So I made it to China safe and sound and have pretty much shed my jet-lag, which always takes about 4 or 5 days to completely adjust. All of China interestingly enough is all on one time zone and they are 15 hours ahead of the Pacific Coast time.
So Christmas in China is a bit like Christmas in Japan, it’s a bit weak.. so to speak, and mostly just an excuse for stores to have sales and Santa pictures in the windows as shown below. Hey! I guess they understand the principle of Christmas after all. In fact I think this Window Santa must be the official government issue as every store that displays any kind of Christmas motif has the exact same Santa picture.
Christmas In China
So what is China like? That probably is like asking what is USA like, it depends where you are at. Linyi is both, on the map and culturally, half way between the new (Beijing, Shanghai) and the old poor agricultural based China. Here in Linyi there is a considerable amount of new construction of high rise apartments or condo’s, being built along side very old shanty type neighborhoods. On the streets you see the latest cars from all the top makers, but a majority of the traffic is still by bicycle, ebikes (see Flickr pictures) and small electric or gas powered three wheeled put-put’s as they are called in Thailand, not sure what they call them here.
Yesterday while I was out I saw 4 teams of mule drawn carts carrying very heavy loads of freshely milled ”green” 2×12, 20′ long lumber being pulled down one of the very busy main roadways heading who knows where. Wow!
I’ve added a Flickr widget on the right side bar and I will be posting my pictures there if you are interested. The ones up right now are from this last Sunday as I went out for walk down to Peoples’ Square, which is about 2 miles from the University.
My family had those same Santas back in the 60′s!
Please blog more!!!