Theatre Panorama 1
Originally uploaded by clarkalastair

A fortnight ago we went to a Mozart themed concert given by the very French Stradivarius String Quartet.

In general the evening was enjoyable with some very good and professional music, and not ridiculously priced either (100 kuai each, not the cheapest seats – 80 kuai, but not the most expensive – 280 kuai). The theater was beautiful, and the acoustics seemed fine.

There were a few drawbacks however. Because the event was arranged by the French Alliance of Dalian, the presenter (and the musicians) spoke in French. Being English, and having studied French at school I could probably understand every third or fourth word, enough for a gist, but not perfect. They had a translator who wasn’t very comfortable on stage, and thusly wasn’t particularly great at her job, stuttering, stumbling and not looking very happy. In general, in this sort of situation it’s difficult to know when to clap, cause the westerners are inclined to clap after the western (French) introduction, and the Chinese after the Chinese introduction, and neither know the correct points in the others monologue to clap.

The experience of the concert wasn’t perfect either, there was an expressed instruction of no flash photography. There was some foolish person very near the front, who was taking flash photos every 5 minutes through the concert and really annoying (justifiably) the lead violinist, who spent half the time staring intently, mouthing “No” towards the person. Though he/she (I’m inclined to say she – which is very sexist of me) didn’t get the message, he/she wasn’t the only one. This caused the lead violinist to get up at the end of one of the pieces and got the Chinese translator to make the announcement again.

Similarly a phone went off from someone in the upper seating, and the lead violinist stopped the piece they had just started and waited until the sound had stopped. The Chinese man rather annoyingly and rudely answered the phone and proceeded to speak for 30 seconds before hanging up, all of which we could clearly hear due to the acoustics of the theater. I’m happy with the dignity that the quartet showed dealing with the culture difference. Even though the locals should have followed the instructions, this sort of quiet listening isn’t in the local experience in the same way it is in the west. The vast majority of people listening were good, there was a few that showed themselves up.

Fisherman Master Ziya Jiang
Originally uploaded by clarkalastair

Yesterday (coincidentally being a Friday) Miao’s mother came across some activities taking place on the Japanese street. (Some houses built in a Japanese style to commemorate something to do with their previous occupation of Dalian) So she called us out to goto see some of these street performances as depicted in this picture.

The YangGe Dance

Part of the activities was a group of people in traditional costumes and makeup dancing the YangGe dance to the beat of some big Chinese formation TangGu Drummers and a whiny instrument called the Suona much like an oboe. These dances seemed to be depicting by dance some traditional stories of China. The picture here shows the story of Ziya Jiang who is said to have fished with a hookless line, in order to let the fishes come to him when they were ready.

According to the wiki, Jiang Ziya was: The last ruler of the Shang dynasty (16th – 11th century BC) was a tyrannical and debauched slave owner who spent his days carousing with his favourite concubine Daji and mercilessly executing or punishing upright officials and all others who objected to his ways. Jiang Shang had once served the Shang king and had come to hate him with all his heart. He was an expert in military affairs and hoped that some day someone would call on him to help overthrow the king. He waited and waited till he was 80 years old, continuing placidly with his fishing in a tributary of the Weihe River (near today’s Xi’an) using a barbless hook or even no hook at all, on the theory that the fish would come to him of their own volition when they were ready.

Other Activities

Among the other activities was a Chinese erhu orchestra with instrumental and singer soloists, synchronized female drummers, a drum marching band, and an exhibition of art in the surrounding houses.

As I was the only westerner around, lots of the performers were nice enough to pose for me (I didn’t ask for that of course), though had I been a good photographer I’m sure I would have made better use of that. I was asked by one of the organizers to participate in the orchestra to ring a bell at a specific time. She was overly optimistic with when this would happen (she said 10 minutes) 40 minutes later still waiting around for this to happen. She did however pull me in front of the stage to take photographs, and had I had a different lens on the camera, this would have been most useful, given my lack of spoken Chinese I tend to keep away from situations where I get told off or told to go away. In a similar vain, I got dragged into this dance by an “old man” performer with his walking stick and cloth to cover his brow from the sun. This produced some interest in the crowd and I felt it quite fun, though a little embarrassed.

The surrounding art exhibitions were interesting because I hadn’t been in these buildings before, so It was nice to see inside. I managed to take some pictures of the art, which in the UK for such a small exhibition, I would have been shouted down for I’m sure. The art ranged from calligraphy and paintings on scrolls, to paper cutting and pottery. All a very positive experience.

I’ve started to play with some fun functions of windows + webcam + timed shots = timelapse video. This is my first go. I have another video on my flickr stream, and on facebook of the sun setting with the light going down. The quality is extremely poor, but the effect is still as magic as those you see in documentaries.

I’m using the default windows drivers for my logitech webcam which produces a much smaller picture (160×120 pixels) than it’s capable (1248×1024 pixels). In the video above the pictures are upscaled. I hope to fix it and taken another series in the near future. I’m planning to take a whole day of pictures, and hopefully from a few angles out of the window.

The idea for this came from an article on lifehacker for making some cool timelapse videos at a house party using the inbuilt webcam of a mac laptop. I’m using the webcam timershot, as suggested from lifehacker, from the WinXP powertools. A utility to rename lots of files at once, the so called JoeJoe’s Rename Master. And finally to make the video itself VideoDub. If you have a mac, the process i believe is much simpler, you just need to follow the instructions on lifehacker. I’ll post more as I make them. The main issue, as you can imagine, is waiting for the images.

"Welcome to English Corner"
Originally uploaded by clarkalastair

In China there exsists a tradition for the modern generation, that of meeting together at set times, on set days, for set periods of time to speak, discuss and talk in English with other Chinese people and foreigners. This happens in many places, in many situations, for different reasons. Near the American/British consulates, in University English departments, in city town centers, and coffee shops across China. For foreigners to meet other foreigners, and prospective Chinese partners, for Chinese to improve their English, for Chinese people to meet prostective rich western partners. The effect is still the same. Cultural exchange, linguistic growth and confidence boosting for the Chinese youth, and a valuable and precious thing this is indeed.

Never before coming to China had I heard of such things in England, such as French Corner to meet and practice French. Maybe this is established in other ways, like student exchange programmes, school trips abroad, student language/country societies etc. But this doesn’t really have the same aim and effect. These things serve other masters, and a shame that we don’t have such a tradition for people to converge and just meet and discuss in a regular meeting.

I understand that language learning is an individualistic thing, and requires an ongoing striving and unwavering desire for improvement, but I’d like to think that an opportunity to meet teachers at school in a more informal environment, to practice speech in god forbid, French, Latin, German, Spanish or any other language, might have been a useful, but the effort might have been seen as lame by English students, and maybe unable to operate usefully, but the idea is a good one and used effectively by some lovely Chinese students.

In some more practical news, I had English corner tonight, and the system has changed so that I only need to go every three weeks, and my accompanying foreign expert teacher will be Carol, and no longer Tom and Louisa. This change in timetable reduces the number of times I need to stay at work till 7PM in the evening, taking an hour bus jounery home in a rather shattered state at 8PM, such is the emotional drain of teaching.

Chinese School Uniforms
Originally uploaded by clarkalastair

Inline with my recent post regarding my “Most Interesting” Photo, this is my most viewed. As part of my usual geeky activities, I check fairly regularly how people have found my photos. This one gets found quite high in the listings on both yahoo and google relating to Chinese school uniforms, and I’ve had 180 views on it. Sadly no comments. Hardly a surprise about that, but I wouldn’t have thought that there could be such interest in school uniforms.

I guess it’s just my upbringing, but I really don’t like this style of school uniform. Maybe it’s just their sports kit, but I see alot of kids walking around in this sort of clothing. Shirt and Blazer much more to my liking, irrespective of my dislike of sports wear.

Hua Tuo Bust
Originally uploaded by clarkalastair

In January I was contacted by a (I think German) Publisher in order to use this photo of Hua Tuo, one of the father’s of Chinese medicine, in a book they’re publishing. of course I said yes, the book has gone to print and can be bought here: Publisher’s Homepage and now I’m a published photographer. Who’d have thought?

This bust is located near my home in Dalian, Liaoning Province, China, in pretty hospital grounds. Which also had a Florence Nightingale Bust. I took the photo on the way home from a tutoring session I had with an upper middle class Chinese family.

According to Wikipedia: Hua Tuo (died 208) was a renowned physician during the Eastern Han Dynasty and Three Kingdoms era of China. He was described as looking like “an immortal who had passed the gates of this life” and “a man with the complexion of a youth and a snowy beard”. The Book of Later Han records Hua Tuo as the first person in China to use anesthesia during surgery. He used a general anesthetic combining wine with an herbal concoction called mafeisan (麻沸散 lit. “cannabis boil powder”).

Dalian Panorama 1
Originally uploaded by clarkalastair

As part of my recent photography, I’ve rather taken a fancy to using Adobe Photoshop to generate large (wide) panoramic photos. A little while ago, I went out up near my work place in the Dalian University of Foreign Languages old campus near Zhongshan Square, with the intention of taking some photos to make some panoramas of my workplace. After getting bored taking photos of the old buildings on campus, I wandered up the hill and just kept going. I took a quite a few sets of photos of Dalian’s skyline, and I think this is probably the best of them, I only wish I was slightly more proficient at using the transform tools in Photoshop, in order to get the corners up and have a truely flat image.

Chinese Door, Floor and Cupboard
Originally uploaded by clarkalastair

According to flickr’s internal, proprietary, algorithm for evaluating pictures in order to rate how interesting they are, this is my most interesting pic. I find this a little hard to believe.

To explain, this photo is part of a set of maybe 150 photos, which I took of my bedroom/livingroom in China, in order to plug them into a Microsoft labs tool called Photosynth, which creates these 3D environments from photos. Internet Explorer and Microsoft Windows needed to see the end product here.

Before this high status happened, I guessed that a few factors applied, for example: number of views, number of people who add the photo as a favorite and who they actually are, tags and their relative “interestingness” score, location via geo-tagging, number of comments and who wrote them, some estimate based on click through from linked sites and web search, number of notes and who created them, title words etc. But compared to my other pictures, this had no comments, I hadn’t given it a title (still the photo filename as from the camera), the tags were nothing special (apart from maybe “Synth Test”) and to be frank the content isn’t that special.

I’m guessing there maybe some analysis of the picture going on (either directly or through histogram analysis of colour frequency) and a trending tag relating to the synth test. It just frustrates me a little to find such an uninteresting photo, as being given this number 1 most interesting photo status. It renders my other photos status in the algorithm very poorly, unless it’s some sort of anomaly.

Llama and Alastair Clark
Originally uploaded by clarkalastair

Having been expecting the stereotypical western view of Chinese keeping of animals (bad conditions and small enclosures). Yes I still hold some stereotypes. I was pleasantly surprised to find the zoo spacious, with large enclosures, reasonably well staffed, and from what I could see good conditions.

You could choose to go around on foot, or pay an extra 40 kuai for an electric buggy tour. We of course being Scottish and Chinese respectfully didn’t want to part with more money and elected to do the healthy thing of walking around. They had a bit for baby animals, an indoor glass house for exotic plants, and sections for different types of animals: including “Dangerous animals” and “non dangerous animals”. Haha.

You could purchase animal feed in the different sections for 1-3 kuai for a unit, and of course there were plenty of signs saying, “don’t feed the animals your own food”, and “don’t annoy the animals.” They had a good variety of animals, and to be honest I can’t remember the last time I went to a proper zoo in the UK so I can’t really compare blow for blow.

I felt the selection of animals was good including llamas obviously, lions, hyenas, camels, bears, leopards, horses (that you could pet), squirrels, swans, ducks, birds, ostriches and others. Having gotten close to this llama, I hadn’t realised before that the wool felt much like soft sheep wool, and could be quite comfortable.

The enclosures with the caniverous animals, had staff selling raw chicken, and whole (live) chickens in cages, in order to throw in. In the lion enclosure there were lots and lots of chicken feathers lying around. I thought this was quite novel, and was tempted to get a live chicken myself to throw in, but at 50 kuai a pop, I have to say I would rather go home and eat chicken myself.

Transport was arranged going to the zoo from the same company that we bought the tickets from (120 kuai for an adult, 60 kuai for students) near the train station, and we had to arrange our own transport home. This translated to one of 5 buses directly outside the zoo.

On the whole the experience was good, though tiring. We should have gotten their earlier as there was a section that we didn’t get to see that was up the mountain on a cable car (trip included free with the zoo ticket). So 1pm -5PM is probably enough if you’re not too fussed about doing lots of petting/taking photographs, but for us it wasn’t long enough as the atmosphere died around 4pm with the in park shops and staff stopping around 4:15pm. The only bad point is that parts of it are in development, so is a bit of a building site, but onl a small area.

Elephant at the Dalian Forrest Zoo
Originally uploaded by clarkalastair

At the zoo there was a performance featuring Elephants. Interesting and funny as the show was, I still felt a pang of sadness to see animals used for entertainment. I understand usage of these large animals for transport and specific tasks in their native countries like India, and as such, training is needed and expected. But to use animals in this rather less practical seems a little off. I do of course acknowledge that the UK used to quite happily use animals for circus entertainment, for which I am thankful that that has now stopped.

I struggle a little to see the difference in keeping a pet purely for companionship and training animals for entertainment, which is a very commonly accepted practice. Dogs and cats, I can understand if they are being used for hunting, guarding, shepherding, giving humans exercise, and other practical tasks. This gives meaning and purpose. But unless I have something in mind, I’ll have to evaluate my desire if and when I want to get a pet, and that for me, companionship as a reason is probably not practical enough a reason.