Travel

Suzhou Humble Adminstrator’s Garden and Tiger Hill

In addition to its many canals, Suzhou is famous as one of the major centers of classical Chinese gardens. Perhaps the largest and best known is the Humble Administrator’s Garden.

The garden is about 13 acres and about 500 years old (at least one site suggests it is exactly 500 years old, having been built in 1509). The “humble administrator” was a government official Wang Xianchen, who clearly could not have been that humble with a spread like this. It is interesting to note that gardens such as these were almost always private, and the idea of maintaining them is relatively recent.

The elements of the garden include the plants, water, architecture (much of it the more minimalist and geometric Ming Dynasty style) and rocks, such as the lakebed rocks in the photo above. The natural and geometric elements fuse in a way that seems very fresh and modern, and one can see where many twentieth century artists, architects and designers may have gotten their inspiration.

This is the sort of place where I could easily get lost in the visual elements for a long time.

But of course we had to move on. We next visited one of Suzhou’s other well-known landmarks, Tiger Hill. The highest point in the city, Tiger Hill was originally the site of a king’s tomb, and later a Buddhist monastery and temple.

Although this photo makes the pagoda at the top of the hill look perfectly straight, it is actually leaning quite strongly to one side:

Supposedly, it is the many attempts over the years to locate and excavate the tomb in the hill that has led to the weakening of the ground below the tower and its severe tilt. The entrance to the tomb was finally discovered in the 1960s in pool lower on the hillside during a sever drought. However, it has remained unexcavated, lest the tower tilt even further.

The top of the hill supposedly provides a spectacular view of Suzhou, but with the dense winter fog I was not able to see very much.

Close call

One final and rather scary note from my Weekend in Shanghai. On the way to lunch on Sunday, we passed through a large bank of food stalls, apparently part of a regular weekend event. We had just talked a girl at a stall and were leaving when all of a sudden there was a loud explosion. We turned around to see that stall had burst into flames. Even though we were already some distance away, the heat was rather intense. Along with many others, we immediately left the area for safety. I sincerely hope no one was badly hurt, though I am especially worried for the girl who was inside the stand. It also hasn’t escaped me how things would be very different right now had that explosion happened only a minute earlier…

Weekend in Shanghai (updated)

This weekend included a 30-hour but still too brief visit to Shanghai. Shanghai is of course a massive city, and an increasingly vertical one, and probably reminds me more of New York than most cities I visit.

This photo captures both the old and new of the city. In the background is the iconic Oriental Pearl Tower. In the front, we see a high-rise building on side, and one of the tenement buildings that line many streets, with five or more stories of clothes (and the occasional cooked duck) hanging to dry.

It was taken while walking east from a downtown neighborhood towards The Bund, the riverfront in an older part of the city One can look across the river and see the new Pudong district that is most visually associated with Shanghai and features it’s tallest, newest buildings.

Visibility was relatively poor on both days, and I did not cross to the other side of the river to see the view of the Bund.

Food was a major part of day (as it has been throughout my stay in China), and Saturday featured both a snack of “soup buns” at small hole-in-the-wall shop where the upper level was barely tall enough to stand in, and an extraordinary Japanese-fusion meal at which my friends and I over-indulged for a couple of hours. After that, we headed to a local jazz club called the Cotton Club (I wonder where they got that name from?), where we heard what I would describe as a “typical jazz-club combo” that wouldn’t be very memorable except of course that it was at a jazz club in China.

The night concluded with brief stops at a few of the dance clubs. One featured two sections, an upstairs with a mixed-crowd of foreigners and locals, and a downstairs that was almost exclusively local. The latter definitely had better music (deep synth trance and beats). Of course, one of the main attractions of the nightlife (which continues well beyond the hour when almost every city in the U.S. closes down) is the people watching. Without dwelling upon it too much in this article, Shanghai did afford great opportunities for people watching, starting with our walk along the extremely crowded Nanjing Road and concluding as we departed the last club well into the morning.

I did have an opportunity to explore more on my own Sunday. I began in some of the quieter neighborhoods near where I was staying, and experienced a more local view of the city.
A walk through Zhongshan Park was in some was a more aural experience than visual. The park was already relatively crowded, with numerous groups practicing traditional Chinese exercises, dance lessons, and band practicing for the upcoming New Years celebrations:

The “music” of the park would change every few meter, as one moved from the metallic percussion of the band to a group dancing to disco from the 1970s. A few feet later, the disco and 1950s pop is overtaken by slower more meditative traditional Chinese music that serves as the background for exercises. Finally, a small portable player of low quality provides something akin to circuit bending.

Regular readers of this site know that I am fond of urban side streets and alleys, so I spent a few minutes in the narrower side streets of the neigbhorhood:

This alley reminded me of a photo I took not far from home in San Francisco last summer.

Along Ding Xi Road, I met the proprietor of a small boutique clothing store and her cat. Look for them to be featured in the next “Weekend Cat Blogging.”

After lunch together with friends again (one really cannot dine alone here), I headed back downtown via the Metro. I pride myself on being able to get around a city when I have a good subway system, a map and a general sense of direction. I was able make my way back to the Bund and Nanjing Road to see them during the daytime. I think the one word description of this area would be “crowded.” And I mean crowded on a level one rarely would see even in New York, and with far more dangerous street crossings. Plus, unlike my earlier walks, people expect foreigners in this district and are constantly on the look for sales opportunities. It is relatively easy to simply ignore them, but the crowds and constant interaction did become a little draining at times. It’s something to consider, I am a “city person” and I don’t mind crowds, but I do need breaks.

At Peoples Square, I did brave one last round of crowds to arrive at the Shanghai Art Museum. Even though it was only a block from one of the busiest open spaces and transit hubs in the city, the courtyard was a remarkable oasis of calm. After taking a moment to relax, I went inside to see the current exhibition, a retrospective of Wu Guanzhong. His work, which includes both oil painting and ink painting, and often focuses on Chinese scenes and themes. Many of paintings are of clearly of landscapes, animals and architecture of China, with an impressionist quality but also more minimal. However, many of later works were more abstract, although with Chinese themes. This was especially true of his ink paintings, some of which were quite large in size and reminded me of the “Autumn Rhythm” series of Jackson Pollock. One of the abstract in paintings called Entanglement relates back to the Humble Administrator’s Garden in Suzhou, which I had the opportunity to visit before heading into Shanghai and will be the subject of the next article…

Suzhou Grand Canal at Night

So far most of my touring has been at night. That will change over the weekend, but meanwhile here are some nighttime images from the Grand Canal in Suzhou. The city is crisscrossed by a network of canals, one of many things for which it is famous.

The architecture of the bridges and buildings along the canal range from very traditional, as in the above photograph, to more modern. In all cases, however, things are always brightly lit with colored lights here. Even the trees are bathed in a green glow.

The Grand Canal forms a loop that circles the old city, and one can observe segments of the old city wall and the towers just beyond it.

Here is a more modern building along the bank of the canal. It blends the geometric modern features that regular readers of CatSynth know I am fond of with more traditional elements.

Daytime will provide different view of the city entirely. The large buildings and their lights which are so prominent at night fade into the background, while the more modest homes that come down to the edge of the water become visible, as do the city’s famous gardens.

Blog about dinner

Well, we at CatSynth took Jacksin’s comment not to blog about lunch as a bit of a dare, so here is a brief post about last night’s dinner 🙂

Pictured above are (from clockwise left), a local root vegetable, jellyfish, and smoked fish. Dinner every night has included a wide variety of dishes, and this was only the first round. We also had a wonderful local small fish cooked in a stew – it had a very rich and buttery texture, and a mild, sweet flavor, one of the best fish I have had in a while. Additionally, there was another fried fish and an interesting pork soup. This particular meal featured local food from the Suzhou and Shanghai area. Previous nights focused on other regions, including famously spicy Szuchuan Cuisine.

Election detritus

Readers may recall that I was in New Orleans on election night, in the middle of the district of William “frozen assets” Jefferson. Well, his runoff election is today.

Keeping cash in the freezer and taking bribes is one thing, but in my mind the reason he deserves to lose is that he has turned to bashing his opponent Karen Carpenter for her support of gay rights and abortion rights. Whether these represent his true views or a cynical attempt to appeal to socially conservative voters, either qualifies as a reason to vote against him. We'll have to see if at the end of the day his little “Republican” play works…

UPDATE: Looks like Jefferson pretty much trounced Carpenter in the runoff. I would like to think it's because of loyalty in the district, and not because of so-called “values issues.”





The Other New Orleans

I conclude my series from New Orleans with a visit to the areas beyond the central city and tourist district, areas hardest hit by Katrina. Consider the following overall map of New Orleans:

The Garden District and Tulane University (where the ICMC conference was held) are in the lowel left section. The rectangular area encompasses much of downtown as well as the French Quarter and the Fauborg-Marigny district (home of the Spotted Cat featured in my article on night life). These are highlighted in red and yellow, respectively, below:

To the east of Marigny are the Bywater neighbhood and the Lower Ninth Ward. The latter is probably known to many readers as the site of some of the worst flooding and destruction from the storm.

Heading out of Marigny north on Elysian Fields Ave., the trendy crowded neighborhood gives way to a more spread-out “Los Angeles” style area of separated buildings, convenience stores. Much of this area appears to be functioning again. We then turn east onto Claiborne Ave. (LA 39), one of the main east-west streets in New Orleans. Heading east, one sees more and more of the severly damaged houses, but the scope of the disaster is most apparent after crossing the canal on a large bridge and descending into the Lower Ninth Ward:

It is more than destroyed homes. Entire blocks are either in ruins or empty, all the businesses are boarded up or destroyed. While there is car traffic and some work on houses, the district seems largely empty and devoid of people and activity:



The photos really don't capture the experience in the Lower Ninth Ward. Imagine the images above extending in every direction around you, with no end in sight. These really are ruins of a city. And it should be noted that this is over a year after Katrina and the promised rebuilding and recovery. Part of me thinks that this area should be left this way as a “monument” of sorts – though I suspect the former residents might feel differently.

Heading back west over the canal on Claiborne, we rejoin Elysian Fields heading north towards Lake Ponchartrain. Many of the neighborhoods along the lake were also hard hit by the storm and flooding:

Unlike the Lower Ninth Ward, the areas along the lake do show signs of recovery and of life.

Arriving at the lake is another experience again. It felt a lot like traveling across San Francisco on Geary from downtown west to the ocean, a quieter area with rough waters and windswept shoreline:

The wind, water and trees provide a quiet, almost peaceful, contrast to the devastation, some of which still can be seen only a few blocks south. But one can see in the waves of the lake, only feet below the flood line on a normal somewhat story day, echoes of the storm surge. It was after all the lake and not the Mississippi River that provided much of the initial flooding.

It is here along the lake that I close this article and my reports from New Orleans. The surreal mixture of natural tranquility and destruction seems a fitting contrast and completion to the music and food, the busy conference and stately manors, streetcars and cats. Somehow it all works together.








Weekend Cat Blogging #75: Cats of New Orleans

WCB 75 is being hosted this weekend by Skeezix the Cat. My contribution this week is a special article on cats in New Orleans. Of course, this is a city steeped in its jazz heritage, and cats and jazz have always gone together at least when it comes to imagery and language. Certainly there were no shortages of artwork, posters, murals, etc., celebrating the “cool cat” of jazz:

The relationship of New Orleans to its real cats is a bit more ambiguous. This is definitely a “dog town” from the perspective of animal companions. People can be seen walking dogs everywhere, and there appear to be lots of guard dogs around as well. Cats were a little more elusive, though I did see a few during my many walks in the uptown area to and from Tulane for the conference. Please click on the images below to see large images of the furry New Orleans residents:

The middle picture is of a pet cat named Kramer who was very friendly and talkative. Most of the other cats I encountered were a bit skittish, many of them darting across streets and hiding under the raised fundations of the houses. Hiding under a house is most times a perfectly good strategy, but I do think with a bit of sadness how many kitties were caught hiding there when the floods came. Many cats were located and rescued in the aftermath of Katrina. Spray-painted notices such as these are still a common site around the city:

Of the groups most involved in locating and rescuing cats and other animals after Katrina was the Louisiana SPCA. Their shelter facility was destroyed in the storm, and they had to evacuate themselves and the animals in their care, no easy task. Upon returning, not only did they not have a facility, but were faced with the reality that so many people had left their pets behind – largely due to a government policy that disallowed pet evacuations, but has since been reversed. You can read more about the SPCA's efforts to rescue animals and rebuild – its both heart-breaking and uplifting.

I did have an opportunity to visit the SPCA's temporary facility. I would like to thank Lori Haeuser and Kate Pullen for taking the time and effort to provide me a tour and more information about their efforts with cats.

The temporary shelter is in a converted coffee warehouse on the Westbank, across the river from the main part of New Orleans and largely spared by the flooding. The warehouse is basically a huge non-insulated space with a concrete floor, not really set up to house large numbers of animals. The SPCA constructed a number of temporary housing units inside the warehouse for offices and animal facilities, including several units for the cats. There are separate units for kitties ready for adoption, healthy cats not quite ready for adoption, those with medical needs, and a separate area for feral cats. Each of the little buildings has its own climate and lighting control – the latter was particularly useful for the feral cats who prefer the shadows. Below is a picture from the adoption unit:

As you can see, they have quite a few black kitties at this time. As noted a few weeks ago around Halloween, black cats do have a harder time getting adopted. And more generally, it seems that culturally many people in the area, particularly those with a more rural background, as less likely to view cats as “pets” that one adopts from the shelter, but rather as functional animals that one might start feeding a befriending, and then perhaps take in. In someways, it is more a situation of the “cat adopting the human”, though those of us with cats know that is how it usually works anyway. They did say that cat adoptions are starting to pick up a bit now, so hopefully some of these kitties will find homes. In the meantime, it seems that they are being cared for as best they can under the circumstances. And they do get to come out and play, as was the case with this friendly little torbie (in photo to the right).

Please visit the Lousiana SPCA website for more info and to support their work.







NOLA Night Life

In addition to the late-night events at the conference, I made of exploring other aspects of New Orleans’ famed night-time culture.

While the French Quarter at night is a rather unique experience, there’s only so much one can take of endless streams of loud, drunk tourists. One of the concerns after Katrina is that this would become the only story in New Orleans. There are, however, good opportunities to hear local music at small venues outside the tourist district.


One neighborhood that stood out was the Fauborg Marigny district. This is small triangle area to the east of the French Quarter, a lot funkier, with a feel more like a trendy “up-and-coming” neighborhood in New York or San Francisco. It seems to be the main hangout for the local crowd as well as local musicians outside the standard tourist circuit. I kind of “adopted” this neighborhood for many of my evenings – in particular, I found myself at a club called The Spotted Cat several times. It’s a cozy place, with interesting artwork and decor, and what is often described as some of the “best local live jazz in New Orleans.”

It’s a rather small operation, cash only – and it looks like their website “thespottedcat.com” is offline and (like more of New Orleans’ real estate) apparently in the hands of speculators. But it seems like a safe bet to just drop in a see who is playing. I heard quite a variety of music, a local character known as “Chaz Washboard” who played, not surprisingly, a washboard, but one augmented with a couple of resonant metal cans and a hotel bell. As someone interested in homemade and alternative instruments, this was a little bonus. The following night I heard an ad-hoc group playing jazz standards, but featuring a remarkable pedal-guitarist named “Dave” who could make his instrument sound like a “strummed piano.” The next band that night was a set of local jazz musicians doing an extended bebop jam – musica gratia musicae. One regular group, the New Orleans Jazz Vipers, plays old swing and popular jazz every Friday. I went with a couple of friends from the conference at the place was packed, spilling out into the sidewalk (where drinks are of course legal). This club was also a great place for socializing, and made friends with a few recent arrivals to the city.

I did finally get a chance to visit the Circle Bar last night. This is also a funky little place for local music, in this case more rock than jazz, and in a lot of ways felt more like a New York club than something unique to New Orleans. But from a local perspective, one can see how this fits into the scene. It’s located away from the tourist areas at the edge the Arts/Warehouse district, not too far from the freeway. It’s even “cozier” than the Spotted Cat, with the main room being a “parlor” of sorts, with it’s notable feature the overhead “k&b” clock – I believe this was a hold-over from a previous club at the same location (?).

I was keen to try the special of the night, Good Riddance Rummy (Baccardi and Coke), but opted for a nice safe Guiness as I was driving that night. The band playing was a local group called the Bipolaroids – straight ahead driving rock, with a bit of 60s British influence in chords and rhythm (e.g., triplets a la Penny Lane, flat seven chords, etc.) The keyboard player had a Minimoog along with a standard keyboard, but I could barely hear any of it with the band being as loud as they were.

So in summary, one should go see the French Quarter at night at least once, but then explore elsehwere in the city for something more real. Spotted Cat gets my strong recommendation for jazz! Circle Bar is cool as well for a funky, alternative night with local musicians.