On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
JanieM
Several of these are from Qing Yun Si, the Blue Cloud temple featured in set 5. Otherwise, they’re mostly random shots from around Yulin.
Temple rooflines.
Steps leading down from the main part of the temple to a little stream. We skipped the climb; I wasn’t sure my aging knees could cope.
A little structure visible from the temple, with no indication of what it was for. I like to assume it was where a monk could go for a quiet moment. The view would have been spectacular, especially on days when the air wasn’t so dusty.
School letting out. This was taken on my last day in town. My flight out wasn’t until evening, and we took one last long walk.
At the farmers market. One of the big things I had to adjust to was the difference in safety consciousness, to speak from an American point of view. It wasn’t uncommon to see two or three people riding on a little motorbike, sometimes with a baby or toddler in one person’s arms. Traffic was chaotic; crossing a street was taking your life into your hands. I saw a little gang of boys about five or six years old sticking firecrackers between the gaps in a stone wall, and lighting them. For that matter, because it was holiday time, there were fireworks everywhere. Street vendors sold them, kids set them off at random all day long, and I have never seen anything like the way fireworks ringed the city on the night of Lantern Festival, the final day of Spring Festival celebrations.
Food safety is its own topic. I was taken aback the first time I saw meat set out so casually, as in the picture. But despite having a generally touchy gut and eating everything that was put in front of me*, I never had a moment of traveler’s distress in the five weeks of my visit.
*Except chicken feet. Pigs ear and chicken feet were among the foods served at one of the holiday family dinners I went to. The pigs ears were marinated in a vinegary dressing and were a bit chewy, kind of like squid, but tasty. The chicken feet just seemed like too much work, along the lines of trying to get the bits of meat out of the legs of lobsters. But if you ever wondered what happens to the feet of all the chicken that get slaughtered for American fast food, now you know. (At least that was so in 2010.)
Street food.
Chinglish.
A scene along First Street on my last day. Forever after I’ve wondered what the man and the little boy were saying to each other.
YY_Sima Qian
Interesting photos! As they are from 2010, they do feel dated now (I am sure even for Yulin), since things change fast in China. However, you can still see the same street scenes in townships deeper into the rural areas and into the interior.
I love pig ear, which made well should be a nice contrast of crunchy cartilage & chewy skin. However, I have something of a mental hurdle against eating chicken feet, even though I can happy consume just about anything that is on offer in China (and SE Asia, Africa, etc.). De-boned chicken feet is about the only kind I can tolerate, just barely.
Mary G
This series is wonderful. I love the rooflines, shudder at the thought of those stairs and the meat on the street, think the little boy is saying that he did so do all his homework and should be allowed to ride his bike until dinner time.
YY_Sima Qian
Speaking of traffic and food safety: I started to travel back to China for business in the late-aughts. One time I was visiting a customer in one of the gritty industrial zones in suburban Shenzhen, with two colleagues (a white American & a local Chinese). At the end of the day, we left the factory in our rented minivan back to our hotel downtown. The street was getting very crowded w/ pedestrians, scooters & vehicles of every kind, as the factory workers ended their day shift. Suddenly a scooter veered in front of our vehicle, our driver could not stop in time, & hit the scooter. We immediately got out of the van, I saw a bloody lump of mangled meat lying on the dusty road. My heart skipped a couple of beats, I though we had run over the scooter driver, and I was seeing the crushed remain of one of his legs. Fearing an incident, I told the American colleague to stay inside of the van, because he was too conspicuous, and that we let our Chinese colleague monitor the situation. (This is just after an infamous incident where an American factory owner was trapped in his office by his workers during a labor dispute.) I took a closer look at the lump of meat, turns out the scooter was carrying a large, freshly slaughtered, de-feathered goose in the back seat to a nearby restaurant, and that was what I saw. We sat in the van waiting for the traffic cops to show up, which took a while. A few minutes after the accident, a chef walked out one of the “holes-in-the-wall” on the side of the road, picked up the mangled goose from the asphalt, washed off the dirt & dust, and took it into the kitchen. We looked at each other, & agreed that we would not eat at that establishment in the future.
YY_Sima Qian
@Mary G: If you like the roof lines of Ming/Qing style buildings (the style seen in these photos, & also seen in the Forbidden City), I think you might love those of Tang/Song/Liao style buildings. They can be founding Shanxi Province, immediately east of the Shaanxi Province. There are wooden temple structures that survived from those earlier dynasties (8th – 12th century AD). I find them to be more elegant, whereas the Ming/Qing style more elaborate & ostentatious.
dnfree
@YY_Sima Qian: thank you and Mary for your comments. We took the “standard” tour of China in 2008, before the Olympics and just before the big earthquake. We too loved the roofs. If you are ever inclined to post some newer pictures, I for one would like to see them. Or some comparison of roof styles!
At the end of our tour we took a trip to the Yellow Mountains. I should see if we have any photos worth sharing. They were beautiful, and there were few white tourists there.
JanieM
@YY_Sima Qian: I love that you fill in so much history and detail in these posts. I tried to soak in as much information as I could, but I came away with very little compared to the vastness of Chinese history, architecture, etc. Plus, a lot of my most interesting stories have to do with people and conversations, which I’m hesitant to repeat because they’re not just mine to pass on.
JanieM
@YY_Sima Qian:
I was looking at Google maps yesterday, trying to find the pagoda, a Yulin “attraction” that will come up in part 7. Jamie and I studied the satellite view for a while and realized that a lot of (presumably) housing construction has gone up around the edge of the city since 2010.
So yes — although that trip is so vivid in my mind it feels like yesterday, it also feels like a lifetime ago.
YY_Sima Qian
@dnfree:
Yes, Huangshan Mountains are breathtaking, like a Chinese watercolor painting made real. It’s been 25 years since I last visited the site. It just gets so damned crowded during holidays.
I would put it among the top 100 sites to be seen in the world. It may sound low on first glance, but consider how many beautiful sites there are in the world…
YY_Sima Qian
@JanieM: Love your series! Yulin is off the beaten path even for me!
YY_Sima Qian
@JanieM:
The gritty industrial zone in suburban Shenzhen that I was visiting in late-aughts, which as of mid 90s were still farm land, has since been razed and transformed into gleaming office towers, leafy residential compounds, and technology parks w/ Silicon Valley vibes.