I went to the theater last night. The event took place in the two-year-old theater, part of the huge new cultural center, centered on an artificial lake, and including the Tianjin History Museum, a concert hall, a science museum, etc. etc.  I haven’t actually seen it all yet.

Anyway, the theater is pictured in this panorama – and it is a panorama, which makes the building appear a lot smaller than it does in person.  If you want to see the whole thing large, click on it for the original file.

We opted for the cheap seats. It was a company from Germany, performing a modern play from Sweden in German. It was a difficult exercise for my German, since the dialogue was as opaque and obtuse as Scandinavian Angst can be. I’m still trying to figure out what the “sound of an open door” was, and what hydrogen, oxygen and vinegar had to do with it.

Luckily for my companions, there were subtitles in Chinese, so they were able to understand “every word.” Unfortunately they were just as mystified as to the meaning of the play as I was.

The audience, of course, gave the company an enthusiastic ovation anyway.  I snapped this picture after the play had concluded.  The big screen above the set actually echoed everything the actors did. Or actually, it was prerecorded (I think) so that the opposite actor-film relationship obtained.

Anyway, I’m sure that the theater managers among us would have enjoyed it.

Afterward, I finally got to see the legendary Galaxy Mall, where I had fruit and yogurt for the equivalent of five dollars.  Yes, fabulous prices are coming to China along with the fabulous malls. Anyway, I figured a snapshot of the mall might balance the video of our local market which I recently uploaded to Youtube.

It rained all morning, from the early morning hours until noon. I hadn’t taken many pictures this year on rainy days, so I spent a couple hours wandering around and snapping some shots for my PowerPoint slide show. I got a nice selection, so, before I decide which ones to use, I figured I’d post a bunch here. The old “run it up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes” sort of deal.

And remember, you can get the larger view just by clicking on the image.

The first shot this morning shows a few Saturday strollers passing by a bouquet of garbage cans.

The garbage trucks here are nowhere near as large as those back home. They don’t have to be, in part because of people like the guy in the picture. Whereas most people made a deposit, he’s making a rather thorough and detailed withdrawal.   This sort of thing happens at every garbage can in the city – cardboard, wire, bottles, and old bicycle chains are extracted and sold to somebody somewhere.

It makes my wonder if, on the new campus,  such people might not be as readily available, since its about 20 miles away from anything else and isolated behind a moat.  We’ll have to wait and see, I guess.

Not far from that spot is one of two “tree farms” that I know of on campus.

When similar trees get diseases or get knocked down by the wind, these trees can readily take their place.

In fact, I’ve only recently become aware of how much planting and replanting of trees is constantly going on.

Here’s another example of replanting – a flower display of annuals going into the central square on campus.  And it’s not just  the flowers. The grass had also just been laid down like a carpet.  Actually I took this picture yesterday before the rains began.

This next shot show  one of the many street-side snack sources near dining hall number one.  The dining hall itself was closed, totally shut down for the hours between breakfast and lunch.

But, luckily, little snack centers like this one are everywhere.  One hopes that the new campus will also have some, even though they are often viewed as cluttered and messy institutions.

I was able to grab a quick shot of the dining hall itself when I walked up the stairs. Actually, it surprised me that I could do this, since most dining halls are shut up tighter than a thermos between meals.

The food is available from separate vendors which are arranged behind the windows that line the periphery of the room.  This sort of arrangement, with ten or twenty independent  vendors in one cafeteria , seems to exhibit a level of private enterprise that I don’t remember seeing at universities in America.  Of course, it’s only been about three or four decades since I’ve actually gotten food from one of those, so who knows?

From the top of the dining hall, one can gaze out over the trees and see how thickly they crowd around all the buildings.  It almost looks like the forest moon of Endor.  The tall buildings in the background are almost all recent constructions and are part of the city, not the university.

Continuing the jungle theme, we see here the architecture building, sitting at one end of the “Lake of Task Commitment.”  Yes, that really is its name — 敬业 湖.

From a certain angle, it kind of looks like a forest building, too.  Yep, Endor’s got nothing on us.

And taking the forest theme to its illogical extremity, here’s the entrance to the faculty activities building over by Aiwan Lake. It seems like the jungle has even wormed its way inside the building!!

Yes, there’s a lot more to this campus than the concrete and asphalt.

On the other hand, there certainly is a lot of concrete over by my office, at Beiyang Square. This morning it was used to good advantage by a couple bicycling toddlers. Or maybe it was a couple toddling bicyclers.  Anyway, they’re as skittish as magpies, so I was lucky to get this shot of one as he fled.

Nearby is something unknown, but not anonymous.

A few days ago I finally noticed this sign at the front of our office building – building 25.  It says “The School of State Secret Protection.”

Man, I never knew they had schools for that sort of thing, let alone one on my own campus.  As you can see, even the human members of this school are cut off from the rest of us behind glass enclosures.   There’s no way you’ll ever wrench a secret  from them!!!

I asked a student about that department, and he’s told me he’s never met anyone from there. Well, no surprise, I guess.

It’s said that in the springtime a young man’s fancy turns to love.  One can also say that an old man’s fancy turns to photos of flowers.   Those old guys cluster like hummingbirds around every single floral display you can find.

I wonder where they migrate to in the winter?

And  did I also bag a shot of these flowers? Of course, I did.  And I do know where I migrate to in the winter.

Okay, I’ll finish up today with two ordinary pictures.  First, the typical pedestrian walking down the middle of the street. Again, one of these days, I’ll have to put together an analysis of why this behavior exists.

It really is quite an interesting phenomenon, and something I think about a lot, since I’m so afraid of doing the same thing out of habit when I’m in America, and thus ending my life before its time.

Anyway, here is the opposite scenario – a vehicle negotiating the sidewalk. This phenomenon is much less common than than in the good old days, and now mainly with miniaturized coaches instead of full-sized one.

Okay – that’s all for now, I guess. I’m off to a play.

This week’s two PowerPoint intro slides feature less obvious aspects of the school dining halls.

First up is the stairway down below dining hall number four.  The basement of that building sports an assortment of small shops and a restaurant that features Western food. I haven’t actually tried that restaurant, but I sure have bought snacks from the quicky-mart and souvenir post cards from a small printing concern.

When I first came to Tianjin, postcards were only available at the Post Office, and they all had nothing to do with the city you were in.  Either they were a special series of antique ink stones, or the same old Great Wall postcards you could get in the next town over.  Now it seems that many small printers have rushed in to fill in the gap. And in a school like this one, full of architecture students who could mostly be professional artists if they had the chance, it’s not too hard to find people who can make effective postcards. In fact, maybe I’ll scan one into this message.

Anyway, it always seems odd to see normal people brush up against the air-brushed beauty of those beautiful people in the ads.

I took the second picture just last night. The weather has turned decidedly warmer this week. And since most places on earth don’t have the real weather of the Pacific coast, where it cools off at night, this means that strollers emerge from their winter hibernation.

Of course, they share the road with speeding bikes like the one blurring in the center of the picture. People don’t walk on sidewalks so much here.   That’s a subject for a whole other post sometime.

In this case, they’re strolling by the entrance to Dining Hall number one, the hall with those strangely-shaped light squiggles to attract the attention of the hungry.  Of course, by this time, (about 7:30 pm) the dining hall itself is closed and locked. But like dining hall number four, there are shops underneath that cater to desperate students.

And there’s also a whole floor of shops above the dining hall as well. Many times have I enjoyed the hot pot up there, on evenings just like this one.    And that should suffice for this post!

This is still a bit of an experiment to test all the capabilities of the site. I am planning on putting a picture in the post, though, as well as maybe a video? Every week I give two lessons to each of four class sections. Each section has between 30 and 35 students, so that makes my entire student load somewhere north of 120.

Each lesson is centered around a PowerPoint presentation, something I have always hated, but I find I’m bound to it here by circumstances. Anyway, the first slide of each PowerPoint presentation contains a recent picture of the school. It occurred to me that it might be nice to post them on a blog, along with a paragraph or two of description, and then it would be an easy post every few days. Not much strain in simply posting pictures. So here are the two pictures for this week’s lessons. The first example was taken a couple weeks ago by the graduate student dorms.  And the thing is, a large fraction of those bikes are probably abandon-ware.  Students usually buy them for the equivalent of five to ten dollars, usually used, and then when they leave for greener pastures, they just leave them  behind.

The second sample for this week shows one of the many workmen riding his work tricycle down a relatively little-traveled alleyway early in the morning.  These guys use those trikes for every sort of errand and go-fer duty. They work long hours. In the back, coincidentally wearing the exact same shade of orange, a student recedes from view in the distance.  Actually two students in orange. Clicking on this picture should load the larger version, so you can search out the other one, if you’re so inclined.

Anyway, since I’m not planning on going back for old pictures, I’ll add one more while I have the chance. This was taken a couple weeks ago in honor of the Tianjin University crabapple bloom. The open mouth on the photographer in the foreground evinces the splendor in the crabs. or something.

Anyway, assuming all these photos work, and the links work for those who want to see the full-size version of the pictures, I will try one last big media file – my commute from work.

Or not.

Actually, one can see this video by clicking here: Riding through Tianjin University

I happened to have a video camera in my hand as I left class. So with one hand on the bike handlebars and the other holding the camera, I rode home at a leisurely pace. You can see it clocks in at about six minutes.  If I’m in a hurry, and the traffic isn’t so heavy, I can do it in five.

Anyway, highlights include the bridge over Jingye lake, the blaring loudspeakers blasting corny music for the evening commute, the west gate standing half-open, as it does for an hour or so every day. The other half never opens. Also you can see some of the sidewalk vendors that the line the streets of my cozy community, as well as the herds of automobiles, lining the sidewalks like beached elephant seals.

And that, as they say, is that. I’ll put this now live on the web.