Thoughts about China while living in Vancouver, Canada

She decided that there were too many reasons for her to continue life in Vancouver. I can relate to that of course. So we decided that I should end my latest Dalian venture. On June 3, 2009 I was packed up and moved back to our humble abode at 3660 SE Marine Drive.

Consequently I decided to move my blogging from Spaces back to wordpress.com http://robertg69.wordpress.com and that's where I have been since and should remain for the foreseeable future.

This week Emma (Wen Yuan) and I have been living without Kelly (Yu Wenwen), her daughter. Kelly left on Monday for a 6 day trip to the US, Washington, Oregon and California, with the String Band from Killarney Secondary.

I found a new image from Suzhou this week:

Even the Internet Nanny in China accepts that enough is enough and now I can access my blogspot.com blog. I have tried it out this week and found that it offers better control over the placement of photos and text. So I will move back there.

And I don't have to do the HTML <> stuff anymore! See you at http://robertg69.wordpress.com Many blog stars, Winer, Scoble et al, are now posting regualrly at WordPress.com. Try it, you may like it!!

At 7 AM next Friday (Oct 21), I will be finishing my packing and preparing to take the taxi to the Dalian International Airport. There I will board China Eastern to fly back to Vancouver via Shanghai. Since that plane will be crossing the International Date Line, I will land in Vancouver at around 11AM Oct 21 Vancouver time.

Yuan has been living there since this past August 20. On Sept 1 she moved into our new Vancouver home. (see photo below)

Readers of my blog may be surprised at the brevity of this entry. The fact is that I have been feeling more and more China-ed out since Yuan and her daughter left. It is very humbling for this cynic to admit that I need to be with another person. But that is the new fact of my life. Adventure is not enough anymore, although I can easily make a case that living long term with Yuan and Wen wen, my stepdaughter (photo below) in China, Canada or wherever should certainly be an adventure in life and living. And I look forward to all of that!

Life in Dalian and on vacation trips away from Dalian have kept me busy.

Let's begin with life in Dalian. Since my wife got landed immigrant visas for her and her daughter from Citizenship and Immigration Canada, our life here was clearly coming to an end. Her mind during the month of July and August was focused on her return to Vancouver to continue her quest of Canadian citizenship and a separate (from him) participation in the Canada Pension Plan.

For my wife and daughter the other priority was getting to Canada in time for the new school year and Kelly's registration at a BC high school. So Yuan spent lots of time on the Internet researching rental properties in Vancouver with a view to finding a home close to a good high school.

With one thing and another Yuan decided to leave Dalian on August 20 last.

By then I had to come to terms with the prospect of staying in Dalian until late December 2005 and so live without the pleasure and joy of Yuan's company for 4 months. After telling her that I felt I couldn't do that. I resolved to split the difference by leaving Dalian to return to Vancouver no later than 2005 October 30.

In the meantime I decided to visit more of Shandong Province. So on Aug 21 I took the night ferry to Yantai. During the next two days I visited Penglai and Weihai. Photos below show some of the scenery I saw. Unfortunately I erased a 256MB flash drive by mistake and lost about 200 photos of this visit, especially the Penglai part.

Most Chinese people I have encountered seem to get the best from me.

Last Wednesday - Aug 3 - in the early AM, I picked up on a post in Danwei.com about a call for laowei to participate, all expenses paid, in a Photo Festival taking place in Tengzhou, Shandong, next to Lake Weishan.
 After checking this out in my trusty Lonely Planet Chinapedia, I found zip there about either Tengzhou or about Lake Weishan. But I know now that is not too surprising because few Chinese not from southern Shandong know anything about either the city or the lake.

And then my wife pooh-pooed me saying “”Go on, it’s too early to call that Beijing number!”  But I persisted and got her, because she is Chinese, to complete the call. Eight days later I can say without hesitation that I am very happy that she made that call to Chen Jian, as suggested by Danwei.com.

Yesterday, and about 24 hours late because of ferry interruption due to Taifeng Masta, I got back from a four day stay in Tengzhou for the 2005 Yintai International Lotus Photography Festival from Aug 4 till Aug 7.
 My bottom line here is that just about everybody I met and worked with during that time got the best out of me and I got a great China experience at minimum cost to me.

There was plenty of good food to eat, good drink and they gave me about 200 glossy prints (7X5) of different scenes in and around Tengzhou that I photographed.  

Best of all I met some of the nicest Chinese women I have known since arriving in Dalian 10 months ago. BTW I met my wife, who is the light and love of my life in Vancouver many months before I came to China.

I also met 4 interesting and amusing laowai, including a Shuchat from Montreal, Canada and a “beautiful American”. So thanks for the post and great tip Danwei!
 
Since there were 55some Chinese expert photographers from Beijing, Ji’nan and Tengzhou involved in the event, I felt that I was one of the most photographed personas in Tengzhou during those 3 days of photo shoots, some for the contest and some for plain fun. They liked my multicolored bandanas and my good humor. So I won no money prize, but the experience was the best prize for me.
 
Tengzhou is a lively provincial city, which can boast of a largish industrial base of the non-rust belt variety. Clearly, municipal administrators there work hand in hand with industry players to enhance the city and the attraction of Lake Weishan, with its extensive lotus ponds and wetlands. Waters of the lake look relatively clean. I tasted some of the fresh water fish from the lake and it was yummy.

Yintai Foods, a prominent employer in Tengzhou, has built a very attractive botanical themed restaurant and is adding at least one hotel and other leisure features in the area.  

Tengzhou is just an hour or so farther on the Shandong Expressway after Qufu and Tai’an. If you focus on the good things in Tengzhou, you will enjoy the visit.

Clintonian naivite

There are so many synctactic tricks in the neo-con playbook that it is not too useful to only discuss one of them. But this latest one has to be a dead give away of how fundamentally puerile their thinking really is. In fact, their main weakness seems to be that they suffer from an elephantine memory and a post-adolescent's fixation on a pet peeve. Or they don't forget much and they obsess about that that they don't or can't forget!!

Is there anything more puerilely naive than the neo-con approach to Iraq and the Middle East? But they facilely fasten (nice alliteration there!) on their obsession with Clinton & Co, which paid political campaign dividends for them last time out, to deflect our attention from their disastrous policies and execution thereof by reminding us how "ineffective" and even how "downright Un-American" the naive Clintonites were. They actually read and knew history! How naive of them!

The Shrub and his pretentious crowd of neocon intellectual supporters have never seen a book they couldn't ignore. And the world pays for their deliberate ignorance. Oh they say it's their strategic strength. Not getting distracted by all the trivial details is what makes for an efficient and hard-hitting executive!! The crassness of it all.

Their puerile hypocrisies may be catching up to them, but their commitment to and discipline about message are not going to go away easily, because that will mean they will be on their way out of political power.

Diogenes dixit!