London Lunar New Year

The festivals seem to pile up this month.  It’s a good thing: by February, winter’s chill has settled into me as surely as ice between the cobbles in Maastricht.  Absent travel to a warmer port, any excuse for a drink, a dance, and a smile is worth a lot.  A birthday celebration in the City offered an afternoon to explore Chinatown, where the New Year celebrations were in full swing.

The Year of the Sheep augers gentle calm beauty, right?

Fortune in all aspects will fluctuate. So, in career, stick with the current job and work hard. In wealth, be very cautious about any investment or there would be a loss. In relationships, be tolerant of family, friends and colleagues to avoid any conflict.

Expect Good luck and Bad, coming in pairs with wild swings in either direction.

Sounds like lots of abuse to look forward to…  ‘Makes me glad that I already saw 50 Shades (it well exceeded my low expectations).

In any case, the streets near Leicester Square were filled with food stalls and dancers.  Small fireworks popped along the sidewalks; children waved toys and flags: we nibbled spring rolls and bean buns and squeezed through the narrow streets looking for outsized paper dragons.

I’m used to chasing fanciful apparitions, after all.

    

By mid-afternoon, a cold rain began and the paper lanterns started to melt.  Misty grey shades settled in.  ‘A good time to take refuge in a pub, then a gallery, out of the wind and warming the spirits.

Boats and babies

Travel on the waterways follows a hierarchy similar to travel on the streets: a little of everything from one-person push-powered rafts to large people-movers that churn in endless lines through tourist sites.

The best (most relaxing, most scenic) travel is via river raft, a long array of parallel bamboo poles, turned up at each end, and pushed with a long pole much like a Cambridge punt.  There are a lot of similarities in the design, the major difference being the water seeping between the poles (especially when the whole raft submerges going over dams) and the 180-degree spin that boatsmen give the pole after each push.  I’m dying to try this technique out when I’m at Scudamores again.

As with bicycles, these rafts are also used commercially for fishing and to deliver fresh fish and shrimp to tour boats.  When ferrying tourists, they are often armed with pump-action water cannons to keep the kids amused, so people tend to give one another some space.

 

Add a motor, and the same raft becomes a lethal missile, arrowing up and down the banks and darting between the boats.  The motor is a single-stroke engine driving a propeller at the end of a long ole – this keeps it from catching on the bottom and simplifies steering. They travel in packs that remind me of Apocalypse Now.

 

Boats and barges are large and, in contrast to the cars, well regimented as they ply the rivers.  Navigation buoys are oppositely arranged from what we use in the US, but the signaling via horns and lights is very familiar.  Boats load up with tourists in the morning and take off, single file, to visit countryside and canyon for three hour trips.  No wilderness experience, but the on-board dining and open-air viewing is superb.

 

 

Oh, right, and the baby…

 

Bikes, cycles, and automobiles

China moves with a greater variety of vehicles than anywhere else I’ve been.   While subways and airports (left and right, below)  are modern and crowded (just like major cities worldwide), people generally make their way on more placid and personal conveyances for surface travel.

 

A lot of folks ride bicycles, similar to the Netherlands.  There are designated lanes, but they often abut busy streets and occasionally vanish along major thoroughfares. Still, on a quieter road (or along a city wall), it’s a pleasant (if rattling) ride.

 

Most working bicycles are three-wheeled, like the Dutch Bakfiets (left) but with the load in the back and lots more space and versatility.  Often, they serve as both haulage and storefront for vendors.

  

 

Another step up adds a motor, generally electric.  Motorbikes are the biggest hazard going on Chinese streets: they are dead silent, douse their lights after sundown, and obey no line or law.  Check the baby in the center position in the lower picture.

 

Cars and busses occupy the top of the food chain on Chinese streets.  They are large, late model, impeccably maintained.  Trucks, in contrast, are large, ramshackle, and occasionally missing front cowling (maybe it keeps the engine cooler.   

And, when everything plays together, the symphony looks like this (there are corpuscular flow groups who spend a lifetime modeling veins that come together like this).  I especially like the lone policeman trying to whip things into order off to the right.

Signage in China: Be Careful Tumble

Signs are the tools that we use to navigate, to stay safe, to understand the society around us.  Symbols and words in North America and Western Europe are pretty well standardized these days – there may be the occasional double-take, but seldom a need to stand and think.

Not so in the Far East. 

Numbers:  Convention dictates that numbers on keypads arrange differently; feng shui  means some numbers don’t appear at all.

  

Maps:  Sometimes maddeningly complex, other times strikingly artistic.  And place names are always evocative.  “Use your imagination”, our guides always suggested.

 

Symbols:  Much more varied than in the West, I grew especially fond of the Fred Astaire kick to signify a moving line.

   

Prose:  Its surprising that in a globalized and connected world, translation accuracy still lags so far behind in China.  The mistakes say a lot about Chinese grammar and syntax, though, so there are lessons even amidst the noise.  The sign at the right appeared on mountain peaks to discourage visitors from walking over the cliffs.

 

 

Celebrity culture:  More than any US president, Bill Clinton was ubiquitous,.  I would have expected Nixon. And King and Buffet trump Trump in bookstores.  There’s also the irony of selling “Blog Weekly” where blogs are absolutely not allowed.