jwebphoto: January 2010

so since i was unable to post day to day in china... here is everything in one huge post, just gonna throw some pics up and try to explain. hope you enjoy.
landed in hong kong and headed over to the mainland to meet up with larry. out of the billion plus people living in china, larry is without a doubt one of my favorite. here is the man the myth the legend rocking out on some karaoke.

while most people in china drive one of these

larry drives one of these, please note the lack of plates. if you could see him drive you could also note the total disregard for all traffic laws.

larry was a killer host and is also killing it with the project we are working on together.
so besides fast cars and crazy chinese guys, i spent some down time in shenzhen treating myself to some of the local street food in some of the little neighborhoods. without a doubt this was my favorite, the ever so popular dim sum, by the way this order of dim sum was less then $.50.

i couldn't resist taking a picture of this hot dog stand thought the picture was a little suspect

a closer look. awkward

you see some crazy things just walking around over there, like this walking pet store, birds, rabbits, some stuff i could not identify.

you also see a lot of US company logos on random things. not the pabst i am use to.

but wouldn't it be awesome to have one of these in your office, but you know with regular pabst

on the last night in shenzhen we stopped in a bar and found this on the wall

at least someone out there is still a tribe fan.
awesome traditional architecture

from shenzhen we headed northwest to chengdu, a city i have visited before in the schezuan province. chengdu is a bit "foggy" these days.

a quick morning meeting left us with no time as we had grab a train to chongqing, where we were greeted by am fantastic meal. schezuan province is known for really good really spicy food, and it earns that reputation well. here is the meal which by the way ran about $11.

soy beans were mashed up using this traditional mill. the resulting paste is made into bean curd which is then dipped into a mixture of tongue numbing spices and is then put into my month resulting in a huge smile on my face.

the people at this restaurant were super nice and seemed pretty surprised to see western faces in their establishment. they got over it and continued to play some mahjong.

after another quick meeting we headed off to beijing for yet another meeting and my first visit to the capital city. beijing is amazing. it is a beautiful city that is actually quite clean. the best quote from beijing was "the government wanted blue skies, so we have blue skies." that referring to the fact that pre2008 olympics the chinese government moved all industry out of beijing effectively cleaning up the air and you guessed it, bringing back the blue sky. pretty amazing.
the city itself is a crazy mix of old and new, my favorite building was the TV station. i can only imagine the look on the contractor's face when the engineers brought in these plans.

while in beijing i had a some down time and was able to walk around and explore the city a bit including the forbidden city and tiananmen square.
the forbidden city was amazing. one of those places that makes you wonder how it could be constructed today let alone thousands of years ago when they did not have things like CAD or motorized equipment.

there is so much detail in everything, here you see the little characters in the rooftops.

the scale of everything is unreal, especially when you consider that it was all aimed at one individual, the emperor.

the lines that are in the forbidden city are amazing

besides the architecture there are amazing sculptures everywhere

ridiculous size to everything

across the street from the forbidden city is tiananmen square. it is crazy because there is one thing that comes to mind when tiananmen square is talked about here in the states, in fact for me there is one image that comes to mind...

however, in china the protests and resulting deaths of 1989 are not talked about at all, there is no memorial or remembrance. that aside, it is a very amazing area completely intimidating in size and stature.
the view of the forbidden city from tiananmen square

the chairman and his solider

i think they might we watching me...

just down the street from the square is the opera house, which some call "the egg" i wonder why?

in tiananmen square i met some guys one from beijing and one from hong kong who spoke very good english. we struck up a conversation and ended up having tea in a small tea house. great experience.
tea

my new friends

again even though i was on the otherside of the world in a totally different culutre there were still plenty of things from home there.
walking around looking for good eats that night i came upon this christmas tree, a really really blue one

on the way to the airport i noticed this VW with a nitro snowboards sticker on the back, they must love MFM there.

it was an amazing trip, got a lot of work done believe it or not, made some new friends and experienced some amazing things. many thanks to all those who helped over there, courtney, larry and everyone else who was happy to share a story or some tea. can't wait to get back there in march.