Random Photograph No. 54 photographs taken in Liuzhou which amuse, perplex or fascinate me. Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing cuccu! Groweþ sed and bloweþ med And springþ þe wde nu, Sing cuccu! Awe bleteþ after lomb, Lhouþ after calue cu. Bulluc sterteþ, bucke uerteþ, Murie sing cuccu! Cuccu, cuccu, wel singes þu cuccu; Ne [...]
It’s May 1st – International Labour Day, no less. Up the workers and all that. And the world’s largest communist country* celebrates in true socialist style. By giving the middle classes the day off while all the actual working class have to go to work as normal. The street sweepers are still sweeping streets, the [...]
I’m not a big fan of bars. Especially in China. I am a big fan of proper British pubs. There are none of those in China. Please don’t tell me that there is a British pub in Beijing or Shanghai. There isn’t. There are ersatz pseudo-pubs. A plague on them. Nearly all bars in Liuzhou [...]
Some time before Liuzhou’s Radisson Blu hotel opened, it became known that the plans included a deli. I remember a conversation with some other laowai, who were being excited and looking forward to the opening. I remained sceptical. It has now been open a few months and touts itself as the “only deli and bakery [...]
If you were going to start any sort of personal transport business, I would guess it would make sense to determine when most of your customers want transporting. This is why the local buses tend to run in the day time rather than only offering a night service. The peak times for moving are well [...]
When they aren’t busy trying to kill us by turning our drinking water into cadmium soup, adulterating our yoghurt with melamine, recycling rancid cooking oil or just mowing us down on the streets by driving on the sidewalks, the locals have taken to producing poisonous disposable chopsticks. Inspections of three disposable bamboo chopstick “factories” in [...]
I have no wish to alarm anyone, but there is a big, yellow, shiny, warm thing in the sky above Liuzhou this afternoon! Does anyone have any idea what it might be?
Bamboo is amazing stuff. Not only is it a beautiful plant, but its uses are apparently endless. It is a food (as every panda knows); it is used as a building material; chopsticks are often made from it; it is used as scaffolding and to prop up buildings under construction. In Yunnan, I saw Dai [...]
The Radisson Blu Hotel is Liuzhou’s newest upmarket hotel. And a fine place it is, too. With great services at the prices you would expect to pay – i.e. expensive. The hotel website is interesting for its imagination. I mentioned this before when it announced itself to be one of Liuzhou’s “most stylishly distinctive dining and [...]
Liuzhou prefecture’s Rong’an (融安) county is about an hour or so’s drive north of the city. The county town is basically a smallish market town serving the surrounding district. It is a poor place and the crime rate is relatively high. A few years ago, I passed through on a rather unpleasant bus journey to [...]
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