Ambra in China

Here's some photos of our first day out on the town with our visiting friend. Ambra is my former student from Phoenix. If you don't know Ambra, you wish you did. I could tell you great things about her all day long. Among other things, she was the moot court U.S. national champion (oral arguments before actual judges).

But I'm sticking to the basics here. Here we are out in downtown Suzhou.

Construction Scene

I haven't been posting again. Here is a quick entry of a common scene here in China. I can't remember whether or not this is one of my photos, or one I gathered from somewhere else (I've taken several much like this, in any case).

All that glitters is not caulk

As I have written before, entirely too much of my life in China revolves around trying to fix things. First of all, that already is my nature, as I am an obsessive fixer. Second of all, every thing in China needs to be fixed.

This is no country in which to be an obsessive handyman, as I have mentioned ten or twenty times before. Everywhere I turn, something needs done or done right. However, this new item takes the grand championship.

I was walking down a hallway a few days ago. There is a large floor crack that has been covered with a metal threshold. The piece was sticking up well off the floor, so I pulled it off and set it to the side so that no one would trip over it.

I expected that the piece would be held down with caulk. Everything in China is held together with caulk. The only problem is that no one knows how to apply it.

This reminds me that I have a long list of caulk-related photographs that I have intended to post. I will get back to them, even though this particular entry is going to supersede all of them. Other than its general and appropriate uses, I have seen caulk used to do the following: hold down floor tiles, hang pictures, fix pipes, plug wall holes, and on and on. It's as if caulk was the first home-improvement substance they ever learned about, and they think it fixes everything. Caulk is the duct tape of China, except that it is even less useful than duct tape, which is actually only really good for, I don't know, sealing ducts? I was already horrified by how many lame attempts at duct tape repairs I see in America. It is far worse with caulk in China. There are likely to be entire buildings here held up with caulk.

Actually, that last one is a little too close to the truth. I don't like thinking about the construction of Chinese buildings, as I just barely noted in my last post.

Back to the caulk. I see it everywhere, but rarely have I ever seen it applied well. Honestly, I think that half the problem is that the Chinese construction boom is so vast, that anyone who has any legitimate skills and experience already has a job somewhere. The repairs are all left to the unskilled.

Whatever. Back to my story. I pulled up this metal threshold, and then inspected. I'd like you to look closely at the photograph and see what they had used to hold it down. Don't read ahead until you have guessed.



That's right, boys and girls... it was held down with....

GLITTER GLUE! That sparkly decoration that has graced millions of grade school posters!

I really should make more jokes here, but I'm speechless.


I went down the same hallway only 1/2 hour later. I'll say this for Chinese workers, they are prompt. They were already sticking it back down. This time, they were using a hot-glue gun.

I suppose that is better than using duct tape, but maybe that's next.

Maybe we should live in a Yurt

I don't have any time these days. Here's a quick one, borrowing from the efforts of someone else. An apartment building fell over in Shanghai. Link here.

Pray for us that there is never an earthquake.

My New Favorite Book

Some months ago I found a book in the school library. The Longman's Visual Dictionary of Chinese is a treasure trove of laughs. I tried to find my own copy on the internet, but to know avail. So I have instead scanned a number of pages, and I will share them with you, dear reader, whenever I feel like it.

The pages cover almost an amazing range of topics. Some are absurdly specific. Most are useless. To say more would be to deprive you of the joy of discovery, so you will just have to wait until I make a new post. If, however, are visiting a Chinese machine shop anytime soon, and really need to know how to say "geared headstock" or "wheel flange" anytime soon, just let me know.

In the meantime, I will start with a page that teaches you necessary vocabulary that is much closer to home: underwear and baby clothes.




Now as you can see, there is a wide variety to choose from. All appear extremely uncomfortable. By the way, this book was published in Hong Kong in 1997, which was the year of the handover from Great Britain. I suspect that they just recycled pictures from some older book, however there are a few pages that almost appear to be calculated insults of the mainland Chinese as backwards and provincial. More on that later. The resolution on the page is good enough to see all the illustrations and text clearly if you click on the image. I will highlight just two.

This was my personal pick for "most uncomfortable looking underwear" (unless it is number 13). In fairness, I would hazard a guess that no one in China under the age of 75 is wearing anything remotely similar.




Now if the picture above looks like something Medieval, what you see below is actually still widespread in China. "Widespread", of course, is a very bad pun in this case, because that is exactly the pose in which you see a whole lot of Chinese toddlers, as their mothers hold them over gutters, tree wells, and sometimes the middle of the sidewalk. Sometimes the toddlers just decide to take care of business on their own schedule. A friend of ours got peed on by a little boy standing in a shopping cart next to her in line at a store.




Disposable diapers are for sale in the stores these days. They probably remain too expensive for most Chinese. If you want proof that bare baby butts are still a common sight in China, here is a photo for you. In case you are wondering, the front of those pants is just as wide open as is the back.



Occasionally, I feel guilty for taking surreptitious pictures of people, but they certainly don't have any compunction about doing it to us, so I guess it is all fair.

Finally, this one reminds me of another little saying we have around here: "China doesn't have a five-second rule".

Think about it.

Halloween

When we were making our original preparations to move to China, one of the ways we sold the kids on the idea was to promise that they could get really cool custom Halloween costumes. Last year at this time, we were still in our hunter-gatherer stage (my oft used label for the early months in which we struggled to get established here), so we didn't get a chance to do it.

This year, we took the whole family out to a tailor in the "Wedding Street" area of town. The soon-to-be married Chinese love to take big sets of photographs in a wide variety of poses and costumes. That is worth a blog post itself, but I don't myself have any copies of Chinese wedding photos. In any case, that makes Wedding Street the place to go to get costumes.

One thing worth pointing out is that the relative costs of materials vs. labor are the inverse of what they would be in the U.S. Here, the materials are expensive, but the labor is cheap. That really came out in the pricing of these costumes. John's costume, which has lots of details, was the least expensive. Mine, which uses the most cloth by far (a floor length toga plus mantle), was the most expensive. Lee's, for which the entire dress is finely pleated, was still less than mine.

Just in case you can't figure out the costumes, here is a summary:

I am Caesar, not any Caesar in particular.

Lee is Cleopatra.

Allyne is some character from some Japanese comic book that she likes.

John is a Napoleonic British soldier.

And Emma... well, her costume: "is a dress like a woman would wear in the Civil War era, but the sort of dress for regular day-to-day wear, it's not a fancy ball dress or anything."

And that list right there tells you a whole lot about our family.



Thanks to Jen Hughes for the pictures.

Nothing to see here

It has been a very, very busy school year for everyone lately. That hasn't left me with much to write about (unless you really want me to explain how to diagram tariffs and quotas and calculate the resulting consumer and producer surpluses).

I don't have any new pictures. I still have a number of old ones stored on my other computer that I can use sometime. However, I won't be having any new photos anytime soon. That is because my camera was stolen.

Like most other minor misfortunes, at least I can milk a story out of it. Or at least a cautionary tale. A street thief got it from me in Shanghai. If I knew exactly how he did it, then I suppose that he wouldn't have been able to do it.

It is embarrassing really. I've traveled a lot of places over a lot of years, and never had anything stolen from me. That is because I always scrupulously followed my own rule, which was to never, ever put anything down. Last year, when I took a bunch of high school kids to Europe. I had coached them thoroughly about street crime. There is no way to be totally safe, but fortunately, not a single one of my kids lost anything. That was not true of the group of kids traveling with us, at least two of whom lost things to pickpockets.

To make a long story short: Lee asked to borrow my camera. I tried to hand it to her, but she wasn't ready for it, so I set it down next to my hip on a park bench while I used my cellphone. It was dark, there was no easy way to approach the bench from behind. Nevertheless, two minutes later, the camera was gone.

Oh well. One can't keep an unbroken record forever. On that note, traveling is a bit like riding a horse. If you keep riding horses, eventually one of them will throw you off. Likewise, if you walk enough public streets for long enough, the pickpockets will get you. They are professionals, and that is their craft.

Speaking of cowboy analogies, I suppose I can take solace that once, many years ago, they got my grandfather when he was in Paris. And that was no mere pickpocketing. They tripped him, and when he put his hands down to catch himself, they stripped bare his pockets. Big Don was, as the title implies, a very big, intimidating cowboy; and yet that didn't deter them in the least.

Then again, he probably looked totally lost in Paris, and that is all the opening it takes for those guys. I've seen the Gypsy gangs at work in France with my own eyes, and until you have seen them, you really can't fully believe how good they are at what they do. Even when you watch it, you can't truly see how they could clear someone out so quickly (and if anyone wants to call me a bigot for linking street theft to our Roma friends, then you haven't actually lived in Europe).

All in all, not a huge loss. Better than having them get my wallet or passport. It was just a two year old pocket camera. It did have some pictures on it I wanted, but nothing truly irreplaceable. I'll buy another one sometime, but I'm not looking forward to it. It is so hard to shop for electronics here. If you go to established stores, you are pretty much safe from the counterfeits. Still, it is hard to comparison shop, and the prices on anything Western quality are always just as high as Western prices (and often higher).

So no photos today.

We have had some extra teenagers staying in our apartment for the last three nights. They are here for a big athletic tournament, and the school was short on hosting arrangements. We were going to take two anyway, but we stepped in and offered to take four. A couple people have suggested that we are crazy for doing so. I reply that that may well be true, but it is only a coincidence.