Monthly Archives: October 2016

Had great fun with ODW’s Pipeline, Infrastructure, and R&D teams at a team building outing.  Go carts.  Gasoline engines.  Indoors.  Got to love China laissez-fun attitude toward safety!

  A pleasant surprise.  I found two bottles of California red Zinfandel lurking in the back of a little used cabinet.  Brought them back from L.A. on my trip in March and forgot about them entirely.

Today is my birthday.  I turned 42 so I’m considering this year my “Answer Year.”

There was no direct flight from Jiayuguan to Shanghai that arrived at a reasonable hour, so I decide to stay over in Xi’an.  (Yes.  My fifth visit to Xi’an, my third in a week.) I had booked a place called the … Continue reading →

Look at what was playing at the Jiayuguan airport.  Like I said, there is no escaping DreamWorks.

The misused idioms, the typos, the allusion to 1970s American ad campaigns!  One of my favorite mangled translations ever.

Total number of white people I saw this trip… Xining and all of Qinghai Province:  3 (all at the Sofitel breakfast buffet) Jiayuguan:  3 (a family checked in to the hotel just as I was leaving for the airport)

 I call this shot “Sunrise Behind Smokestacks and Cooling Towers”

Something about this poster for the third and final Wolverine movie with Hugh Jackman almost moves me to tears.

Ah.  So these are what have been waking me up each morning.  Happy Golden Week, everyone.

The two ends of the Great Wall of China.  Looking down at the desert in Jiayuguan in the west, looking down at the sea in Shanhai in the east.  Thousands of kilometers of wall in between.