Touring in Nanjing

While we were in Nanjing we did a little touring. To the north of the city is the Zhong Shan, or central mountain, with several interesting areas. We visited the tomb of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, one of the fathers of modern China and one of the leaders of the first republic, who died in 1924. His tomb is very much in the Imperial tradition, with a long walkway up to the actual tomb. The walkway had a lot of steps, especially for old knees:This is the view down the steps, with some of the people in our group: Prof. Jiaoying Shi in the yellow shirt near the center, and Prof. Jim Shen in black to his right (our left). At different points along the path there were buildings and sculptures off to the side, and this one shows Judy standing next to a turtle that originally held a large tablet on its back.If you look closely at the turtle's head you will see what looks like racing stripes; this was probably a very fast turtle!

Nanjing has been the capitol of China in various ways over the centuries, and among those it was one of the early capitols of the Ming emperors. There is an area of Ming tombs on the same mountain, and we visited there the next day. One of the features of these tombs, both in Nanjing and in Beijing, is an avenue with many animals that show the emperor's power. In Beijing they have been replaced by concrete replicas, but in Nanjing they seem to still be the stone originals. Here is Judy saying hello to a camel, and in the distance you can see other animals down the avenue.The overall area of the Ming tombs is very broad and there are many wonderful buildings and walkways; it's not within the scope of a blog to include many more. Just one -- a wonderful small tile shrine in which you would burn papers on which you had written prayers or requests.From Nanjing we went on to Suzhou, and I'll write more on that soon.

66

Today (it's still June 28 at home, even though it's the 29th here in China) is my 66th birthday. I think this must be a good date for a birthday; my 60th birthday was in Botswana and my 65th was in Scotland, both with good friends. This year I celebrated it in China.

The 66th is a very good birthday; the number six is liu(4), which sounds like the word for "luck", so 66 is liu liu or "luck luck." One's daughter or daughter-in-law is supposed to cut up 66 pieces of meat and cook them with noodles, and offer this to the king of the underworld so he'll forget to come for you. But instead we had this wonderful birthday cake!Our dinner was held in the area around the Confucius Temple, a very big tourist area along a river. Beside the river was a wonderful dragon, seen here by day and then by night.The dinner was 22 courses, although "course" really means a very small dish of the food, and the dishes were quite varied and interesting. And no birthday dinner is complete without entertainment, including this lovely pipa player.And no birthday is complete without a toast, so here's a photo of several students and my colleagues Jim Chen and Ruwei Yun sharing a toast with me. Ganbei!

Greetings from Nanjing, China

We have been attending a conference on education and entertainment, hosted at Nanjing Normal University. We had a good trip, flying north from Chigago near the North Pole (sorry for the poor quality of my cell phone photo of the in-flight map) to Beijing and then on to Nanjing.During the conference there was a book signing for the translation of my beginning graphics textbook into Chinese, and the photo shows Prof. Jiaoying Shi (right), me (middle), and Prof. Zhigeng Pan (right); Prof. Shi led the translation team and Prof. Pan worked with him. A number of others contributed to the translation and I appreciate all their work.We expect to have other things to share from Nanjing soon.

It's been too long...

I've not posted to this blog for over two weeks now, and (if anyone is reading and cares ;^} ) I apologize for that. In terms of the photos on the last entry, the place I was standing when I took the photo of Dubuque Street and the river was under a foot of water shortly after I took the photo, and the bridge I was standing on when I took the photo of the riverbank overflow was cut off on both ends as well. I just didn't have the heart to keep writing about the problems everyone was having. All the gory details can be found in the pages of the Iowa City Press Citizen or the Cedar Rapids Gazette online. The water is going down, and in some places has gone down quite a bit, but that just exposes the amount of damage in homes and businesses -- it will be a long time for people to get back, and some will (for good reason) just give up and move on. The lucky few had flood insurance, but the key word seems to be "few."

The good news is that Rick should be back at work, even though the hotel isn't yet open -- at the last I heard, he was supposed to help provide security for the hotel once it was accessible but not yet open. The management like him and want to keep him working for them, and that's nice to hear (though it doesn't surprise me; he's a good worker).

Anyway, I'll have more to say soon, but for now, thanks for your patience.

The Iowa City flood of 08, part 1

Over the last few days we've had a continually growing flood problem in Iowa (and much of the Midwest) and it's getting very, very serious. We're particularly affected by the Iowa River, whose watershed runs WNW from Coralville out into central Iowa. This is my first note on the flood, but I'm sure it won't be my last, as you'll see. We are very fortunate, though -- we're high above our own little creek, and that creek has only a very small watershed so it doesn't even flood up to the path at the bottom of the yard.

The flooding comes from getting a lot of rain on top of soil that is still saturated from the long, snowy winter and from earlier rain. The rain has come from some pretty intense storms; you can see some storm clouds (from our front porch) at the leading edge of a storm late last week.Floodwaters have been rising slowly, giving people time to move out of their homes, but the waters have been rising relentlessly. This is a composite photo so you may need to click on it to get a good view of the flooding. It is taken along Dubuque street, one of three main routes into Iowa City from the north.
In Coralville, upstream of Iowa City and downstream of Coralville Reservoir, the river is out of its banks, and you can see how the river comes over its bank and down through a wooded area. When these pictures were taken, the river was still under control at the Coralville Lake dam, though the outflows from the reservoir were about three times normal. But the lake was still rising, and last night the river came over the spillway. At this point the river is forecast to rise about five feet more in Iowa City, so you can imagine what it might look like at the peak in a few days. I'll try to document this more when we get there.

Traditional values?

The 2008 Presidential campaign has an interesting twist. The Republicans, the party of traditional values, also has a tradition of campaigning against the Democratic candidate's wife on the grounds that she didn't represent these values. But Senator McCain's wife is anything but traditional. Her Wikipedia entry shows her to have done some admirable things, but she hardly fits into the Mamie Eisenhower - Pat Nixon - Laura Bush middle-America model.On the other hand, Michelle Obama is much more middle-America. She grew up in a working-class family and has small children. She is also very accomplished, as again shown by her Wikipedia entry. Personally, I would much rather sit next to her than Mrs. McCain at a dinner party, because I believe that Mrs. Obama and I would have much more to talk about.

Summertime, and the livin' is sweaty...

It's been a cold, wet spring -- and we may have more to say on that later, since there are real flooding problems around the midwest this year -- but we always knew that the cool weather couldn't last. And it hasn't. Today it is so sticky, a bit warm but very, very humid, and we've put on the air conditioning for the first time. It's always good when we can hold off the A/C until June, and a week into the month is even better. But it's time for summer, and we'll hole up in the heat of the day now until September, when we can once again enjoy a time without A/C and without heat.

Die Dreigroschenoper

For years I've been a fan of Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) by Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill. I have a CD of an original production with Lotte Lenya (Weill's wife, for those of you who only know her in "From Russia with Love"), and I've learned just about all the German in the original 1931 script.Recently I found the movie in the Coralville Library and had great hopes for it. It was directed by the great G. W. Pabst and Lenya was Jenny, as in the original production, but it wasn't the same -- the production just didn't have the kick of the original, and some of the best songs were left out. But as a piece of history it was interesting; German movies of the early 1930s have a flavor that American and other European films of the time don't.

First firefly

Big night tonight -- I saw the first fireflies of the season. Fireflies, or lightning bugs as we called them when I was a kid, were one of the great treats of summer. I can't say I treated them well, but they were just plain magical. Now they're a large part of the summer experience, and it's good to see them again.

Birthday (1)

This month is my 66th birthday, and our good friends Qi Hua and Jun Ni invited us over for dinner a couple of days ago. I'm really sorry that I didn't take a photo of the whole table, because they and Jun's parents really gave us a wonderful dinner. We just don't go out for Chinese food in the US any more (unless we have Chinese friends with us who know how to order off the menu) because we're so spoiled by real Chinese food.The sixty-sixth birthday is a very special one in China, because six is liu(4), and liu also means "luck". So sixty-six is liu liu, or "luck luck" -- a very good birthday. Our friends made a very special dessert for us, "eight-treasure rice". The eight treasures are dried fruit and nuts in the sticky rice, with sweet red bean sauce as well. Yum! The photo is a dish of eight-treasure rice that they sent home with us and that we shared with Rick for dinner last night. What a treat to have such good friends who spoil us so!