It's been quite a while since my last post! That usually means I've been keeping busy otherwise, and these last few months have definitely not been an exception.
You see, even though my job relocated me to China in part to reduce the amount of business travel we have to make, business travel is still very much a part of my work life. Only these days, most of the travel is within China!
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| How I don't travel for business |
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| How I also don't travel for business |
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| How I typically travel for business - at 300km/h on rails! |
My most frequent business trips are to nearby Wuxi (about 45 minutes by high speed rail), where we have a joint venture that I work closely with. Avid readers will also know that Wuxi happens to be Cherry's hometown, and while it is mostly unremarkable in terms of historical significance, Wuxi still has some rather nice scenery on good days:
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| Entertaining Laowai in the old city |
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| The Nanchan Temple area of Wuxi |
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| Lake Li near the company in Wuxi. They run around the lake every Wednesday afternoon! |
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| Of course, no proper business meeting in China would be complete without KTV! |
Aside from Wuxi, I also work closely with another JV in Chengdu, which is significantly further away, requiring flight to get there in any reasonable amount of time. Chengdu is in the inner country, and while I'd been there a couple of times in the past for vacation, this past May marked my first visit to Chengdu for business purposes, so we got to of course get our fair share of spicy Sichuan cuisine:
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| The primary purpose the trip really was to work :) |
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| A nearby plaza |
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| Chengdu residents love to eat Chuan Chuan, sort of a cross between skewers and hot pot, outdoors in the evening! |
However, Jim and I spent the weekend in Chengdu, so we made it a point to visit some of Chengdu's historical sites. Unlike Wuxi, Chengdu can claim a fair amount of historical significance. One of the most famous historical sites Chengdu has to offer is the Dujiangyan irrigation system. The primary purpose of the Dujiangyan irrigation system, built over 2000 years ago during the Qin dynasty, was to route water from the Min river to over 5000 square kilometers of neighboring farmland. The biggest problem Li Bing, the primary engineer of the project, faced was the fact that there was a mountain in the way. To clear the mountain, with no explosives as gunpowder wouldn't be invented for several centuries yet, his workers spent eight years heating and cooling the rock of the mountain, causing the rock to crumble, eventually cutting a channel through it! A true marvel of ancient engineering!
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| A mockup of the bundles of rocks used to construct the dams in the irrigation system. These bundles of stone effectively control the flow of the water without completely blocking it. |
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| One of the great heroes of the Three Kingdoms era - Zhuge Liang |
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| Li Bing, the chief engineer of the Dujiangyan Irrigation System |
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| The Fish Head levee, which separates the river into a wide channel and a narrow channel for routing and flood control |
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| The Bottle-Neck channel, which Li Bing cut out of a mountain with no explosives, used to distribute water to the farmlands |
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| The site of Dujiangyan is quite picturesque - this photo was taken from one of the suspension bridges spanning the river |
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| There are a few suspension bridges that span the river. We managed to catch this shot on a rare moment where there weren't many people traversing the bridge. |
Our next tourist destination, the nearby Mount Qingcheng, has a special place in my heart, since I visited it (sort of... I actually visited the rear mountain) over 13 years ago, during my first fateful trip to Mainland China! Mount Qingcheng is one of the sacred mountains of Taoism, and features dozens of peaks dotted with Taoist structures, which really lets the hiker feel like he's been transported into a
wuxia novel
, or Chinese martial arts novel!
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| The Gateway to Mount Qingcheng |
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| Live guqin music, one of the most popular classical Chinese musical instruments. |
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| A special type of lotus root grown on Mount Qingcheng |
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| The surreal foggy vistas of Mount Qingcheng |
As I said, it was a real treat to visit this site again after so many years!
We spent the next day in the city center of Chengdu, which is also chock full of numerous tourist sites and attractions of historic significance. First stop was Kuan Zai Xiang (宽窄巷), literally Broad Narrow Alley. This pair of alleys is essentially Chengdu's "Old Town", a renovated tourist walking street full of local eats, shows, and goods for sale:
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| One of the first gates in the "Broad" alley, as stated on the sign |
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| Figures of key characters from each of the Three Kingdoms, of which Chengdu was prominently featured as a part of the Shu kingdom |
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| Chengdu is famous for its covered cup tea culture... |
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| ... and Sichuan opera, a popular ancestor of the famous Beijing opera |
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| Rabbit heads, one of Chengdu's specialties... |
Next up was the Three Kingdoms park and museum. As mentioned before, Chengdu prides itself on its Shu kingdom heritage, and this park is testament to that pride!
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| A statue of Guan Yu of Three Kingdoms lore |
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| Ancient impression of a white tiger |
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| Military technology from the Han period, approximately 1700 years ago |
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| Map of China circa the 3 Kingdoms era |
To close out the day, we visited the Dufu Thatched Cottage, a monument and park dedicated to famed Tang dynasty scholar and writer, Dufu.
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| Winding pathway |
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| The namesake thatched cottage |
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| Excavation site on the premises, where numerous Tang dynasty household artifacts were discovered |
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| Whimsical caricatures of Dufu by modern students |
At last, we met up for dinner with the team, where we had this lovely delicacy at a local hot pot restaurant!
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| Yum |
Next up, travelogues of our summer trip to Northern Europe!
