A small selection of my photos from our spring break trip to China. More on Flickr and even more on my hard drive - let me know if you want to see any of the others.
The biggest prison in Shanghai, in the middle of a neighborhood that once housed Austrian Jews fleeing the Nazis. Shanghai is a really interesting city - there have been westerners there as long as it’s been metropolitan, but it’s still very Chinese—our hotel was in the heart of the old French Concession, but we were able to go out in the mornings and buy fried bread and pork buns. It’s fascinating to see how all of the old European buildings have been reused.
A sort of public yellow pages - people spray paint their phone numbers and jobs on walls to advertise services.
It was tempting to take many more Engrish pictures, but there was just too much to choose from. These are some of my favorites. I’d appreciate it if somebody could give a proper translation of the top one—all I can tell is that the got “shoes” and “zero” right.
A nice view down a canal in Suzhou.
Tiananmen square is (as one would expect) crawling with soldiers, but they’re generally very friendly.
At Pearl Market, three of whose floors are devoted entirely to selling knockoffs. I thought there was a particularly beautiful irony in this one - Sony Ericsson produced an iPhone knockoff that looks like the one in the picture; at the pearl market, knockoffs of the Ericsson knockoff were being sold as iPhones.
As this was also at the Pearl Market, I can only assume the boxes actually contain fake sheep placentas.
One of the other things that I wasn’t expecting was how much the locals used the tourist sites - the whole garden around the Temple of Heaven was full of people playing cards and doing tai chi.
We visited the Mutianyu section of the great wall, which is not the most crowded and touristy but still very developed (the Chinese government has restored a long section of the wall, so most of the accessible parts were built recently). Upon arriving at the last tower one is warned by a small forest of signs that the area beyond is a non-tourist zone and access is forbidden. There is a clearly-beaten path around the signs and we kept going out to the next tower. The unrestored sections of the wall are crumbling and overgrown, but still incredibly impressive.
The friendly neighborhood coal-delivery man.
Incense burning at the Lama Temple in Beijing, which is still a working monestary and had more pilgrims than tourists.
The monks themselves. Picture-taking was forbidden inside, so I wasn’t able to get any photos of the younger monks playing games on their cell phones.
Looking down an alley in Beijing.
Check out the rest of the pictures at http://flickr.com/photos/jqubit/sets/72157604648782963/
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