Sinoshine

We spent part of our day in the city last week. Getting to the city center by cab is always an experience. This cabby tried to charge us double the normal rate. I just laughed at him. And then I took a picture of his Chanel covered carseats.

Of course we made the obligatory stop at MacDonald's.

Because the weather is finally getting nice, it was really crowded. You know it's crowded when even the Chinese people are taking pictures of the crowds.

We headed for the river walk and passed by a few street calligraphers. There were about 5 or 6 older men and women with these huge brushes writing on the sidewalks. I have no idea what they were writing. After a bit of googling, I learned that these are just hobbyists. It's a fairly common pastime in the cities to practice (or showcase) calligraphy like this. As you can see this lady's is so-so.

But this guy's is really beautiful.

Next time we're in the city, I'll look for more examples. I love the idea of it being so temporal.

The river was also crowded with people just watching the boats go by.

And the boats here are definitely worth watching.

Maybe a boat ride is in our future. But for this trip, we continued down to watch the kites. I remember from past summers seeing hundreds of kites for sale near the river. We walked down to the area where everyone was flying them.

Most of these are purchased from small sales stands like this one.

And one more picture to share today - these workers on top of what was probably a ten-story building. No safety nets or anything.

BTW, it's currently 73 degrees and headed higher. Good bye spring. We barely knew ye.

Spotted at our local supermarket:

The grass is riz,
I wonder where the flowers is.

April 18 - We were blessed by yet another round of snowfall.

And not just a last whisper of snow to say goodbye to the winter, this snow came heavily for about an hour.

It did melt later in the day, but it was once again a reminder of how little we can control here.

P.S. They just turned the heat off for the year. Time to stack the extra blankets back on the bed!

Because PiR²

And we R dorks.

And we have no round pie pans.

Chinese (lunar) New Year was officially celebrated Feb 9-12, which was a few days before we arrived back in Harbin. However, like Christmas trees that last until February, the Chinese just don't want the fun to end and so remnants of the holiday stay long after the official festivities have ended. Same with the fireworks. And the fireworks here are NO JOKE! It's traditional to set off firecrackers whenever a new business opens up to frighten away evil spirits (or just because firecrackers are loud and awesome). Because we live in a college town, and because most businesses were temporarily closed during the holiday, every day starting at about 8am there's a new business opening or an old business reopening or maybe someone who just went out for a meal returning, so there's a round of firecrackers for luck.

The whole town is covered with firecracker papers.

It's traditional to decorate the house with words of luck or blessing. One of the most common is Fu, which means "fortune." It's hung upside down because the word for "upside down" has the same sound as "to arrive." But, this is only true in Mandarin. In Cantonese the word "upside down" is the same as the word "to run out," so don't be hanging your signs wrong!

Nothing goes uncovered with messages.

And when I said they were no joke about the fireworks, I meant NO joke.

Hawaii, take note. Although I didn't find out how much these cost, I have a feeling they were dirt cheap. These stands were set up on the last day of the lantern festival. That night there were hardly any "small" fireworks. Everyone was having their own Hilton Hawaiian Village show. This was the view of the apartments right behind us (in one of the worst night shots of all time). They were setting off huge fireworks all around our building, and if it hadn't been -10 degrees, I might have gone out to get some better shots!