090201 ©Ingrid Booz Morejohn
Monday, February 2, 2009
How many Sichuanese does it take to move house?
Yujie Dongjie, Chengdu 090202 ©Ingrid Booz Morejohn
Saw this bunch of geniuses moving someone's house yesterday. The big discussion was how to load the last remaining piece of furniture on to the truck. After much head-scratching they shoved, scraped, smashed and crammed the piece on and tied it up. None of the furniture was protected in any way, it looked like a pile of junk on its way to the dump. Reminds me of a move I made in Hong Kong. We all used a group of guys called "the little boys". When I was moving back to Sweden I hired them to cart off my boxes to the shipping office. The first thing they did was kick the boxes down the stairs, letting each box happily bounce and crash from step to step, like in a cartoon.
Morbid tourism in earthquake zone
Hanwang, Sichuan ©Paddy Booz
Shortly after the May 12, 2008 earthquake in Sichuan we heard of local Chengdu residents going up to the earthquake area just to rubberneck at destroyed buildings and surviviors camped out near the ruins of their previous lives. Indeed, so many people drove out to Mianyang and Dujiangyan (two of the closest areas near Chengdu hit by the earthquake) that their cars were blocking the roads and they had to be shooed away by the police. Admittedly for many it was a way of trying to fathom what on earth had happened. The earthquake had come so suddenly and caused such enormous tragedy that Sichuan and a lot of China were in a state of shock. Seeing with your own eyes buildings that were leaning on their sides and whole villages completely obliterated in just a few seconds is something difficult for the mind and heart to comprehend, so many understandably sought answers by visiting in person.
Others just came to gawk and take pictures, like tourists. This kind of voyeuristic tourism is well-studied and has many names: "morbid tourism", "dark tourism", "thanatourism", "disaster tourism", "grief tourism", etc. I'm the first to admit that there is a kind of magnetic appeal to places where something horrible has happened. I remember on a visit to New York friends being fascinated by an otherwise completely normal looking house that was the site of the Amityville Haunting on Long Island (which later evolved into the Amityville Horror book and movie). A large industry has grown up around this kind of tourism: Tourists visit the tunnel in Paris where Princess Diana died in a car crash. They join Jack the Ripper tours in London and visit The Killing Fields in Cambodia, the London Dungeon, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ground Zero, Pompeii and Khao Lak in Thailand. It also seems that the farther we distance ourselves from a tragedy the more legitimate (and less voyeuristic) a disaster site becomes: war graveyards, tombs, battlefields, execution sites in the distant past are labeled as "history tours" . Many make the distinction between a natural disaster and a disaster caused by man himself, but it is death, destruction, pain and suffering that is the common drawing card for them all.
China is no exception although many of the sites are clothed in the legitimacy of history, revolution and political legitimacy: Museum of the Nanjing Massacre, the battlefields of the Three Kingdoms, the route of the Long March. Everyday tourists gather around the Well of the Pearl Concubine in the Forbidden City, seemingly trying to figure out how such a small opening could swallow up a concubine. The questions going through their heads are easy to imagine: Was she chopped into pieces first or was she drowned in the well itself?
...and now finally we have regular tourism to the earthquake areas of Sichuan as seen by this notice in the China Daily:
Holiday revives tourism in quake-hit Sichuan
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2009-02-01 19:01
The provincial tourism office on Sunday announced 16.5 million tourist visits in the holiday, which ended Saturday, up 21.9 percent from the Spring Festival week last year. The Donghekou Earthquake Relics Park, established to commemorate last year's May 12 earthquake, in Qingchuan County welcomed more than 64,300 domestic and overseas tourists during the holiday.
The park contains the ruins of Donghekou Village, where all but 300 of more than 1,400 villagers failed to survive a devastating landslide triggered by the earthquake.
Earthquake tours in the county attracted more than 100,000 visitors in the holiday, which helped revive small businesses, said a tourist office official.
Many tourists visited small restaurants set up by survivors in temporary settlements in Beichuan County, one of the worst affected areas, and were drawn to countryside tours to see farmhouses built after the earthquake.
# 6 Today's picture 090202
Tombstone with occupation "Wife", Helsingborg, Sweden ©Ingrid Booz Morejohn
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Panjiayuan Market Beijing
Panjiayuan Market, Beijing ©Ingrid Booz Morejohn
Panjiayuan Market (潘家园旧货市场 Panjiayuan Jiuhuo Shichang) in Beijing is one of the most interesting markets in China. I try and pay a visit to Panjiayuan every time I come to Beijing, and every visit is different from the previous, with new bargains to be had and new trends to be caught. Much of the souverirs that you find in other tourist shops in Beijing are sourced here by shopsellers, at much lower prices and in a greater selection. Panjiayuan has seen huge development in recent years, but many years ago it started as a cheap market with all the goods laid out on the ground. Locals knew it as Dirt Market or Ghost Market (because of its early morning hours). Today Panjiayuan is an established market area with covered walkways and numerous enclosed shops. The prices are still much cheaper than regular stores but the end price is up to your skills as a bargainer. You can find just about anything here to tickle your fantasy of recreating a little bit of olde China back home: "antique" furniture (newly produced in old style), lanterns, ceramics, sculptures and buddha heads (an entire parking lot full of them), embroidery, boxes, knick-knacks, paintings, trinkets and doo-dads, you want it, they've got it. A recent trend are fake paintings of famous Chinese painters. The originals sell for millions, at Panjiayuan you can get them for a few hundred. Name your artist or just bring a picture of the painting you want to grace your living room wall and they will produce it for you. You must, of course, leave your morals and intellectual copyright scruples aside.
Panjiayuan is open all days of the week, but it is only on weekends that all the stalls are open and all the small sellers that lay out their goods on the ground are present. This is the time to visit. Come as early as possible, the first weekend sellers arrive at 4.30 am! Weekdays: 8.30 am - 6 pm. Caveat emptor: 99% percent of the so-called antiques at Panjiayuan are fakes, set your initial offer price with that in mind.
Address: Southeast corner of the Third Ring Road, just east of Longtan Park (潘家园桥西).
©Ingrid Booz Morejohn
Some cats are lucky, others not
Sail cat ©Ingrid Booz Morejohn
Chinadaily.com.cn 090124 #3
Lucky cat falls 15 stories and survives
A lucky cat fell off his master's 15th-floor balcony in Qingdao, Shandong province, and survived unscathed.
Wang, the cat's owner, found the cat wandering the streets several months earlier and took it home. She kept it on the balcony of her apartment.
One night, she heard a noise and realized the cat had fallen. Wang found the little cat trembling on the ground but it was not injured.
The cat's developed a bigger appetite ever since the fall.
Through the kitchen window
Natural History Museum, Pitt Rivers, Oxford, England ©Ingrid Booz Morejohn
Through the kitchen window I see a butterfly flutter by,
a black one with long tails.
He is attracted to our pomegranate tree,
and I want him to stay.
But he doesn’t and goes away.
080831
Chinadaily.com.cn 090124 #2
Wanted: boyfriend for 2 days, acting skills a plus
A female student at Peking University didn't want to go home alone for the Spring Festival so she's seeking a man to pretend to be her boyfriend.
She is offering to pay up to 10,000 yuan ($1,460) a day to the person who accepts the role.
She wrote that her family won't let her go home for the holiday "unless I bring home a boyfriend with me."
The ad triggered debate on the Internet with some saying they understood her situation while some psychologists said it could cause trouble for her and possibly put her in danger if dishonest men answered her ad.
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