The Pants Go Viral

(Link to original site for photo above.  Link to Google Translation)

 Remember the "Pair of Pants" building from previous postings here?   Well it seems that this unconventional skyscraper is getting quite a bit of attention over the past few days, at least on the Internet here in China.  According to the China.org.cn website:

"A netizen from Suzhou uploaded photos of the skyscraper to his microblog on Aug. 27, and was quickly forward more than 4,400 times despite the bloggers limited audience."

 The India Times also has a good article regarding the explosion of opinions on Chinese websites.  The building has looked like a pair of pants for a good six months now, so I don't understand why the public debate is just started within the past few days. 

Regardless, it has quickly snowballed so that the Chinese sites are awash with comments...I hear over half a million now.  And, best of all, there are Photoshopped images.  I've included a few of them in this post as a cross-cultural-enlightenment-opportunity.  Links are provided to the original websites (just in case there is someone in China who is concerned about intellectual property).  There is also a link to a Google translation of the site.  (Google Translate is good...but it still can be pretty sloppy.  Be warned.) 

(Link to original site for photo above.  Link to Google Translation)

Most of the critics are calling the building 秋裤, or QiuKu.  (That's the caption in the cartoon above.)   Ku means pants.  Qiu means Autumn.  I'm not really sure what the two characters mean when taken together, but I believe it translates as "long johns".   I believe that because, right now, if you do a Google search for images with 秋裤, about half of the images displayed are of the Pair-of-Pants-Building.  The other half are of people in long underwear.

(Link to original site for photo above.  Link to Google Translation)

Other people are calling the building "jeans" or "hip huggers".  Some have suggested they continue building another 20 stories or so and put a bra on it.  Opposing the criticism are a  few brave souls defending the architecture as art.  (After all, they say, the 19th century Parisians thought the Eiffel Tower was an eyesore at the time it was being built.)  But my favorite people are the ones that bypass the serious debate and move straight into the mockery....by grafting bodies upon the structure.

(Link to original site for photo above.  Link to Google Translation)

 As a side note, the official name of the pair of pants building is DongFangZhiMen (东方之门) which translates as "Gateway to the East" or "Door to the Orient".   If you're ever in the neighborhood, then that is also the name of the subway stop that you would get off at to come visit our apartment.

(Link to original site for photo above.  Link to Google Translation)

As another right now if you do an Internet search on images related to 东方之门, you can find some other Photoshop humor.  Over the next few days, there may be some new ones.  Check it while you can.  I expect that they will fade away with time, as do all things on the Internet.

(Link to original site for photo above.  Link to Google Translation)

ps:  If you like these Photoshopped images, then go to this link and scroll through the full set of photos.  It's probably the best collection out there.  It's in Chinese, but just click on the right arrow to scroll through the 20 or so photos.

(Link to original site for photo above.  Link to Google Translation)

TaiMu Shan

 In China, there are many famously historical mountains - the sacred mountains of Buddhism and Taoism.  These mountains (and just about every other hill more than 10 feet high) are covered with ancient shrines and monuments and a temple or two.

 TaiMu Shan, in FuJian province, is not among these historical mountains.  Sure, there is a temple up there.  But the main attraction of the mountain is more natural than supernatural.  It is like a little slice of Yosemite or Yellowstone.  It is blessed with dramatic rock formations and stunning views of the coastline of the East China Sea.  It also has an assortment of trails, each with its own unique scenery and obstacles.

 One of the obstacles on our trail was called the "ray of sunshine", or something like that, where the path wound it's way through a narrow gap in the rock formation.  They call it the "ray of sunshine" because that is all you can see as you squeeze your way through.  You can see the ladies below going down to the entry.

I was about 10 yards past this point (where the ladies are above) when I realized that there must not be very many personal injury lawyers in China.   The sunlight was choked off to almost nothing.  It was impossible to see the pathway as it continued steeply downward and the stones became more slimy and slippery.  But the lack of light became academic - the gap became too narrow to tilt one's head to look downward. 

At one point, the gap became narrower than I am thick (From back-of-shoulder-blade to front-of-chest).   I had to work my way through sideways on one foot and one arm.  I may be a fat American, but I am not the fattest one you will ever find.  One more inch around my middle and I would have become a permanent fixture of TaiMu Shan.  (By the way, the women in our group were nimbly slipping through the crack like a rabbit in a rabbit hole.  The fact that I have a bigger chest, from back to front, than all of them should tell you something about the physique of the average Chinese woman.)  

At the top of TaiMu Shan are dramatic knobs of granite, like the one shown above.  Some brave workers have constructed a kilometer or so of walkways around the circumference of these knobs.  The walkway rests upon concrete beams cantilevered from the nearly-vertical rock. You can see the walkway in the photo above.  When  stood on the platform, I couldn't imagine how the poor construction workers installed those support beams.   It's a long way down to flat ground, so any kind of scaffolding would have been a remarkable feat.  

 The platforms allow you to walk almost completely around the top of TaiMu Shan.  The scenery is spectacular, and was especially so on the day we went because the skies were sunny and crystal clear.  The photo above shows an inlet of the East China Sea, with a small town nestled at the shore. (Note that this is not the beach-side village we visited earlier.  That was much smaller.)  The photo below shows the terraced sides of the hills down below.

 Finally, you can see below a photo of our group that went to TaiMu Shan...totalling about 50 of my co-workers and their families.  Very nice people and a pleasure to travel with.  (I am at the back at dead center.  You can just barely see my head poking up above the others.)

Rice, Tea, Corn

Fujian province is a far cry from the flat lands of Suzhou and the Yangtze River flood plains.  There is a saying:

"If we divided Fujian into ten parts, then eight parts are mountains, one part is water, and one part is farmland".

As you move back from the beach-side village near XiaPu, away from the beach, there is a ribbon of that rare farmland that is flanked by the hills.  The villagers, I assume, must farm this land.  Maybe they split their time between fishing and farming, or maybe some fish and others farm.  Close to the houses there are patches filled with corn and squash and other vegetables. (Kitchen gardens I suppose.)  Beyond those are acres and acres of rice.

The climate is sub-tropical, which means that the winters are pretty mild.  For the rice farmers, this means a nearly perpetual growing season that yields multiple harvests.  The rice fields near the beach had crops in all stages of growth.  In the top photo, you see in the foreground some newly planted shoots (stalks, seedlings, whatever you call them).  Behind are plots at different stages of maturity.  The photo above shows a plot that was recently harvested.

The photo above....it shows one of the garden plots I mentioned.  (Just to prove I wasn't making stuff up.)  In the center are stalks of corn that would make any Indiana boy homesick.  The Chinese love corn on the cob, especially as a street food that can be eaten on the run.  The cobs are impaled on a wooden stick which serves as a handle, first for the preparer to retrieve the ears from the boiling pot and then for the consumer to munch on the ears like a Popsickle.

But more than anything, the Chinese love their rice.  All Asians, for that matter, love their rice.  They can talk for hours about the different types of rice and how each type requires different preparation and has different texture and is suitable for different dishes.   Asians know rice like the Irish know potatoes.

The husband of Betty, my guardian angel, was excited to be going to dinner in Fujian.  The rice in Fujian, he educated me, is of longer grain and fluffier than that grown to the north.  Not like the basmati rice of India, he said, but more like the Jasmine rice of Thailand.  (I felt like a beer drinker listening to a Frenchman talk about wine.)  Delicious and sweet, he said the rice is.  "The best in China?", I asked.  He thought hard for a few seconds and then answered that, in his opinion, the best came from the Northeast of China, at the northern limit of the growing range.  Because the rice there can not grow as fast, it has longer to concentrate the flavors of the sunshine and the sea breezes.  So he tells me.

The photo above shows newly harvested rice, drying on the asphalt road that leads to the village.  Fishing nets, rope, rope fibers, rice straw, and  rice - everything that the villagers needed to dry was laid out on that road.

Some of the surrounding hillsides are terraced to create additional land for crops.  At the lower levels of the hillsides, the terraced plots are filled with rice.  Higher up the hillsides, it is more valuable to grow tea  The photo above shows a plot of tea plants.  (My colleagues call them trees, but I think it would be more accurate to call them bushes.)  Fujian province is famous for "white tea", and I would guess that is what we see above.  My understanding is that the white tea is consumed mostly because of its medicinal reputation rather than its flavor. 

Of the teas from FuJian, the most prized is the Fuding White Tea.  Fuding is a city just a few miles away from the beach side village near XiaPu.  So it's a reasonable guess that these terraced hillsides are Fuding-White-Tea-in-the-making.

In China, the local palates are highly discriminating in their tastes for tea and rice.  When it comes to corn-on-the-cob, though, not so much.  There is no such thing as sweet corn as we know it.  No tender, sweet, milky kernels of white or gold.  All of the corn is field corn, with no-parking-yellow kernels matured to the point of being tough and fibrous.  It is bland, it is starchy, and it is most definitely not sweet.  I hope that, with time, capitalism will fix this.  Surely there are millions to be made growing and selling real sweet corn here.