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This year I went to Nanjing to spend part of the Chinese New Year holiday with some friends. We spent some time there, and also in the smaller cities of Wuxi and YiXing. I went to visit a friend's home town at YiXing - it's a small city famous for its teapot industry. The area has a particular kind of purple clay that is used mostly for making small teapots which have become famous in China. My friend has several classmates who have become well-known for their designs and their pots regularly sell for 10,000 RMB each. That's a lot of money for a 3-inch teapot. They have a special method or ritual for using these - a bit complicated, but interesting. The entire city is given over to this industry, and a huge new factory mall has been built, with 10,000 shops in it, all selling these teapots. Most pots have a photo and name of the artist who made them. I have never seen so many little pots in my life. | ||||||||||||
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I'm including a few photos of part of the interior of a railway station here, and one of our airports - for no good reason. Just look and pretend you're interested. Note the sign for Gate 223 at the Pudong Airport, and the flight schedule sign that lists 100 flights at a time. Larger than most. I have 3 photos of the Maglev Train, two of the exterior and interior (prior to boarding), and one of the track. You can see that the track is just a flat concrete pad with nothing to prevent the train from sliding off. The train travels at 430 Kms./hr., and is quite stable and silent; not too much wind noise. For the Shanghai Railway station, note the sign board listing the trains. You can see the T, D, and K trains, among others, each of which has different levels of comfort and speed. The D trains have a first-class section which is more roomy. Shanghai has 3 railway stations, this one being in the South of the city and a 30-minute commute. The main station is very close to the downtown core, and more convenient, but older and not as comfortable. However, the city has just completed a new railway station at HongQiao, very near the HongQiao airport, and all high-speed trains will be routed here from now on. That will probably make travel more convenient for everyone, since the HongQiao Airport has also been extended and will now likely carry all domestic flights - as well as the nearby train station feeding it. The Pudonog Airport will probably be confined to international flights, of which Shanghai has zillions. | ||||||||||||
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It has long been one of my disappointments that the fresh fruit available no longer has any taste. I can still recall as a child, eating peaches and apricots that were incredibly delicious, but those days are long gone. There are almost no fruits remaining that have any taste. Growers in California and other major fruit-growing areas of the US wanted to eliminate the natural blemishes that occurs on most fruits, so they were cross-bred through many generations to produce a cosmetically-perfect appearance. Then, they wanted to standardise the sizes, so they cross-bred for size consistency. Next, sporadic and uneven ripening was a problem since pickers would have to return for many days over a month or more to pick all the fruit. That was inconvenient and expensive, so the growers cross-bred the fruit to ripen as nearly as possible on the same day. Next, tenderness and delicacy were a problem because fruits are often damaged during packing and transportation. So, the growers cross-bred the fruits for toughness and hardiness. It's no secret they succeeded - you can take an apple in the supermarket and throw it against a wall and nothing will happen. Then, shelf life was a problem. Natural fruits will last at best only a few days before they begin to spoil, so growers cross-bred fruits that could be picked green and would last for months - and they do. And the result is apples that taste like cardboard - if they have any taste at all, and many don't. Eating a Granny Smith apple is like eating nothing. Peaches and apricots taste like soft wood, certainly not delicious in any sense. The growers were so interested in the cosmetics and durability that they sacrificed all the taste. And I believe few people left in the US or Canada know what good fruit actually tastes like. I mention this all as background for an article on China's Water Honey Peaches that appears in my Science Section. In an article for the Wall Street Journal, a reporter visited Shanghai and area and tasted these fruits for himself. His conclusion was that these are the finest and most delicious peaches in the world, and I fully concur with his conclusion. I was astonished to discover the quality of much of the fruit here - far surpassing anything I have known in recent years. And the reason is that the fruits here are bred for taste and flavor; residents don't mind an occasional blemish - they want the taste, and will tolerate the inconveniences. | ||||||||||||
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I spent one Chinese New Year's with a family at their home near Fudan University. They live in a compound containng maybe 40 apartment buildings of varying heights, from 8 to 30 stories, interspersed among small walkways, rivulets, gardens. And at midnight, all the families from all the apartments went outside into the walkways and simulaneously lit all their fireworks and firecrackers. Very quickly it was impossible to hear anything, for the noise. And soon it was also impossible to see anything, except incessant flashes of light, for all the smoke. The show lasted for 20 minutes or more, after which the ground was covered with a layer of red firecracker paper 2 or 3 inches thick. What an experience; Hundreds of fireworks launching at one time, repeatedly for 20 mintues. And millions of firecrackers exploding at the same time. You may have read that a large, expensive, and almost-finished office building and hotel in downtown Beijing burnt to the ground during the New Year Festival in 2009, credited to phosphorus from fireworks landing on the building roof. Too bad. It was their own fault; they organised a massive fireworks display without thinking of fire protection on the roof, and disobeyed the policemen who told them not to proceed. They had firemen and others stationed in all the appropriate places, but forgot one. We had no such troubles in Shanghai and, for another successive year, I bought armloads of the stuff and created my own light show right outside my apartment building. Long strings of 10,000 firecrackers each, boxes of firework rockets (25 per box) and assorted other stuff. The firecrackers are great. The fuses are all twisted together in double rows like two long cartridge belts laid side by side. You light one end and the whole works detonates within maybe two minutes. We lit several of these simultaneously and you have never heard so much noise or seen so much smoke in your life. The fireworks come in a cubic-shaped box with tubes standing vertically and the rockets inside, all wired together. There is one fuse on the outside of the container; you light that and it does the rest by itself, igniting one rocket every few seconds. The boxes can have from 25 to 100 rockets, depending on how much money you want to spend and how large a display you want. The larger boxes have larger tubes, bigger rockets that go higher and have a bigger bang and light display. And after we exhausted our arsenal I asked the security guard if he wanted to give me a broom to sweep up the two-inch thick carpet of firecracker mess on the ground. And he said, "No, we'll clean it up in the morning". I love this country. I grew up with firecrackers. We could buy them freely when I was a child and I have so many pleasant memories of these. The law changed when I was 14 or 15 and I was so sorry they were banned. But they aren't banned here. My second childhood. Noise, light, explosions, confusion, cordite, the smell of gunpowder, things that go 'Boom' in the night. And people ask me what I want for Christmas. | ||||||||||||
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