Steve's China Blog

Last week of 2011

2012-01-09T21:44:00.022+08:00

On Christmas Eve Sarah and I went to the Lazy Pug for dinner. The menu was similar to their Thanksgiving menu except that the dessert was apple caramel cheesecake instead of the pumpkin cheesecake. It was very delicious. On Christmas day we went to the Kempinski Hotel for their Christmas brunch buffet. It was really good too, and we both ate a lot. I do not think we had dinner that evening, since we were both so full.

Sarah and I after Christmas Eve dinner at the Lazy Pug.

We had been planning to go to Sapporo Japan for the holidays to visit my friend Reese, who is there on assignment for a few months, but Sarah didn't apply for her visa in time so we couldn't go, so we decided to go spend a few days skiing at XiLing Snow Mountain nearby Chengdu instead.

We left for XiLing Mountain on the Tuesday after Christmas. There are two buses that go from Chengdu to the mountain each day, but when we got to the bus station they were both sold out, so we caught the next bus to Dayi. When we arrived in Dayi we had lunch, and then found three other people to share a ride up to the mountain. It was slow going from Dayi since they were still repairing a lot of the road that had been damaged by landslides. I'm not sure if these were from landslides resulting from the earthquake three years ago, or not.

Blocked traffic due to road repair on the way to Xiling Mountain.

We arrived at the mountain in the late afternoon, and took a cable car up to the top of the mountain.

Entrance to cable cars up the mountain.

It was very foggy up on the mountain, but we were really excited to see the snow!

Sarah in the snow.

We stayed at a new hotel there called the Scandina Resort Hotel, which was suppose to be like a Scandinavian style of resort. When we booked the room we wanted a room with heated floors, but the room we got did not have this. After a few hours of complaining we were moved to a very nice room with heated floors. It was cold up on the mountain, so it was worth the time complaining.

Some icy steps leading up to some villas.

Our (final) villa.

On Wednesday we went over to the ski resort area. They had a bunch of things to see and do; such as snowmobiling, dog sleds, etc...

Sarah with a snow making machine.

Nice puppy!

On the (not so) Great Wall.

We came there to go skiing, so we got our lift tickets, ski's, boots, etc... and went out to the slopes. There were a few hundred skier's about, and almost all of them were beginners. We went over to the beginner area, and I taught Sarah some basics of skiing. She and I went a little way up the slope and came down a few times so she could get use to being on the ski's. Like all beginners she got good at falling down a lot, but unlike most she got very good at getting right back up!

Many beginners braving the bunny slope.

At the top of one of the beginner slopes.

Smoke break.

At some point I wanted to go down a tougher slope, but found out that there were half-a-dozen or so of ruling elites visiting the mountain, and only they could use the chair lift up to the big slope. I would have to wait until later in the afternoon before they opened the lift to us mere peasants.

One of the steeper slopes.

Sarah (middle) coming down the bunny slope.

After about 6 hours of skiing we started to feel tired, and decided to call it a day. Sarah was a bit bruised, but we both had a great time. We were looking forward to going to a nearby hotel for BBQ, but when we got there we found out that we had to signup earlier for the BBQ. There were not many places to eat up on the mountain, so we decided to order some Sichuan food for dinner instead. One of the dishes we ordered was a dish of chicken, peppers, and onions. We figured that the chicken used for this dish was the weakest chicken in China since it had bones, skin, and hardly any meat on it.

On Thursday we decided to go down the mountain early and get our bus tickets before they sold out. It had been very foggy on Tuesday and Wednesday, but the sun came out on Thursday. It was a nice trip down on the cable car.

A view back up the mountain.

A view down the mountain.

In the cable car.

One of the nice views of the mountains.

When we arrived at the spot where we would catch the bus we were told that we didn't buy tickets back, but it was first come - first served, so we decided to hang around at the bottom of the mountain and catch the next bus back. We had some time to do a little browsing of the local vendors and Sarah ate some snacks.

Some vendor shops near the base of the mountain.

Sarah having a tofu snack.

The bus ride back was much faster than the trip to the mountain, and we had time to stop for an early dinner. Chengdu seemed warm after being up on the snowy mountain the last few days. By the next day though we could feel the chilly damp weather of Chengdu in winter.

On Friday evening I joined Sarah, Kitty, and Jackie for a hotpot dinner. Jackie had moved back to Chengdu the day before, after several years of living in Beijing. We thought she would enjoy some real hotpot! It was a really good dinner, and I tried not to eat too much (I did though).

Kitty and Jackie enjoying some hotpot.

After dinner Sarah and I walked over to the Shamrock Pub, chatted with our friends Claire and Dave, and had a few glasses of wine. We ended up talking about really good and bad movies, TV shows, books, etc... I didn't really want to stay so long, but it was very late when I got home. Surprisingly I felt ok the next day, which was good since it was New Year's Eve.

On the evening of New Year's Eve I went to the Lazy Pug with my friends Sarah, Kitty, Jackie and Johnson. The New Year's Eve party there was pretty laid back. The theme of the party was Tacky 80's Music Dance Party. It was a lot of fun! We ate a lot of different appetizers and chit-chatted all night. After midnight a lot of the people there danced, including Kitty and Jackie.We didn't stay too long after that though.

Sarah, Kitty, Jackie, and Johnson at the Lazy Pug.

Sarah enjoying a lychee martini.

Some others ringing in the new year at the Lazy Pug.

Dancing in the new year.

Welcome to 2012.

Thanksgiving and a beach trip

2011-11-29T22:42:00.006+08:00

My initial plan for Thanksgiving this year was to take the Friday after Thanksgiving off and eat turkey at different places all weekend, but plans change. At first it looked like I would have to work all evening on Thanksgiving, but I got lucky and the meeting I was to attend that evening got rescheduled to an earlier time, so I had a chance to go have a turkey dinner somewhere.

My friend Sarah and I went to the Lazy Pug restaurant for Thanksgiving dinner, and it was really really good. We had roast turkey, mashed sweet potatoes, bacon and bourbon stuffing, gravy, green beans, a glass of wine, and some pumpkin cheesecake. The turkey and stuffing with gravy was wonderful. The cheesecake was phenomenal. The only thing missing was the cranberries, but after a glass or two of excellent California Merlot it did not really matter much. It was the first time that Sarah had eaten turkey, and she really liked it.

On Saturday we went to Peter's Tex-Mex Grill for lunch, and they still had some turkey left so we had turkey there too. Roast turkey, mashed potatoes, cornbread stuffing, cranberries, gravy, some mulled apple cider, and pumpkin pie. Not as good as the meal at the Lazy Pug, but it was still wonderful.

After lunch Sarah and I headed to the airport and caught a flight to Sanya, which is on Hainan Island in southern China. We arrived in the early evening and got a taxi to the Mandarin Oriental resort. The food on the flight wasn't worth eating, so after we checked in we wandered about the resort checking out all the restaurants there.

They had a buffet restaurant, a seafood restaurant, a noodle restaurant, and a Cantonese restaurant. Most had stopped serving dinner already, so we went to the Sunset Bar and had some snacks. Mini crab cake sandwiches, baked oysters, an assortment of nuts, and some strawberries with cream melted on top. They had some Russian beer on the drinks menu I wanted to try, but they were out of it that evening.

The room we had at the resort was really nice. A beach pavilion room with our very own little plunge pool out back that was only a few steps from the beach.

The view out the back patio of our room.

Our own little relaxing area outside.

Our own little plunge pool.

On Saturday morning we went to the buffet restaurant for the breakfast buffet. It was a really nice mix of Chinese and western breakfast items, and we ate so much that we didn't need any lunch that day. My ribs feel sore just thinking about all the different food we ate that morning. I'm not even going to try to list it all here. Hehe!

Sarah enjoying some carrot juice during breakfast.

Part of the breakfast buffet.

After breakfast we wandered around the resort to see what we had missed in the darkness of the previous night's wandering. The grounds were really nice with all kinds of tropical plants and flowers, statues, three different swimming pools, as well as the beach. There were also a lot of colorful butterflies all over the place. It was really charming.

A monk meditating on the beach.

One of the pools at the resort.

A pretty little statue outside of some of the rooms.

Some lovely landscaping.

One of the many little archways decorating the grounds.

Statue behind the archway.

Some tiny flowers.

After wandering around the resort we decided to go visit the adult-only swimming pool. There were not many people there, and no one was in the water. Sarah did not know how to swim, and wanted to learn in a place without a lot of people watching. I taught her some basics about swimming, and even though she needed to practice her kicks and strokes some more, she did really well and could swim all the way across the pool after a short while.

The adult pool.

Sarah takes a swim.

After swimming we sat in the sun for awhile enjoying the warmth. I was kind of worried about sunburn, but got a little color only. Sarah got to try her first Pina Colada, which she enjoyed.

A yummy Pina Coloda on a warm sunny day.

For dinner that evening we went to the Casa Mia Italian restaurant in downtown Sanya. We had read reviews about it online which said it was very good. They had a lot of good looking items on the menu, and it took awhile to decide what we wanted. They had like three pages of different pizzas! Sarah settled on the lasagna and I chose the spicy seafood fettuccine, as well as a shrimp cocktail as an appetizer.

The shrimp cocktail was about 8 little shrimp served with thousand island dressing, instead of cocktail sauce. I guess it is hard to find horseradish sauce in southern China. The pasta I had was tiny shrimp, tiny clams, and calamari mixed with spinach fettuccine in a spicy garlic/butter sauce. It was very tasty but I was surprised that all the seafood was so small, especially for a restaurant on a tropical island. Sarah's lasagna was really excellent (Almost as good as mom's). It was the first time Sarah had eaten lasagna and she really like that too.

On Sunday morning we went for a walk along the beach and collected seashells. As you might have guessed, this was Sarah's first time to go to a beach. A weekend of many firsts for her.

A view of the beach.

A path leading down along the beach.

After walking along the beach, and packing our things, we checked out of the resort and got a taxi downtown to have lunch at an American restaurant called the Dolphin Sports Bar. We had read about this place online and wanted to try it. Sarah had the chicken Caesar wrap, and I had a cheeseburger with chili on it.

After lunch we wandered around downtown and looked around at some of the shops there. It seems a lot of Russian tourists come to Sanya, and a lot of the stores and shops had Russian names, and/or signs in Russian.

We wandered around and around, and eventually came back to the Dolphin Sports Bar. We still had a few hours until we needed to go to the airport, so we hung out at there for awhile drinking a few beers, snacking on shrimp quesadillas, and watching people go by. At one point we chatted with a German guy who had stopped by for an afternoon beer. He lived in Sanya in the winter time and in Germany during the summer. Sounds nice.

The flight back to Chengdu was kind of uneventful, expect for all the children. I am not sure why, but there were lots and lots of little children on the flight. They appeared to be between the ages of 3 and 5, and of course they were noisy as they could be. One of the stewards on the flight gave one little boy a small smack upside the head since he was jumping up and down on his seat and yelling. Sarah and I made faces at some of the noisy ones, which confused them and quieted the little brats down for a little bit.

Our flight was late (as usual), and we arrived back in chilly damp Chengdu at around 9:00pm. We were both hungry for some Sichuan food, so we ended up going to a little maocai place near my apartment and had some meat and vegetables on sticks that are cooked in a big pot of boiling spicy oil, and we also had a small bowl of pig brains cooked in hot chili peppers. Mmmm... zombie food.

A day at the shed

2011-11-04T22:42:00.003+08:00

A few weekends ago my friend Sarah and I met up with a friend of hers, and we drove out of Chengdu to a place called Flower Town. We were dropped off by some flower/plant markets, and we walked a ways to a place called the Cowshed Country Club.

This wasn't some country club like near where I grew up. It is more like a little getaway place out in the country. It's a place to relax, drink tea, play mahjong, play cards, play ping pong, and/or eat BBQ. The weather was nice and warm, and when we arrived we were offered some cold noodles or tofu, along with some green tea. I had the noodles and Sarah had the tofu. There we met up with about a dozen or so of Sarah's co-workers and friends.

Some of us played a little ping pong, and Sarah barely beat me in a fun game... 22 to 20 (and I didn't lose on purpose!). After ping pong we walked around the area a little bit and then it was time for lunch. The BBQ here is what we would call kabobs in the west. We had a wide variety of good stuff... rabbit, pork, beef, chicken wing tips, spicy bread, etc... all put on sticks and grilled; along with some noodles, some assorted vegetables, some steamed bread, and some watermelon. It was a good and a lot of fun to eat!

After lunch Sarah and I found a nice little couch in a quiet spot that had a nice breeze, and we took a short nap sitting there. Then about 8 to 10 people came over and sat on the couches nearby and began to play cards. They were kind of noisy, so we decided to go walk back to the market area and see if we could find a taxi back to Chengdu.

We got lucky and found a taxi rather quickly, and went to Wanda Plaza where I bought some groceries. That evening I cooked spaghetti for Sarah. She seemed to like it very much. The whole day was very nice and I enjoyed it very much!

Some holidays and dentists

2011-10-12T09:45:00.004+08:00

A lot has happened since my last post, but I have not had much time lately to post anything. In the middle of September we had the Mid-Autumn Festival holiday and I had a three day weekend. It was very nice, and I ended up seeing some friends I had not seen in awhile. I do wish I had gotten a chance to see my friend Reese before she traveled to Japan. She is going to work there for a few months.

At the end of September I flew back to the US for a few weeks of vacation. I stayed a few days at my parents' house, relaxing and getting over my jet lag. At some point in those first few days the roof of my mouth started hurting. I thought I must have eaten some hard/sharp food and cut the roof of my mouth. It sure felt weird.

After church on Sunday my parents and I drove down to visit my brother in North Carolina. The drive down was only a few hours, but seemed like a long time after all the air travel a few days before. By this time the pain in my mouth was getting worse and I had started taking aspirin for the pain.

The next day my parents, my brother Jay, and I drove down to Myrtle Beach in South Carolina. Some of our friends have a place down there on the beach and we stayed there with them. On the first evening we went to a place for some seafood. I had the fried oyster platter and it was really good! I really miss good seafood in Chengdu.

A view of the beach from our room.

Another view of the beach from our room.

The next few days was spent relaxing, swimming in the pool, shopping, and eating a lot of good food; such as seafood, prime rib, and even some German food. One night we all got together and watched the Redskins play the Cowboys. Dallas played so poorly that the Redskins should have won, but they lost at the end of the game. Oh well, it was still fun to watch.

Looking down at some of the swimming pools and jacuzzi's below our room.

A great looking motorcycle we saw.

(left to right) Jay, Mom, Dad, me, Fay, and Joe at a good restuarant.

On Thursday we drove back to North Carolina and dropped Jay off at his home, and then my parents and I continued on to Maryland. It was a long day on the road, and my mouth was really starting to bother me. Aspirin had become a new major food group in my diet.

A small roadside market (near Petersburg Virginia?)

I don't remember much about Friday. I must have spent the day recovering from the long drive back from Myrtle Beach. The one thing I do remember was dinner. My father had bought some crabmeat during the trip on the previous day, and he and my mother cooked crabcakes and scalloped potatoes. That was probably my favorite meal of my vacation. It was soooo good!

On Saturday I drove up to the Maryland Renaissance Festival and met up with my friend Greg. The weather that day had turned really chilly, and we ended up eating a lot of food throughout the day to stay warm. It seemed like most of the people at the faire had the same idea since the lines at the food places were long. I had a crabcake sandwich with fries, some oyster shooters, some seafood gumbo, and some strawberries dipped in chocolate. I was thinking about getting a smoked turkey leg too, but didn't get around to it.

Hey nunnie nunnie!

Besides eating we wandered about the faire and watched some shows, visited some shops, and watched people. They had one new show there this year called Hey Nunnie Nunnie, which was pretty funny... a pair of nuns telling jokes. We also watched Shakespeare's Skum doing their rendition of Leave it to Hamlet. We didn't stay at the faire very long. Greg had to go to work that evening, and I was feeling pretty tired. I think was OD'ing on all the aspirin.

Leave it to Hamlet

A small girl watches some minstrels.

This guy had the wildest costume.

Sunday was spent being lazy, chatting with a friend in China online, and watching the Redskins beat the Rams. On Sunday evening my parents and I met up with some friends to go try a Sichuan hotpot restaurant in Virginia. The hotpot was served a little different than here in Sichuan in that each person had their own little pot. It was also different in that you could get fresh seafood, such as shrimp and flounder. Either way it was all very good. Besides the hotpot I ordered several Sichuan dishes for everyone to try, and it was all delicious.

(left to right) Dad, Mom, Pete, Susan, and me at a Sichuan restaurant.

Some yummy Sichuan dishes.

On Monday I spent the day shopping, and in the evening my parents and I met up with my friend Les for dinner. We went to a little Greek place near where my parents live called Charlies. I had the gyro, which I had not had in a long while. It was better than I remembered. I also ordered some Greek potatoes that were excellent. After dinner I went back to my parents' house and did some laundry and did most of the packing I needed to do for my trip back to China the next day.

The trip back to China was long... a little over 24 hours in total time. The flight from Washington DC to Beijing was almost 14 hours long, and my mouth was really bothering me the whole flight back, so I didn't get much sleep on the flight. We were a little late arriving in Beijing and I had just enough time to go through immigration, get my bags, go through customs, catch a shuttle from terminal 3 to terminal 1, check in for my flight to Chengdu and get to the gate before we boarded. It seems I did not have to rush after all, since the flight to Chengdu was late taking off.

The next two days were still a holiday in China, so I spent my time relaxing with a good friend who came over to visit me. I really missed her. It was good to be back. The weather in Chengdu was also a little warmer and that felt good. I got most of my stuff unpacked, and did a lot of laundry.

On Friday afternoon I went to a dentist here, and after a quick checkup they prescribed me some antibiotics and referred me to a dental hospital. The antibiotics worked really well, and by Friday evening I no longer had any swelling or pain in my mouth. It was the first good night's sleep I had had in a week or so. Saturday and Sunday were work days, so I worked at the office on Saturday and worked from home on Sunday.

On Monday morning I went to the dental hospital. After the checkup I was told that I did not have a cut on the roof of my mouth, but that it was a traumatic ulcer. They also thought I might have been in need of a root canal on one of my teeth, but after looking at the X-rays they found that my teeth were ok, and just in need of some cleaning. They prescribed some new medicine and told me to come back in two weeks for another checkup and get my teeth cleaned. I was very happy no surgery was needed.

I think I now need a vacation to recover from my vacation.

Chinese social security

2011-09-17T17:54:00.002+08:00

This might be pretty costly to me...

A message from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security

Basically it says that foreigners in China must now pay into the Chinese social security system. Since my company also has to pay into this I might lose the benefits allowance that my company pays me. Ugh.

A trip to Jiangyou

2011-08-23T15:16:00.004+08:00

A friend of mine from work invited me to their hometown of Jiangyou this last weekend. It is a few hours drive to the north of Chengdu, and was the hometown of Li Bai, a leading Tang Dynasty poet. Jiangyou is a medium-sized town (by Chinese standards) with a population af about 800,000 people. (Chengdu is a medium-sized city of 11 million, in case you are wondering)

We drove to Jiangyou after work on Friday evening, and after we arrived in town we visited a little restaurant that had seats out by the river. For dinner we had a variety of BBQ dishes... lamb kabobs, pork kabobs, spicy chicken skin, spicy pigs intestines, spicy duck intestines, little quail/pheasant eggs, some shredded cucumber, and some freshly made potato chips. It was really delicious, but we couldn't finish it all.

After dinner I checked into my hotel... the MingHua Hotel. They don't have any 4 or 5 star hotels in Jiangyou, and it turned out to be nicer than I thought it would be. I got a suite and it only cost me about 270 Yuan (about $42) per night. The only complaint I had about the room was that the shower didn't have a shower curtain. It had the rod for it, but no curtain.

Tina called me on Saturday morning and asked if I would like to go to a birthday party. We hadn't really planned anything for the weekend, so I said ok. The birthday turned out to be another one of those 100 day birthday parties for a child, and there were a lot of relatives in attendance. Lots and lots of relatives.

Guests start heading to their seats for lunch.

Tina and I, along with her parents, aunts, and uncles

Anyhow, it was a lot of fun, and I tried not to eat too much or smoke too much during the lunch. I asked Tina to tell her relatives that I didn't drink that early in the day, and no one really minded that I did my toasts with tea. The food was pretty good, and there was lots of it!

Some hot peppers growing outside the restaurant

After lunch we went to do a little shopping, and after that I went back to my hotel for a nap. Tina went to visit some more friends and relatives. We met up in the evening for dinner, and we went to a place that Tina liked and we had rabbit hotpot. Yum!

Rabbit hotpot!

After dinner we went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (in 3D) at a theater near my hotel. Tina had not seen this one, and I had only seen a bad copy that was filmed by someone in a Russian theater. There a lot of little things I noticed that I had missed while watching my bad copy that made the movie more enjoyable. (Did you notice his son's initials? Slytherin maybe?)

On Sunday we had planned to go a nearby mountain that had some temples, and had some places that had to do with Li Bai, but the weather was really windy and rainy so we decided not to go. Instead I went over to Tina's place for a little while and we watched some TV, and then we went to her grandmother's house for lunch. Oof! I think I gained a few pounds during this weekend trip. So much good food!

Heading out of Jiangyou on a cloudy/rainy day

After lunch we headed back to Chengdu. Since Tina's mother, father, and aunt were coming along for the ride I decided to snooze through the trip (since I couldn't understand much of what everyone was saying). When I woke up we were about 50km outside of Chengdu, and noticed that the first billboard I saw was for a Chevy Camaro. I don't think I've ever seen a Camaro in Chengdu. Chevrolet seems to sell a lot of these little compact 4-door cars that a lot of Chinese like.

After I got home I cooked a small dinner and tried to stay up late, since I was going to be starting on a late shift at work the next day and I'm use to going to bed early. I watched the movie How to Train Your Dragon, and then did some reading before bed. Monday will come too soon.

Some time with friends

2011-08-15T19:34:00.003+08:00

The weekend before last Jackie came to Chengdu to visit me. She had taken off some time from work and was on her way to her hometown of YiBin to visit her parents. We spent one day visiting Kuan Zhai Xiang Zi (wide and narrow alleys), which is sort of like JinLi Street with lots of shops, restaurants, and teahouses in an old Chinese style setting.

A room in one of the teahouses

Phyllis and her boyfriend joined us, and we went to a little restaurant nearby for lunch that had DaPanJi. After lunch we stopped by a little art gallery to see some Chinese paintings and calligraphy.

Some calligraphy

Another beautiful painting

After visiting the art gallery we went to visit all the little shops in Kuan Zhai Xiang Zi. It was getting a little hot in the afternoon, so Jackie and I went back to my apartment and had a nap before going out to dinner. For dinner we joined our friend Kitty and had some hotpot. It was very good, and I tried not to eat too much (which I do too often when I eat hotpot).

On Sunday morning Jackie met up with a friend of hers and went shopping, and I was going to meet them for lunch but they ended up shopping through lunch time. After their shopping trip Jackie left for YiBin. I was very happy I got to see her.

Since I am in between projects I took last week off. I didn't travel anywhere, and stayed home most of the time. On Monday night I found out that I got a new project at work, and will be able to stay in Chengdu (yeah!). The rest of the week I spent most of the days at home avoiding the heat outdoors, and going out for dinner in the evenings with friends.

On Saturday evening I took my friend Cindy out for a birthday dinner. We went to Fiesta Thai, and had a lot of really good Thai food. Afterwards we went back to my apartment and watched a movie. My landlady got me a new DVD player and it has a USB port, so I can see the movies that I have on my computer on my TV now, without having to run cables all over the place.

On Sunday I went to Peter's Tex-Mix Grill for lunch with my friends Reese, She Wen, and her friend Clelsea. Reese is going to be on an assignment in Japan for a half a year, and since the others had lived there before I thought they could meet and talk about Japan. It was a really good lunch and everyone had a great time chatting.

After lunch Reese and I went to do a little grocery shopping and then we went back to my apartment and took a little nap. Then we watched some TV, and in the evening we cooked some spaghetti with Italian sausage, bell pepper, onion, and mushrooms. Reese helped to clean and cut up some of the vegetables, and we ended up having a very nice dinner.

After dinner we watched the movie Soul Surfer. Jackie had watched it when she came over the week before, and Cindy watched it the evening before, so I ended up watching it three times in a week. It is one of those enjoyable movies that is based on a true story that even the kids can watch. I won't tell you much about the movie except that it is about a girl in Hawaii who wants to be a surfer. The surfing scenes and Hawaiian scenery in the movie are wonderful, and the story is very inspirational. Jackie, Cindy, and Reese liked it very much.

The big 50

2011-07-28T18:52:00.001+08:00

Yesterday was my 50th birthday! I worked from home during the day, and in the evening I went out with some friends and I had a nice steak for dinner. Some friends wanted to buy me drinks, but I had to turn them down since I had to work the next day. Turning down an offer for a free drink is sort of frowned upon here, but work is more important.

The other day I remembered that I had spent my 40th birthday in China. I had come to China with a group of about 20 people for vacation and some kungfu/taichi training. The day of my birthday we were in a little hotel in a town called Dengfeng, which is right outside the Shaolin temple in Henan province. The people in the restaurant at the hotel brought me a birthday cake during dinner, but they didn't have any forks so we used chopsticks to eat the cake.

My 30th birthday was in Oakton, Virginia. One of my neighbors was also having his birthday at about the same time, and we had a big cookout/party with about 40 or 50 people. I'm not sure where I was on my 20th birthday. I might have been at the JFK Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, or was that in 1982? I forget. I have no idea about my 10th birthday... that was too long ago for me to remember.

Where will I be on my 60th birthday? I have no idea.

Rain and an infant party

2011-07-05T18:45:00.002+08:00

Chengdu is the capital of the Sichuan Province, and Sichuan means "four rivers", since it has four major rivers that run through it. Since we have so many rivers in Sichuan there is usually a lot of flooding, but in Chengdu there is usually not any flooding. On Sunday though we had a lot of rain, and there was some flash flooding around the city.

Where I live it was not too bad, since we live very close to a river and a lot of the rain drained down to the river quickly. The rivers in the city have high walls built into the banks, and I've never seen them come close to overflowing. This picture was taken last August and shows the river in front of my apartment, and this was the highest I had ever seen the river get. On Sunday it was about this high.

In some parts of the city though they had up to 30 inches of water. A lot of roads became impassable, and even one subway station got flooded. I also heard that a lot of cars, bikes, scooters, and motorcycles were completely submerged in some underground parking areas. You can see some pictures of some of the flooding in Chengdu here.

Some friends of mine recently had a baby, and Sunday I was invited to a party for his 100th day birthday. This is pretty popular here since only a few decades ago the infant mortality rate was much worse than it is now. If an infant lived to 100 days then it was usually a good sign. Anyways, I went out to find a taxi, which are hard to find even when it is not raining, and after waiting for an hour and not finding a taxi I gave up. I was soaken wet, so I went back to my apartment and dried off, fixed myself some dinner, and watched an old episode of Poirot.

It turns out that there were about 100 people invited to the party, and only about 60 could make it on Sunday. There was another party held on Monday for the 40 or so of us who could not make it on Sunday. I'm not sure what the name of the restaurant was, but it was somewhere in the western part of the city.

The food was very good, and I ate too much. As the only foreigner at the party a lot of people came up to greet me, make sure my wine glass was never empty, and made sure that I was given a cigarette as soon as I extinguished the previous one. I think I was smoking through almost the entire meal. One of those strange but happy events in Chengdu.

Happy 4th of July!

2011-07-04T21:42:00.002+08:00

"I should, indeed, with peculiar delight, have met and exchanged there congratulations personally with the small band, the remnant of that host of worthies, who joined with us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword; and to have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact, that our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made. May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all, the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them."

-- Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826)

Have a great Independence Day!

Old bites, new bites

2011-06-27T20:10:00.000+08:00

On Thursday and Friday they were spraying insecticide at my apartment complex, which they do all over the city at this time of year. On Thursday my housekeeper was cleaning my apartment, and no matter how many times I tell her to only open the windows that have a screen she opens them all, so when I got home from work on Thursday evening there were a ton of mosquitoes in my apartment. I didn't get much sleep on Thursday night.

After work on Friday I got home and wanted to take a nap, but Kitty called and wanted to take me to a restaurant that she had found. When we got there it turns out they did not open until 9:30pm, and we were too hungry to wait so we went to a DongBei restaurant nearby. DongBei means EastNorth, and refers to food from the Northeast part of China. We had a dish of sliced beef with spring onion; pork with green beans; and a salad made of shredded lettuce, shredded cucumber, and cold clear noodles. It was quite good and a nice change of pace from the spiciness of Sichuan food.

On Saturday evening I decided to go find a new restaurant near my apartment that I had read about online. The Lazy Pug is owned by an American couple, and the head cook is from Chicago. The decor is very nice... sort of hip and laid back. They have only been open for a few weeks, and are still working out little problems here and there, but it is a nice place. And there was a cute little pug puppy named Basil there who liked the California Pale Ale.

I liked the California Pale Ale also. For dinner I had a caesar salad and the pulled pork BBQ sandwich. This is the only place I know of in Chengdu that has slow cooked pork, and they say that they cook it for 15 hours. Next time I go there I want to try the bleu cheese burger.

100 years of IBM

2011-06-16T21:03:00.004+08:00

100 years ago today IBM was established. At the office we had some presentations in the morning about the history of IBM and the vision of the future. I missed it since I had some work that had to be finished. In the afternoon though we had a little party. We had a huge cake,...

Our big cake

Our Chengdu site manager, Kevin, lights the candles

some cookies, soft drinks, and a game with IBM trivia. Even though the questions were in Chinese I got one of them right and one a nice little prize. I couldn't read the question, but the possible answers were software languages, and the only one on the list that was created by IBM was FORTRAN.

During the last few months IBM has been sending us information and videos about IBM. This is one that we got, and has been very inspirational to all of us at my office...

Testing. Testing. Is this thing on?

2011-06-04T00:40:00.003+08:00

I haven't posted much in awhile. I've been pretty busy wrapping up my project, and studying for a DB2 certification exam for work. Of course, the exam got cancelled on the day I was suppose to take it. We're having some network problems because of some new distribution of bandwidth plan that China Telecom came up with, and no one at the office could access the test website.

I mentioned wrapping up my project for work, and my time on it will be finished at the end of this month. I am hoping to start on a new project in Chengdu, but since we have a lot of projects all over the place I am not sure where I will be living a month from now. There's a possibility I might be on a project in Shenzhen. There are projects in India and the Philippines too. Of course, I would prefer to stay in Chengdu, but who knows? Maybe I can take a year of unpaid leave and study Chinese full time.

Other than all that there is not much going on right now. This weekend is a 3-day weekend since Monday is the Dragon Boat Festival holiday here in China. I'm not sure if I will go to see any dragon boat races, and may just spend the weekend relaxing and not reading any technical manuals. Ok. maybe I'll read a little bit.

Like cats?

2011-05-27T19:23:00.003+08:00

I've been really busy lately, so I haven't posted much in awhile. Here's a little something you might think is funny, unless you live in Guangzhou where this might be normal...

Enjoy!

Phuket Trip - 2011

2011-04-19T08:15:00.011+08:00

April 5th was the Qing Ming (Tomb Sweeping Day) holiday here in China, and we were on holiday on the 4th and 5th. I decided to take the remainder of the week off too, and go to Phuket Thailand.

A lot of my friends were telling me I shouldn't travel there that week since there were heavy rains and flooding in Thailand, volcanoes erupting in Indonesia, earthquakes in southern China, Burma, and Japan, tsunamis, etc, etc... All sorts of pandemonium everywhere. I don't really care... I was very tired of the chilly damp winter of Chengdu, and wanted to go somewhere nice. Of course, the weather was wonderful the whole week!

Entrance way at the Club Med resort in Phuket, Thailand

I had to work the Saturday before Qing Ming holiday, so I flew to Phuket on Sunday and arrived in the evening. By the time I got to the resort it was pretty late, so after unpacking I got some sleep. On Monday I woke up early, and went around setting up some excursions outside the resort and made an appointment for a message for later in the week. Then I went and shot some archery before lunch time. In the afternoon I relaxed by the pool until dinner time.

Kata Beach

I was pretty lucky as far as the weather went. It was sunny and around 32°C (about 90°F) every day, and we only had a few minutes of rain on Tuesday and Thursday. The week before they had rain 5 days out of 7.

The daily Sun Dance out by the pool

Circus workshop

On Tuesday I went on a trip to visit some temples. There were 6 people in our group... 2 young ladies from Italy, a family from Russia, and myself. We had to drive about an hour to the mainland where the temples were. These temples are referred to as lost temples since they are old temples, but not many people live nearby so they do not have many worshipers visit them. The first place we went to was a temple inside a cave and it was very old.

Entrance to temple cave

A giant reclining Buddha

Some monkeys that live nearby

An old Buddha statue

An ornate Buddha statue

The temples around the outside of the cave had been renovated, and there were a few merchants about selling tourist stuff.

Drum tower

After those temples we visited another temple that had some huge Buddha statues nearby.

Walking up to the Buddhist temple

Elephants and lions!

One statue was sort of Indian in appearance, and one was Chinese in appearance.

Huge Indian-style Buddha statue

Huge Chinese-style Buddhist statue

We then went to visit another group of temples, and one of those was shaped like the king's boat. They had just finished renovating it, and they were still renovating some of the other buildings nearby.

Boat shaped temple

On the inside

After visiting temples all morning we went to a little restaurant that was out on the water for lunch.

Floating restaurant

Restaurant's music system

The lunch was really great! Lemon grass soup, spicy chicken, egg with crab meat, steamed crab, spicy fish, and assorted vegetables.

Can we start yet?

After lunch we headed back to Phuket, and I spent the afternoon at the pool before dinner. After dinner they had a variety show that I watched with some friends. It was pretty silly, and I was glad I didn't get dragged up on stage like some guys did.

On Wednesday I woke up early, had breakfast, went for a nice walk, shot some archery, had lunch, took a short nap, hung out at the pool, had dinner, chatted with friends by the pool in the evening. I didn't stay out too late though, since I had to get up early the next morning.

On Thursday I went to Phang Nga Bay. It was very early in the morning, and we drove up to a marina near the mainland to board our boat called the June Bahtra, which is a Chinese-style junk.

The June Bahtra

There were 9 people total in our group. 2 French couples, a couple from Shanghai, a guy from France, a young lady from Malaysia, and myself. We sailed around the northwest part of the bay, and we got to see a lot of pretty islands.

A fishing boat passes by some islands

Some more pretty islands

If you have ever seen the James Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun, then you might recognize this bay. The ending of the movie was filmed here.

Khao Phing Kan (aka James Bond island)

Entrance to Scaramanga's lair

At some point we changed boats to one that could go through some caves, and then we went to Panyee Village. This is a small fishing village that is partially on stilts and partially floating, and has been around since around the end of the 18th century. These days they make quite a bit of money from tourists, to supplement what they make from fishing.

A restaurant and some houses on Panyee Village

Fishing boats

After visiting Panyee Village we went back aboard the June Bahtra, and ate lunch there. After lunch we cruised around the bay some more, stopped by a quiet spot for some swimming, and then headed back to the marina in the late afternoon.

Yummy Thai food

Sailing around the bay

I got back to Kata Beach in time to take some pictures of the beautiful sunsets we had every day...

Sunset at Kata Beach

A romantic way to watch the sunset

Friday was spent pretty much like how I had spent Wednesday. They had an acrobatics show on Friday evening that was quite good. After the show they had a little champagne party which was a lot of fun.

Champagne party!

Wana and I

A French/Thai band

Happy (great name for a bartender) pours some beer

Time to dance

Indonesian girls are so pretty

Chinese wallflowers

Yummy snacks

On Saturday morning I skipped archery, and went shopping in the nearby town instead. I bought a bunch of souvenirs for friends. After lunch I took a short nap and then went to the spa and got a traditional Thai message. It was wonderful! I did a little more shopping before dinner. After dinner I spent some time chatting with friends, and then went to bed early. I had to wake up early the next day for my flight back to Chengdu.

Back from Thailand

2011-04-13T20:04:00.003+08:00

I got back from Thailand on Sunday. I've been really busy, but I will post about my Thailand trip as soon as I can. In the meantime... try to find this episode of Bizarre Foods:

Bizarre_Foods - Chengdu

One of the things that this show reminded me about was the weekend before I went to Thailand my friend Cindy took me to a little street that has little food stalls that open after 10:00pm. We had various spicy grilled items (such as beef, lamb, sliced potatoes, quail eggs, etc...) and some spicy noodles. It was wonderful!

Enjoy!

Leftover Women

2011-03-31T16:48:00.006+08:00

Leftover Women (sheng nu) is a relatively new term here used to describe women in China who are unmarried career women. The age threshold for leftover women fluctuates. It was once 30, but can now mean anywhere from 25 years or older. Being a leftover has its distinct variations in meanings depending on age.

Between the ages of 25 and 27, leftover women are considered “fighters” (sheng dou shi) which means they are still romantic enough to keep looking for true love. Leftover women between the ages of 28 and 31, fall into a different rather unpleasant tier known as the “doomed to be left” (bi sheng ke). This category of woman is said to have little chance of ever catching a husband as their work keeps them too busy to almost not care. For those leftover women who fall within the age group of 32 and 36, there is even less hope of marriage as they remain single in the professional world and are “leftover fighting Buddha” (dou zhan sheng fo). Last but not least in this hierarchy is the category of leftover women 36 and older who are considered “leftover goddesses” (qi tian da sheng).

Leftover women of today tend to be highly educated, highly paid, and highly independent; so they usually have higher standards when looking for a prospective mate.

The lyrics in English...

Warm sunshine, shining on your face
Looking at the young guys all around, every one of them are very girly
Having a house and a car is what women long for
Marrying the right person is the biggest wish

Asking you if you have a car, asking you if you have a house
My mother will also ask you how much savings you have
If you have no car, if you also have no house
Hurry move aside and don't block my way

I also have a car, I also have a house
As well as RMB in the bank
If you guys aren't even as capable as me
Don't depend on me, I'm not your mother

You don't have a car, you don't have a house
Don't expect to get a beauty into bed
Pretending to be poor, you only drive a lousy BMW
Don't pretend you're a rich guy who can keep me as his mistress

x2

You don't have a car, you don't have a house
Yet you still want to get married and be a groom
If your life isn't well off
Why should I accompany you in wandering

You say I am realistic/practical, that I may as well admit
You can call me a gold-digger and I won't feel hurt
A man after all should be like a man
Without a car, without a house, forget about finding a bride

Needless to say, most Chinese guys do not like this video! Hehe

In the 1970s, Chinese people chose a bike, a watch and a sewing machine as the "must have" gifts when married. And in the 1980s things had changed into a refrigerator, a TV set, and a washing machine. Along with the economic development of the last decade, the gifts for marriage have become more expensive, and now many brides-to-be will ask for apartments and cars.

Got salt?

2011-03-23T14:09:00.003+08:00

My internet here has been having a lot of problems lately. Here's an article that explains why...

China Tightens Censorship of Electronic Communications

If anyone wonders whether the Chinese government has tightened its grip on electronic communications since protests began engulfing the Arab world, Shakespeare may prove instructive.

A Beijing entrepreneur, discussing restaurant choices with his fiancée over their cellphones last week, quoted Queen Gertrude’s response to Hamlet: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." The second time he said the word "protest," her phone cut off.

The increased internet censorship hasn't been very effective. Just very annoying. Luckily they haven't done anything noticable to my phone.

I was hoping to post some last week about the effects here of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, but didn't get a chance. There were a few things that seemed odd. The first was all of the rumors flying around about big radiation clouds coming to China, etc... I got a lot of panic filled messages from friends. One of them was about how eating salt would help resist radiation poisoning. This was the result...

Stop hoarding salt, China tells radiation-scared shoppers

China's economic agency told shoppers Thursday to stop panic buying salt, blaming baseless rumors that the iodine in it can stop radiation sickness.

The Chinese government has repeatedly said the country's residents will not be exposed to radiation from a nuclear plant in northeastern Japan which engineers are frantically trying to bring under control after it was damaged by last Friday's earthquake and tsunami.

There is actually a store near my apartment which in English is called The Sichuan Salt Store. When I first saw it I thought that maybe the the name was mistranslated, which happens a lot here, but it turns out it is a store that sells salt. Usually I never see any customers there (mostly because Chinese do not use a lot of salt in their food), but last week there was a line of customers around the block!

This is the story this week....

Chinese salt hoarders pepper stores with demands for refunds

The nation was caught up in a buying frenzy last week amid Japan's nuclear reactor crisis. Now people are lining up to return the seasoning after learning it won't protect them from radiation.

One of the most interesting results of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan is the reaction of the Chinese people. Normally Chinese people will tell you that they hate the Japanese, which is what the government here has brainwashed them into believing. But most of the Chinese I have talked to, and seen posting on the internet, have a great deal of respect for how the Japanese behaved during and after the disasters.

Of course, there are some idiots here who still cling to their politically induced hatred. They remind me of the mind-numbed zombie liberals in back in the USA.

Big plate of chicken and a trip

2011-03-14T07:06:00.002+08:00

Last weekend the weather started getting a little chilly again. My friend Cindy and I met up with Reese and Anson to go out for some DaPanJi. Cindy had never had DaPanJi before, so she was really looking forward to it. Actually, it seems like a long time since I've had DaPanJi, since my first choice with the cold damp weather of Chengdu in the winter is hotpot.

The restaurant is a little XinJiang food place near a medical college here in Chengdu. Reese sent me the address of the college in Chinese on my phone, so I could show it to the taxi driver, since I could not remember where it was. The taxi driver dropped me off at one of the gates of the college, but it was not the right one, so I ended up asking a student passing by for help finding the gate. She was nice enough to walk with me to where I needed to go. I offered to buy her dinner in exchange for her help, but she had to study and could not join us for dinner.

The DaPanJi was very good. We also had a spicy fried fish dish and some lamb kabobs. We had hoped to have some flat bread also, but they were out. Cindy enjoyed the dinner a lot. She also enjoyed meeting Reese and Anson.

A few weeks ago I realized that I had not traveled anywhere tropical in all of 2010. The week before last and this week I have been trying to arrange a trip to Thailand for early April.

At first I was thinking of going to Mauritius, but the airfare from Chengdu to there is really expensive! The price was fluctuating between around $4,000USD to a little over $7,000USD for round trip tickets. Then I thought about going to Maldives, but Maldives seems too romantic of a place to go to by myself, and there wasn't enough time to find someone to go with me. So after looking around at a bunch of other places I decided to go back to Phuket in Thailand.

I used a travel agency here in Chengdu and we finally got all the flight and resort reservation completed yesterday. They were not too efficient, but after everything got put together I found that my airfare would be half the price of what it would be if I had booked it online with an American travel agency. Nice! Now I need to figure out where I put my sunscreen.

Chengdu Best

2011-03-03T22:16:00.002+08:00

You can see a lot of really nice pictures of Chengdu and areas surrounding the city at this link...

Chengdu Best from the China Daily.

It's a Chinese site, so I hope it does not load to slowly for those of you outside of China.

Enjoy!

After the holiday

2011-02-22T17:25:00.003+08:00

Things have been pretty busy for me after returning to work after the Chinese New Year holiday. The weather is also starting to warm up a little, which is nice. My friend Cindy came over to visit on Valentine's Day. We talked about going out to a restaurant, but decided they would be very crowded that evening. We ordered a pizza and watched a few DVDs.

One of the DVDs we watched was a movie called Little Miss Sunshine (rated R). I had not seen this movie before, but had bought the DVD a few months ago after someone recommended it to me. The story is about a dysfunctional family traveling from New Mexico to California, so that their little girl can compete in a pageant. Although I thought some parts were funny and a bit clever, this isn't really the type of comedy that I prefer. I don't really enjoy laughing at the suffering of others.

It's like when you listen to people who suffered from Bush Derangement Syndrome (and most likely suffer from Palin Derangement Syndrome now) and you want to just laugh at them because the seem so ridiculous; but at the same time you feel sorry for them because they are suffering from a mental disorder. It's kind of creepy sometimes when you see one of these people trying to look intelligent, hip, and/or funny; but when they open their mouths they say terrible things that make no sense to the rational sane people around them. There is a pretty good article about political derangements at the Digital Journal.

Thursday was Lantern Festival, which is the last day of Spring Festival. It was also the last day of huge fireworks displays that start at the beginning of Spring Festival. The fireworks on Thursday evening went off until some time around 2:00 or 3:00am. Luckily for me my work shift was changing from an early shift to the regular shift the next day, so I got to sleep in a little later than before.

On Sunday I went to the Shangri-La Hotel with Reese for the buffet at the Cafe Z. They were having a Korean Food themed feast, and it was quite good. Not everything on the buffet was Korean, so we also enjoyed some Chinese food (mostly Sichuan and Cantonese dishes) and some Japanese food too. There are a lot of places that have better buffets than the Shangri-La, but none that I know of that have as many selections. It was good.

Year of the Rabbit

2011-02-09T19:11:00.004+08:00

Last week was the beginning of the Chinese New Year, also called Spring Festival here. It is now the year of the Rabbit. I had a whole week off starting on Wednesday. I spent most of the holiday being lazy, of course. I actually slept a lot more than normal. I wasn't going to bed any later than normal, but slept in late most days.

It was Chinese New Year's Eve on my first day off, and I was fortunate enough to have my friend Kitty invite to her place for lunch that day. Her parents had traveled to Chengdu from their hometown nearby and fixed lunch for us. The dishes included a spicy fish dish, some chicken in a spicy sauce, some sliced beef, some smoked chicken, some sliced pig's ear, some spicy sausage, and a soup made with pork and turnips. It was very good and I ate too much!

After lunch Kitty's parents went back to their hometown, and Kitty and I went to do some shopping. Kitty wanted to buy herself a phone, and she picked up a new iPhone 4G that looked very nice. After phone shopping we went to a large bookstore downtown, and we bought some books and a couple of DVDs. We spent the rest of the afternoon setting up Kitty's new iPhone.

In the evening we went to the Shamrock Pub (one of the few places open that evening), had some dinner, and watched the variety show they have on CCTV every year. At some point in the evening they had a dumpling making contest for the foreigners, and I was asked to be a judge again. It was pretty fun and we finished up before midnight, just in time to see all the fireworks!

The rest of the week was pretty much just a blur... sleeping in late, playing on the computer, reading, watching DVDs, joining friends for lunch and/or dinner, etc... I did wake up early on Monday though. Kickoff for the Super Bowl was at 7:25am this year and I wanted to get down to the Shamrock Pub early for their Super Bowl party and get a good seat. We ended up with a pretty good sized crowd (about 90 people), and the game was a lot of fun to watch.

Chengdu during Spring Festival is pretty nice. All the migrant workers go home to visit their families, so it seems a lot quieter here without all the construction going on. A lot of other people travel to and from Chengdu during the holiday also, so there is not as much road traffic, and it is easier to find a taxi cab. The big problem is that a lot of restaurants close during the holidays. Luckily I can cook.

Sometimes people outside of China ask me why I don't travel during Spring Festival, and I have to explain Chunyun to them. Chunyun is the name for all the traveling that people do during the Spring Festival holiday period. It is called the largest annual human migration in the world. In 2008 the number of passenger journeys during the Chunyun period was about twice the population of China (about 2.26 billion). For those of you in the USA, imagine the Thanksgiving travel crowd multiplied by a thousand. If you would like to see a few pictures from past Chunyun's you can look here.

Some events

2011-01-25T09:42:00.002+08:00

The Sunday before last we had our IBM Chengdu Annual Party. It was held at the ShangriLi-La hotel like last year. We had a really good dinner of a bunch of different dishes. My favorite was the shark fin soup with crab meat. We also had a lot of entertainment put on by some of the employees of IBM here in Chengdu. There was singing, dancing, acting, etc... I thought the best was one girl who played a Chinese musical instrument. She was very good at it. Of course, I forgot my camera.

On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of last week we had snow flurries. It was very pretty, and luckily the snow did not stick to the roads (or anything else for that matter). The local news shows had pictures of children happily running around enjoying the snow. Some of them had probably never even seen snow before. Who knows.

One evening I went out to dinner and ran into some friends, Dave and Dick, and after dinner they decided they wanted to go to a night club called The Castle. Dave is from the US and was teaching English here, but will be moving to Thailand soon. Dick is a professional bodyguard from Holland and has been living in Chengdu for quite awhile, and is almost always wearing his bulletproof vest. When we got to The Castle it turns out that Dave had a VIP card for the place, and as a VIP the night club had a bodyguard for us.

It was kind of funny to see Dave and I sitting there with a tall Chinese bodyguard on one side of us and a taller European bodyguard on the other side of us. Everyone must have been wondering who we were! Usually I hate going out to Chinese night clubs... they are usually too crowded, and you have to be careful of pickpockets and bothersome hookers. We didn't have any of these problems. No one wanted to get too close to us! We had a couple over-priced warm beers served in small glasses of ice, and then I went home.

On Saturday evening my manager invited all of the people he manages out for dinner. The place we went to is above a Chinese medicine shop, and the dishes are all made from items from the shop. We had two entrees that were large soups. They both had a chicken and a turtle, as well as other things that are considered good for one's health, such as herbs and such. One of them even had a seahorse in it! I don't think we could have eaten the seahorse since it was probably too hard, and I don't think anyone tried.

2010 Holidays in Chengdu

2011-01-04T17:30:00.009+08:00

Jackie flew into Chengdu late on the evening of the 23rd. I had to work on 24th, but worked from home, and we went out for lunch to a little restaurant behind where I live. We had some rabbit with red chili peppers and another dish that had chicken with potatoes and spicy green peppers. The chicken dish was really good! There was a little leftover, so we took that back to my place to save for another day.

Jackie had planned to go get her passport renewed while I worked that afternoon, but even though Chengdu is warmer than Beijing it is much more damp, so she wasn't feeling too good after lunch and decided to go get her passport another day and take a nap at my place instead. By the evening when I finished work Jackie was feeling much better, and we decided to go out to Hooters for dinner. She had never been there before, and we figured it would not be too crowded on Christmas Eve.

A good crowd at Hooters on Christmas Eve

Hooters was very crowded when we got there, and we even had to wait a few minutes to get a table. Jackie ordered a philly cheesesteak, and I ordered a steak sandwich, and we shared a pitcher of Killkenny beer. It was the first time Jackie had eaten a philly cheesesteak and the first time she had drank an amber lager. She liked them both very much!

Jackie with my steak sandwich

For Christmas day we had made reservations at the Kempinski Hotel for a Christmas lunch buffet they were serving, and we were joined by my friend Reese.

Jackie, me, and Reese before Christmas lunch

The lunch was really wonderful! We had turkey, lobster, steak, mussels, pork loin, etc....

Mmm... all you can eat too!

After lunch the three of us walked around Tonzilin Street looking at the shops, and I bought a few new DVDs. After that we took a taxi to a big shopping area near Chunxi Road and we visited a lot of stores there. Reese bought some winter clothes for her mother. Since it was a Saturday it was very crowded with shoppers.

On the day after Christmas Jackie and I spent the day hanging out at the apartment relaxing and watching Poirot DVDs. For lunch Jackie fixed the leftover chicken dish from Christmas eve, and she added some thin clear noodles to it. It was wonderful! That evening we cooked dinner for Reese and her friend Anson. Jackie cooked some chicken curry that a friend of ours from India had taught her how to cook, and I cooked some jambalaya. They were both rice dishes, but hey! We're in China so that's ok. With the two dishes we had a bottle of beaujolais, and everything tasted wonderful! There were no leftovers of that dinner.

On Monday Jackie went to get her passport renewed, and we had planned to meet for lunch afterwards and then go visit a place called Kuan Zhai Xiang Zi, which means wide and narrow alleys, and is an old neighborhood that has been remodeled for tourism. I had woken up with a cold, so I decided to stay home and try to get some rest. Jackie went to Kuan Zhai Xiang Zi, but she didn't spend the whole afternoon there. In the evening we went to visit my friend Kitty and after showing Jackie her little store we all went to a hotpot place for dinner. The hotpot was really delicious, and was very good for my cold.

On Tuesday Jackie took a bus to the nearby town of YiBin to visit her parents. I gave her a really good bottle of BaiJiu, which I had bought during a charity auction some months before, to give to her father. I do not drink BaiJiu, but I remembered that she had told me that her father liked it. I asked her to tell her father that the gift was really a bribe so that if Jackie and I decided to get married he would give us his blessing. When she told him he laughed, and said, "I'll think about it".

I spent Tuesday afternoon, Wednesday, and the first half of Thursday at home getting over my cold and playing Everquest II. On Thursday afternoon I got together with a friend of mine named Cindy who is from Tianjin and was in Chengdu visiting friends. We went to Wanda Plaza and did some shopping and had dinner. We had hoped to go see the latest Harry Potter movie, but it was not showing at the theater there anymore, so we decided to go back to my place and watch a DVD. We watched the movie Star Trek, which Cindy really enjoyed.

Friday was New Year's Eve and Jackie returned from YiBin and we went over to the Shamrock Pub, along with our friend Kitty, to celebrate New Year's. The theme of the party was The Wizard of Oz. Not sure why they chose that, but it was a lot of fun to see so many crazy foreigners dressed up as their favorite characters from the movie.

Some of the Wizard of Oz costumes

Jackie, Dorthy (Ivy), and I

There was a few contests, like the best Dorthy costume...

Some contestants for the Dorthy contest

Dorthy (Ivy) gets checked by the Wicked Witch of the West (Penny)

... and a live band that was pretty good...

Singer of the band

More of the band

Kitty liked the band

After the band played then a DJ played music the rest of the evening. This was both Jackie's and Kitty's first New Year's Eve party and we all had a great time!

My friend Cindy was there too!

A good sized crowd for the party

Dance, dance, dance

Jackie and Kitty take a break from the dancing

Kitty, me, and Jackie at the party

On New Year's Day I had to go add some money to my phone and we had lunch at a little restaurant nearby my apartment. It was a nice simple lunch of rice porridge and some dumplings served in a spicy broth. For dinner we were joined by Phyllis, and we all went back to the restaurant where we had gotten the chicken dish on Christmas Eve.

Having dinner with Phyllis and Jackie

The chicken dish was not as good the second time, but the company was excellent! It was really great to see Phyllis! Even though she lives and works close by to me I do not get to see her as often as I would like.

On Sunday morning Jackie and I went over to Chunxi Road to do some shopping. Jackie wanted to buy some things to take back to Beijing. We had lunch at a Japanese noodle place and wandered around looking in shops. Jackie was hoping to buy some spicy rabbit heads (a delicacy here in Sichuan), but we didn't find any. In the afternoon Jackie flew back to Beijing.

In the evening Cindy came over to my apartment and I fixed some spaghetti for us. We watched the movie The Blind Side on DVD while we ate dinner. It was an enjoyable evening. On Monday I spent the day playing Everquest II, reading a book, relaxing, and watched the last episode of the 12th season of Poirot... Murder on the Orient Express. A nice way to end a long holiday.

Snow and stuff

2010-12-16T21:36:00.002+08:00

The weather in Chengdu has gotten really cold this week. We even had some snow last night! Just a dusting, but there was still some in shady places this morning.

I do not think we had any snow in Chengdu last winter. Maybe a flurry. It would be nice to have a white Christmas, but I don't think it will happen.

I was trying to decide where to travel to during the week between Christmas and New Years. Everything that week is insanely expensive though! Almost 3 to 4 times as expensive as any other week. My friend Jackie is also taking off that week, and after talking with her about vacation options she decided she wanted to come spend the holidays with me in Chengdu. Yeah! We're still deciding what we are going to do while she is in town, but I am really looking forward to seeing her.

My work schedule is changing a little tomorrow... For 3 weeks I will not be on the early shift, nor will I be providing on call support during non-work hours; so I should have some time to do some things like Christmas shopping! I also need to do some cleaning up of my apartment.

Thanksgiving Dinner

2010-11-29T19:12:00.000+08:00

Last Thursday was Thanksgiving and this year I went to the Sheraton Lido Hotel in Chengdu for Thanksgiving dinner. The American Chamber of Commerce got us a special price on the dinner, which included a Thanksgiving buffet and two glasses of wine.

For dinner I ate a salad with caesar salad dressing, turkey with mushroom gravy and cranberries, ham, oysters, Malaysian fried chicken, some spicy beef dish, potatoes, pumpkin, fried rice, some mushrooms, and finished it off with some dan dan mian (noodles). Part of the buffet was a noodle bar, and I couldn't resist having the noodles but it filled me up so much that I passed on dessert.

There were about two dozen of us at the dinner. About a third of the people were foreigners and the rest were Chinese. Most of the Chinese there had lived in the USA before, and I think they missed eating Thanksgiving dinner since returning to China. It was a nice evening with great food and enjoyable company.

Happy Days!

2010-11-06T11:32:00.001+08:00

This is pretty funny...

I've watched it several times and it is still as funny as the first time. Enjoy!

Weather, Maryland, Movies

2010-10-28T16:41:00.002+08:00

The weather in Chengdu is starting to get a little chilly now. The high temperature yesterday got up to 14°C (about 57°F). Time to start wearing sweaters and jackets again. The nice thing about winter coming is that a lot of restaurants will now start serving lamb. People here usually don't eat lamb when the weather is warm since they believe it "puts fire in the belly".

It does look like things are heating up in the elections back in the USA. I see that in my home district back in Maryland that Charles Lollar is making Steny Hoyer worried. This must be really upsetting to a ruling class elitist like Hoyer, and it seems to be showing, as you can see in this article from the Southern Maryland Headline News...

Lollar: Steny Hit Me in the Back, Twice

A lot of my colleagues here at the office are watching what is going on with the elections. My English mentees and I are going to discuss the election next week and it will be interesting to see what we end up talking about. They are curious about how the results will effect future US/Chinese relations. They were rather surprised when I showed them this picture and informed them that this is in Detroit, and not China...

Well, it's not really Detroit. It's a set for the remake of the movie Red Dawn. The original movie had the Soviets and their western hemisphere lackeys invading the USA. The new version will be having the Chinese invade the USA. Here's an interesting article about the movie in the Asia Times Online...

US paranoia seen in new Red Dawn

What is interesting about this picture is that when shown without any explanation most people believe it is real... and could be somewhere in the USA.

I forget where I found the picture below, but it's sure to drive some people crazy!

Another fat holiday

2010-10-12T17:14:00.005+08:00

The 22nd of September was the Mid-Autumn Festival holiday here in China, and I was on call, but did not have to work. Even though it was a holiday and I didn't have to work it seemed like nothing was going right. In the morning I was updating my iTunes on my laptop and the operating system on my iPhone, but that failed and it locked my phone.

I had to find a China Unicom sim chip to unlock my phone, but all the places that sold those chips near where I live were closed for the holidays. Also, my water in the apartment went off for awhile, and after it came back a pipe for my sink in the master bathroom started leaking. I was suppose to have lunch with some friends, but with my phone out I was not able to contact them.

There were a whole lot of little things that went wrong all day that day, but luckily nothing major. The next day I fixed the phone, fixed the pipe, etc, etc, etc... In the afternoon my girlfriend came over and we spent the afternoon and evening together, which was really nice. I wished we could have spent more time together, but I had a lot to do the next day.

On Friday I went to the airport and caught a flight to Beijing, and then flew from Beijing to Washington for a two week vacation in the US. I arrived at Dulles airport on Friday evening and met my parents and my brother, who had come out to pick me up. We drove over to Uncle Julio's in Reston where we met up with my friends Greg and Les and had dinner. It was great to see everyone! Jay and I split a Cadillac Platter... a pound of fajitas and a lobster tail. Yum!

Saturday was a nice lazy day. Jay, Mom, and I drove down to Pope's Creek in southern Maryland for lunch and went to Captain Billy's restaurant for crabs and oyster stew. It was very good!

A dozen and half steamed crabs

Jay and I prepare to dig in!

In the afternoon I tried to take a nap, but wasn't that sleepy so I played a little Everquest. In the evening we all went to Charlie's Pizzaria restaurant. Mom and I split a pizza, Jay had a gyro, and Dad had a calzone. A customer at the table next to us got a big surprise when her daughter, who had been in Afghanistan the last 6 months, showed up. She was very very happy!

The rest of the vacation was mostly spent lazing around my parents' house, eating way too much food, watching football, and some shopping. A lot of the time it rained, so there wasn't a lot else to do. One evening I went to dinner in Virginia at a restaurant called Mike's Italian Restaurant with my parents and 14 other friends. It was fun to see everyone, and the veal parmigiana was huge! I'm surprised I was able to finish it all.

We did have some nice weather the second weekend that I was there. On Saturday my friends Les, Lynne,and Geoff came over and we drove out to the Maryland Renaissance Festival. The faire had a pretty good size crowd that day, and it was a lot of fun. Here are a few pictures...

Some performers at the faire

Some faire-goers dressed up

A strange... gay bug

The Pyrates Royale sing

I just had to get my picture taken with this girl

On Sunday my parents were playing golf, so I went over to their country club in the afternoon to meet them for dinner and to watch the Redskins beat the Eagles (yeah!). It was good to watch some NFL football, and it was really good to see the Redskins play well, especially after their disappointing loss to the Rams the weekend before. Not sure they needed all that much pink though... nice gesture, but it seemed over the top to me.

On Tuesday we had a Thanksgiving dinner. Mmm... roast turkey! We also had mashed potatoes, stuffing, green bean casserole, bread, gravy, cranberries, white chocolate raspberry ice cream, and some oatmeal cookies I had baked a few days before. My mother did a great job of cooking everything, and I did a great job of eating too much. Oof! My ribs hurt after eating all that.

There were a few other wonderful meals I had too. I got to eat American food, Mexican food, Italian food, Greek food, Thai food, Indian food, and yes... even some Chinese food! One night we had a dinner of steamed spice shrimp, fried oysters, and fried scallops that was really wonderful. Fresh seafood is not something I get a lot of back in Chengdu.

After two weeks of eating too much and loafing around it was time for me to go back to Chengdu. It was a great trip and it was great to see the family and a lot of my friends. There were some friends I did not get to see, and I was hoping to see them. Oh well... more incentive for them to come out and visit me! ;)

On Friday I headed to the airport and caught my flight to Beijing. Usually the flight goes up through the middle of Canada, over Alaska, and down through Kamchatka and eastern Mongolia heading into Beijing; but this flight went up through eastern Canada, western Greenland, over the North Pole, down through the middle of Siberia, and then southwest through Mongolia to Beijing. This made the flight only 13.5 hours since we weren't going into the jet stream much.

Flying over the North Pole was nice since I was sitting on the left side of the airplane, so as we were flying north to the pole I could look to the west and see the sunset. After we went over the pole and we were heading south looking out the window was now to the east, so the sunset turned into a sunrise. It was very pretty. Before the sun came back up over the horizon the top of the sky was dark blue which became lighter blue, then a small green line where the blue sky met the yellow in the sky under that, which became orange as that met with the red part of the sky under that, which came down to the black which was the Arctic Ocean. I'm sorry I did not think to take a picture of it.

Party Tunes

2010-08-29T13:50:00.003+08:00

Did you know that a lot of Chinese people are big Micheal Jackson fans? I'm not a fan of Michael Jackson or the Chinese Communist Party, but found this funny video the other day....

Enjoy!

IBM office on CDTV

2010-08-15T00:27:00.004+08:00

A few weeks ago there were some people from one of the local TV stations here at our office putting together a story for a show called Chengdu Economy Weekly on CDTV1. The story was about the IBM office here in Chengdu, and here is what the aired...

There are a few people speaking English in it, including one decadent western capitalist American. Enjoy!

Birthdays

2010-08-08T22:01:00.003+08:00

The weather in Chengdu has gotten up to it's normal hot summer weather. It is very hot during the day, and most nights it rains. We seem to be getting more sunshine than in past summers, but that might just be my imagination.

I had my 49th birthday back on the 27th of July. I worked that day, and that evening I went out to dinner and treated myself to a caesar salad with chicken and a tenderloin steak. It was a quiet and relaxing evening. I saw this article in the New York Times the next day...

Happiness May Come With Age, Study Says

The results, published online May 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were good news for old people, and for those who are getting old. On the global measure, people start out at age 18 feeling pretty good about themselves, and then, apparently, life begins to throw curve balls. They feel worse and worse until they hit 50. At that point, there is a sharp reversal, and people keep getting happier as they age. By the time they are 85, they are even more satisfied with themselves than they were at 18.

Since I am already happy I am looking forward to becoming 50 and seeing how things could be better.

My friend Hebe had her birthday on the 2nd of August, and we got together one night after that to have a birthday celebration for the both of us. We went to an Indian restaurant and had dinner. It was very nice.

Some local news

2010-07-18T14:41:00.003+08:00

Not much has been going on since the last vacation, except a lot of work so I thought I would post about some local news items. This story is about how much Chengdu people love to play Mahjong...

Chengdu's nonstop majiang: Man dies, game goes uninterrupted

Chengdu residents are known for their love of majiang--and a recent video shows just how far this passion extends.

In the video, an elderly man has just fallen to the ground, and while onlookers crowd around and call emergency personnel to the scene, at the next table over, a group of majiang players are devotedly playing their game, not once looking up at the commotion around them.

What can I say... life is cheap here. Not sure of all the reasons that it is, but maybe I'll devote an entire post to that some day. Here's another article I saw the other day...

Chengdu To Encourage International Dining Enterprises

Chengdu will also launch a batch of major projects for building a gourmet city, including creating local leading dining enterprises, cultivating five dining enterprises with sales of CNY500 million, and developing five dining enterprises into multinational firms.

In addition, Chengdu will focus more on attracting investments and will introduce five well-know multinational dining enterprises, including Burger King, Long John Silver's, and Hardee's...

Not really gourmet, but it will be interesting to see if these places do well in Chengdu. Rumor has it that one of the five places will be a Romano's Macaroni Grill restaurant. That'll be nice!

3 Days in Hong Kong

2010-07-02T09:26:00.003+08:00

When we arrived in Hong Kong it was cloudy, rainy, and very warm and the weather didn't change the entire time we were there. We stayed at the Royal Park Hotel in Kowloon, which is north of Hong Kong Island. Jay and I had talked about going to Victoria's Peak or taking a boat ride around Victoria Harbor, but since the weather was so bad we never got around to doing any of those things.

A rainbow over Hong Kong

Most of the time was spent relaxing, eating, shopping, and generally enjoying being some place civilized. The relaxing and eating was easy since the hotel was so nice and they had some decent restaurants, and there are also lots of great places to eat in Hong Kong. We had dim sum, seafood, salads, steaks, etc... I think we both gained some weight here.

Downtown Hong Kong

We also visited a lot of shopping places. In fact, our hotel was right in the middle of a big shopping center called New Town Mall. The first place we went shopping though was at the Pacific Place Mall on Hong Kong island. Pacific Place is one of the most upscale places to shop in Hong Kong. They had one store called Chinese Arts & Crafts there that had a lot of Chinese jewelry and carvings made from jade, amber, crystal, and ivory. They were all very beautiful and very expensive. We spent a lot of time here looking at everything they had since everything was so nice to look at.

Cool looking buildings downtown

The next day we went wandering around Causeway Bay and Tsim Sha Tsui, and ended up at Harbor City which is a huge shopping mall. The only thing annoying about these areas are these guys from nearby tailor shops who come up to you on the street trying to sell you a suit. One time we were standing outside Harbor City having a cigarette and one of them came up to Jay and tried to sell him a suit. Having failed at that he tried to sell Jay a Rolex copy. Then some hashish. Jay was laughing at the guy the whole time! It was funny.

Some shops along Causeway Bay

A cruise liner parked at Harbor City

Another funny thing is that in the evenings all the TV's are tuned to the World Cup. This was the same as on the mainland. No offense to anyone who actually likes soccer, but I think it's one of the most boring games around. We did have a few laughs poking fun at the fake injury acting of the players, but that got old quickly. Luckily they only have the World Cup every 4 years.

Saturday was our last day in Hong Kong. We went to the airport at around lunch time and bugged the nice folks at Air Canada until they gave Jay an aisle seat, and then we had lunch. I saw Jay off on his flight back to the US in the afternoon, and then I finished up some shopping at the airport before catching my flight back to Chengdu in the evening.

Jay's trip to Chengdu

2010-06-28T19:27:00.006+08:00

Jay and I arrived in Chengdu rather late, so we just went to my apartment and went to sleep. I was going to work the next two days... I worked part of the day on Thursday from home and all day on Friday at home. On Thursday we went to my office and I showed Jay around a little bit. We had lunch with two of my teammates from work, Yan Mei and Wen Yun.

Yan Mei, Jay, Wen Yun, and I at lunch

We had some really good Sichuan dishes for lunch (fish covered with hot peppers, minced chicken with hot peppers, pork and vegetables in spicy oil, and pickled peppers). Jay did pretty good with the food during the whole trip. He was willing to try everything we served him, and he didn't get sick or anything. I did try to make sure we had some western meals every once in awhile too, since Jay was not use to eating so much Chinese food.

On Saturday morning Jay and I went to the Panda Breeding Research Center in northern Chengdu. We got there early because we wanted to get our pictures taken with a little panda, but we couldn't find the place to do that. There were no signs for it. Eventually we found a place that had a line of people, and sure enough that was the place.

Baby panda with mother panda

To get your picture taken with the little panda you have to donate 1,000 Yuan to the research facility. Jay forgot his donation at my apartment, so I gave him mine so he could pose with one of the pandas.

Jay and his panda

I think this panda was only a few months old. They are quite small when they are born and grow quickly. After visiting the pandas we went back to town; and my friends Cynthia, Tony, Phyllis, and her sister Jessie took us out for a Sichuan dinner. We had a variety of dishes that I think are only found in Sichuan. It was very good.

Tony, Cynthia, Jessie, Phyllis, and I at dinner

A whole lot of Sichuan goodies

After dinner Phyllis and Jessie took Jay and I to a place called Shunxing Ancient Teahouse. We enjoyed some tea and some snacks, and watched a Sichuan Opera/variety show. At one point some guys came over and gave Jay and I a shoulder/back massage while we watched the show. They also had someone who went around cleaning ears, but we passed on that.

Performing with an old style instrument

Kung Fu tea pouring

Face changing

Jay gets a massage while chatting with Phyllis

On Sunday Jay and I got up early and met up with my friend Jolly and her friend Scarlet. We went to a place called Leshan which is about two hours drive from Chengdu. We were going to see the giant Buddha, which at 71 meters high (about 233 feet) is the largest statue of Buddha in the world. The first viewing of the giant Buddha statue was by boat.

Jay and I on the boat in Leshan

Scarlet and Jolly

Jay and I with the giant Buddha statue in the background

The river current here is very strong, so the first time going by the Buddha statue was very quick as we were going down stream. The boat then turned around and slowly went upstream by the Buddha, so everyone had time to take pictures.

Some souvenir sellers outside the dock and park

For the second viewing of the Buddha statue we went through a large park and came up to a place by the head of the Buddha and then walked down to the bottom. It was quite a hike, and all of us were pretty tired afterward.

The steep climb down the side of the giant Buddha statue

A look down where the feet are

Jay and I check out a really big toe

Down past the Buddha we found a small place with some shops and restaurants, and we took a little break with some cool drinks and some souvenirs.

Jolly and Scarlet help Jay do some souvenir shopping

We then made our way to the Wuyou Temple nearby. The bridge leading to the temple was very pretty.

The bridge to the Wuyou Temple

On the bridge

When we got to the bridge we discovered that if we wanted to go up to the temple we would have to do a lot of hiking up a small mountain. We were all too tired for that and decided to call it a day. We called our driver and he picked us up nearby and we drove over to Leshan to buy some snacks (sliced beef, sweet duck, and fruit). I think I caught a cold from the air conditioning in the car, since I woke up Monday morning with a slight head cold.

On Monday Jay and I went to JinLi Street in Chengdu. JinLi is a market street that is decorated like an ancient Chinese market street. It's not totally authentic since there are places there like Starbucks and Dairy Queen there, but it's nice.

Jay bought some Chinese KungFu-type shirts and also had a painting done with some Chinese calligraphy that resembles his name in Chinese.

Nice job with the calligraphy

There were also many pretty Chengdu girls to see there.

A pretty girl poses for the cameras

Actually, there were a lot of pretty Chengdu girls just about every place we went. I think if Jay comes back to Chengdu it will be more to see the pretty girls then to see me. Haha!

A pretty girl plays a guqin at a teahouse on JinLi Street

On Tuesday we didn't go do any sightseeing. My cold was getting worse, so I didn't want to go anywhere. Jay went for a walk in the area around my apartment and I tried to sleep some. We also spent time preparing for the next day's trip to Hong Kong.

In the evening we went to join my friend Kitty for some hotpot. The place we went to was called Lao Ma Tao, and it has been around for a long time. We had beef, lamb, stomach, liver, quail eggs, enokitake mushrooms, and lotus root. I didn't eat any of the liver, but Jay tried all of it. It was really good! It was also helpful for my cold.

Jay's trip to Beijing

2010-06-18T18:17:00.007+08:00

Jay flew out of Raleigh on Friday June 11, and after a stopover in Toronto would arrive in Beijing on Saturday 12 June at about 3:55pm. I got a flight from Chengdu to Beijing on Saturday 12 June that was suppose to arrive in Beijing at around 3:20pm. The plan was that we would both meet my friend Jackie at the only McDonald's at the arrival hall in terminal 3 of the Beijing airport. Unfortunately I booked my flight on Air China and my flight to Beijing was 2 hours late.

This really screwed things up since Jackie wasn't sure what Jay looked like, and Jay was not sure what Jackie looked like. I found Jackie at the McDonald's at about 6:00pm and there was no sign of Jay, so Jackie and I started to plan what we would do to find Jay. A few minutes after that I looked up and there was Jay! He had gotten tired of sitting at the McDonald's after having sat on an airplane for 15 hours and had gone walking around the airport. Anyways, we finally were all together.

Jackie decided that the best way to get to the hotel was to take a city shuttle bus to YaBing Road, and walk over to the hotel. This was probably the cheapest way to get there, but the walk from the bus stop to the hotel was very long, especially for Jay and I since we had been traveling all day. After we got to the hotel we checked in, and Jay went to get cleaned up before dinner.

For dinner Jackie took us to a really nice Beijing Roast Duck restaurant (and we took a taxi rather than the less expensive bus). This place was a duck restaurant that the locals go to... not one of the tourist dives. The dinner was wonderful! After dinner Jay and I went back to the hotel and crashed. The next day would be a busy day.

Jackie had to work on Sunday, so Jay and I were on our own all day, but she did find us a driver for the whole day named Jiang Tao who met us at our hotel in the morning and took us to the BaDaLing part of the Great Wall. As you can tell from these pictures Sunday was kind of smoggy...

Part of BaDaLing Great Wall

More steep climbing ahead

Even with all the smog the view was very nice. The route we took was very steep. The place had also been very built up nearby with lots of restaurants, shops, and other tourist trap places. I guess they did this before the Olympics since it was not like this years ago when I had last visited the Great Wall.

Jay and a big rock

After going to the Great Wall our driver drove us to a restaurant nearby the Summer Palace, and Jay and I had some dishes that are popular in the Northeast part of China, such as braised beef with tomato and beans. It was a really good lunch, but we ate too much. This would become a trend while in Beijing.

I forgot the name of this restaurant, but it was good

After lunch we went over to the Summer Palace. I had been to the Summer Palace a couple times before with the last time being in 2006. Back then it was going through a lot of renovations (to get it ready before the Olympics I guess), and there was a lot more to see there this time. We even got lost for a little while. Jay was becoming more proficient at saying, "bu yao" (do not want) to all the street vendors who were all over the tourist places selling all kinds of junk. I did not take a lot of pictures at the Summer Palace, which is kind of strange since it is one of my favorite places in Beijing.

Jay near one of the covered walkways in the Summer Palace

After returning to the hotel from the Summer Palace we went for a walk around the area near the hotel. I wanted to buy a carton of cigarettes, as well as some snacks and water for the next day. We went down several streets and saw a lot of cool sights, such as little sidewalk BBQ cafes, different kinds of stores, and lot of different kinds of people. Jay was loving it all.

The next day Jackie met us at our hotel, and took us to the Forbidden City.

Jackie and Jay outside one of the gates to the Forbidden City

Jackie and I inside part of the Forbidden City

One of the courtyards inside the Forbidden City

Jay points out something interesting as someone photographs the wacky foreigners

It was very crowded and we tried to see as much as we could. We got these little GPS audio tour devices that told stories about each of the locations we visited and Jackie especially liked the stories.

Jackie listening to a story on an audio tour device

We finished going through the Forbidden City at around noon, and Jackie took us to a youth hostel nearby that she had heard had great lunches, but they were not serving food that day so we ended up going to a little dumpling place nearby. We had some dumplings with beef and some dumplings with egg and vegetables. Jay really loved the dumplings.

Jackie poses outside of a youth hostel in downtown Beijing

After lunch we went over to this placed called HuTong, which is a big lake surrounded by cafes and shops.

A view of the lake

Jackie got Jay and I a bicycle rickshaw and we rode around the lake for awhile. The driver was pretty funny and tried to explain the sights around the lake.

Our bicycle rickshaw driver

Jay and I seated in a bicycle rickshaw

A very pretty girl dressed on Tong Dynasty clothing

The day was very hot, so after our ride around the lake we wandered around on foot, and took breaks in shady spots to do some people watching. It was a nice way to spend an afternoon.

Jay and I relaxing in the shade

On Tuesday we met up again with Jackie who took us to the Temple of Heaven. The weather was very hot and my feet were hurting from all the walking we had been doing the last few days, but it was a lot of fun.

Jackie and Jay acting silly in the Temple of Heaven

After the Temple of Heaven we went to a market area and visited a few shops. One was a pickle shop called Liu Bi Ju, which had been there for over 400 years. Jay loved this place, and bought several types of pickles.

Loads and loads of pickled vegetables

After pickle shopping we visited a noodle restaurant and had lunch. The food there was kind of so-so.

Enjoying some noodles for lunch

After lunch Jackie left to go visit her Uncle, and Jay and I made our way over to the Lama Temple. I think this was the largest Buddhist temple I had ever visited, and also one of the prettiest. There were a lot of little temple buildings which contained shrines to different Buddhist deities.

Down a narrow passage in the Lama Temple

After visiting the Lama Temple Jay and I went to a pub called Molly Malone's' that was near our hotel and had a dinner of kabobs and oysters. It was pretty good. I miss good seafood in Chengdu sometimes.

On Wednesday we woke up and had a large breakfast at the hotel, and in the afternoon we went to the airport to catch our flight to Chengdu. It was an Air China flight, so it was late taking off.

Travel time

2010-06-12T08:47:00.001+08:00

I'm off to Beijing later today. My brother Jay will be flying into Beijing this afternoon. We are going to be spending 4 days in Beijing, a week in Chengdu, and then 3 days in Hong Kong. It should be quite an adventure since Jay has never been out of the USA before.

I need to finish packing. Will post more about Jay's visit to China later!

Busy, but lazy weekend

2010-05-17T16:33:00.002+08:00

On Friday night I met up with my friend Tina and we went over to the Shangri-La Hotel to see a band from New Zealand called Solidaz (pronounced "solid as") who were playing at Mooney's Pub there. They play a mix of old stuff and new stuff, as well as some decent blues tunes every once in awhile. After listening to some music there we went for a walk along the river and chatted until very late.

Saturday and Sunday was spent being lazy... playing on the computer, eating, napping, laundry, watching TV and DVDs. I've been watching season 3 of Battlestar Galactica. It's a good series, but each episode is rather emotionally intense, so I don't usually watch more than 1 or 2 episodes in a sitting. I also watched episode 9 of the HBO mini-series called The Pacific. It is like Band of Brothers, but takes place in the Pacific theater and is about some Marines. Good show, but some of it is rather gruesome.

I also watched some episodes of a show called The Universe which aired on the History Channel. The two episodes I watched this weekend were about comets, asteroids, and meteorites; and how do we stop a really big comet or asteroid from hitting the earth. In stopping a big comet or asteroid from hitting the earth we have to detect it, have a plan to deflect it, and then have someone decide who will do it. The show made it sound like the United Nations would get to decide the important things, so I had the feeling we were doomed.

I also watched some movies. The first was a 2D version of the new Clash of the Titans, which was pretty good although it was filmed in a theater so my copy did not have very great quality. It was much better than the 1981 version, which had Harry Hamlin as Perseus who always seemed too much of a sissy to be the son of Zeus. Sam Worthington was a much better Perseus in the new one. Of course, the special effects and combat scenes were much better in the new one too.

Along the same story line was Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. Good effects, so-so acting, and a lousy story. I just can't get into all the movies about snotty high-school kids who save the world. Another teenager movie I tried to watch was Kick-Ass... a movie about a teenager who decides he wants to be a comic book-style super hero. It is an interesting idea, but the movie was so juvenile that I stopped watching after 25 minutes or so.

Although I watched this movie the weekend before last, I thought I would recommend How to Train Your Dragon. I think the people who did this film were the same people who did Lilo and Stitch, but it was much better. I'm hoping to go see it in 3D at the theater while it is still playing here. The problem is that there are a bunch of movies already out, or coming out this month, that I want to see and I am not sure I'll have the time to see them all in the theater.

I didn't stay home all weekend. On Sunday evening I went out with some friends to a XinJiang restaurant near the north gate of Sichuan University called Xin Jiang Bugba Restaurant. The story of this restaurant is that a business student at the university didn't like the food or the service at the XinJiang restaurant outside the south gate of the university, so after he graduated he opened his own place near the north gate.

The staff at the north gate restaurant are all Uygher from XinJiang province who can speak reasonable Mandarin, and the food is really good. The only complaint I have is that the pieces of lamb that they use on their kabobs is smaller than what I am use to. Anyways, the staff is friendly and the place is as clean as any nearby Chinese restaurants. The menu is in Chinese and in Pinyin... No English yet, but the guy who runs the place wants us to translate it for him. We might work something out for that later. You can get an idea of the dishes of XinJiang here.

An article

2010-05-10T19:46:00.002+08:00

A few weeks ago I read this article in the New York Times....

More American Expatriates Give Up Citizenship

“What we have seen is a substantial change in mentality among the overseas community in the past two years,” said Jackie Bugnion, director of American Citizens Abroad, an advocacy group based in Geneva. “Before, no one would dare mention to other Americans that they were even thinking of renouncing their U.S. nationality. Now, it is an openly discussed issue.”

Now, first off... I am not planning on giving up my US citizenship. No worries there.

Since I first read this article a few weeks ago I have gotten to talk to a dozen or so US citizens who live and work here in Chengdu about it. I was kind of surprised that all of them had either read the article or they had heard about it. All of the people I talked to said they had no plans to renounce their citizenship, but what was interesting was that almost all of the people I talked to said they had no interest in going back to the US, and it had nothing to do with taxes or banking like the article suggests.

Warm weather is here

2010-04-30T21:04:00.001+08:00

The last few weeks we have had some unusually cool weather. This week though, the weather has gotten really nice and we have even had some sunshine the last few days! It's nice not to have to wear a sweater and/or a jacket now. Of course, it also means that the lovely ladies of Chengdu have started to wear mini-skirts and short shorts in earnest again. Don't you guys wish I had posted pictures?

This coming weekend is a three day weekend, since Monday is a holiday. I did not make any plans to travel anywhere, but am hoping to just relax and enjoy the nice weather some here in Chengdu. Maybe go see some sights.

Party, game, party

2010-04-27T18:45:00.008+08:00

Last Friday evening I went to a party at Hooters. The theme was a Hollywood party. The Hooters Girls dressed up in costumes, and at least one guest did (Charlie Chaplin). Here are some pictures...

Hooters Girls (left to right): Cathy, Catherin, Sophie, Cici (ex-Hooters Girl), and Nancy

Me with Hebe dressed as a beauty queen (I think).

Lady Gaga (aka Nicole) and I

Ruby playing around

The long and lovely Fiona

Like the Halloween party they had a limbo contest...

How low can you go?

...and a beer drinking contest...

Whoever invented these stupid hats is probably very rich now.

They also had some singing and dancing. There were also some girls at the party who use to be Hooters Girls but finished college and went out to work in the real world, such as Cici and Sarah. They came to enjoy the party as customers instead of as waitresses. It was great to see them.

Sarah was on the 2009 China Hooters calendar. I sure miss seeing her around Hooters.

The game Everquest II was having an Experience Bonus Weekend so I spent all of Saturday, and most of Sunday, playing my Paladin and my Alchemist some. They both made lots of experience in the game. Here's the latest picture of my Paladin...

Stea in the Pillar of Flames desert.

On Sunday evening I decided to get out of the apartment and go get a pizza at Shamrock. I figure it would be pretty empty on a Sunday and I could enjoy some quiet time, but it turns out there was a group there having a party for some charity. It was pretty funny since the theme of the party is red dress, so a lot of people were wearing red dresses... even some of the guys! You can see info about the event as well as pictures here. (Note: these pictures are from last year, but you get the idea)

The event was put on by a group here called the Chengdu Panda Hash House Harriers, who go out for a run somewhere every two weeks. I've been thinking about joining them, even though I do not run anymore. Some of them walk though, so I can do that. Sounds like a good excuse to get out of the city for a day.

NBA, movies, and food

2010-04-19T19:44:00.003+08:00

Last week on the way to work we drove by a school in town and there was a big event going on there. We couldn't really see what was going on, but the students were putting on quite a show for someone with basketballs. Browsing around on the internet I discovered this person's blog and it looks like the event was for some NBA players in town...

Mike Gansey China Trip Day 2: Can You Say Rock Stars!

On Saturday I went out with Phyllis. We went to see the movie Alice in Wonderland. It was pretty good. I couldn't even remember the story, since it was so long ago that I read it (or it was read to me), so the story was new to both Phylis and I. The 3D effects were really good, and the story was really good. All the actors did a good job too. I couldn't even tell that Johnny Depp was the Mad Hatter most of the time. After the movie we went to a sushi place for dinner. I don't usually have high expectations for seafood here, but it was really good. It was a really good evening.

Today I was browsing around some local news sites from back in the DC area and found this review of a Chinese restaurant outside of Falls Church, Virginia. The restaurant is called Hong Kong Palace, but the Chinese characters on their sign are for Chengdu...

FOOD: Wok on the Wild Side at Hong Kong Palace

It seems that the chef at the restaurant is from Chengdu and even went to the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine in Chengdu. If you live in the area and are curious about some of the dishes I have mentioned in the past you might want to try this place.

Long Quan and Luodia

2010-04-12T17:26:00.003+08:00

I have not posted in awhile, and I should have posted about this awhile back... A few weeks ago the peach blossoms were blooming and everyone was going out there on the weekends to see them. A friend of mine named Lisa and her cousin took me to a place called Long Quan to see the peach blossoms.

Not many blossoms around

I guess we should have gone a few weeks earlier since there were not many blossoms left.

Lisa and I

After walking around for awhile, and not finding many peach blossoms, we decided to go to a place called Luodai which was nearby. Luodia was an ancient town near Chengdu, and today it is a busy tourist trap.

An introduction to the town of Luodai

There isn't much left of the ancient town, but a few buildings. The recreated a lot of the buildings and stuff, and now the place is full of shops selling junk and lots of snack places.

A beautiful dragon wall

We went to one of the snack places and had a variety of different noodle and tofu snacks.

Mmmm.... Sichuan snacks

Uhhh... no thanks

Not too much else is going on. My brother is coming out to visit in June and I've been trying to arrange that trip. I'll post more about that later.

Hokou

2010-03-12T16:40:00.002+08:00

I have not done much lately that has been worth posting about, so I thought I would talk about some things in China that I have not talked about before. One of the things that is interesting here is some thing called hokou (户口 hùkǒu), which is a system of residency permits for citizens of China. The system was originally introduced in ancient times to help keep track of people for taxation and conscription purposes, and it also became a method of social control by the communist party in the 1950's.

Basically, your hukou ties you to where you are born and allows the government to control the movement of its citizens, especially between rural and urban areas. If someone resides in a place and they do not have a hokou for that place then they can not officially get a job, a place to live, education for their children, health care, get married, etc..., and you can be detained by police and deported back to your permanent residency location.

Although a person is required to live in the area designated on their hokou, in practice the system has largely broken down. After Chinese market reforms, it became possible for some to unofficially migrate and get a job without a valid permit. Since the 1980s, an estimated 200 million Chinese (about half the population of the US) live outside their officially-registered areas, with much less access to education and government services, and in several respects occupy a social and economic status similar to illegal immigrants.

To move your hokou from one place to another is not very easy, but it is easier today than it was in the past. I have a friend here at work who wants to marry her boyfriend, but their hokou are from two different places, so they can not get married. They are in the process of moving his hokou from another city in another province to Chengdu. Seems like a major bureaucratic pain the butt.

This sort of reminds me of the internal passport system that existed in the Soviet Union. Communist countries always seem to want control of every little aspect of everyone's life. I wouldn't be surprised if the regime in Washington comes up with something similar for the US (under the guise of controlling immigration and/or health care costs, no doubt).

Happy Chinese New Year!

2010-02-22T19:15:00.003+08:00

My Chinese New Year holiday is over, and I am back at work now. The holiday is still going on, and will finish with the Lantern Festival sometime later this week. I was off from the 13th of February to the 19th of February. I spent most of the holiday just relaxing. I got a lot of sleep, ate a lot of food, played on the computer some, and finished reading Flashman in the Great Game. I've only got 2 more Flashman books to finish.

On Chinese New Year's eve I joined Reese and her family for dinner. Her mother cooked a bunch of Hunan dishes, and they were excellent. Some of the dishes were new to me, and I was told that some of the recipes are only cooked on New Years eve. Such a shame... they were quite good. After dinner we watched some of the New Year's specials that are on TV every year. I stayed with them until about 10:00pm, and then went home. I was kind of tired.

The fireworks this year were really good, or I should say they are really good... They are still going on. People start shooting off fireworks about a week before New Years, but the really big fireworks show is at midnight on New Years. That lasted until about 3:00am, and would have made anyone from Baghdad homesick. They will keep shooting off fireworks until Lantern Festival, but not as intensely as New Year's night.

I went out a few times during the holiday. One night I went out to dinner with Jessie. We went to a restaurant called Del Mar, which serves Mediterranean food. It was quite good. Jessie had a pizza and I had the cordon bleu (they were out of the lasagna and the scallops). We had some stuffed mushrooms for an appetizer. After dinner we went over to her place and I met her mother. She was very nice. After that we walked around TanZiLin, which is referred to as European Street, to look at the shops. I might move to that area later this year. It's very nice.

One night I went to dinner and met this lady. She was single, in her early forties, very beautiful, and very rich. Sounds perfect, huh? But from what I could tell she was a total drunkard. Too bad. Usually when a Chinese person has a drink or two their face turns red. In the time it took me to drink two glasses of wine she drank almost an entire bottle of bourbon whiskey, and she didn't blush a bit. After she got drunk she started ordering people around, and what surprised me was that some people did as she said! She ordered me to dance with her, but I told her I wouldn't until she said, "Please". That got some funny reactions from the people around us. She was a fun dancer. I decided to leave when she ordered a bottle of Hennesy.

I also visited a DVD store that has a lot of pirated DVDs. I got a good copy of the new Sherlock Holmes movie. It was pretty entertaining. He starts out like James Bond and evolves into Sherlock Holmes. I also watched a movie called The Book of Eli. I really liked this movie. It's an action movie, but it actually has a really good story. The story evolves as the movie goes along, so at the beginning you are not sure what is going on. Loved the ending too.

I also found the first 9 seasons of the TV show Poirot on DVDs, and I had to get those. They come with both Chinese and Japanese subtitles, and I think the listing of shows was translated from English into Japanese, and then from Japanese to Chinese, and then from Chinese into English, so you end up with some pretty funny names. For example, instead of "The Mystery of the Spanish Chest" there is "Mysterious box from Spain", and my favorite... instead of "Wasp's Nest" there is "Powered by Bzzd".

This Chinese New Year also marks my 5th year in China! Yeah!

Avatar

2010-02-05T09:55:00.000+08:00

Last weekend I went to see the movie Avatar. I had heard from a lot of people that it was a great movie, but I had no idea what it was about. To tell the truth, I was kind of disappointed. The scenery in the movie was very pretty, but it seemed that making the movie in 3D was an afterthought. There were not that many effects that seemed like 3D effects, and I do not think seeing it in 2D would have been that much different.

The most disappointing part of the movie was the story. The Avatar project by itself seemed like an interesting idea, and I wish they had gone into that some more. Unfortunately the story was one of those trite "corporations are evil" stories that Hollywood never seems to tire of. In the movie Avatar it is an evil mining corporation versus some rastafarian cat people who are attuned to nature in some wise and mystical way. What a load of crap.

2010 IBM Annual Party

2010-01-26T16:55:00.004+08:00

On Sunday we had our annual IBM party. This year it was held at the Shangri-La Hotel, which is one of the nicest hotels in Chengdu. I am not sure how many attended, but it seemed to be several hundred people.

The crowd gathers

The evening started with some short speeches from various upper management people from Chengdu, China, and Asia Pacific...

Some words from our site manager

Then it was followed by various entertainment venues, such as singing...

A nice song

Angel sings for us

The managers sang a song called One Night in Chengdu, which is a change from the famous One Night in Beijing (not to be confused with the song One Night in Bangkok)

... and there was some dancing...

A sexy show dance

A glitzy fun dance

Jessie and Candy do another belly dance for us

A tribute dance to Michael Jackson

... some contests...

How many marbles can you pick up with chopsticks?

... and even a short fashion show...

She doesn't look this sexy in the office

We also had a big dinner during the shows. A lot of the items served were seafood, such as scallops and crab, which kind of surprised me. The dishes were all pretty tasty, but a lot of them arrived at our tables a little cold. I know it's not easy to serve a dozen or so dishes to several hundred people, but they tried. The wine was from France and was ok. Altogether it was definitely better than years past though.

All throughout the party they had drawings for prizes. Prizes ranged from coffee makers and rice cookers all the way up to the grand prize of a trip for two to Bali. I didn't win anything though. Oh well, next year maybe.

Hotpot, Tropico, etc...

2010-01-23T13:59:00.002+08:00

I got over my jet lag pretty quickly. It was good to go out my first weekend back for some hotpot. Reese and her family took me to a hotpot place near where they live that has an all-you-can-eat hotpot. Oh, I felt so fat after that! I think a 13 day trip home was just right... I just started getting really hungry for Sichuan food by the end of my trip.

A friend of mine went to a city in northern China called Harbin. The ice sculptures there are much much more impressive than the ice sculptures at the ice show I saw while back in the US. The link to see his pictures can be found here.

I know I have not posted much lately, but I've been busy with work, and also I've been playing around with a computer game I bought in the US called Tropico 3, which is a new version of the game Tropico in which you get to be the leader/dictator of a Caribbean island country. Viva El Presidente!

Tropico combines city management with a wide variety of residential, economic, civic, and military structures and transportation and resourcing management, with political gameplay including a variety of factions with needs and demands, elections, coups and revolutions when needs are not met, and the ability to follow each Tropican including key faction leaders individually, determining individual needs and orientations, and apply a variety of means of persuasion from improvement of conditions or bribes to firing, imprisonment, and assassination. It also has a groovy island musical soundtrack!

I see that it's been a very good week in the US! The Supreme Court overturned a bunch of unconstitutional campaign finance restrictions that the socialists have been slowing building up over the last few decades. In Massachusetts they elected a conservative republican to take Ted Kennedy's senate seat (defeat the machine!). The aristocrats in the congress and senate are scrambling to distance themselves from El Presidente's socialist agenda now, since they realize the voters might not be as stupid as they thought. It's so much fun to watch the crazies go at it! (links here and here). And if all that wasn't funny enough there is this...

Voting Democrat Causes Cancer

Enjoy!

The rest of the trip...

2010-01-09T08:56:00.003+08:00

My Christmas trip back to the US was very nice. I got to see my parents, my brother Jay, my nephew Nicky, and some of my friends. I spent most of the holiday eating, shopping, more eating, relaxing, watching football, eating some more, playing on the computer, etc... A good way to spend the holidays.

One day after Christmas we all went to the National Harbor to see the Ice Show. The ice show was a big collection of ice sculptures housed in an enormous tent-like structure that is specially constructed and thickly insulated to help maintain its internal temperature of 9°F. It was cold in there! Luckily they lent out parkas to everyone as you were going inside. Here are some pictures...

A Christmas sculpture

An ice angel

Some of the Chinese sculptors must have made these

A toy soldier with slides in the background

A giant horse and sleigh

After viewing all the ice sculptures we walked around National Harbor, and with the wind chill it seemed colder outside than inside the ice show. We ended up walking down to McCormick and Schmicks for dinner. Even though it was only 4:00pm there was a half hour wait to get a table. The meal was very good... I had the steak, and shrimp stuffed with crab meat.

A few days after Christmas Jay and Nicky flew back to North Carolina, and I drove up to visit my friend Greg. His wife Amy and daughter Gillian were visiting the Chicago airport. Actually they were going to Nebraska to visit Amy's family there, but ended up staying at the Chicago airport longer than expected. Greg and I went to dinner at a good place called Victoria Gastro Pub, and then back to his place to play a twisted game on his XBox called Left 4 Dead 2.

I spent a relaxing New Year's Eve with my parents at their house. We had a delicious dinner, enjoyed some good wine, and watched the New Year's festivities on the Fox News channel. Happy New Year! After that we watched a show called Red Eye on Fox that was pretty funny.

One night I went out to dinner with my friends Les, Lynne, Greg, Amy, and Gillian. We went to Charlies' and had a really nice dinner of various Italian dishes. It was great that we all got a chance to get together. Hopefully we'll all get a chance to go the Maryland Renaissance Festival in September or October!

During the holidays I watched 3 football games... I saw the Redskins lose to the Cowboys, WVU lose to Florida State in the Gator Bowl, and the Redskins lose to the Chargers. The Redskins really sucked this year and WVU usually chokes on bowl games, so I wasn't that surprised at the losses.

Besides my teams losing in football, the only bad part of the holiday was seeing how messed up the country has become in only a few short months since my last visit. The idiots in charge in Washington and in the state capitals (in Maryland and Virginia anyways) seem to be totally clueless about economics. What a bunch of marxist twits. Oh, speaking of marxist twits, I saw that the White House Christmas tree was decorated with images of Mao, transvestites, and who know what else... enjoying that hope and change yet?

The flight back to China was better then the flight to the US... No delays. The flights to Chicago and Beijing actually arrived early. The flight to Chengdu was on time, and after 23 hours of traveling I was ready for some sleep especially since I had to get up early the next day for work. The next night I slept for 12 hours which is a lot more than my normal 6 or 7 hours that I usually get. Luckily it is a short work week, so I will have the weekend to recover from my jet lag.

Christmas in Maryland

2009-12-27T01:55:00.002+08:00

Merry Christmas! I'm back in the US for the holidays. I had not posted anything for a few weeks since I was getting busy for my trip. There were a few things that happened in that time (besides work and packing)... One weekend I went out looking for some gifts to take back with me, but ended up spending too much time looking for Zhu Zhu Pets. A friend of mine named Angel helped me look for them, but we never found any.

Angel took me to see a movie at the theater in Wanda Plaza after our fruitless search for toys. We saw the movie Treasure Hunter, which has a lot of big name Chinese stars. The story was sort of silly, but the special effects were good. The next weekend I took Angel out for dapanji, and Reese and her boyfriend joined us. That was really good since I had not had dapanji in awhile. I took Angel out to dinner the evening before my trip back to the US. It was Dong Zhi (winter solstice), and most Chinese around Chengdu like to eat lamb, dog, and/or dumplings. Angel didn't want any lamb or dog meat, so we had fish hotpot. It was a wonderful dinner to have before going on my trip.

My flight back to the US left Chengdu at noon on the 23rd, and I had connections in Beijing and Chicago before landing at National Airport in Washington DC. The flight from Beijing to Chicago landed late, as we kept circling around waiting to land. After I got through customs I had to check my luggage back in, and I checked on the status of my flight to DC. since the flight to DC was scheduled to start boarding 10 minutes ago, I figured I was going to miss that flight but that flight was delayed too. I had to wait around Chicago airport for a little over 2 hours before our flight finally took off.

It was nice coming back into DC. The skies were clear and the city and surrounding towns were all lit up. It looked really beautiful. There was snow on the ground too, and I had not seen that much snow in several years, so that was nice to see. When the plane landed it was a little after 11:00pm, which was around noon back in Chengdu so I had been traveling for 24 hours. My parents picked me up and we drove back to their house. We saw about 5 or 6 deer outside my parents neighborhood during the drive. I wish I could have gotten a picture of them but it was too dark, and I wanted to get to the house and get some sleep.

Today is Christmas and I'm just relaxing today. My brother Jay and his son Nicky are flying up this afternoon from Raleigh. Can't wait to see them. This will be the first Christmas that the family has all been together in 5 years, so I'm really looking forward to it. You all have a great Christmas!

8 Trees

2009-12-11T18:48:00.001+08:00

On Thursday afternoon I got a message from a friend of mine named Sophia who was wondering if I had plans for the evening. I told her I didn't have any plans, and she invited me to dinner. Later that evening I went and met her at a place here called 8 Trees Wine Bar for a dinner and wine tasting. This was the first time I had been to this place, and it was very nice. For dinner we had:

Garden salad, with La Jalle Rouge 2006 - Bordeaux Red
Chicken sauté et Provence style tomatoes, with Lacaze 2006 - Bordeaux Superieur Red
Cheese and fruit, with Remparts Figeac 2005 - Saint-Emilion Grand Cru

The food was very good and the wine was excellent. There were about 2 dozen people who showed up for the dinner. Most were from Europe. The people that Sophia and I sat with were from France, and luckily most of them could speak English so we had a good conversation all evening.

I think the 8 Tree is named for the trees that are out front. They provide a nice shady cafe-like setting when the weather is nice, and I'm hoping to go try that out when spring comes. The 8 Trees is also right next to the only Catholic church in Chengdu, and I was told that it was actually part of the church a long time ago.

When Sophia and I left we walked around to the front of the church, and it was very pretty. Sophia wanted to give me a ride home on her electric scooter, but it was too cold to ride on that so I took a taxi home. I also didn't want her to drive me all the way to my apartment, and then have to drive all the way to her home on such a cold evening.

Thanksgiving dinners

2009-12-03T16:48:00.001+08:00

I was talking to a friend a few days before Thanksgiving about places that serve turkey in Chengdu, and he told me that the best place to go was Peter's Tex-Mex. They had reservations there for Friday night, and that I could come join them and bring a friend as well. I asked Kitty to come along, and since she had never had turkey before she wanted to go.

They had two dinner set menus for Thanksgiving. We both had the traditional dinner which included: hot mulled apple cider, pumpkin soup, waldorf salad, roast turkey, mashed potatoes, cornbread stuffing, sweet potatoes, gravy and cranberries, pumpkin pie or key lime pie, tea or coffee. It was very good! Kitty didn't care much for the turkey, but liked the rest of it.

On Saturday some friends called me and wanted to go out to the Cotton Club that evening. I decided to go with them, but couldn't stay out late since I was on call for work. We decided we wanted to go out some place to eat before going out clubbing, but where should we go? Well, Peter's has a place right near the Cotton Club, so we went there! ShiBun is from China and Michael and Al are from France, so they have never had a traditional Thanksgiving dinner so that is what we all had. Everyone seemed to have enjoyed the dinner a lot.

After dinner we went over to the Cotton Club for a few drinks and some chatting. It was kind of funny... ShiBun speaks Chinese and Japanese, but her English is a bit so-so. Michael speaks French, English and his Chinese is ok. Al can speak French and English but his Mandarin Chinese is poor. I can speak English, but my French is poor and my Chinese is so-so. There was a lot of translating going on whenever anyone said something. It was a fun and very interesting evening.

Shopping, eating, and shopping

2009-11-25T14:54:00.002+08:00

On Friday night I went to Wanda Plaza and did a little shopping. I had to buy a new electric shaver, since my old one was dying. There were sparks coming out of the cord and a little smoke from the motor, so I really needed to get a new one. I also bought a new space heater for my bedroom. It's pretty nice and has a remote, so I can wake up in the morning and turn it on before actually getting out of bed.

On Saturday I went to lunch with Jessie to a little restaurant she found called Symphony, or something like that. It's billed as a French restaurant, but was more like an European restaurant. It was actually quite good! We started with a small dish that was sort of like Shepard's Pie with some cheese added on top. Then we had soup and a small salad. We ordered two entrees... roast chicken with herbs and seafood covered in cheese. They were both excellent. For dessert Jessie had the passion fruit mousse and I had some chocolate cheese cake. Yum yum!

It seems Saturday was a good day to eat a lot. That evening Reese and her family invited me out for hotpot. We went to a different place this time, and the pot that we cook in there was made of stone instead of the normal metal ones. I could not really taste the difference. We had sliced beef, sliced lamb, pork meatballs, fish, some little cigarette-shaped dumplings, small eggs (quail or pheasant... not sure which), pig's blood (gelatinous-like cubes), mushrooms, potatoes, and lotus root. It was very good but I ate too much as I usually do when I eat hotpot.

On Sunday I did a lot of laundry and played around on the computer during the day. In the evening I went to dinner with Sophia at noodle restaurant in Wanda Plaza. After dinner we did a little shopping at Ito Yokado. Sophia looked at boots and I bought a new iPhone 3GS. I didn't mess with the new phone when I got home since it was kind of late and I wanted to read the manual before playing around with it. Yeah, I'm one of those manual reading types of people.

The next day I read about how the iPhone works online, but when I tried to get it working I ran into some problems. Nothing's ever easy here. The iPhones purchased here in China are locked to China Unicom, and my phone account is with China Mobile. In order to unlock the iPhone I had to borrow a China Unicom sim chip from a friend and put that into my iPhone. When I hooked it up to my laptop and started ITunes then it was unlocked, so then I could take out the China Unicom sim chip and put in my China Mobile sim chip and continue with the registration process.

Now I need to get in touch with China Mobile and get the internet on my account turned on. I think I will wait until I get back from vacation in January to do that. Oh, I forgot to mention... I am going back to the U.S. for Christmas and New Years. It will be the first time in 5 years that I've been back there for Christmas and I am looking forward to going.

Chilly suddenly

2009-11-17T16:47:00.000+08:00

Last Tuesday the weather was very pleasant. The temperature was in the low to mid 60's, and there wasn't any wind. On Wednesday though the temperature dropped suddenly and it got windy. The last few days have been in the low 40's with wind and sometimes rain. It seems to have caught us all unprepared. I think it will warm up a little at the end of this week though.

We have a new person on our team here at work from Thailand. He's a having a very rough time with the cold weather, since he's never been in cold weather before. He didn't even know what a humidifier was. Now he had to go buy a heater for his apartment, coat, sweaters, etc... Luckily he is already use to spicy food.

Happy Birthday USMC!

2009-11-11T20:45:00.004+08:00

The 10th of November is the birthday for the U.S. Marine Corps. There are six marines here in Chengdu who provide security for the consulate here, and on Saturday night they had a party at the Crowne Plaza Hotel to celebrate.

Nice ice statue

I asked my friend Jessie to go with me and she was nice enough to accept. We spent Saturday afternoon running around getting our clothes, and Jessie's makeup and hair done. She looked great!

Jessie and I all dressed up

There was about 150 people total who attended the party. Most people were Americans, but there was a few Chinese, a few Australians, and a few Brits.

Cocktail hour outside the ballroom

We both had a good time meeting new people, as well as people I had known previously. We also met someone named Rachel. Jessie doesn't usually meet many women taller than herself, so she had to get a picture with her...

Jessie and Rachel

After the cocktail meet and greet, we went into the ballroom and watched the ceremonies. The started with some of the marines presenting the colors...

Start of the ceremonies

After that the person in charge at the consulate give birthday wishes to the Marine Corps from the State Department. Then they showed a video from the head of the Marine Corps wishing the marines a happy birthday, and showed a bit about what the marines are all about. After that the guest of honor talked about his 17 years in marines. By the time he was finished we were all ready for dinner.

Dinner table centerpiece

We had salad...

Nice salad. Jessie is good at taking pictures of food

... and soup...

Minestrone soup with pesto

Jessie had the stuffed chicken...

Jessie's chicken entree

...and I had the beef tenderloin...

My steak

For dessert there was a dessert buffet...

A small part of the dessert buffet

...and someone making Bananas Foster. The kids loved that...

Flame on!

After dinner there was some dancing and more socializing...

After dinner dancing

It was a rather enjoyable evening, and it was nice to spend the evening in such an American way.

Halloween Party

2009-11-05T21:40:00.006+08:00

Saturday was Halloween, and I hadn't really planned to do anything or go anywhere. I was talking with my friend Reese about going out to dinner on Saturday night when I remembered that there was going to be a Halloween party at Hooters. We decided to meet there that evening; and Reese would bring her boyfriend, her sister Rena, and their mother. Their mother had never been to an American restaurant before, and none of them had been to a Halloween party before.

I knew that the waitresses there would be wearing costumes, but I was surprised how good they were and I was surprised that so many customers dressed up in costume. Here's a few pictures...

Welcome to Hooters!

Nice chains

Here kitty, kitty!

Me with the lovely witch Ivy

A nice variety of costumes

The four riders of the apocalypse take a break

A new Hooters girl? I hope not

Time to dance!

For entertainment the waitresses put together a cool little dance. It started with the girls lying on the floor like they were dead...

Arise my pretties!

Then they came to life and did a Chinese style fan dance...

Lovely fan dance

Then it turned into a really sexy modern dance...

Go girls, go!

It was a lot of fun. There was also a beer drinking contest...

They have to drink from hats?

Heck with the hat. Gimme the glass!

...and they also had a limbo dance contest...

How low can you go?

It was all a lot of fun, and my guests had a great time too.

Nicole, myself, and Cici

The Manchus grab Tina!

Almost Halloween!

2009-10-29T08:57:00.002+08:00

It's almost Halloween. The first thing we need to do is make sure the pumpkins don't find the beer. Oops! Too late. Oh well.

I hope everyone has a fun Halloween!

Now and then and now

2009-10-22T21:14:00.004+08:00

Last week they were having a trade fair at the exhibition center nearby our office. On Friday Chinese Prime Minister Wen, and several heads of state from other countries came to visit the fair, so security was very high in the area.

Wen Jiabao Meets with Foreign Leaders Attending the 10th Western China International Economy & Trade Fair

A lot of traffic lanes were blocked and there were police everywhere. A lot of us weren't able to go to the office that day, so we had to work from home. I made a comment about politicians blocking traffic to some of my co-workers, and one of them asked me if this doesn't happen in the United States. I told him that sometimes a politician will do something like this, but they usually don't get re-elected if they do.

We also saw on the news about several people in the Obama administration praising Mao, which is really weird. Last week it was was Anita Dunn, who is the White House's communications director. Here's the story from the Wall Street Journal...

From Mao to Obama

Anita Dunn, the White House's communications director who has declared war on Fox News, came under scrutiny herself last week when it was discovered she had told an audience that Mao Tse Tung was one of her favorite political philosophers and quoted Mao on how to "fight your war." In her speech last June, after she joined the Obama White House, Ms. Dunn said the "two people I turn to most" were Mother Teresa and Mao Tse-Tung. She barely discussed the late nun, but waxed at length about the lessons Mao had taught her.

And then there was Ron Bloom, who is the new manufacturing czar. Here's the news story from the Washington Examiner...

Another Obama administration czar agrees - 'kind of' - with Mao

First, it was White House communications chief Anita Dunn telling a high school commencement audience that the murderous Chairman Mao was one of her "two favorite philosophers." Now, it's manufacturing czar Ron Bloom who it turns out "kinda" agrees with modern history's most prolific genocidal murderer that "power grows out of the barrel of a gun."

Were these people born stupid, or did they just get progressively stupider as time went on? Anyways, here's an amusing story about Obama and Mao in the People's Daily...

"Oba Mao" items popular with foreign tourists in Beijing

A souvenir shop in the popular Houhai tourist area of Beijing has recently become quite famous because it is selling products with the image of U.S. President Barack Obama's face imprinted over that of China's late leader Mao Zedong, CCTV.com reports.

Here is a rather good article about the dangers of maoism from BigGovernment.com...

Lessons From Chairman Mao

There is something tragic in man’s nature that an ideology which has been the scourge of the 20th century, inflicting misery and death upon hundreds of millions, still has so many adherents. China recently celebrated the 60th anniversary of its Communist Party. Although communism’s horror show continues to enslave a large portion the world’s population, many in our county are still sympathetic to this cancer. Its track record bears repeating, particularly to students, whose naïveté and inexperience leave them susceptible to dangerous belief systems.

If you want to read about the entire horror that was Mao I would recommend reading Mao: The Unknown Story.

Trip to Bali

2009-10-12T20:27:00.004+08:00

There is no direct flights from Chengdu to Bali, so I had to change planes in Hong Kong and Singapore. I flew to Hong Kong, and the person working at the check in counter for Dragonair Airlines made a mistake on my baggage claim, so they were nice enough to upgrade me to business class. I had a few hours layover in Hong Kong and did a little shopping at the stores in the airport. I also had lunch at a place called Champions Sports Bar, and the burger I had was kind of so-so.

The flight to Singapore was kind of uneventful. There was a really nice sunset over Singapore when we were arriving, and we were on time so I did not have to rush to catch my next flight to Denpasar (Bali).

When I arrived in Denpasar I got my visa, and got in line to go through immigration. I was almost at the head of the line when I realized I had left a carton of cigarettes, that I had bought at the duty free store in Chengdu, on the plane. I went to an information desk and asked if they could call the plane and they did, and I could get my cigarettes at the lost and found. In the mean time a large plane load of people had arrived from Japan; so now the lines to get through immigration were really long so it took me almost an hour to get through immigration, get my bags, and go find my ride to the resort. I arrived at Club Med in Bali at about midnight.

When I woke up on my first day at Bali I realized I had caught a small cold from either the air conditioner during the flight over, or from the air conditioner in my room. It wasn't too bad... just a little coughing, runny nose, and a sneeze every once in awhile; but it meant that I could not do some of the things I was hoping to do. Sneezing while snorkeling would not be pleasant.

My fellow guests at the resort were from all over the world. There were people from Indonesia, China, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, France, Germany, etc... Not too many Americans, since it is so far away. I was kind of surprised to see quite a few Chinese there. Someone who worked at the resort told me they only come during Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) and National Day holidays. They seemed somewhat well behaved, and the only problem I had with any of them was some lady who would cut in line in front of people everywhere. I also saw one spitting, but he did that into an ashtray, and not where people walked. The biggest problem others had with the Chinese were that they talk very loud. I hadn't noticed since I am use to that.

Most days at the resort were spent waking early and having breakfast, wandering around the resort, hitting some golf balls at the little driving range, shooting some archery, having lunch, taking a nap, going for a swim, shoot some more archery, wander around the resort some more, have dinner, socialize with others at the bar and maybe watch a show, and then go to bed.

I enjoyed wandering around the resort. It was very tranquil and very pretty. Here are some pictures...

A nice six-hole par 3 golf course

Area leading down to the beach

A small shrine. For shows or weddings maybe?

Some local ladies make some straw baskets

Outside the rooms

Aerobics in the pool

A view from the beach during low tide

Even Buddha likes the beach

One of the dragons in the main restaurant

The food was really good too. Just about every meal had dishes from Indonesia, India, China, Korea, Japan, Italy, and a variety of western dishes also. My favorite breakfast was an Indian egg dish (scrambled eggs, chopped vegetables, and curry), bacon, and fruit. Sometimes I would have Japanese style salted fish instead of the bacon. It was hard to select a favorite for lunch and dinner since there was so much variety. The kimchi was great for my cold. The sushi was fresh and very delicious. Everything was wonderful and even with a little self-control I think I managed to gain a few pounds.

I ended up shooting a lot of archery. The guy who ran the archery range like to have me come over, since I could translate a little of his instructions to the Chinese guests who showed up to do a bit of shooting. He could speak English, French, and a little Japanese; but no Chinese. There were a few people that worked at the resort who could speak Chinese though.

Every afternoon they had a little archery tournament of some kind, and I was in 4 tournaments. The first was a team tournament and I was teamed up with someone named Mitch from Australia. We came in third and got bronze medals. I won gold medals in the other 3 tournaments. One was a "beat the pro" tournament and I shot the second highest score there. I should have gotten a silver medal, but they gave all of us that beat the pro's score a gold medal.

One afternoon I traveled to the northern part of the island to visit an elephant park. They had a lot of information about elephants and a nice little museum of elephant related stuff.

Some elephants at the elephant park

They had a total of 30 elephants at the park. Three of them were brand new baby elephants.

The newest arrival with mommy

After watching a little elephant show I went for a half-hour ride on an elephant through the nearby jungle and farm area. Once you got use to the little swaying back and forth it was pretty nice.

I feel like King Julien!

Even though the rainy season in Bali has officially started it never seemed to rain where I was. Sometimes I would go somewhere and they would say "You're lucky... it was just raining here this morning". I did seem to have luck when it came to nice weather there. The day I went to the elephant park was a lucky date, so on the way back we saw a lot of weddings going on.

Outside a temple where a wedding is getting ready to start

A small shrine

I woke up early on my last day and I had a nice breakfast. After breakfast I went to say goodbye to my friend Maria before I had to catch my ride to the airport. Maria is from Korea, and it was really great getting to meet her. There were a few girls from Korea that I met there. I use to live in Korea ages ago and they all brought back a lot of memories about Korea that I had forgotten.

Maria and I take a look around the boutique

From Denpasar I flew to Hong Kong and had a few hours at the airport to do a little shopping before my flight to Chengdu. It turns out that I was not at the main terminal, and the stores I wanted to visit were all at the main terminal. I browsed around the shops at my terminal, but did not see anything I wanted to buy, except a nice silver ring with a beautiful blue sapphire. Too bad it costs over 26,000 Kong Kong dollars (about $3,400 US)! It was nice, but not that nice. I bought some nice big cookies for my driver and his family. I knew his daughters would really like them.

For the flight from Hong Kong to Chengdu Dragonair upgraded me to business class again, but I am not sure why. Maybe they like me, or something. I flew into Chengdu in the evening and I got home at about 10:30pm. I did the minimal amount of unpacking I needed to do, and then went to bed. Traveling is so tiring some times.

It took me awhile to post this since one of my teeth has been bothering me, and typing away in front of the computer is kind of dreary when you are in pain. Anyways, by the last day of my trip my cold was pretty much gone but one of my teeth had started to hurt. I would have rather had the cold back.

Time with friends

2009-09-14T20:26:00.002+08:00

Last week they were having an Oktoberfest celebration at the Paulaner's restaurant in the Kempinski Hotel. It ran every evening from Tuesday night to Saturday night. I went on Wednesday night with some friends. Paulaner's had a really nice buffet of German food, and some good Oktoberfest beer they had brewed. They also had a band from Austria called Alpenrocker who played a mix of songs in German, some songs in English, and at least one song in Chinese.

It was pretty fun, but it was very warm that day and for some reason the restaurant didn't have their air conditioners up very high. I was also pretty tired from the long work day, so I didn't stay too long. After lots and lots of good German food and two beers I decided to go home. I got home at about 10:30pm or so. There was a lot of lightning flashing around, and we had a really huge thunderstorm later that night that went on until about 4:30am or so. We have been having a lot of rain just about every night.

On Friday night I went to Mooney's Pub at the Shangri-La hotel. The American Chamber of Commerce was having a TGIF Happy Hour party, and I thought I would go to represent IBM, since the people from the company who usually go tho these events could not go. Mooney's had a band from Australia called Peachy which was good. For a warmup act there was a very pretty Chinese girl who played some songs on an electronic fiddle. I ran into a bunch of friends there from the US, and a lot of what we talked about was football. It was a nice evening.

On Saturday I went to visit my friend Reese and some of her family who are visiting Chengdu. Her mother and oldest sister, Hong Ping, had traveled from Hunan province to visit Reese and her sister Rena. Hong Ping is thinking of moving to Chengdu, and I think her mother would like to play matchmaker between the two of us. Lunch was a large variety of Hunan dishes made with pork and vegetables as well as a chicken dish. I ate too much so I didn't need to eat much for dinner that evening.

Hong Ping is hoping that some day she can get a job translating books from English to Chinese. She can read very well, but needs some practice with her spoken English. The book she is currently reading is Jane Eyre which uses a lot of old English, and even I have trouble reading some of that. After lunch she read some of this to me. We also talked a little bit about Chinese writers, and she was very surprised that I had read works by Lao-Tzu and Zhuang Zi. It was an enjoyable afternoon, but I was a little tired since I got a support call from work early that morning and did not get as much sleep the night before as I had hoped.

Bad choices

2009-09-08T21:43:00.002+08:00

I saw this article in the China Daily...

China's national flag to go up in White House on Sept 20

The national flag of the People's Republic of China (PRC) will be hoisted at the South Lawn of the White House in Washington on September 20, media reported Sunday.

Chinese associations in the United States had applied to hold a ceremony in front of the US President’s residence to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of PRC.

...and I thought that's... strange. Why would the government of the United States, the country who has liberated more people from tyranny and oppression than any other country in the history of mankind, want to celebrate the 60th anniversary of a government that has oppressed and destroyed the lives of so many human beings?

Traffic problems

2009-09-01T18:28:00.003+08:00

Traffic here in Chengdu seems to get worse and worse every day. This morning's commute was the worst I had ever been in... anywhere in the world at any time. The traffic in Chengdu is not fast, but it is very heavy at times. There are a lot of factors that make traffic here bad...

1) Cars are still new to China and most drivers do not have much experience driving. On my first trip to China in 2001 everyone was on bicycles and there were only a few cars. Now it is the opposite. Of course, if you ask people if they can drive they will tell you they have been driving for a long time and are very experienced.

2) There are probably about 1,000 new drivers every day in Chengdu. That's just a guess, but I heard that Beijing sells about 2,000 to 3,000 brand new cars every single day, so 1,000 new drivers for Chengdu with a population of about 11 million people is not a bad guess.

3) A lot of these new drivers have no training, and many pay bribes to get their license. Corruption is bad everywhere here, and the Chinese version of the DMV is no exception. When I first looked into getting a driver's license here they only had the written test in Chinese, but I could hire an translator. There are two types of translators I could hire... one that would translate the questions for me, and one that would translate the questions for me and give me the answers. The second one is a little more expensive. Just about every person I have talked to that has gone through a driving class here has been encouraged to bribe their teachers with small gifts if they wish to pass.

4) Most Chinese drivers are rude and selfish. Selfish driving is the rule of the road here. Never let anyone else have the right away. Never let anyone pass you. If you have to stop somewhere be sure to stop where it will provide the most inconvenience to others around you. Do not pull off the road if you need to use your cell phone... Get into the left lane and slow down to 5 MPH while you chat on the phone. Heck, if you can drive down the divide between 2 lanes at 5 MPH then that is even better. This stuff about saving face is a load of BS too. I've heard people say they did not want to let someone pass them because they might lose face, but their actions to avoid this loss of face are shameful most of the times. For example, I've seen someone in a car almost run over some little old lady as she tries to walk across the street because they didn't want to let her go by first. Crazy.

5) Most Chinese people do not know how to wait in a queue. Traffic is basically a long queue of people who happen to be in (or on) vehicles. Although you will often hear that China has a civilization that has lasted for 4,000 years (or 5,000 years or 6,000 years, etc... depending on who you talk to) waiting in queues seems to be a civilized behavior they missed. Or else they knew about it, but forgot about it while Mao was in power.

6) Political elites are the worst offenders of traffic laws, and many other drivers emulate their bad driving behavior. If you are driving down the road and see a car with a red colored character on their license plates then you know they are high up in the government and are better than you. They are above the law. They also have a special sounding horn, and you better get out of the way if they honk it at you. Failure to do so could be reason enough for a trip to a labor camp for a few years. If one of these idiots hits you just go ahead and plead guilty. It's never their fault.

7) Chinese police do not enforce traffic laws. They do pull people over who have not paid their car tax, but that's about it. Want to drive down the sidewalk? Go for it!

There are probably dozens of other reasons too, but I won't go over all of them here. You get the idea.

Here's a picture I took a few weeks ago at an intersection near where I live that I travel through every day on the way to work....

It's not a very good picture, since I did not want to get out of the car to take it. We weren't moving, but that doesn't mean someone would not run me over if I stepped out of the car, especially the people on bikes, scooters and motorcycles that weave in and out of this mess.

I will have to try to explain how traffic flows through this intersection... It is a 3-way intersection that comes off of an old bridge which goes from west to east. The bridge can support about 3 lanes of traffic (there are no lane markings on the bridge) and the other two roads which run north and south can support 3 to 4 lanes of traffic. There are lane markings on the north and south roads for one lane of auto traffic on each side as well as a lane for bicycles. Cars, trucks and buses use the bicycle lane whenever they want and bicycles, scooters, motorcycles, pull carts, etc... sometimes use the auto lanes if they can survive doing so. Lane markings are only guidelines... not rules.

Up until yesterday there was no traffic lights at this intersection, and going through the intersection is a bit of luck and a bit of chaos since the concept of right-of-way is not really understood here. Sometimes someone has to stop to let traffic in one of the other roads of the intersection pass because the others have nudged in, and this is when the problems start.

If someone in front of you stops to let other traffic go by you do not just stop and wait your turn (you do not know how to wait your turn in a queue, remember?)... you go around them using the bicycle path or even the lane for oncoming traffic. If there is a lot of traffic you can have a lot of lanes of traffic, since people will continue to go to the sides to go around the stopped traffic. Since you are not an experienced driver you did not look down the road to see that there are 3 lanes of traffic trying to squeeze into the one lane of oncoming traffic that you have now taken, and being a rude selfish driver you do not care. So now you will sit and wait for someone else to move.

Although there are now traffic lights at this intersection it did not seem to help this morning. After all, traffic lights are like lane markings... only guidelines, not the rule.

What is curious though is this... I've seen cars hit pedestrians, other cars, bicycles, etc... but I've never seen them hit a dog. Dogs seem to have some magical property that allows them to cross the street with no fear and no danger. It's weird.

Football season has started

2009-08-31T19:10:00.003+08:00

The NFL season has started, and like the previous years I am listening to the Redskins Radio show through NFL Fieldpass over the internet. The Redskins' first pre-season game against the Baltimore Ravens was pretty bad. The Redskins' next two pre-season games against the Pittsburgh Steelers and the New England Patriots seemed much better.

On Tuesday evening I went out to Shamrock for dinner, and they had the usual soccer and rugby games on the TV there. I mentioned to my waiter that I wished I could watch American football, but the stations here never carry that. He told me there was a new sports channel on their cable called ASN (All Sports Network) that showed American football, and sure enough I got to watch the Monday Night Football game between the Baltimore Ravens and the New York Jets. It was even an exciting and fun game to watch!

A replay of the game between the Washington Redskins and the New England Patriots was supposed to be on Saturday night on ASN, so I went to watch that. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the satellite hookup, and they could not get that station that evening. Oh well, I had dinner there and ran into some old friends and made some new friends, so the evening was not a total waste.

Dog days

2009-08-24T19:28:00.002+08:00

A few weeks ago I went over to a friend's house to see some puppies. They have a big copper colored poodle that just had puppies a few days before. This weekend I learned that someone stole the mother dog a few days ago. Not sure how well the puppies will do since they still have not been weened yet.

On Friday night I got a support call from work, and had to work all night. Then I got another support call early on Saturday morning, and when I was done helping with that I had to help with an upgrade to one our systems in Korea. I was very tired by lunch time. Even so, I went out to do some shopping with my friend Reese in the afternoon. I bought a few long-sleeve shirts and a jacket, since summer will be ending soon. In the evening I joined my friend Kitty for dinner. We went to the fish hotpot place near my apartment. It was excellent... I ate too much.

Sunday was a lazy day. I could have slept all day, but got myself up and did some things around the house. I played on the computer some and watched a few movies in the evening. Terminator 4 and Inkheart. This week is going to be pretty busy since half my team at work is on vacation.

My P-38

2009-08-11T21:30:00.002+08:00

About this time thirty years ago I was going through basic training in the Army. Back then when troops were out in the field they ate C-Rations, which are tins of food. In order to open those cans of food we had a simple little can opener that we referred to as a P-38. The P-38 is considered by many as the Army's greatest piece of gear... simple, compact, durable, and easy to use. I was given a P-38 thirty years ago, and not only has it been on my key chain all these years but I still use it regularly.

When I got my P-38 it was a dull silver color, and through the years it has turned darker and darker. On Sunday I was surprised to find to find it covered in a thin layer of rust. I could easily rub the rust off with my fingers, but I can't understand why it got rusty all of the sudden. I've had it all these years, in all kinds of weather, and it's never gotten rusty before. A trivial mystery that occupies my mind sometimes.

News of the new news

2009-08-10T17:57:00.003+08:00

I didn't have a lot planned this weekend. I had some friends over for dinner on Saturday night. I cooked some spaghetti and we also had some french bread and gouda cheese from Holland. It was pretty good. The rest of the time I spent playing on the computer, doing some laundry, and catching up on the news back in the USA.

I haven't read the news much lately since I've been so busy. It's amazing how much has been going on... I never even heard of this cash for clunkers program until now. What a financial disaster that is. It looks like a typical government program... give everyone $3,500 or $4,500 for their old cars, but the taxpayers end up spending anywhere from $20,000 to $45,000 per car. It looks like they are going to try to keep the program going too. These are the same idiots that want to run the health care system?

The socialization of the US health care system is another big topic in the news. It's always funny when these aristocratic-wannabes in Washington decide they know what's best for the masses, and then they get all upset when people complain. How dare those sheeple complain!

Doesn't matter... they don't care about the will of the people and they'll pass that socialist garbage. It is interesting to see them display their utter contempt and disdain for the average person though. They always say their there for the people but we all know that, like socialist political elites everywhere, they don't give a rat's pah-tooty about anyone but themselves. If the changes to health care are so great then why are the politicians exempt from it?... for their whole lives?

It looks like they really underestimated the public's reaction though. Only in a few places did their red guard thugs show up to beat the complaining peasants. No worries though... they're taking names, and a few years in a re-education though labor camp will stop those pesky complainers. This article is pretty funny...

Know Your Town Hall Mob Agitators!

Greetings citizen! By now you may have heard scattered rumors of state and party officials encountering reactionary resistors at local health care reform information programs. Do not be alarmed, for our 5-year plan for citizen health proceeds without delay. Remain stalwart! The truth can be told at last, that these so-called “protests” are merely the desperate rear flank mob actions of dead-end bandits and saboteurs in the pay of enemy insurance agents.

About time the people in the US started standing up for their rights. I have to wonder if events in Iran and Honduras helped.

The recession here in China is pretty much over with. When it hit here back at the beginning of the year you could tell something was wrong. Usually the whole country is one big construction site, but all those migrant workers who usually do all that construction work were told to stay home after they left for the Spring Festival holidays to visit their families, and construction came to a stand still. It seemed rather quiet sometimes with no construction going on.

The government then put together a stimulas package which gave tax breaks to businesses, so that they could hire people and get the economy going again. It seems all that construction is going again, which is good for the Chinese economy even though it can be loud at times. Even the government in Beijing knows that tax cuts are always a great way to get out of a recession. Increased government spending and tax increases are really bad for economies. Too bad the idiots in Washington don't know this, or maybe they do and they just don't care.

Let's see, what else?... Oh, there was this trip to North Korea by Bill Clinton. A reporter discusses socialist culture in an interesting article I saw in the Washington Post about a photo taken there....

An Emotional Restraining Order For Clinton the Statesman

When former president Bill Clinton arrived in Pyongyang on his mission to bring home the two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who had been detained by the North Korean government for nearly five months, he posed for an official photograph with the country's reclusive leader, Kim Jong Il. The photograph is, to be blunt, weird. Disconcerting. Creepy.

Why would anyone dislike life in North Korea? They have government run health care (political elites are exempt from it though). No need for tax cuts for business (since the government owns all the businesses). No need for tax cuts to improve the economy since they are in a permanent recession (since the government owns all the businesses). No complaining peasants. No food either.

Contest, hotpot, and shopping

2009-08-04T20:01:00.005+08:00

Last Monday when I was at Hooters some of the girls asked me to come back on Friday for something special, so on Friday I went back with some friends and a co-worker. Friday was the one year anniversary of Hooters in Chengdu, and they were having a Miss Hooters contest for the Hooters in Chengdu. The competition started with each girl saying a few things about themselves to everyone in Chinese and in English.

Ariel (left in pink top) from Shanghai Hooters was the MC

After that the girls did some dancing and some even sang a little.

I wish they danced like this in the Hooters in the US

And more dancing.

Getting everyone to sing along

We had dinner there too.

Victoria ordering dinner

Limbo time

Then they went around and introduced themselves to customers and encouraged the customers to vote for them. There were four winners of the Miss Hooters in Chengdu contest. Those four girls will go to the Hooters in Shanghai where they will compete against girls from the Hooters in Shanghai, Beijing, Hangzhou, and maybe Wuhan. The winner of that contest will be Miss Hooters of China, and will go on to compete in Las Vegas against Hooters girls from all over the world.

Nicole and Ruby

On Saturday I woke up and played around on the computer, fixed lunch, and did laundry. In the afternoon Reese and her boyfriend came over for some swimming. In the evening we went to a hotpot place behind my apartment. I had been to this hotpot place before, but they have changed recently. Before they served your regular style of hotpot, but now they specialize in fish hotpot. It was really good.

On Sunday I just lazed about the apartment in the morning. In the afternoon I went to meet my friend Victoria and we went over to do some shopping at Metro. I was really hoping to get some Italian sausage there, but they were all out of that. I did get some Australian beef, some cheeses from Europe, some wine from California and France, and a new mosquito zapper. The plan was to go back to my place and cook dinner, but by the time we got back it was pretty late, so we just went out to dinner at another restaurant near my apartment.

A movie and a steak

2009-07-29T20:10:00.001+08:00

Last week I took some of my English mentees from work to see the new Harry Potter movie. The week before that I re-read the book. The movie was entertaining and the effects were really good, but there were a lot of changes from the book.

It seemed to me that in the earlier movies they left out things, but did not make many changes to the story. I figured that was due to the fact that the last book had not been published at the time so no one knew how the story would end, but the sixth movie was finished after the last book was published so I do not know why they made the changes that they made.

After watching the new Harry Potter movie I had to read the last book of the series, mostly because I had forgotten what happened in most of it. It will be interesting to see how differently the last movie will be from the book, or if they'll be able to include all the things they left out and/or changed.

This last Monday was my birthday, and for dinner I went to Hooters. I had a nice steak tenderloin and a small chicken caesar salad. They put in a Wii there and I played a little golf on it. I splice as much playing on the Wii as I do in real life. It was a lot of fun, but I couldn't stay as long as I would have liked since I was on call, and had to go to work early the next day.

A few things

2009-07-15T09:52:00.001+08:00

I know I have not posted anything after posting about my Hawaii trip, but I've been pretty busy. It seems I am spending all of my time either working or sleeping. There was also a lot going on that I didn't feel like posting about by themselves, so I'll tell you about a few things that have happened since I got back.

In Chengdu there are a few international schools. They usually teach foreign kids and a few rich Chinese kids. I wonder if they teach certain things, such as the Chinese version of history (which tends to be really inaccurate). Anyways, on the Saturday before the 4th of July there was an international school here that was having a 4th of July picnic which I was invited to, but I waited too long and wasn't able to get a ticket for it. I heard it was ok.

A few days after that I was chatting with a Chinese friend online and she asked me to marry her. I was very surprised and somewhat flattered, but I said no.

The 4th of July weekend was a bonus experience weekend in Everquest 2. For those that don't play the game that means is that your characters in the game can do some adventuring and quests and they are rewarded with experience, which helps them gain levels in their chosen profession. On Saturday I got my assassin to level 72 (yeah!) and decided to have my alchemist get some experience on Sunday. At sometime in the early afternoon on Sunday I got knocked out of the game and could not get back in.

In a lot of online games there is a problem... plat farmers (also called gold farmers in some games). These are people who logon to a game and make in-game money that they turn around and sell for real money to other players, usually through a third party. Plat is a term used for platinum, which is a denomination of coin in the game (e.g. platinum, gold, silver, and copper). A lot of plat farmers are from China. They can be very annoying at times, but I have met a few nice ones.

Back when my assassin character made level 70 I started saving my in-game money to buy him some nice items. It seems that having a positive cash flow and logging in to the game from China was justification enough for Sony (the owner of Everquest 2) to think I was a plat farmer and ban my account. It took about a week to work with their customer supprt to get my account reinstated.

Other than that things here are going ok. Last week the weather was a little cool and rainy, but this week is starting to warm up quite a bit. The new Harry Potter movie opens here later this week, and I am trying to setup a time some weekend to take some of my co-workers whom I help with their English. I took a few of them to see Star Trek a few weeks ago, and we had a great time. I am hoping I can get more to go with me this time.

Oahu - Last few days

2009-06-29T17:38:00.005+08:00

Our 3rd and 4th days in Oahu were pretty similar. We started each day with a trip to Ala Moana Mall to do a little shopping. This was a really nice shopping mall. It had a lot of stores and a lot of restaurants. Most of the stores that we visited were clothing stores. Jackie didn't want to buy anything since she could buy things cheaper in Beijing, but she wanted to see all the fashions.

Jackie in front of the Chanel store

They also had a Hilo Hatties at the mall, so I stopped there and picked up a few more Hawaiian shirts and a bunch of chocolate covered macadamia nuts for my friends back at the office. Jackie was a little tired after all the shopping.

Jackie takes a quick nap in the hotel lobby

For dinner we went back to Outback Steakhouse, since Jackie liked that so much. There were a couple of restaurants on Oahu that I had read about that I wanted to try (such as Alan Wong's, Nico's at Pier 38, 12th Avenue Grill, etc...), but I discovered that Jackie wasn't very interested in fine dining but was rather interested in fun dining. The waiter we had was new but luckily he was being trained by Ashley, the same waitress we had the first night there.

After dinner we went back to the Harbor View Pub for a few drinks and to listen to a band that was playing there.

Enjoying the band

It was a lot of fun. The place was full of locals having a good time. One guy had a dog that would guard his beer when he left his seat....

Rascal, the beer guard dog

Another guy had some money from Zimbabwe. Their inflation is so bad that this $20,000,000,000 note is worth about 22 cents US....

Big bucks (sort of)

On the 4th day we took a little trolley that went around Waikiki so we could see some sights...

A pretty hotel on Waikiki

Surfers hanging out at Waikiki Beach

Another shot of Waikiki

A pretty surfer girl

The trolley eventually made it to Ala Moana Mall where we did some more window shopping.

Jackie tries on a coat

For lunch we went to Bubba Gump's, and had a bunch of different shrimp appetizers. It was kind of hokey, but it was fun.

Inside Bubba Gump's restaurant

After lunch we went to the Ala Moana Park, and did some swimming at the beach there.

Ala Moana Beach

Some Japanese newlyweds take some wedding pictures in Ala Moana Park

Some tourists in canoes head out to the ocean

For dinner we found a nice little Indian Restaurant called Bombay Indian Restaurant. The food was very good. Since we had to wake up early for our flights home the next day we decided to just go relax in our room. I watched a little TV and Jackie watched some Chinese TV over the internet.

Early the next morning we went to the airport. Jackie's flight to Tokyo and then Beijing left at about 10:30am, and my flight to Tokyo then Shanghai and then to Chengdu was to leave at 9:45. My flight to Tokyo on China Airlines was over an hour late taking off, and I was kind of worried that I would miss my connecting flight to Shanghai. Shortly before we were to land they moved me to business class so that I, and 3 others who were on the same flight to Shanghai, could get off the plane first and rush to catch our flight.

We ended up making our connecting flight with only a minute or two to spare. Unfortunately our luggage did not make the flight. In Shanghai I arranged to have my luggage flown to Chengdu the next day and then rushed to catch my flight to Chengdu. The next day was a work day and since I did not have my dress shoes, toothbrush, or shaver (they were in my luggage) I worked from home. Later in the afternoon I got word that my luggage had arrived in Chengdu and I had to go to the airport to get it.

With my poor Chinese it was quite funny trying to get through security to get the the baggage claim office, and then trying to get my luggage from there. Eventually I got my bags and took them home. I really needed a shave and to brush my teeth. I could go into the office the next day. I had a lot of chocolate covered macadamia nuts to give out.

Oahu - Day 2

2009-06-24T21:13:00.007+08:00

On our second day on Oahu we caught an early morning shuttle to Pearl Harbor.

There were a lot of things to see at Pearl Harbor.... USS Arizona Memorial, tour of the Battleship USS Missouri, Submarine USS Bowfin, Pacific Aviation Museum, etc... We got tickets to go see the USS Arizona Memorial and had about an hour to wait, so we walked around some. We got to see the USS Bowfin, but did not have enough time for a tour of the inside...

USS Bowfin submarine

Some different naval items from WWII...

Jackie takes a look at a naval gun

There was also a memorial for lost submarines...

Memorials for submarines lost at sea during WWII

The aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis...

A big aircraft carrier in the harbor

USS Missouri and USS Arizona Memorial in the distance

After a little bit of sight-seeing we headed over to the USS Arizona Memorial...

When we arrived at the memorial there was a place where you could rent some headsets that played information at different locations about the USS Arizona and the attack on Pearl Harbor. They had them in about half dozen languages and Jackie got one in Mandarin.

We walked about listening to recorded information at some locations, and then we were lucky enough to meet 3 Pearl Harbor survivors who were there for a short time in the morning talking to people and signing autographs on descriptions of what their story was on 7 December...

Some survivors of the Pearl Harbor attacks

One of them even spoke a little Chinese to Jackie, which made her very happy. After that it was our turn to start the tour. We entered a small theater where they played a short movie about the USS Arizona and the attack on Pearl Harbor. After the movie we went outside and we boarded a small ship that took us out to the memorial. Here are some pictures we took...

On the boat coming to the USS Arizona Memorial

Docking at the memorial

Some of the names of those who lost their lives on the USS Arizona

Those who survived and later joined their shipmates

The buoy marks the one end of the USS Arizona underwater. The USS Missouri in the distance

One of the turrets of the USS Arizona is above water. The buoy marks the other end of ship underwater

A display showing the remains underwater

Inside the memorial

The flag flying above the memorial

Some of the USS Arizona still visible

Jackie poses with a US Sailor

After visiting the USS Arizona Memorial we went over to a stadium nearby where they were having a swap meet. The swap meet is held twice a week, and is hundreds of vendors selling all kinds of souvenirs, clothing, but not much food. We bought some cold fruit drinks and walked about the area looking at things. We didn't buy anything and after awhile we decided to find our shuttle and head back to the hotel.

By the time we got back to the hotel it was almost 3:00pm. Jackie was very tired and wanted a nap and I was very hungry and wanted something to eat. I went to a little place near the hotel called the Harbor View Pub, which luckily had some very good sandwiches. A little while after I got back to the hotel room Jackie woke up and was hungry so we went out for dinner.

For dinner that evening we went to the Chart House restaurant which is right next to the hotel...

Jackie all dressed up for dinner at the Chart House restaurant

I was told that this restaurant was owned by the same person who use to own the Chart House restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia which I had been to before and thought was very good. This one didn't seem as good, and it also seemed more expensive. Jackie had the Chicken Picata (which looked really good), and I had some clam chowder and a caesar salad with chicken. It was kind of so-so.

Big Island to Oahu

2009-06-22T19:06:00.007+08:00

Our last day on Big Island and we started with a nice breakfast of cinnamon French toast and fresh fruit. I have not had French toast in ages, and Jackie had never had it before. It was delicious! After saying good bye to the others at the Volcano Forest Inn we got back on the road again. We wanted to see some of the east side of the island before we caught our afternoon flight to Oahu.

On the road again

Where the west side of the island is mostly volcanic soil and in some places resembles a desert, the east side of the island is lush with lots of grasslands and jungle. Here are some more pictures...

Some grasslands near cattle farms

A big beautiful tree

A lovely scenic view

North of the city of Hilo are a few waterfalls, the largest being Akaka Falls which was very beautiful...

Akaka Falls

A little side trip into some jungle

Some jungle flowers

This gives you an idea how big the jungle growth was

Another waterfall near Akaka Falls

There was one place that I was hoping to go to, but we had trouble finding it. Laupāhoehoe is a place that was hit by a tsunami in 1946, and there is a memorial for the school children that died in the tsunami. It turns out it was a little north of Akaka Falls, but we thought it was to the south.

For lunch we stopped at a little Thai place in Hilo. We were in need of some spicy food and some rice.

Our waitress was impressed we could eat such spicy food

After lunch we went to the airport, dropped off our rental car, and caught our flight to Oahu. The flight from Hilo to Honolulu was about 40 minutes, and at the airport we got a shuttle to our hotel. We were staying at the Hawaii Prince Hotel Waikiki. It seemed that 90% of the guests at the hotel were from Japan, so the service was very good and the place was very nice and clean. Our room was on the top floor.

Across from the hotel is a large marina with all kinds of sailboats and yachts, as well as some very pretty beaches.

Left view from our hotel room on the 33rd floor

Middle view from our hotel room on the 33rd floor

Soon after checking in we made arrangements to go to Pearl Harbor the next day, and then Jackie wanted to go to the beach next door that is in front of the Hilton. Jackie went for a swim and I decided to relax in the shade of a palm tree.

Jackie goes for a swim

After that we went for a walk in the marina to look at all the boats.

Jackie poses by some boats in the marina

At dinner time we went walking around Waikiki near our hotel and decided to have dinner at Outback Steakhouse. Jackie had never been to one before, and it looked like fun. I had the Outback Special (sirloin steak) and Jackie had the Savory Pepper Mill Steak, and we both had a beer that was either local or Australian... I had never heard of it before. Our waitress was great, and really took great care of us.

NOTE: I got my evenings messed up and changed the last paragraph to the right place.

Big Island - Day 5

2009-06-18T13:53:00.008+08:00

We got up early on our 5th day on Big Island, checked out of our resort, and hit the road. We decided to drive around the south side of the island and see some sites before checking in at the bed and breakfast place near the town of Volcano we would be staying that night.

Driving along we stopped at places to see some of the beautiful scenery...

View of the see along Route 11

Down around the southern most point of the island we stopped at a bakery called Panaluu, which is the southernmost bakery in the USA. Since it was lunch time we decided to eat there. They had a nice little place outside where people can sit and eat.

Outside the entrance to the Panaluu Bakery

Some birds who hoped we dropped some of our lunch

After lunch we wandered about looking at all the different types of flowers that grew nearby.

Jackie really loved all the different flowers

We got back on the road and started heading east along route 11. There was lots more beautiful scenery to see.

Some coastline along the southern part of the island

We stopped at one place that was very beautiful, and Jackie had to yell, "漂亮!" (piào liang... beautiful) since it was so lovely. It was the only time I heard her speak Chinese during the whole trip. The picture here does not show how vivid the colors really were.

Jackie really loved the view here

We also visited a black sand beach that was very pretty. The thing that struck me about the black sand beach was how strong the waves and wind were. It was exhilarating being there.

A black sand beach

Big waves and big winds

Eventually we made it to the Volcano Forest Inn, which is where we stayed that night. The Volcano Forest Inn is a really nice B&B place run by a couple named Debbie and Greg. They did a very good job of making us feel welcome. The inn is located off of route 11 about a mile or two from the Volcano National Park, down a little gravel road and surrounded by jungle (rain forest is the new pc term for it, but I still call it jungle).

Volcano Forest Inn among the jungle

After settling in our room and resting a bit we drove out to the Volcano National Park. Here are some pictures we took in the park...

Outside the Kilauea Visitor Center

Pele... Goddess of fire and volcanoes

Some of the many steam vents in the area

Kilauea volcano

Some hikers walk inside a crater of an old volcano

A view of the shoreline in Volcano National Park

End of the road

We went back to the Volcano Forest Inn before dusk, and met another couple that were staying at the inn also... John and Teryn (hope I spelled that right) who were from Oregon, and friends of Debbie and Greg's. Everyone else had already had dinner; so Jackie and I heated up our leftover pizza, lasagna, and Pasta Milano and had a nice Italian dinner.

After the sun went down there was a light rain and everyone headed out to the park to see the lava at night, but Jackie and I were a bit tired after all the driving around that day so we stayed at the inn and relaxed before going to bed. We wanted to get up early the next day to see some sights on the east side of the island before our afternoon flight to Oahu.

A beach and a luau

2009-06-15T17:35:00.006+08:00

After getting back from the air tour we decided to drive up to the northwest part of the island to visit one of the white sand beaches we saw from the air. On the way there we saw a strip mall, and since it was almost lunch time, we decided to stop to find a place to eat. It was a pretty nice little mall and they had a Macaroni Grill there, so we decided to go eat there.

Enjoying some pasta

I had the Pasta Milano and Jackie had the lasagna. It was all very good, but we couldn't finish it all. After lunch we headed back out on the road and went looking for our beach. We couldn't find the one beach we wanted to. Our pilot had told us about a road to take to get there, but we ended up finding the other beach, which was much more crowded.

A white sand beach on the northwest side of the island

Beach goers and a surf paddler in the distance

Neither of us had our swimsuits, so we walked about and did some people watching and relaxed a little bit before going back to the our place. We had to get ready for our luau!

Jackie all dressed up for the luau

Our luau was held at the King Kamehameha's Kona Beach Hotel in the late afternoon. The main area had tables and chairs to seat about 200 or so people, a large stage, and tables setup for the the big buffet.

Jackie posing with a local

Another area had some canoes setup with big bowls of mixed drinks, as well as a little bar to serve other drinks. There was also a second little stage and the big BBQ pit where they cook the pig for the luau.

Small bar in the hut and drinks in the canoes

The luau started with some little shows on the stages and around the bar as people made their way in. One guy had a show about how to open a coconut...

How to open a coconut

There was a little band that played some island music...

One of the bands

A lesson on how to fold palm leaves into different shapes...

Island origami

Jackie was definitely dressed better than I was

To officially start the luau they brought the pig out of a pit where it had been cooking all day,...

Mmmm... pig

and after that some actors dressed as the king and queen made their entrance...

Guard and hula dancer greet the king and queen

The king and queen make their entrance

Jackie tries her first ever Mai Tai

The rest of the evening was filled with lots of great food, dancing, and singing...

A Hawaiian dance to start the show

A dance in Tahiti costume

Air tour of Big Island

2009-06-11T17:59:00.007+08:00

Early on our fourth day on Big Island we drove to the Kailua Kona airport for our air tour of the island. We looked at several air tours and decided to take one of the airplane tours. Originally we were thinking about a helicopter tour, but those were only 45 minutes long and only covered a specific part of the island, whereas the airplane tour was 2 hours and covered the entire island.

The airplane we flew in held 8 passengers and the pilot. Everyone on board had a window seat (which was not the case in some of the helicopters).

Jackie has her coffee, so we're ready

Our pilot was a Hawaiian and knew a lot about the island, its history, and also about the local legends.

Our pilot and tour guide

We got our safety briefing, boarded the aircraft, did our sound check so everyone could hear the pilot, and then took off.

Jackie checks her headsets

All buckled in and ready to fly

Here is just a few of the pictures we took while on the air tour...

Coastline off of Kailua Kona

Where lava met the sea a long time ago

Southwest part of the island

Recent lava flows to the sea

Cliff by the shore along the southern side of the island

Volcano in the distance

Lava travels through lava tubes underground to reach the sea

This use to be a residential neighborhood that was overrun by lava

Pele (goddess of fire and volcanoes) must be nearby

Harbor at Hilo on the east side of Big Island

Akaka Falls

A beautiful jungle valley

Jungle along the coast

Some of the huge coastal waterfalls

Another beautiful coastline on the northern part of the island

They film movies and TV shows (like Lost) in some of these valleys

Another view of this really large valley

A white sand beach along the northwest part of the island

Another white sand beach along the northwest part of the island

Altogether I think Jackie and I shot over 200 pictures on this air tour. I am kind of limited as to how many pictures I can publish in each post, so I could not put too many here. Other things we saw were macadamia nut orchids, coffee farms, cattle ranches, a fishing village, small towns, jungles, deserts, beaches... Big Island has a lot to see.