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.