spring2life take2

writing this in the last hour of 2008, there is not much left but wishing all of you a happy new year 2009. may there be peace around you and in your hearts.

i have rarely wandered in a park so full of beauty, even in late autumn, where it lacks the sensation of blossoming flowers. the temples we had reached only late in the afternoon, but neither me nor my colleague wanted to give in, even after 5 hours of walk.

only the sunset forced us to go on and find our way towards the exit, not knowing that leaving the park was possible throughout the night. but the golden light of this time of day we fully savoured.

that christmas hiatus was not planned (not to self: better write holiday posts in advance…), so ex post my best christmas wishes, alternatively seasons greetings to you all. there is a small number of china pictures left which i would like to share, starting with this view of the buddhist temple in the summer residence of the emperor together with the 21. century skyline of beijing.

walking and sightseeing in the middle of the crowd sometimes offers the opportunity to profit from posing meant for others, and this way i got the picture to the right. A lot of joy is in this pose, that’s why i like it.

found in the pond in the emperors summer residence. one of the empty, dried capsules of the lotos flower i picked up an brought as a material reminder of this place.

there are many aspects on which to judge a government ruling 100 years ago. the cultural revolution in china found resonance among the millions who suffered under a violent regime that in many ways abused human workforce just for the aggrandissement and luxury of the ruling class (and just a flash of thought: what will history books write about current governments and administrations).

still there are achievements, others but in a different way valuable from the revolutions results. a heritage of art forms that still lives today and articulates valid statements, not only in the field of gardening.

i’ve rarely seen such perfection in form as here, embedded in a perfect landscape, in the summer residence of the emperor in beijing. for me this is form brought back to the principle of absolute simplicity, stripped of all unnecessities, and in this way nearing perfection.

noise, smog and dust of beijing, all was left behind.

the weather on this my last day in china was as good as it could get: moderate warm (for november) and a nice mist in the air that did avert that summer-like steel blue sky. it created an extremely fine balance with the red painted wood and the still mostly green leaves.

the whole way around the lake in the emperors summer residence was a feasting in new vistas, new visual highlights. and, due to november, it was not too crowded, so i really could enjoy my time.

as I was quite often ask to pose for a photo together with chinese people (i guess a european man with a ponytail is regarded as even more interesting than a “normal” foreigner) i pretty soon lost my shyness and asked people to allow me make a picture of them. this way the group portrait of the three generations was realized.

… and sometimes of course i didn’t ask but tried my best to “steal” a shot. i just couldn’t resist this one.

the last day in beijing pampered us with blue sky and warm sunshine, ideal for a visit to the summer residence of the emperors. the place was busy with locals, and their exercising with the ribbons made up for a wonderful double arc with one of the most harmonious bridges i have ever seen.

so the very first meters in this park promised a wonderful restorative day after the cold marathon through the forbidden city from the day before.

40 taxi minutes away from the center of beijing, my hotel offered a great view over the suburb houses – 21st floor is a kind of vantage point. plus, i had a better impression of beijings smog – not that i did care too much for this. looking down was quite spectacular, photographing was more difficult as the window did open just enough to hold the camera outside.

you remember the good ol’ film days? when we had tri-x and pushed it to 1600 to get verrrry grainy b&w results? and were proud of the available light photography we were able to do then? at that days i would never have thought of snapping with a standard zoom lens late at night in not-so-well lit corners of the street, like here in beijing. a lot has changed, not everything for the better, but digital photography has brought me a whole new horizon of opportunities. available light among them, but also to shoot 500 frames without a single thought of regret…

found on the wall of a kiosk in the more touristic areas. well, that’s probably capitalism: to sell whatever is requested. and here in my county at home, militaria and obscene relics of 1939-1945 also are requested and sell only too well.

but the combination of heroic posters of the cultural revolution and the iuxtaposing movie? posters is extraordinary.

the lonely planet guide told: “you don’t have to search for the rikshas to drive you through the hutongs, they will find you”, and so it was. outside the north end of the forbidden city, you could merely walk for 5m without being asked for a riksha tour. As it was off season, there were maybe 50 rikshas for every tourist.

the cold grey weather we had, just above freezing, perfectly matches the blue-grey colors here, with the chillies a perfect complementary in color as well as characteristic.

the chinese society undergoes a fast transition. this is strongly visible also inside the cities, where those who do not manage to be on the rising side live under very simple conditions. i did not want to think about winter temperatures in accomodations like this.

the exit gate of the forbidden city shone in such a fresh and strong red that it was almost painful in the eyes – and to the sensor, as the histogram showed. a friend later on told me that the preliminaries of the olympic games 2008 had included a real orgy in paint, even in the hutongs, the leftovers of the traditional beijing quarters, where all the roadside walls were painted grey.

of course this was only a make-up and was not connected to substantial improvements. the hutongs were a strong contrast to the splendor of the forbidden city, and a contrast to the modern, multi-story, skyscraper architecture that is the visible result of the olympics boom. the hutongs feature a similar red as the old parts of the forbidden city, but the rest is dreary and grey, except for the more touristic parts.

no words, in my eyes there is nothing to add to this harmonious arrangement

the forbidden city of course was full of people photographing, themselves like the lady in the lead picture (which i found amazing in the iuxtaposition of a single figure against those incountable roofs), each other, the architecture, also me. a european man with a ponytail is so extraordinary that especially gals wanted me to pose together with them. but how can i blame them when i was interested in chinese faces and people.

a long time ago i was quite good in fermi estimates, so i tried to get an idea about the numbers of pictures taken every day in the forbidden city, but alas, i was not able to do a qualified guess.

the availability of electronic gadgets was stunning and gave me a little bit of an idea about the development of spending capacity now in the middle class of china. and in terms of numbers, this middle class already is big.

instead of struggling with maths, i preferred to fall back to photographing roofs, tiles and numerous shades of red on the walls. satisfying that was.

in the maze of the forbidden city, you always get carried on by the masses of tourists (local tourists in my case), but when you manage to reach a corner you can stay for a while and watch the delicate beauty for example of the roof tiles.

in yesterday’s blog entry i already mentioned b. brechts “questions from a worker who reads”, and this thought accompagnied me throughout the palaces and palaces and palaces. it kind of gets a special connotation in china, as the masses are so big that it’s only to easy to not notice them as individuals as we would do naturally in our home country.

so it was a feast for the eyes, tiring a bit after 4 hours, and the border to the garden area was most welcome at that time.

leaving the hotel at 6:15 was not enough: there was already quite a crowd – 99% chinese – at tiananmen square, chatting in the cold morning air and all waiting for the flag to be brought by clockwork-like moving soldiers to the flag pole. and i was in the midst, all i could see were the camera displays of the fellows standing in front of me.

when the flag finally was rising, i was lucky to catch a glimpse over the heads to see the portrait of the chairman watching this ceremony.

tiananmen now of course is a highly political place, so there was quite a number of policemen to watch the spectators, and all lamp posts are equipped with dozens of cameras. therefore i was even more astonished to see dozens of homeless sleeping in the underpass leading to the “great hall of the people”. when i started taking pictures, again policemen appeared, this time not adressing me but instructing the homeless to probably pack their belongings and go.

having only 2.5 days for beijing on the way back from the world urban forum in nanjing, my colleague and i decided to go to the great wall immediately after arriving in beijing airport. a wise decision it was, because the next day not only the sky was grey but also the temperatures around freezing point. the wall is great and big and incredibly steep.

and incredibly crowded, even in november – i do not dare to think how crowded it was during the olympics. still, after walking for one hour, we had left most of the fellow visitors behind.

the path was so steep and the stone so polished that more than one times my shoes slipped, so i can only guess what the soldiers up there may have experienced (but maybe the stone was not that glazed then).

the air in autumn was already hazy which made up for a nice feeling of distance. what i found most impressive but failed to capture were the filigrane shrubs and bushes without leaves, silvery reflecting the last sunlight. but the the taxi had come and we had to leave for beijing finally.

beijing airport was impressive, to say the least. dimension-wise as well as in puncto tidiness, and at least from the latter those pictures should give an impression.

in europe it is common wisdom that societies with a socialist background usually have an enormous amount of hidden unemployment by entertaining low paid support jobs that would not exist in a pure capitalistic environment (don’t deduce from this statement that i would rate our capitalistic society higher – the last months have shown on which bubbles we have built). in beijing airport as well as on the streets of nanjing numerous amount of cleaning staff was re-cleaning clean things, to maintain the high gloss as here in beijing, or spotless clean motoways as in nanjing. impressive, but probably not a useful model for other parts of the world.

but as a billboard to the world, showcasing chinas prosperity and well-organisedness it presumably served the purpose.

no narrative text today, this image i value just because of its graphical values in terms of colors, distribution of areas and lines. hope you enjoy it, too.

everything else I do know precisely thanks to the exif data, even the place:

This is the result on clicking on this link and switching to satellite map. technical background? a cheap gps logger, the transystem bt 747 and (because i am a dedicated linux user and programmer) some perl code to find the correct coordinates via the exif time stamp of the picture. similar software is available for windows and the mac. nice gadget, and saves some note-taking.

late night wandering through nanjing. having experienced all the noise during the day, it’s astonishing that street life pretty much closes down at 8 pm. only in the biggest shopping malls you might find open shops now, and it’s better to find a place in a restaurant soon.

not only the people have transferred a lot of activities to the street, also the pets sometimes live out in the open. carefully taking a picture of those birds in cages, to my utter shock the dog started to bark at me. i should keep the not-on-the-viewfinder eye open…

any questions in which direction to go? where you are?

there is one major challenge when wandering alone through a chinese city: how to come back. the namecard of the hotel is a lifesaver, so i always had two in my pocket. but not every taxidriver has good eyesight and/or knows the way. to make it more difficult, nanjing for example had 4 nanjing hotels, and it took me a while until i knew to ask for the jinjiang nanjing hotel. and even then: the hotel was in a corner of a block and had 3 entrances, looking all different. people you ask in the street don’t speak english and/or don’t know where they have to send you.

so once i left the shuttle bus to walk the rest of the way late at night, got the wrong direction and landed in a cul-de-sac, which fortunately turned out to be the end point of a bus line. showing the hotel name card, i was sent from one bus driver to the next and motioned into a bus, where a lady of maybe 25 year in white cotton gloves started to maneuver the bus through the nightly streets. after 20 minutes of silence she suddenly gestured to show the card again and urged me to get of the bus right there. so out on the street i was, and after several tries to get information from the rare pedestrians, i finally got a cab. this cab drove the street for 150m, turned around, went back again 150m, entered through a gate and after another 100m dropped me – in front of my hotel door.

strolling at night, in the rain and without tripod usually is not a standard situation for good shots, but having only 8 days in china i wanted to get out the maximum of it. and this construction site offered some dramatic light effects, especially when the welding startet.

street photography in the true sense of the word, and dangerous it was: in europe we don’t see and electric bicycles, and in china when you see them it is already quite late: quiet and fast they are, and in the rain the drivers were not too willing to take care of a mad photographer…

the world urban forum of the united nations in nanjing was also used by the chinese government as a platform for showcasing achievements in tourism and real estate development. one of the booths sported this forest of tree silhouettes which was consequentially used as a picnic arena for the local visitors.

the middle of the hall was filled with flower pots, scented osmanthus in this case, and only under close inspection it was – again – revealed that those were artificial plants. good optics, yet no substance.

participating in a trade fair late in the year, the scenery above is what you usally get at the end of the day. no daylight, little photography – not only because of the light but the feet and the eyes are sore and the nee for a shower and some food is just overwhelming.

chinese representative architecture is first of all BIG. architectonically at least not completely boring, the expo halls in nanjing however had no distinctive chinese elements. it was more smoothened international, global and therefore exchangeable steel and glass style.

nanjing is an extremely busy city – 8 lanes roads, skyscrapers, noise and smog. but when you enter one of the parks, by miracle all that negative aspects of city life stay behind and you are in a different world.

chinese garden design is not that renowned here in europe, we usually take japanese, zen style gardens to be sufficient representative for east asian gardening. and of course china was long enough almost inaccessible for travelers, no wonder everybody concentrated on the available japanese examples of this region’s garden style.

so when the light went and the park closed, i took one look (and a picture) back to this enclave that had made me forgotten in which busy place i was. the way back to the hotel in a subway with only chinese directives was an adventure for itself.

the mixture between old and new drew my attention. deducing from publications, reports of friends, as well as own short time experience in one chinese city, development in china happens at blazing speed – that is, in the cities. a lot of young, western style well dressed people in remnants of old architecture and traditional colors that get surrounded by steel/glass/concrete skyscrapers. should i ever have the opportunity to come back to china, i would love to see the countryside as i guess the life in the villages is extremely different from the cities, in way that we don’t see any more here in europe.

found in a gift shop next to the fu-zi temple in nanjing. in china there seems to be a still unbroken reverence for the former chairman. from a westerner’s point of view this seems a bit bewildering, just having read wikipedia’s entry about this leader of his people: the number of victims of the chinese revolution and the following 30 years is estimated as 10 millions. strange – as so many things in china.

in case you don’t know: munich, capitol of bavaria and the city were i work, has a chinese tower. built 1789, it nowadays is the center of a beer garden. absence of abstinence in my case not only leads to a certain inclination towards beer, but also to chinese roof constructions. the fu-zi temple area in this respect was a treasure trove, whilst the chinese beer i experienced as not really convincing.

the temple is surrounded by a number of buildings from the imperial times, besides a museum many of those houses now host shops for gifts and souvenirs.

this is a roof detail from the fu-zi temple in nanjing. at this first encounter, i was overwhelmed with the fine details and the expressiveness of the sculptures. and despite of the many (chinese) tourists, the place had kept the feeling of a religious area, whereas not so intensive as the temples i have seen in chinatown quarters for example in indonesia. communism and cultural revolution for sure have taken their toll.

i am a fan of these temple sceneries (just see incense in the chinese temple), but nanjing offered nothing such. an official mission of course is not the ideal setting for pursuing private photographic interests, so i took what was offered.

the scenery to the right unfolded itself just outside of the temple, quietly and unspectacular. glad to have my long tele zoom with me, i just had to wait for the worker to take the right pose.

the trip to china brought +20gb raw files. going through the directories (when shooting in big numbers, i organize my files one folder per day) i still am in day 2 and try to discover the keepers or at least the not so-so ones. the shot above i like – otherwise i wouldn’t show it, of course – as it depicts that scenery outside of fu-zi temple in nanjing as a typical chinese urban mixture of young people in western style clothes, but again the temple and the connected philosophy and its symbols as nowadays again appreciated setting.

nanjing as a megacity of 7.5 million inhabitants is as modern and/or western as it can be in the contemporary china, but still using traditional symbols as decoration. even manpower-driven rikshaws are present, in former times deprecated because of the exploitation of the kulis.

in the big crowd gathering on the rare banches in front of the food stalls in the fu-zi temple area in nanjing, this cook sat self-forlorn (or maybe just tired), closely watched by a statue of konfuzius.

the already mentioned ‘re nao’ holds true for street vendor businesses also. even late at night, the crowds at the food stalls are loud and busy, queues tightly packed. europeans with a certain affinity for less body contact when waiting immediately find themselves at the end of the queue for quite a while.

at the food stall, it was quite easy for me to adapt to local queuing policies – hunger or appetite make up for a good motivation. it was considerably less easy for me in the public toilets, where you have again to queue up almost touching your front man busy with his business at the urinal, otherwise you have to wait for quite a long time…

back home again, there is still a stack of photos from china i would like to share with you. these are from nanjing again, showing a food stall selling shao mai, the typical chinese dumplings. when you are not too picky about the settings, those small shops can offer excellent food and a pleasure for the eyes as well. having learned only two words of mandarin in the last week, i was still able to by my food and/or ask for permission to take pictures. wandering in the streets was an experience i wouldn’t have wanted to miss. of course the card of the hotel was like an insurance for getting back by taxi as a fallback, but even bus drivers speaking as much english as i do speak chinese were very supportive and helped me find my way.

nanjing is not at all accustomed to foreigners traveling without a guide or translators. the overwhelming friendliness however made up for most of the difficulties, also in the restaurants. not beeing able to use chopsticks is a major drawback here, as one restaurant we visited had only 2 forks and two knives for those westerners not wanting to accept the challenge.

taking a rest from ‘re nao’, the chinese expression for ‘hot and loud’. for me, who is coming from a small town in the bavarian mountains, a city like nanjing with 7.5 million inhabitants is really stressful. so i did enjoy this quiet garden with the harmonious forms of the roofs, the ponds and the plants which look nice even in late autumn.

this bonsai i found in zhonghuamen, a restaurated gate in the 12 m high city wall – the longest in the world as the guide told me proudly – and an elder couple was taking care of these trees and enjoyed my attention. unfortunately i was to shy to ask them for the opportunity of a portrait…

zhonghuamen itself consists of three gates in a row, in between deep spaces where every enemy would become easy prey for the soldiers standing on the wall. notice the modern skyline of nanjing in the smog, not so far away.

coming from a city where the average age is almost 50 years, china at first sight is a country of young people. but in the quieter places you can see the interesting faces of the elderly, taking a walk, doing tai-chi in the parks or simply walking backwards for training purposes. the latter is not a joke, as i had thought at first, but writing reminds me that i have to take a picture of this.

walking the bird is another habit unknown in western countries but frequent to see here in china. in zonghuamen here in nanjing people gather with their birds in cages so that the singing out of one cage stimulates the other birds to do the same. the whole thing for sure is not without problems as the cages are probably too small and many of the birds are captured from the wild.

my thanks go to athine. of course you don’t know who athine is, so i will tell you. for the current world urban forum in nanjing, the chinese organizers recruited more than 2000 volunteers, mainly students with a major in english. athine is one of them, and she accompagnied our bus from the airport to the hotel. chatting with her, she gave me the advice to go to zonghuamen early in the morning, where i would find locals doing free air exercises. this way i got the chance for this picture of that girl doing her exercises and getting advice for improvement

china is definitely worth many words, a lot of praise, but i also see the restrictions: numerous blogs i can’t read, http://blog.andreas-manessinger.info/ to name just one example. why? i don’t know, but china is like this…

i came to china open eyed – ok only partly after that long trip – and open minded, and up to now my astonishment is a positive one, in all respect except the fog. i do hope it’s just natural fog and not heavy air pollution, because if so, it must have killer qualities. the people i met were friendly, the food is just gorgeous and the visual treatments abundant. i need more time to process my images, so this is just a treat for the images to come. stay tuned – internet is slow here, so commenting will be difficult, but at least i can upload and blog.

and before i forget: high iso with the a700 is just great and indispensable here, as fog means low light already at 04:00 pm. the picture above is just a normal bibble pro/noise ninja registered conversion. If you want to se where it is, just follow this link to google maps. the coordinates were taken with a small i-blue bt747 gps logger.