The Summer Palace

Hi all. I'm home. I got really nostolgically excited as my plane flew over Minnesota. As I got closer to the airport, the first recognizable thing I saw from the plane window was the Target on Cliff Road near my parent's home in Burnsville. I was so happy to see how green everything was. My thanks to all of you who arranged things with nature to work out perfect for my return - the lilacs blooming was a nice touch.

This morning I drove to Cub Foods to get some groceries as I was a bit peckish. I stepped in the doors of the store and was overwhelmed. I've been to this grocery store many times, but after a year plus in Asia, everything was huge and I had no idea where to begin. After I got a few groceries, I called my sister-in-law to ask her where I could get Japanese foodstuffs and she recommended Kim's - a Korean/Asian market that has a lot of the things I've grown used to eating.

Well, even though I'm back, my blog hasn't caught up with me yet, so I am going to post today on the Summer Palace. This HUGE area complete with lakes and dragon boats was, to me, the highlight of my time in China. Here are some pics with (as per usual) very little commentary. It's hard to belive all this was built for just one family, but great to know it's available to everyone now:



Here's a short video of some musicians playing traditional Chinese music in the building in the preceding picture:

They had this area of the palace where you could don emperor/empress style costumes for about 10 yuan (which is nothing) and then take your picture. Mom and I, who don't mind a little foolishness decided to try them on. I look like I'm wearing some kind of one-piece legless baby outfit with a bow tie. I thought I'd look better if I kept a stoic look, but I simply look nervous and constipated:

Mom's pic looked much better - she'd have made a better dowager empress than I'd have made an emperor. I think under my rule, China would be a pretty silly place (but we'd have fun, my friends, we'd have fun):







These are the dragon boats that tooled around on the lake - we wanted to ride one, but the line to get tickets stretched on to eternity, so we just took pics:

This old man talked to me and I talked to him. It didn't matter one bit that neither of us could speak the other's language, nor that we couldn't even get the gist of what the other was saying. I pointed to my camera and he nodded:



Every building had it's own interesting name, like "The Palace of the Fragrance of the Lotus" or "The Temple of the Reclining Buddha," but this one was my favorite because it included one of my least favorite words (you can guess which one):

Notice it's not just moisture, but EXTENSIVE moisture.


The next night, two of my students, Takayuki and Yuriko had come into town for Golden Week, so we met them at their hotel and got some coffee in the lobby bar, but had to move because they were drilling into the lobby floor (at 9:30pm) and we couldn't hear anything - the staff moved us to the closed dining room. It was so great to see these two and I hope to visit them when they move to India in the fall:

I still have a couple more places from China and Korea to put up here, so in about 2 posts I'll be all caught up.

I have a job interview tomorrow morning - wish me luck!