Post 129. Windy.

Apologies for being absent, my travels to Texas left me with a wicked summer cold so I was down and out pretty much all last week.  But I'm almost back to normal, and since my travel camera got dunked in a Boundary Waters lake twice, I am now sporting a new camera, a fun Nikon V1, and had to get out and play with it.

As I was flying home from Texas, my home was experiencing lots of storms.  (Needless to say I wasn't overly thrilled at getting into airplanes knowing I was flying into the storms - but I have moderate faith that if the flight doesn't get cancelled it'll land somewhere - and I really wanted to get home even if it was midnight on Friday night.)

And indeed there were storms.  The straight-line winds were so strong that my husband said they spent an hour in the tornado shelter at work. 

So today I ran out an photographed some of the damage.

(There was one photo that remained untaken.  The bugs, these weird long, skinny, bent bugs were in the grass by the thousands.  I braved them a couple times, but on the drive home as I saw this neat arrangements of three or four very large trees, all pulled up from their roots, lying on their sides all in a row.  But when we pulled over on the grass the millions of bugs came up out of the grass, I just couldn't make myself get out - and I would have had to walk maybe 1/10 of a mile into a golf course.)

But I had fun getting the shots I got.  The bent billboard is my favorite.  That was some wind!

See on,
Julee

Post 128. Leaving New Orleans.

I finished working so I came to the airport early. No luck getting an earlier flight, but I actually find airports oddly relaxing.

(Odd for someone who fears flying as much as I do.)

But I suppose it is relaxing because when at the airport my only purpose is to get on an airplane. I don't work or check work email. I watch people, I surf the net, I read, I play games on my iPad. (My current addiction is Candy Crush Saga. Fun awesome.)

Plus for long layovers I will get a bite to eat or maybe treat myself to a Starbucks.  Basically I just let myself have fun.

So today i am playing and waiting.  There is a chance of storms where I am heading, but hopefully they'll hold off until I get home.

So here are my photos for today, a neat sculpture at the airport and me with my feet up.  (This airport actually has these metals things in front of the seats precisely for putting your feet up. Brilliant!)

See on.
Julee

Post 127. St. Rose, Louisiana

After a slightly bumpy flight into New Orleans, followed by a day spent thinking about quality management systems, I headed out for a walk from my hotel.

The hotel is in a business park in St. Rose, and I started walking towards the office to reinforce the location and increase the likelihood I would remember the route in the morning.

As I walked I noticed a plane coming in low right in front of me.  Awesome photo op.  But to get all if the power lines and businesses and streets out of the photo I wanted to get as close as possible, which meant walking about a half mile down a dirt road along a wooded area.

As I started I was loving the hundreds of dragonflies. Then I saw a rabbit. Then the bugs got thicker. Moths, bees, and unknown insects.  Then many began landing in me. Something got stuck in my hair.

Then a plane came and it was too low to capture well in a photo. (Probably made worse by my lack of a real camera. Whoa is me.) I made it about two more minutes before I had to turn around and run away from the bugs. I just couldn't take any more.  Too much lag time between planes, and too many things crawling on me.

Once out of the woods I started looking for other photo ops. There were palm trees and flowering trees that were lovely. I was so caught up in enjoying the scenery that I was startled by a security guard who pulled up beside me to ask if I was all right

That was really sweet, but I don't know if I looked really red because it was so hot or if he just wasn't used to seeing a woman out walking - there were no sidewalks so I was walking along the street.  Either way I asserted him I was just a half a block from my hotel and that I was okay.

So here are my photos for today.  (I actually googled to see how far the nearest Best Buy was because a phone camera, especially in bright sun, is not quite as satisfying as either of my Nikons.). I sure hope my husband comes home with some good shots from his trip.

See on.
Julee

Post 126. Houston, we have landed.

My adventures this week take me to Houston, Texas and New Orleans.  First up, Houston.

Monday night was a lovely night to fly to Houston, and despite the hour I had to pause after landing to capture a photo of a fabulous cow in the airport.

Unfortunately my travel camera went with my husband into the Boundary Waters, and since I have a multiple leg flights I didn't want the hassle of checked baggage so no room for a DSLR.  But the phone works. Probably I wouldn't want a giant blown up picture of the cow anyway.

Then I was taken out to lunch to a neat place, Monument Restaurant. Great scenery of the waterway and it was right by a battleship memorial park. Awesome battleship.

Houston I like what I have seen so far.

See on.
Julee

Post 125. Eating (and drinking) in China.

A few final comments on my exciting trip into China.  First, it was an overwhelmingly positive experience.  I think I was fortunate to have primarily seen Changzhou because from what others who visited other cities have said, Changzhou was very modern and upscale and did not have the extreme crowding that can exist in other cities.  We did not experience any fighting for train space or walking shoulder to shoulder among throngs of people on the streets.

Nanjing was busier than anything in Changzhou, but the trains were very empty and in the park/mausoleum while there were people it was not unpleasantly crowded.

I had full on Chinese meals twice.  I knew these meals would be nothing like eating Chinese in the U.S., and I wasn't sure what to expect.  Our first meal I chose barbeque, but we were with three Chinese gentleman who did all of the ordering, so we had a nice mix of foods, everything from chicken and pork on a stick, to fish, to shrimp, to veggies.  The only thing I did not like was the boiled shrimp dumpling.

Here is the inside of the first restaurant, isn't it cute?

 Our meal.  Several fish dishes and some peas off on the right.

 Interesting fish yes?   It was quite good.

This was the second restaurant.  This was my favorite of the two.  Several truly delicious items here. 

These fish (crawfish?) were yummy.

But it might have been the baijiu (at least that is what we were told we were drinking).  We only sipped our one shot, so it lasted a while.  I didn't think it was any more terrible than hard liquor at home.

A fabulous treat - fried peanuts in balsamic vinegar.  I even managed to eat some of this meal with chopsticks.  I was told I was competent if I could get to the point where I could pick up peanuts with the chopsticks.  I totally did!

I thought this was chicken.  It was good.  When my husband was going for a second portion he pulled out the head.  Maybe it was actually duck.  And he no longer felt hungry for that second helping.

Both evenings our Chinese guests were excited that I was up for some beer.  I do not actually drink beer in the U.S., but I can tolerate it.  I was a bit worried about how easily I would be able to enjoy a Chinese meal since I am not much of a fish eater, and I'm not terribly adventuresome when it comes to new and exotic flavors, so I figured a beer might help.  Turned out the beer was really good.   Plus the food was good on its own too.  

 

All in all China was a win!

See on,
Julee

Post 124. Nanjing, China.

Our last day in China.  Journey to Nanjing.

(The Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum, our goal for the day.)


Jason had been on the train for work, and he decided we could handle the train by ourselves.    I was less sure, primarily because I worried about how we would ensure we made it from the destination train station, to some tourist site, and back to the train station since no one would speak English.  But after a brief few moments of panic, I agreed we should go but I left making arrangements to make the travel possible to my husband.

I had read, an another American my husband had chatted with, had suggested if we ventured out for a day that we should head to Nanjing.  Our concierge wrote two sentences in Chinese on a piece of paper.  "I need to go Ming Xialong."  and "I need to go to Nanjing Train."

(We realized later that these sentences had been written with a sharpie like pen, not terribly conducive to a day outside in the rain, but we managed to protect them from getting wet - so spoiler alert - all ends well.)

The train station was like any train station.  I had been worried about how we would ensure we got on the correct train, since they had departure times just like an airplane.  This just goes to show how little experience I have with trains, I had imagined a subway like system with trains every couple of minutes, so until we got there I couldn't imagine how we would get it right.  Turns out they have a fabulous system.  There is a big waiting area, inside.  On a big board are the upcoming trains, and your train # is red (for don't get out of your chair), yellow (almost time to walk to your platform), and green (get up, now you can walk to your platform).  And you insert your ticket into a turnstile that verifies you are indeed allowed out on the tracks.

Easy peasy.

Oh, except for the potties.  First off, that is where everybody goes to smoke, so it really stunk.  Then this was my first encounter with a true Chinese potty.  It did not go well.  (You can Google Chinese potties, I did not desire to preserve that memory, so no photo, sorry.)

These were our lovely seats.  Notice the speed posted on the sign - 300 km/hr.  We were moving.

 It was rainy all day, so everything seemed a bit hazy.  But once again we got to see a lot of beautiful scenery, buildings with all sorts of fabulous detail that we just don't see at home.

 There was a lot, a lot of uphill walking to reach the mausoleum.  This was the most interesting part of the walk - not stairs - kind of a ramp.  A super slippery ramp from the rain.  But we made it to the top.  (These stairs go up to the top of the building that is in the very first picture.)

 Awesome door handles.

So we made it all the way to the top after probably 30 minutes of climbing.  We go inside and low and behold...  A gift shop.  I am so not joking.  It was so strange.  There was one large room, all open.  There were story boards with more information about the mausoleum, but the story boards ran along the outside of the room with gift shop type items in the middle. 

We were truly baffled.  That was it?  So we saw some more stairs, leading further up.  Maybe there was more?  (Nope.  But we climbed another 15 minutes or so, sweated a ton more, and made it to the top of the mountain.  There were so many trees that we couldn't get a good picture that showed we made it to the top, but we did.  My husband did get a nice shot of me during the final climb - I kind of fell behind.)

The upside was that after walking up all that way we got to walk down.  That went very well.  Then, since the mausoleum was in a huge park area, we wandered around and saw more.  There was a neat museum, but it was all in Chinese so we weren't really sure what we were looking at. 

The man's history involved some sort of battle.

(But my favorite part of the museum was this wild, copper face on the front desk).

More neat buildings and some awesomely huge concrete animal sculptures ended our day.

See on,
Julee

Post 123. Shopping and Dinos in China.

So on my last day 'alone' in China I was bored enough of walking to the same park and starbucks area that I braved a cab on my own.  I had a nice map that had the places I wanted to go in both English and Chinese characters, and the concierge assured me I would be fine. 

Visiting a shopping area maybe wasn't highest on my list of desired places to go, but there was not a lot of tourist type activities that were within an hour drive of the hotel, and I really did not want to take a cab 90 miles away and risk not being able to get back.

So I headed to the downtown shopping center.  In the back of my mind I kept hoping for some sort of rustic market, where small vendors sold food, baskets, jewelry, whatever.   But this shopping mall, almost three or four malls really, was as modern as any U.S. mall.  But for adventure I wandered a bit outside of the shopping areas and found two excellent parks.

 

 

 

The entrance to the shopping mall, and an interesting food stand.

 



 

 

 



 I liked the shape of the building above, then the Nike store - nice!  And the Chinese also care about your safety on stairs.

 

I'm not completely sure I understood the message of this picture, but I'm not terribly good with icons or the abstract.  Interesting though.  This was just hanging on one of the glass walls outside a clothing store.



 

 I found one bookstore and wandered around for about a half hour.  I found some photography that I could understand since - yeah - all pictures. 

 I liked the neat art-work that part of this clothing store's display.  Look close at how the people made of string were created.  Neat.

 These metal characters were outside of a bar.  (It had a sign that said "Bar" so I'm guessing it means what I think it means, but it was closed so I couldn't go inside.)

 A street view.

 

The most authentic looking area all day.  

 

A movie theatre.

 

The shopping center area only took up a little over two hours of my day, so when I got back to the hotel I still have 4 hours until my husband would be finished working for the day.  We had talk about taking the train to Nanjing on Saturday, so I figured I would use the rest of my free time to see what a Chinese amusement part was like.  China Dinosaur Park here I come.

 

 



 Getting into the park took me a while.  There were lots of people just standing around outside of the ticket booth when I arrived so I wasn't sure what was going on.  None of the price signs were in English, and it kind of looks like maybe ticket prices varied by what time of day you entered - and there was something about 3:30 so I thought maybe cheap tickets started later and people were just waiting.

Eventually I realized it was only 2 pm, so yeah, that wasn't right.  And then after about 10 minutes of thinking and watching I saw a sign that said - in English - that the outside attractions were closed for a little while because of the weather.  Huh?  It was... humid.  It was not raining, it was lightening, it was not stormy, and it was not that hot.  It was humid.  I foudn that baffling.  Also, isn't like the whole park outside?  What exactly is open?  Finally there was one lady who bought a ticket and I watched her go through the gates.  So I went to the ticket counter to buy a ticket too.  The lady tried to tell me that the park was closing at 5 pm, so that took me 5 minutes to figure out.  (I didn't care - I just wanted to see the scenery.)  And the scenery did not disappoint.

 I watched two live shows, a bird show and a walrus show.  Pretty much like English shows.  The parrot drove a bicycle on a wire, an emu ran out on stage, the walruses played with a ball and did flips.  The rollercoaster ran twice in the two hours I was at the park.  I saw the log ride go once.  I did not see any other rides with riders.

The trip back to the hotel continued the excitement since when I tried to get a cab four men rushed me - I assume telling me I could not have the cab.  (No English now.)  Okay, okay.  I won't take the cab.  I'm thinking maybe there was a line, but who knows.  Then a guy in a silver car tried to talk to me, I'm thinking he was telling me that he could drive me.  But his car was silver and the cabs are light green.  I read the travel books, only official cabs for me. 

Luckily I had prepared for this possibility and the Dino Park was only a little more than a mile from the hotel, and it was straight down one road.  So I just walked back, getting to enjoy more of the Changzhou scenery, and I was treated to a few more cute dinos.

 And soon my hotel was in sight.

See on,
Julee