Author: Willem

Sunday was pleasant enough to spend outside, and since I had to get away from work for a while – and Dameisha –  I took a taxi to Shenzhen’s Luo Hu station and on a whim the metro from there to the west side of the city to ‘Windows of the World’.   Nothing to do with Microsoft! – it is a very big theme park providing outdoor displays big and small of world landmarks, mostly scale models of man-made constructions, but also of natural landmarks.    The first picture is of the entrance (the monorail train car seems as old as the ones we have at the Seattle Space Needle!).  Scroll down and see how many of the other landmarks you recognize.  The answers are at the bottom of the post.

 

 

From the top down :

Eiffel Tower (of course), scene from Japan with koi feeding and Mt Fuji, Stonehenge, Lion Gate at Mycenae (full scale), Quell Park – the grounds of a house and estate in Barcelona that Gaudi designed and built for the Quell family*, African mask, 20 yuan (US$3) for a ride on the camel with the pyramids as a backdrop!, native American totem poles, the little pee boy from Belgium, the ‘official name’ is a little rude! (know what it is?), the Shwe Dagoon Pagoda from Burma, Chinese gate,  the Segovia Alcazar a fortress and magnificent castle from Segovia, Spain, and and Assyrian king Esarhaddon.

*my absolute favorite of the landmarks, trumping even the Eiffel Tower and the gorgeous Chinese gate.

The weather was nice enough late Friday to take a very pleasant stroll on Dameisha beach,  just a few blocks down from my apartment.     It is out of season, of course – so the activity on the beach is subdued.     But I did manage to catch some riders on a jet ski ( 摩托艇 ).    In summertime there is also parasailing – being towed behind a boat while you dangle from a parachute.

These pictures are from yesterday after I had returned to Dameisha from Shenzhen.    It is an outlet mall here that suspended its operations a year or two ago, and has now reopened (for some ‘happy’ shopping as the first picture suggests).     There is a nice collection of stores – all the brand names such as Nike Adidas Samsonite Levi’s Gucci and more – but not many shoppers.    Earlier Sunday had been a nice day but late afternoon the winter monsoon wind picked up again making it unpleasant.

The goddess in the chariot is Venus – the Roman goddess principally associated with love, beauty and fertility.   I suspect the 2007/08 date on the plaque is when the outlet mall first opened.

P.S.  The shooting incident involving congresswoman Giffords in Arizona was covered for several minutes on the national news TV channel CCTV today.

Here is a selection of pictures from today.   Four of us took a taxi to Shenzhen.  First stop was at McCawly’s Irish Pub for lunch (shepherd’s pie with a beer for me, yum).  The next picture is from the Tequila Coyote Cantina next door, a Mexican restaurant also run by the McCawly’s owner.   The ornate front of the Lili Marleen Bar is on the other side.

Done with lunch, we headed to a dept store called Jusco in the Coco Park Mall.  2011 is The Year of The Rabbit, so get ready for many more rabbit pictures from me until the Chinese New Year celebrations are behind us in February.

 

Done with Jusco, but not finding the charcoal Dave wanted for his outdoor grill at the apartment, we now head to another Jusco with the Shenzhen metro rail system.  The picture above is a romantic version of it as far as I can tell.   The one below is a 3D map of our exiting station’s surroundings.   It was hard to navigate to the second store.  The cutie pie kids are from a billboard in the station and the green Shenzhen Tong card is the equivalent of the Octopus card in Hong Kong, and the Orca card in Seattle.  I love the name of the Internet Cafe Lu Lu.

The kids on the street are looking at a dead rat.  A street vendor is getting her baked potatoes out .. a hard life, I hope she sold all of them!   Watch out for the snake coming at you in 4D  (hmm – not sure what the fourth dimension is!).  Rabbits in the stuffed toy machine, and – at last! – we found the charcoal in the second store.     Not sure what kind of building the leaning building is, this picture taken from the Citic Plaza 中信广场, as is the tall building under construction.   I don’t know why, but it made me think of the 1985 ‘We built this City’ song by Starship :

We built this city on rock and roll x2
Say you don’t know me, or recognize my face
Say you don’t care who goes to that kind of place
Knee deep in the hoopla, sinking in your fight
Too many runaways eating up the night ..

 

I believe this billboard is of Deng Xiopeng : a Chinese politician and leader of the Communist Party of China who as a reformer led China towards a market economy.   He was in office for some 13 years until 1992.  The last picture is just of a tall apartment building on the way back to Dameisha.

It’s past midnight Monday night here but I made it in.  We made an unscheduled stop at Anchorage airport in Alaska to off-load a sick passenger (couldn’t find out what ailed him .. apparently these was no doctor on the flight, either).  The first picture is of Anchorage airport through the airplane window.  Snowy and icy on the ground but the weather was clear.   So from Anchorage we flew over Alaska, the Kamchatka peninsula and Japan.    I was so happy to see my driver still there at Hong Kong airport, this is now three hours after our scheduled arrival time.   Without him there – I could have A. taken the train to the border and hope to get a taxi in Shenzhen at 11pm : a dicey proposition.  B.  The easier one : walk into the Regal Airport hotel right there and arrange a pick-up in the morning.    The final picture shows the exit point from Hong Kong territory.   I am in a van similar to the one on the right in the picture.   Right after the picture was taken we tried our luck and used the ‘Hong Kong Residents’ lane, and hey, they let us through.

There was a full-body scanner in my security line this morning, but they stopped using it before I got to the front, which was a relief for me.     (It’s the radiation that I don’t like).     Anyway, here I am waiting for the flight to San Francisco, and I am sure I will sleep since I had to get up at 3.45am.

I had dinner last night with my friends Bill Dave and Meredith in the Seattle neighborhood of Ballard – a restaurant called The Hi-Life located in the historic Firehouse No. 18 built in 1911 (picture below).  It serves up American food and I had pot roast, carrots and mashed potatoes with beer.   Very nice!    And today Steve and Ken treated us to pork, sauerkraut, spaetzle, greens and a special corn bread : a feast.

But alas, my time home is over and I’m taking off for Hong Kong early in the morning via San Francisco.  We don’t have snow at the airports here on the West coast, so that’s a good thing!  And now I have to go and finish up with my packing.

Click on the picture to enlarge it.