Archive for the ‘Places’ Category
Wight Flight
From a valuable blog called Squatter City (and by the author of a recent book by the same name):
Attention squatters: Detroit has 12,000 abandoned homes and 36 square miles of vacant land. What’s more, in a shocking tidbit, the dean of the University of Detroit’s school of architecture asserts that families are exhuming 400 to 500 bodies a year from local graveyards and reburying them in suburban cemeteries. All because of the fear of crime when coming to visit a relative’s grave.
Another kind of fog
The locals kept saying, insisting, that it was dust from the Gobi Desert. It wasn’t dust from the Gobi Desert.
Here’s a small section of the incredibly long line to see plasticized Mao. We skipped that ride. But Mao was the only one not coughing that day. Not a camera malfunction – this is really what the air looked like.
Beijing Pizza Hut
Boing Boing has a post up on something that I saw in Beijing – have never seen anyone else mention it.
Wife and I, paralyzed with hunger in Beijing one day, actually ate at a Pizza Hut. (Actually… we ate at Pizza Hut a few times in China, OK… Leave me only, foodie dorks…)
Seated near the salad bar – not all that different from the salad bars at PH at home – we noticed something rather peculiar. Folks weren’t just calmly slopping their salads together as at home (mom always used to drop the choco pudding on top of it all – what’s up with that?)… No, they were building frigging pyramids of fruit and veg, towers obelisks of pineapple, etc… Thing is, everyone was doing it – just seemed to be part of the PH experience over there… Could help but laugh – folks would work in pairs, one supporting the plate, and the other building. Literally – no overstatement – they’d spend 20 or so minute on the whole thing.
Now I learn the secret – they’re only allowed one trip…