Soldiers and Soldiers

Slooowly bringing the blogging back to China with photos from Xi'an and Beijing, respectively, from the beginning of March when I showed my mom the sights for a week. (and no, my mom isn't in either one of these pictures...)

Bottle Capitalism

Just in case you were under the illusion that we spent every day of our travels hauling our kids from one fantastic attraction to another, allow me to share with you one of their favorite activities while traveling - playing "store" in the hotel room, using found bottle caps as currency. (For those of you reading in America, what they call "bottles" in Southeast Asia are these strange containers made from real glass, it seems, and topped off not with plastic, but with a strange crimped metal thing that you have to use a special tool to remove. Weird, huh...?)



It started out with Zekey, who spent his time while waiting for food to come in restaurants searching for caps, and quickly spread to the two other kids. Once they realized that there were tiny numbers printed on the inside of each cap, the game quickly mushroomed into a bona fide obsession. Letters were soon discovered, and these represented hundreds and then thousands.

We may be sorely negligent with our home schooling curriculum, but I think the boys crammed about a year and a half worth of long sum addition into two weeks of competing to see who's bottle cap collection was worth more. I have no idea what the airport security people thought about the approximately 1,568 bottle caps that were strewn throughout our luggage at one point, but I know I got a kick out of it.

And now for the herpetological section of our program...

The Red Cross in Bangkok runs the world's second oldest snake farm. There, they raise and study all sorts of snakes, and extract venom to produce anti-venom for treatment for snake bites. They also put on a pretty good show for the public, which is a lot less sensational and tourist trappy than others I've seen. Watching the show, we learned that...


Pythons are big!


...as are King Cobras.


Cobras are bitey-er, though.

Thailand has a lot of other snakes, too. They come in a wide range of sizes, colors, and toxicities.

Time sequence no. 2

Riding in the back of a pickup with the boys on top a load of groceries to a good snorkeling beach about five miles away was fine...



... it was just on the way back that things started to get a bit, well, challenging (the red and black in the background is my shirt as I'm hovering over Xander and Zekey) ...













Here's more of Jane's view from the inside of the cab, looking to the front this time:



The cool thing about tropical rainstorms is that they're not that cold, well, once the pickup stops to let you off, anyway. Oh, and we'd already gotten wet snorkeling, so we, um, got the salt water rinsed off of us quite thoroughly...

Time sequence no. 1

Ysa rockin' out on a bamboo xylophone at a cafe that we often ate at in the north of Bali.

Going with the flow

What this photo shows: me, Xander, and Zekey bobbing around on the waves with a lot of local kids at Tabula Nusa Beach, a gorgeously remote stretch of seaside about two hours west of the Papuan capital of Jayapura.

What it doesn't show: the relative height of the waves, which, at around two feet, weren't really dangerous, but strong enough to toss everyone around like so many assorted socks in a washing machine. Fortunately, unlike socks in the wash, nobody went missing. (One of those times where I had to squelch the Protective Dad instinct and watch the boys happily bob around and get smacked silly by an unexpected wave or two.)

Also not shown - many of the Papuan kids were eating corn on the cob, which, as Jane pointed out, is the perfect thing to eat while floating around on an inner tube in salt water. No butter, but the salt's all provided!

A few more pics, while we're at it... (Click to see them larger on Flickr)




Some of the local flotsam - a sprouted coconut and a cool spiny starfish of some kind.


Jane tried chewing betel nut, which turned her mouth a bright scarlet and made her an instant hit. Worthy of a post in and of itself...


And, yeah, I've posted this picture before, but have to do it again - if only to remind myself that I was there...