B & W Day and Some Nice Walks.

November 2^nd ‘All Souls Day’ or as it often known, ‘Day of the Dead’. There was plenty of life in our house this morning though, nice day for a walk, or deportment classes, whichever you prefer. The ladies chose the latter, I chose the former, they even managed to beat me to the school today, most unusual. Having left them I decided it was time for another ‘black and white’ day, it’s been a long time since the last one. I wandered around some back streets, through the town streets, along the riverside etc and managed to take a few (two hundred and fifty eight to be exact) photos. Needless to say a lot of editing was needed as well as a few collages, the first of which is some of the back streets.

Next up a few people at work.

Eventually, after much peering into shops and furtive clicking I found my way to the riverside. This was quite busy, the winter season has definitely arrived, but some scenes are peaceful.

I wondered if you’d like to see me in B & W, can you still recognise me?

Just because it’s a black and white day doesn’t mean we can’t have a panorama now and then.

The riverside market was fairly quiet.

Moving on I passed some of my favourite canines before heading into the bap market where I picked up a snack, shredded potato with a fried egg on top. Of course I messed the photo up, it would be hard to see properly in B & W but I didn’t ‘aim’ the camera correctly!

I don’t know much about Pokemon, in fact I know nothing at all. Is Pikachu usually lost?

Here’s the second, and last panorama of the day, this time a vertical one.

Snowbirds were abundant today, here are a few doing what they do.

Another few street views, makes you wonder how we coped without colour in the ‘old days’.

Finally, on the shop front anyway, here are a few fronts!

Is this the local ambulance service? Not quite, this is how they ferry patients back and forth between the old and the new hospitals.

This next shot is nothing special; it’s just a row of houses in our apartment complex. However, I love the way it turned out, what do you think?

Being back home I managed to catch up with the Brigadier; she had left school ten minutes early today. Once again I was successful in getting her to pose, it must be those classes!

I think I should stop there, fifteen pictures is enough for one day. The afternoon brought another nap, only for me, and the evening brought mayhem. Huan had gone out to practice her hulusi and I settled down to work on the PC, photos, words, even watching movies. That wasn’t to be, there was a sound of relays clacking (UPS), the vision of lights flashing and everything went dead. Well, I say everything, whatever it was it lasted a very short time; the bedroom clock didn’t register a power failure at all. However, the PC had died; obviously the UPS is long past its ‘throw it in the bin’ day. Once I got everything up and running again, using the internet was just a pipe dream. All I managed to do in the end was get the photos pruned and edited.

November 3^rd “La la laaaaaa - Do you want to come with me?” came the plaintive cry of a young Mexican Chinese maid. I responded in the negative and went back to work on the PC. Chrome history and cache all had to be cleared which means of course entering passwords all over again for all apps. Facebook responded with “Please enter the code you have received by test message” and, as usual, I did not receive any code. Luckily I was prepared and had downloaded a set of codes for just such an eventuality.

Once I had got everything back to normal(ish), I went back to streaming and finished the last episode of ‘Vigil’. Even streaming is a pain in the rear end a lot of the time, Express VPN’s new Lightway protocol doesn’t seem to handle it very well.

Huan came home and after lunch suggested a walk. Again I declined and completed yesterday’s Blog entry. It was her turn for an afternoon nap today.

November 4^th No school for Huan so we took one of her favourite walks, Feicui park, otherwise known as the scenic mountain route. On our way we found out where the egrets may well be nesting this year, at least until the water gets too high for them.

More birds of the snowbird variety were spotted on our way up, quite a few walking, up and down, and also four busloads off to be ‘sold’ something. For me though, it was just a couple of old boots hiding behind the hedge.

Experimentation was the name of the game today, to be more accurate, vertical panoramas. Here are the first two taken on our walk uphill.

I didn’t forget to create horizontal ones too!

The next attempt at a vertical one was slightly different. I took fourteen photos, starting back over my head somewhere and finishing in front of my shoes. It took quite a lot of effort to get the settings right when stitching but I got there. This is probably a once only photo!

Our mountain pooch didn’t come when called today, we did find her though. She gave us a few feeble wags of her tail but looked very weary. I wonder if old age is catching up on her, we have known her six years, since we first relocated here. While I was chatting to her the chickens came a-running, perhaps the farmer is away for one reason or another, hence hungry dog and chickens.

On our way down we spotted members of the Fire and Rescue service walking up the path. The first three were in normal uniforms, carrying walkie-talkies, body cams and a large Nikon, the second two were in their action gear. The man walking with them told us that they were off to a ‘snake alert’! Someone had called them, possibly a snake in their house. We had no idea how far they were walking or how long it would take, so we didn’t wait.

And that’s it, our snaps for today. There was another vertical panorama but I guess four is enough. There were also some goats, but by the time I reached them the ‘line by size’ had been disturbed by a snowbird who got there first. Besides, you probably had enough of goats last week!

November 5^th Bonfire night back in the UK, but we’ll have no such frivolity here thank you! We can wait until the New Year when we have no fires, but the fireworks are much better. I was thinking of reprinting the speech from “V” here but I have this feeling I may have done it before. Is that old age? Partly; old age is also realising that your body is not as young as it was!

Today I was off like a rocket, before Huan left for her class, I wanted to do the reservoir walk. Passing the egret’s home I spotted one a bit nearer than last time.

My photography plans today were minimal, mark distances on the way up the hill, and that was it, unless anything else turned up. So my first picture shows me which way to go, and just in case I’m not sure, they say ‘mountain’ twice.

At this stage I felt fairly good, looking forward to my walk, it had been a long time since we, or even I, went that way. Just to show you that it’s not only me who thinks the first part is steep, here’s a truck, a car and a bike, all making heavy weather of it.

After forty five minutes I had walked uphill 2.6k and reached the tourist sign. This was the stage where my body was telling me that I was no longer a young sprog. My lungs and my legs were crying out, nay, screaming for some much needed oxygen!

At least the incline reduced after that point and while the route was still up, it was a lot easier. The next few photos are views; this one is at 3.1k.

This one is at 4.05k, zoomed in so you can see through the branches.

And here we are at what seems a strange distance, 4.6k. This is one place with a good view due to the new bridge so I always stop for a look-see.

5k is up next.

Finally, after about one and three quarter hours I reached 6.6k, the end of the reservoir where I could look back on Wuzhishan. Huan pointed out when she was looking at the photos that you can see our building in the zoomed photo. It’s strange that from down there, we can’t see the reservoir up here!

What would have been nice would have been a soft drink, some juice fresh from the coconut, or even a bottle of water. People walk up here every day, especially during the winter months and there’s no café or drinks stall. I took a panorama of all that lovely water instead.

After that it was downhill all the way, with my age showing again. It was easy enough; observers would have thought nothing was wrong at all. What I had, was shin splints, obviously the gap between long walks, especially those with hills, has been far too long!

Apart from one elusive butterfly and an almost flat frog I found no wildlife for your delectation today. The birds were everywhere of course, obvious by their song, but invisible to us mere mortals. This remains one of my favourite walks, there is enough tree cover to get up and down before lunch without being frazzled, the air is clean and the views are great. If we do meet any other ‘humans’ en route, they are invariably friendly and chatty. Life is good today!

I arrived home at roughly three hours and fifteen minutes having covered 13k. I know it’s not exactly marathon level but I was pleased enough with it. I even managed to beat the commander home, not by much though. Can you guess who needed the nap today?

Today being Friday we were out for dinner again. In my pre-planning I had intended to sing “Today’s Friday, Today’s Friday, Friday is fish, Is everybody happy? You bet your life we are. However, I then remembered we already have copyright problems with some of our theatre shows on YouTube, as well as with Huan’s local performances. Singing was cancelled! If you’d like to see what we ate, go here - https://youtu.be/F0DP6huInNI

November 6^th With Huan still not busy on Saturday’s we now have a market walk routine, that means there is no rush to get out of the house, no boots are needed, and we can slowly stroll. Tea street was a little on the busy side today.

The market was busier as well, I have decided that as well as snowbirds (from way up North), we must also have other migratory oldies from central and southern China.

The market always has a lot of Chinese medicine sellers, this guy piqued my interest, he looks very impressive, nice hat too. However, if you peer into the top of his hat you might get an idea of what he will look like without it!

This stall is selling all sorts of medicine. The stall holders were able to name the medicines far easier than they could name any of the ingredients. The dried snake is put into a bottle of drinking alcohol, we did get that much.

Huan’s deportment class was up next; or four of them anyway. They had all been asked to go and deport themselves in the market this morning with a view to advertising and selling Li minority clothes. They would have had to buy their own costumes so Huan and a few others declined the invitation. The ladies pictured here are in fact of the Li minority, very pretty too.

We bumped into Yú and Zhào dé today, which is unusual. They said they often come, although we have never bumped into them before, and they always have some healthy coconut juice.

We did have one between us as well, but you don’t need to see our ugly mugs again. Today’s was not so tasty for me; I much prefer them straight from the tree.

It looks as though this year we have a full snowbird orchestra, I will look forward to hearing it. All too often it is only singers, singers with the accordion, or all hulusi players and no singers, here you can see a variety of instruments, even an electric guitar!

Walking home Huan heard the dulcet tones of hulusis, we found two of her classmates practicing in an art studio. While she was chatting I got busy with the camera. This one is four hanging scrolls showing a part of Máo zédōng’s time.

And this one is four individual scrolls, of the type you are more likely to see and who knows, even like. They are shown together here in a collage.

November 7^th My trusted companion was at my side today so another nice long countryside walk was taken. First though we passed through the bap market to check out a new seller, we may be lucky, as soon as we start out last Russian loaf we’ll put an order in. Watch this space! I also convinced Huan to have a second breakfast, well it was nine o’clock.

Some unusual bovine buddies are next. Invariably the cows we see are brown, “how now brown cow”, but today we spotted these two, looking a lot more like European cows. The second one was quite aggressive, thinking I was after the calf when I was trying to get a bit closer.

Our route was under construction today, but they left enough room for us to sneak past.

Sorry about this but the director insisted I add a turkey!

I insisted I add some trees, I love being out in the countryside.

After taking all the shots to create the view above I wasn’t really looking where I was going. As Huan said “snake” I felt something squish under my feet. Luckily this particular hissing Sid had already shuffled off this mortal coil.

More countryside views, days like this make me happy!

The next one brought a smile to both of us, because we both saw the same thing on the ridge. Can you see it? It’s a prancing horse of course!

This next one had us quite puzzled until we got home and enlarged the photo. We knew it was a spider’s web but couldn’t quite make out what was going on in the middle. You can see the scary spider to the left but we’re still not sure just what it’s trying to immobilise and eat. There was still a bit of a struggle going on.

More scenery, this time with good old ‘pointy mountain’ right at the top.

Happy families are up next; this is the first time Huan has seen yellow ducklings in the water.

And now another one of those pesky electric cars, complete with a ribbon on the front. I did offer to buy it for the back seat driver, she refused it as she still has no driving licence.

The last one of the day is another clash of the titans. In this case the insect was the victor and it was trying to take the caterpillar (?) home. There was a small problem though, the prey was too heavy for the predator to fly so it was shuffling its way, rather haphazardly, across the path.

By the time we got home we had walked twelve kilometres which included some moderate hills so we were both tired, contentedly so. No OAP naps today though, we were strong!

November 8^th “Monday is washing day, is everybody happy, you bet your life we are.” Yep, as well as being shopping day Monday is usually washing day as well. Today was no different. How about another song? “If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise…” You can fill in the rest yourself. I wasn’t down in the woods but I did spot a bear who wasn’t having a picnic, but having reading lessons from Teacher Huan!

Huan had a busy afternoon outside; I had a busy afternoon inside. For Huan it was deportment, and for me it was sorting. I started under the desk and removed the UPS, hopefully avoiding any further problems from its aging innards, then somehow connected all the bits and pieces back together again. Perhaps my Christmas present will be a new UPS! More admin followed with the folder matching of Huan’s and my computers, it’s been at least three months. Huan likes to look at the photos and watch the videos now and then; her PC also acts as a backup storage for the photos and important files. My last job of the afternoon was to change both of our QQ accounts to Chinese. It’s obviously easier for Huan if hers in Chinese. I’d prefer mine to stay in English but the program I use, QQ International, is being left to die. Unfortunately, changing to the local version gives me no language choice at all. It seems they used to have English but stopped this year. With a little luck they will see the error of their ways and bring it back, just for me.

Both of us fancied an after dinner walk today, out in the cold weather. The temperature dropped by eight to ten degrees from yesterday, it was hovering between 22ºC and 24ºC. Mind you, my body thought it was more like 17 ºC, aren’t I the big softy?

All we did was walk up and down all the various streets, popping into the occasional shop. Two of those shops were appliance shops, we are a little worried that our fridge may be on its way out. It shouldn’t be, it’s only six years old; they don’t make them like they used to eh! We did take a snap of an almost empty street which I then ‘warmified’ and added a ‘vignette’ effect. I quite like it, what do you think?

Finally, for the day, and for the week, proof positive that the snowbirds have returned in force. We spotted a whole flock of them, following their leader, or as it is otherwise known, dama dancing. I just had a quick Google to explain ‘dama’ for you and stumbled across the following page, I would suggest that you peruse all three articles in chronological order, they make quite an interesting read. https://www.sixthtone.com/topics/1003116/chinese-dama. And here are the ones we spotted.

From snowbirds to sleepy birds, time for us to get some much needed zzzs in, hope you’re all keeping well, and continue to do so. Bye for now, see you next time.

Birds and Goats and Stuff.

October 26^th This was what we saw when we opened the curtains this morning.

Perhaps because we saw that we were both a bit sloth like in getting up, having breakfast, getting ready for the day etc. As a result Huan had to rush off before me leaving me to decide on another route. I decided to check out further upriver and see what the damage was. By this time the weather had cleared and we had a beautiful day.

As you can see the river looks perfect. In fact the only evidence of the high water was occasional clumps of vegetation formed on the banks. In fact throughout my walk I didn’t see any wind damage or any rain damage. All the damage we had was caused by the river being swollen from further up in the mountains.

That last photo is the view from lizard alley, another reason I took that route today. It’s a long time since we saw our little friends. Today I only managed to find one.

The sky was so clear on my way back into town I managed a snap of the moon. To say that the Fuji only has 3x magnification it’s not too bad.

My little “Billy the kid” was waiting for me when I left the riverside. No photos for you, you will remember him, although I did make a video for us.

Art is next; do we have a ‘modern artist’ somewhere around Wuzhishan? Not exactly, this pattern, as you can probably guess, was created when the municipality did a lot of work on the pavement and didn’t put the stones back showing the motorbike parking bays.

Knowing where I could find a family of pigeons I took a slight detour behind some buildings, they didn’t disappoint me. Well the grey one did, it flew away; the white ones heard something behind me and to my right. There were more pigeons and even chickens in an old unused room.

Quite a few of my canine friends were out today as well so it was an enjoyable walk, almost long enough, it was nine kilometres. Speed kept it short; I had to slow down searching for lizards, if not for that I would have extended it to make ten. It’s a long time since we, or even I, have had a ten. Mind you, Huan thinks I shouldn’t do that anyway!

Life was back to normal for Huan too, hulusi practice in our little square, it’s very quiet when she is not in the house!

October 27^th This morning’s walk included an umbrella and comprised of me basically going around in circles in the town waiting for the rain to start. Do you remember things your parents or grandparents may have said and wonder if the same phrases are still in use today? As I was wandering I kept thinking how ‘close’ it was. For you youngsters who have no idea what this old man is waffling on about, ‘close’ used to also mean uncomfortably humid or airless.

Did I get any pics today despite not taking the Fuji? I did manage to get one or two. Here are the ladies on the way to their hulusi class, now there are three of them. The class is much bigger than that I hasten to add.

The town square was a hive of activity, the usual badminton, individuals doing various forms of exercise and then what appeared to be hundreds of dancers. Huan told me they were looking for one hundred dancers for some performance. From what I saw a lot more practice is needed. The second photo is snowbirds doing tai chi.

Both of us managed to get home before the rain which appeared just after lunch. The forecast for the rest of the week is not much better. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

October 28^th Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun, or so sang Noel Coward. If you fancy upping your English listening skills, whether you be a native speaker or not, then go here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkEd3WgR8qw&ab_channel=RichardHolbrook. We were housebound in the morning due to rain so had to go out after lunch, in our case in the non-existent midday sun. Wuzhishan was completely surrounded by rain as far as we could tell. Both of us had difficulty focusing on buildings that weren’t so far away, we realised that this was due to clouds. We also realised that we were sometimes getting wet even though there was no real sign of rain, walking in the clouds again.

Going across to our little island a pair of goats must have felt the ‘wet’ too because they were hiding in a little cave. However, the goats on the irrigation canal had no such worries.

A strange insect caught my eye a little further on; I couldn’t get it on my hand at all.

I took Huan to see the room with the pigeons and the chickens and we managed to get a snap of this nicely coloured fellow.

Even more birds next, I wanted to show Huan “Billy the Kid” but he wasn’t there. Instead Huan insisted I took these photos of a goose, two chickens and their chicks.

And finally for today, for the technical among you, another electric vehicle, but for a change, a truck instead of a car. I thought this might have been a PHEV, (Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicle) but I failed to find any sign of a filler cap or an exhaust pipe so it may be a full EV.

We had a miniscule amount of sun, a larger amount of dampness, but at least we got out of the house for some fresh air and a seven kilometre walk. That is far more than we expected with the forecast which was ‘rain all day’. Hopefully, we’ll have the same results or better for the rest of the week when the forecast remains unchanged!

October 29^th Confined to barracks again, partly the weather’s fault, partly the boss’s. I was given the job of taking lots of photos of the neighbour’s apartment which she wants to find new tenants for. The instructions were that the photographs should be taken at 10 o’clock. By half past the rain had come back from its short NAAFI break.

In the afternoon I was a music producer and publisher, helping Huan either upload from her phone, or record onto mine and then upload from mine before printing.

We did get out for dinner though, it is Friday after all. Today we didn’t stray too far but the place we chose is definitely worth visiting. Check here - https://youtu.be/oNElyk6AI0E

October 30^th Market day called so no early start was needed and no long walk either. We felt the odd bit of rain here and there but the rain did have enough patience to wait until after we had returned home.

Often while we are out Huan stops for a gossip, sometimes I hang around (not understanding much), other times I go on ahead, slowly. Today it was the bridge lady’s turn for a chat so I went for a look at the river and took a couple of photos to stitch together, one vertical and one horizontal. I think the latter is the best one to share with you.

This week we were actually shopping in the market, buying vegetables for my two day duck stew. As always we looked for something for you, dear reader, today we found a portable bakery. The ovens run on gas and presumably they use an inverter or generator for the controls and the mixer. The results are not bad, but I do miss European bakeries.

Our last picture of the day is one of the ingredients for dinner, a bean. It’s not just a common or garden bean though; it’s something I had never seen before we came to China. Searching Google for some exotic name for these culinary delights didn’t have the result I thought it would. You all know string beans, green beans, runner beans, broad beans, kidney beans, baked beans and all sorts of other beans. Well, meet the “Chinese long bean”!

The rain came back after lunch; just as well, we both needed a kip. Is it the weather or is it our age? No need to answer that!

October 31^st A good day! The weather was fine walking weather and Huan was free to accompany me. Her choice was the ‘farm side’ so that’s where we went. Mind you we found the goats before we reached the farms; they were just across the island bridge. Not knowing a great deal about goats maybe one of you can tell me why none of them were grazing today, all were napping or just relaxing. This was at nine o’clock in the morning mind.

Here’s the last one on its own so that you can see the dragonfly.

We’ve had a lot of goats this week so why not also have a lot of fowl. Here are the boys.

Sentries on duty.

“What did you say?”

More sentries, this time running away!

All the way along this road I had been ‘mooing’, hoping to catch the attention of my bovine buddies. I was beginning to think they were not there as no eyes peered over the wall as they usually do. I needn’t have worried, as soon as I got to the gate they came for a chat.

It was definitely a day for feathered friends today, “stop pushing, there’s enough for all!”

“We’ve had enough, we’re off to the pub, see you later!”

“Let’s try a slightly different route home’ said moi, rather foolishly. We tried navigating through the first photo but there was no way through so we ended up going via the second trail.

Initially, when we reached the access to the construction road, everything was going fine, but then I trod in the wrong place and almost had visions of Huan seeing my hat floating on the surface with no sign of me. I did manage to get out, fairly rapidly, as you can see from my socks!

So we didn’t get rained on, we had a nice seven kilometre walk through the fields and farms, we saw lots of ‘wildlife’ and I got my boots dirty, not a bad morning I’d say. This last picture had me looking at it for quite a while trying to fathom out what the third ‘pinyin’ word was until my brain cell eventually clicked that the third word was English. Did you spot it?

November 1^st Here are three firsts for the first of the month. 1) 1800, John Adams became the first US president to take up residence in the White House. 2) 1848 The first W. H. Smith bookstall opened in Euston Station. 3) 1936 Inauguration of the first BBC Television service from Alexandra Palace, London. I’ll leave you to decide which was the most important! (Details from Penguin Pocket Reference ISBN0-141-02715-0)

Monday, Monday, so good to me, time for shopping. Today I thought I would show you how great a variety of noodles we have available to us. Even then, this collage is missing at least another row of ‘normal’ noodles and there are loads more pot noodles too. For some reason all the photos are a little out of focus in the distance, I think my phone somehow changed itself from normal photo mode to portrait. Anyway, you get the idea.

Our only other photo of the day, and the last one of the week, shows you that the snowbirds have definitely begun returning en masse. You would think the supermarket would be aware of this and maybe make allowances for it. No, there was only one lady weighing and pricing the fruit and veg, added to which her pricing machine was playing up.

Huan was off out in the afternoon for her deportment class, she asked me to walk her there because Yú was skiving off today. As I was sitting there in my Onslow suit when she asked (vest and pyjama trousers), I respectfully declined. Just as well I did as the rain bucketed down not too long after. Huan was OK, she got to school in the dry and the rain stopped just before home time.

Well folks, there we are, another week over, another week of mostly miserable weather. I guess we can put it down to climate change. Wherever you may be, I hope the sun is shining on you, if not literally, at least metaphorically. After all, that’s the way it usually shines on us!