Back from Wanshan Island.

Liz and I just returned with our American friend Luke from a little two-day sojourn out to Wanshan Island. I'll keep this short (photos will be up later) as I'm fairly exhausted from laying around on a beach, eating mountains of seafood, and enjoying the nightlife a little too thoroughly.

The beach wasn't awesome. It was more than adequate, but also kind of small, dirty and only accessible by boat. On the plus side, there were never more than about 50 people.

The village we stayed in was little more than a small fishing port. Had maybe three or four restaurants and the requisite bbq spot, all right on the water next to the fishing trawlers. Our hotel was fine - relatively clean, safe, bug free, nice view, and at the top of a million flights of stairs. Almost everyone we met was really nice (except some folks at Karaoke...long story). And the food...oh the food. Piles of seafood, all caught within the last few days and all freshly killed and cleaned. There were these kind of lobster/shrimp looking things called lei niao sha...and quarter-sized clams that you dip in spicy soy sauce...I could go on and on. More to come after we get some sleep.

Liz has a blog

"You know, you remind me of a poem I can't remember. And a song that may never have existed. And a place I'm not sure I've ever been to." - The Simpsons

Liz has a China blog too, called Footloose Fish - you can access it from the side panel or at:
http://footloosefish.blogspot.com/

Typhoon photos

When Liz and I were leaving for this great adventure, everyone told us to be careful, safe, and the like. Like a seven-year-old who's been told not to look at the sun during an eclipse, I decided to go against my own best interest and venture out with some new friends (Michael and Bev) into the remnants of a typhoon. I assure you, the typhoon was still blowing hard and, yes, we brought beer. Here are photos - I'm going to try to them with a Picasa slideshow because there are so many. Simply click on the slideshow to see full size versions of individual slides, or to see a larger slideshow.

Tim Wakefield approved

Just wanted to shoot out a belated congrats to the Sox on making the postseason yet again. As far as autumn in New England goes, I think I'll miss October baseball more than fall foliage, Sam Adams Octoberfest, and hating returning college students.

Special congratulations go to Jason Bay, who had to switch the dates of his timeshare in Sanibel to November for the first time in his career; to MVP Dustin Pedroia; to captain 'Tek and his robust .220 batting average; to Tito's fleece pullover; to Dice-K's finesse; and to Tim Wakefield, my all time favorite Red Sox player.

(Photo courtesy of Surviving Grady)

Yes, Tim, I also approve.

Okay, back to your regularly scheduled China programming...

The Island of my mind was not this dirty

We went to Qi'ao Island last week. It was actually pretty nice considering we were able to get there by bus. A side note on the buses here: they are very frequent, cheap, and efficient, and you thank your lucky stars if you are able to get an air conditioned one; they usually aren't too crowded except during rush hour; and absolutely nothing is in English (shocking I know). Anyway, we took a bus (including a detour where we went about 20 minutes beyond our stop and ended up in a Chinese office/industrial park) and were able to escape the throngs of people for a few hours.

Qi'ao Island is just off the coast of Tangjiawan on the northeastern tip of Zhuhai, and is accessible by a nice bridge via bus #85. Qi'ao isn't super exotic or anything, though I guess "exotic" is relative to whatever you know and expect. On a sliding scale, Qi'ao Island is more exotic than Rhode Island, Fire Island, and Staten Island. Actually it is more built up than I would have expected. There are several university affiliate branches out there, as well as some smallish factories, an international school, some restaurants (more on that later), and a few oldish fishing villages. I read that there are also old ruins and temples, but I didn't find any. It was about 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,000 Celsius) and we underestimated how much water a couple of gringos would need to stay strong, so our hike was perhaps not as awesomely awesome to the awesomest power as it could have been. That is to say that we cut it a little shorter than we would have liked. Oh well.

In any case, I'll let the pictures do the talking. Also, I'm still waiting on more suggestions for Snake Whiskey...

***

Here's the entrance to the mountainous "area" in which we went hiking...let's just call the "area" a park, because the actual name of the place is both long winded and completely nonsensical, as you can see by the writing above the archway:


I have no idea what "ollywood [sic] International Film and Television Culture City" is, as the park does not in any way involve "ollywood", "International", "Film", "Television", "Culture", or "City" (it may involve "and", and nature's inherent complexity probably requires a conjunction or two to keep on keepin' on). Side note: it's like the joke my highschool European history teacher used to tell about the Holy Roman Empire - "It was neither 'Holy' nor 'Roman' nor an 'Empire'." When Mr. Jackson said that, we just laughed and laughed and laughed.

Perhaps there was once a movie filmed there...as far as I could tell, there were just a few beat up little concrete huts, a giant radar tower on the mountaintop, some fishermen's shacks, a couple hard-to-access beaches, dead frogs, and menacing giant spiders on their equally menacing webs. Not sure what the scenery would give you cinematically, but clearly someone from the crew stole the "H" on the entrance sign when they found out that their contract didn't carry into post production.

Here's one of those dilapidated concrete huts I was talking about.


Here's a view of the coastline, taken as we were walking down a little dirt path.


After our hike, we found a beach a few miles away that had a really wonderful, quiet restaurant. We had some sort of pork dish (or maybe it was duck)...


...and the best tofu dish I've eaten in my entire life, cooked with noodle-thin mushrooms...


Also, out front was a guy raising and lowering a giant fishing net into the water using pedal power. You can see the net being raised on the giant harness, as well as the fisherman in the small covered area on the right.


Also, I'd like to note that we survived our first typhoon, which made landfall here on Tuesday afternoon and night. After staying up all night at a friend's apartment (typhoon party), we went out and took come shots of the destruction. I'll get those photos up this weekend.

Snake Whiskey

Yesterday, I saw my first bottle (jug) of whiskey (?) with a cobra inside it; I'm thinking about buying it and doing a more grotesque version of my buddy's chronicle of drinking an Agent Zero. I just asked Liz what she thought might be a good mixer for Snake Whiskey. Her answer: "regret." She's probably right. Personally, I think Coke would work, but read somewhere that you are supposed to do shots (which I hate) and then bite a slice of cantaloupe (like a lime after tequila). Any ideas? Not trying to get bombed...just hoping for some interesting takes on this exotic, possibly medicinal liquor.

Snake Whiskey and apple juice probably wouldn't taste very good, but at least you could call it an "Original Sin." A good drink name would be "the Indiana Jones" (as in "why'd it have to be snakes?"), but I haven't gotten a whole lot further than that.

I'm now accepting submissions - all drink ideas that DO NOT include consuming the actual snake will be considered. All drink ideas that DO include consuming the actual snake will be hilarious.

Island photos, Autumn festival, Gongbei and more

Here's the second round of photos. For some reason I have been terrible about taking photos of a lot of the things that to me make this place so unique: the vendors, the random guys on bicycles carrying van-sized bundles of styrofoam and cardboard, the food, Chinese fashion, and the like. I may have to commandeer Liz's point-and-shoot to take some photos when I leave my bulky kit at home. She won't mind...I think she kind of likes me.

Here's an old rundown apartment building across the way from where we were staying after we first arrived. I'm not sure, but my guess is that these types of places were first built when Zhuhai started to expand beyond a fishing village some 20 years ago. They're still around - moreso away from commercial areas - and are not the type of place that I would want to live.

Here is Ye Li Dao (or Ye Li Island) during the day, as seen from our 18th floor apartment.

The boxy, temple-looking thing on the left is actually a restaurant, which is visible at night...

I took this during the Mid-Autumn Festival. If you don't know what the Mid-Autumn Festival is, let me break it down for you by way of a simple equation: Halloween + (Phish concert - illegal drugs) + China + (4th of July - universal drunkenness) + Lunar Calendar = Mid-Autumn Festival. There are families picnicking everywhere. Little kids carry around traditional paper lanterns. People are happy. Glowsticks. Blinking, lit up toys. Disgusting mooncakes (no one likes them). And old people dance in the streets!

I probably snapped off 40 frames to get this scene: just across the causeway on Ye Li Island, they set up a circular fenced off area and played Chinese swing music (for lack of a better description). One by one, older Chinese couples would get up and dance. Well, more shuffle around in rhythm while holding hands. And on and on it went.

Ye Li Island has a path that goes all the way around it and takes a few hours to walk, or so I'm told. We only made it about 15 minutes in. I snapped these photos of people approaching on bikes and on foot. It was very crowded, in a good way.

Here's a shot of some locals I took today in Gongbei - the busy, somewhat touristy area that includes the Macau border.

The bike carts you see are often filled with anything from trash to produce.

Not sure what to make of this. It was in front of a hotel-looking building, which I assume was actually a government building of some kind.

As you can perhaps tell by the glass tubing, the plane gets lit up at night (I'll try to get a photo if I'm ever in the area).

The rest of the shots were taken from Lover's Road in Gongbei, about an hour before sunset.

Here's Liz, with Macau in the background. Or Macau, with Liz in the foreground...however you want to look at it. Regardless, if you click through and blow up the photo, you can see the crown of the Grand Lisboa in the skyline just above Liz's head.

Here are two shots up Lover's Road in the other direction. You can see part of sprawling Zhuhai in the first...

...and a semi-funky shot where I was playing around with the f-stop.

We were seaside during low tide, so there was a flock of Little Egrets jumping around in the mud looking for dinner.

Liz told me they were Little Egrets. I have no idea. The only birds I see these days are either skinned, roasted, and hanging in shop windows, or are locked in little wire cages waiting to be skinned, roasted, and hung in a shop window. As an aside, we had lunch yesterday at an outdoor noodle place that adjoined a sidewalk stall where you could have a lady kill, pluck, and gut a live chicken or goose for you. Good noodles. I plan on going back during the chicken stall's off hours.

As I said, it was low tide. There was also a guy wading around in a larger tidal pool looking for small crabs.

Chinese Quahoging, my friends. Chinese Quahoging.

First day photos in Xiangzhou

People have been asking for photos, so here they are in the approximate order I took them. Liz and I had time the first day we were in town to walk about in our area (called Xiangzhou...sort of the Brooklyn of Zhuhai, as best I can tell), so these first few photos are as close as you'll get to my first impressions (minus, regrettably, any food photography). Click on the photos to see higher res versions. At some point I'll get a Flickr account and make this photo thing a little more streamlined, but currently I feel like some content is better than no content

This is sort of typical highrise architecture in Zhuhai. Usual setup on the main boulevards (or "beilu") is a 20-story apartment or office building with a one- to four-story shop of some kind at the bottom. In the pictures above and below, there are large electronics stores at the bottom.

Same building pictured here on the left. Our apartment is in the second set of tan buildings on the left. We're on the other side of the building, 18th floor (more on that in a bit).

Two old men lounge around in the shade of an alley; one of them is some sort of cobbler. It's at least 90 degrees out. Every alley and sidestreet is full of people fixing things (cobblers, tailors, small engine mechanics), cleaning things (carpets, furniture, dishes), and, of course, selling things (clothes, shoes, sunglasses, noodles, whole roasted chickens, dried fish, produce, Chinese medicine, DVDs, juice, tea, and beer). I'll make sure I get some shots of the different vendors and post them here. Important to note is how safe I feel here. Other than the threat of pickpockets and the occasional drunken idiot, I think common sense (no dark alleys at 2am) will keep us very safe.

Silk flowers in a storefront.

A cat leashed to a tree. The angle of its neck makes me think it's giving me the once over.

Banyan trees line one side of Lover's Road. Lover's Road (more pictures to come in future posts) is the main thoroughfare that meanders along the seaside in Zhuhai.

We took a bus south along Lover's Road and hopped off in a beachy part of Jida, a slightly less residential part of Zhuhai than Xiangzhou. We stopped, had some malted beverages and watched the sky turn dark. This little seaside bar (an anomaly in Zhuhai) channels its inner Thailand and places some lanterns inside kayaks planted upright in the sand. I got this photo by putting my camera on our table and telling everyone not to move. I need a damn tripod. More to come soon.

First post, two weeks deep

Hello everybody. My apologies for the delay in setting this up. For reasons that are too frustrating and inane to recount, I didn't get a stable internet connection until about two days ago. If I had my act together, I would have diligently written down my initial thoughts upon arrival ("wow, everything is in Chinese!" "Wow, everyone smokes everywhere - even in elevators!" "Wow, Cantonese people are short!" "Wow, Chinese fashion is like reading a newspaper with a migraine!"). Sadly, you'll just have to dive right in, without the all the wonderment of encountering any place for the first time. By now I've been living and working here for nearly two weeks - hardly a veteran, I know - so please accept my apologies if I casually throw something out there without explaining it. That is not to say that I know everything about where I am, etc., but that the part of this blog that was to be about discovery will start in medias res, so to speak.

That leads me to the purpose of this blog, titled "Separate Incidents": firstly, I require a forum to write my thoughts, lest this whole experience be lost. I've also been told that expat English teachers' writing skills sometimes erode after a year or two of speaking simply, so I'm trying to stave off that brand of scurvy with a lime of eloquent blogging.

I've also recently taken up photography (Nikon D40 with a 18-55mm kit lens and a 55-200mm telephoto w/ VR, if you're interested) and want to have a place to show off pictures, get some input, and generally give the hobby a sense of purpose. Yes, I have a need to display whatever I shoot - as the good book said, you don't light a candle and put it under a bucket (or bushel). As I've only been taking photos (with effort) for a few months, I can't really say what type of photography you're going to see here; there will probably be landscape/cityscape shots, some portraiture, LOTS of food photos, and maybe some artsy fartsy pieces that won't make me look like a total hack.

Lastly and most importantly, Separate Incidents is to be a window into my daily life here in sunny Zhuhai for family, friends, colleagues, and anyone who wants to read it. Phone calls to/from China are expensive; emails are fleeting; letters are slow; and I need you folks to feed my latent narcissism. Anyone who wishes to reach out can do so either in the comments section of the most recent post, or can email me at the usual place.

Separate Incidents is nothing more than a collection of observations, photos, and, of course, the occasional rant about the Boston Celtics or the Red Sox. Hopefully we all learn something from this.