This has nothing to do with China, but this is why I love MetaFilter. From this thread come these links:
- Visualize what it means to say you are one person in 6.5 billion.
- Evolutionary timeline.
- Scale of an atom [from proton to electron cloud - 11 miles!]
- Scales of stars and planets.
I don't think I'd feel perfectly safe even in America walking a dark alley alone. It's different here though. Things aren't safer because of Big Brother. He's hardly noticeable except for the occasional traffic cop and mounted closed circuit camera. But it's safe. So I walked.
I walked down to where a family normally sets up a night kabab stand that functions as a outdoor bar and resteraunt for locals. Chinese men walked past in the dark with their shirts lifted above their nipples. The stand was closed. Too wet. I walked the other direction towards PopLand and the bakeries. I knew vendors set up there in the rain sometimes. I'd been before.
I was still on my camera kick from Tianjin University so I took out the FZ30 and plopped it on the metal bicycle seat that drove the portable outdoor resteraunt. Two long exposures later and nobody seemed the least bit curious as to what I was doing. I snapped a few more. I showed the vendor his photo, took my food, and walked home.
Click for a larger picture.
Tags: Treyopia Tianjin night food kabab vendor street rain China story
Excellent read for anyone else who knew they wanted to be a writer as a kid when everyone else wanted to be fireman. Actually, I wanted to be a fireman-jet pilot-writer/photographer. I've grown substantially since then. Today I want to be a writer/photographer-international teacherman. See?
Anyways, from the snobs guys at Pitchfork:
Get That Out of Your Mouth #27
Chris Dahlen tries answering the question of why there aren't any "great" culture writers, like Hunter S. Thompson and Lester Bangs, today.
"... as we spend more of our lives online, more of our experience of the world takes place entirely in our own heads-- and our imagination is being rewired by computers... we have to strip away the geekery, the gadgetry, and the consumerism, and instead of explaining why this brave new freakshow interests us, we have to understand what it's doing to us. And whoever does that, wins the title of 'the next...' "
A former student of mine emailed me offering a tour of China's oldest higher education facility, Tianjin University. I accepted. We established earlier that we both had a love for photography so she encouraged me to bring my cameras. We met a few days later at ACES. The plan was to walk but there was a light drizzle in the city. We found a cab that would take her bike and a mile later we were there.
We grabbed dinner and I embarrassed myself by spilling hot and sour soup all over my khaki's. I told her the story of my sister and I visiting my grandmother and her friends for lunch a few months back and the two of us spilling and dropping everything all over the table. I introduced her to a new English vocabulary word: "clumsy."
"We can dress 'em up and make 'em look nice, but we still can't take 'em out."
Best grandmother quote ever.
My host was very nice. She was studying for her masters in chemistry. Against my expectations, she told me it was harder getting jobs like that as a women in China. I figured one of the better lasting effects of communism would be a reduction in sexism, especially at work. She wanted my company primarily to practice conversational English which is a component of the very competitive interviews in China. My roommate warned me that it's disappointing getting to know students and watching them graduate and try to find employment in the extremely dense Asian job market.
We walked around quite a bit. Three hours, actually. There are two main lakes at Tianjin University offering the most beautiful scenery I've witnessed in this fair city yet.
My cab driver back home was thrilled to see an American escorted to a cab by a young coed. I was confronted with a series of disbeliefs. He held the door open for her for a full minute before conceding she was not getting in with me. He refused, the entire ride, to admit to himself that I wasn't the least bit cognizant of his boy-to-boy joking and nudging concerning my host. This turned to him pulling my arm up to his, good naturedly, and then grabbing at my arm hair with a deep belly laugh. A minute later he was rubbing my belly. He pointed at McDonald's and gave it a thumbs up. "Bu, bu" I said and thumbed down. I acted out expanding my gut with my hands using International Hand Gestures (IHG) to say "high saturated fat content". The gesture was misread as a Non-Standardized Silly Foreigner [NSSF] invitation to jiggle a laowai gut. He laughed and pretended to steal my wallet on my way out of the cab.
Future People's Liberation Army officers drilling at the center of campus. More PLA cadet photos here.
Young People's Lake and the Tianjin skyline
Dorms and crepuscular rays at the second lake at the edge of campus. If I were to name it, I think I'd call it the Necking Pond. No no, not for anything I did. China is a crowded place. Eight students to a dorm. They take it outside.
Tags: Treyopia Tianjin University stories photography
