a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
So barely has typhoon Conson dissipated, when tropical storm Chantu comes up (the magenta blob on the map below). I’m not sure why we have two consecutive storms with names starting with ‘C’. But the bigger concern is that the storm might interfere with Hong Kong International Airport’s ability to dispatch me home on Thursday.
The Hong Kong Observatory says it will be ‘rather windy’ tomorrow. Got to love that British word rather. How much is rather? I guess I will find out tomorrow!
I cannot drink warm coffee or tea now that it’s high summer .. too darn hot outside, and sometimes inside when we get here and the air conditioning had not been left on overnight in the office. Nescafe make a nice little gulp-size iced coffee, so I keep some of those in the refrigerator at home.
It’s a long day if after 11 hrs at work, you still have to go to a 2 hr dinner. The dinner was OK and we had some good conversation that was not about work, though. NO SHOP TALK! as we say. And hey, I’m going home on Thursday, so one of the t-shirts from a Hong Kong street market is what I will wear in Seattle. Shorts and t-shirt, just right for Seattle’s summer.
The mission of the day was to go to see Big Buddha, on Lantau island (that’s also where Hong Kong International Airport is situated). Since the storm had passed, it was a beautiful day and the line to the tramway that goes up to the site where the Buddha is perched, was very long — we waited for an hour to get onto the car. The tramway is fairly new, started operating in 2006, goes for 5.7 kms and is supported by 8 towers. It goes up very high at one point as the first picture shows, but the other segments are lower. We picked a cabin with a glass floor (it was OK sitting down but eerie standing up).
There is a village with all kinds of souvenir and food stores, and then one has to climb a series of steps to get to the statue of Buddha.
The statue is named Tian Tan Buddha because its base is a model of the Altar of Heaven or Earthly Mount of Tian Tan, the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. It is one of the five large Buddha statues in China. The Buddha statue sits on a lotus throne on top of a three-platform altar. It is surrounded by six smaller bronze statues known as “The Offering of the Six Devas” and are posed offering flowers, incense, lamp, ointment, fruit, and music to the Buddha. These offerings symbolize charity, morality, patience, zeal, meditation, and wisdom, all of which are necessary to enter into nirvana (see last picture).
The Buddha is 34 metres (112 ft) tall, weighs 250 metric tons (280 short tons), and was the world’s tallest outdoor bronze seated Buddha prior to 2007. It reputedly can even be seen from as far away as Macau on a clear day. Visitors have to climb 268 steps in order to reach the Buddha (we climbed it, yes! oof!) , though the site also features a small winding road to the Buddha for vehicles to accommodate the handicapped.
So the two Wills -Willem and Will – (he’s a colleague I worked with before, just joined our project) came to Hong Kong on Friday night. The typhoon passed well south of Hong Kong, so we were fine except that cats-and-dogs rain would come down on to the city at times.
Pictures from the top :
Junk spotted in Hong Kong harbor on Friday night from the Kowloon side. Hibiscus at the Flower Market on Saturday morning. A fluffy kitty kat with one brown eye and one blue (since I was speaking of cats and dogs), also in the flower market area. Traffic in the Mong Kok area on the Kowloon side; at this time on Saturday afternoon the sun was blazing down and one thought the rain was gone permanently, but no! absolutely not. Saturday night we went to Lan Kwai Fong in the central district, where we happened to find a beer fest that was going on, only to be caught in another downpour. Yikes. The locals tell us in summer it could rain like this for days at a time.
I wanted to post a ‘happy’ picture, couldn’t find any in my picture library. So I picked this one instead ! from a comic book I bought on a previous trip to Hong Kong. Yes, printed comic books are still alive and well, and the artwork in them is beautiful.
I am very sure these horsemen are not getting ready to battle a snowstorm of e-mails, wall-to-wall meetings and items that need attention ASAP, but hey – I feel I am one of them. Now where’s my horse and my sword? Giddyup!
Keeping our eyes on the typhoon* Conson here, the first of the season .. looks like it will go by on the south side of us. Hong Kong is where the red asterisk is, so there might be LOTS of rain this weekend there.
*typhoons and hurricane are essentially the same, but here in Asia the term hurricane is not used
What a day at work .. but it’s over and hey! Friday is coming up. Guess where I’m going this weekend? Right : to the Fragrant Harbor (that is of course Hong Kong, the English name derived from two Chinese characters Heung and Gong ).
These snacks are the ones I grabbed at the grocery store tonight : Italian Meat flavored chips, a Sam Miguel beer, dried pineapple, peanut brittle with black sesame seeds and Miso soup. And of course peanut m&ms. (No, I didn’t eat all of the snacks, only some).
No, it’s not your eyes .. the picture’s quality really is that bad. My apologies – but it’s all I have to prove I actually went out and played tennis tonight. The temperature chart below is for Dameisha, and it shows average highs of 34 C (92 F). The humidity is what really matters and boy, most mornings at the bus stop I pull out my hand towel and wipe my face and neck and arms.
Check out this Carambola tree with its starfruit – disguised as a leaf ? : )- in the Kaiping area from yesterday. The tree is native to the Philippines.
P.S. So the Spanish team La Furia Roja did it. Good for them and our sympathies to the Dutch. The organizer of the Work Cup Soccer pool I participated in, won it. Always a little suspect if that happens!
May the best team win! I will not see it since it will start at 2.30 am in the morning here. I picked Brazil (wrong!) over Spain in the final in the draw I submitted at the start of the tournament, so I didn’t do too badly. But I guess I expect Spain to win, then.
And congratulations to the organizers and to South Africa on making such a success of hosting the event. The New York Times ran a very complimentary article today –
And here’s Sunday’s pictures of the bus trip. We stayed overnight at a hot springs resort (building with the palm trees in front)/ The highlight of the stay was to have my feet nibbled by a horde of tiny freshwater fish! More about that later with a picture someone else took that I still have to get. The village pictures are in the Kaiping area, a World Heritage Site .. as China’s history goes, they were built very recently, about 100 years ago. The picture below the one of the banyan tree shows rice lied out to dry; the husks are still on. The berry fruit grows on the trees in the area, it is called yellow skin or yellow seed (I will follow up), as does the cute stubby bananas (delicious). I found the truck with the pigs getting cooled down at a rest stop, and I can never resist taking a picture of a beautiful Chinese gate arch !
The company coach bus picked us up at 8am and we made our way to Taishan in western Guangdong province. It is the site of 2 new nuclear reactors for which construction started in Nov 2009. The units will each have a maximum capacity of 1,750 MW and is a third generation pressurized water reactor (PWR) design called EPR for European Pressurized Reactor, or CEPR which stands for China European Pressurized Reactor. Two other units currently under construction, one in Finland and one in France, are both facing costly construction delays.
Here is a link with more information
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90776/90883/6849430.html
Pictures from the top down : Typical road-side scenery- these are fish farms with aerators for the water; we encountered several large suspension bridges since we had to cross Shenzhen and the Pearl River delta from east to west; a model of the new nuclear reactors. The shell is a double layer. The black cylinders contain the nuclear fuel. Behind me is the construction site. There will eventually be six reactors lined up alongside the hillside. The first two are slated for a 2014 start-up.
One of our team members leaving the project got a pair of fuwa dolls as a gift (first picture).
The Fuwa in the second picture (Chinese: 福娃; pinyin: Fúwá; literally “good-luck dolls”, also known as “Friendlies”), were the mascots of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. The designs were created by Han Meilin, a famous Chinese artist. Check out more interesting detail on Wikipedia’s entry for ‘Fuwa’.
Finally, this also solves the mystery of my March 23 posting. The Hong Kong picture actually had three of the Beijing Olympics fuwa characters on it.
We had dinner tonight at a co-worker’s apartment .. he had shrimp and beef steak that was bought in Shenzhen, and cooked up potatoes and green beans in a wok to go with it : very good.
I took this picture on while walking on the way back to my apartment. It is high summer, and people are outside until late at night here in the beach town of Dameisha. I am not adventurous enough to try the food sold on the sidewalk : ( .. if I could cross the language barrier and inquire about the strange looking items on offer, it might have been different!
To my brother Chris : Happy Birthday! Wow! It’s a Big One. Veels Geluk!
The company is organizing a road trip for us out into Guangdong province to Kaiping and Taishan for this weekend. There is a hot springs resort at Kaiping, and some interesting historical watchtowers, and a nuclear power station at Taishan which we will tour. Click the map to enlarge.
So here is (some of) the story of the USA pavilion at the 2010 World Expo. Since I realized too late where it was, I just couldn’t retrace my steps there on Saturday. Finding a picture of the completed pavilion on-line is surprisingly hard, and a rendition of it is shown below. It’s supposed to be an eagle with welcoming ‘arms’ drawing people in. I don’t know that I see an eagle there.
Clive Grout, the Canadian architect commissioned to design pavilion is on record saying :
“The building is designed here the way we’d do it if it was in downtown Philadelphia or in Los Angeles. It’s a model for high-density, low-rise development in our cities. We have a very prominent site and it is the USA Pavilion. People will find it. We have not felt the need to do an architectural handstand to get attention.”
[Well blah. A little architectural flair would have been nice].
And here is a blunt assessment of a Chinese journalist (I lost the name of the person and the publication) : “The lack of enthusiasm in America has something to do with its national traditions. America has traditionally pursued isolationism and is only concerned with itself rather than the outside world. Even though things changed after the Second World War, on the whole, Americans still believe devoutly that “all politics are local,” and congressmen only care about things that affect their own district. Naturally they do not approve of allocating money for this Exposition”.
[Funding for the pavilion had to be raised from private donors, due to legislative limitations prohibiting the use of appropriated funding for an American presence at World’s Fairs unless expressly authorized by Congress].
There must have been a black storm cloud hanging over my head in Shanghai because another severe rainstorm with lightning broke out just as our in-bound flight was arriving, forcing it to land at Hangzhou airport an hour away. It took a very very long time for that plane to make it back to Shanghai. We eventually left at 2 am (scheduled departure was 6pm), and arrived into a closed Shenzhen airport at 4 am Monday morning sans luggage. The bags are still in Shanghai. But I had a lucky break in that a colleague from the China team was on the same late flight, so she could help me at the Lost Luggage counter, and we hunted down literally the only available taxi at Shenzhen airport that morning. We had to walk through a dark terminal to get there. So as I arrived here in Dameisha at 6.15am, I begged off going into work this morning, and will go in only this afternoon.
So – Polite language and no noising, please (sign from a line at the Expo): I need to get some sleep.
Happy 4th of July! I am at Shanghai’s Hangqiao Airport waiting for my flight to Shenzhen. The sequence of symbols is from Google’s homepage (I love it) and below that is the closest I can offer to a fireworks picture : the view from my hotel last night over Shanghai with the blue LED glow underneath one of the freeways (it gets switched off at 11pm). The Marriott at Tomorrow Square is unusual (for me at least) in that its lobby is on the 38th floor of a skyscaper building. My room was on the 45th floor, and the lounge is on the 60th. Consider that the Bank of China building has 73 floors and that 100 floors is pretty much as high as skyscrapers go.
Alright .. more pictures. The iron oxide -coated (rusted) exterior is of the Luxembourg pavilion. Latvia takes one on a hot-air balloon tour of the country. Then Russia, Algeria and South Africa – which had displays and arts and crafts inside such the baskets woven from telephone wire and the husse met lang ore*. The rest of the continent was housed under the Africa pavilion. Then the UK pavilion, Poland and Spain, and a somewhat scary baby. The cute fishes are on the Pacific Pavilion, the figure from the Solomon Islands. Then Singapore, Malaysia and .. drum roll ! the giant red China pavilion (which had a really impossibly long line of people trying to get into it). Finally, the Saudi Arabia pavilion and a building for Asia. And a Find the Willem picture to end with.
*Husse met lang ore = Afrikaans for ‘curious’ things or creatures with ‘long ears’, used as a reply to someone, usually a child, asking ‘what’s inside?’ or ‘what’s that?’
Soo .. you may ask : what about the United States of America pavilion? Is there one? Yes there is! – but I did not get to it because it was a little out of the way, and I knew what it looked like. I will write about it tomorrow.
