Blogging between the Seasons

This has been a mild winter so far – it felt like fall in November and December, and spring has been in the air for much of this month. It still is, despite the first snow of this winter that fell last week. Most of it melted away, before it started freezing again, yesterday afternoon. After two unusually cold and snowy winters in 2009/10 and 2010/11, I’ve heard nobody complain about too little snow yet, not even around Christmas. In normal years, complaints of that kind would be essential bits of smalltalk.

Between the seasons

I’m spending no less time at blogging than before, but I’m taking more input than usual – reading, exchanging e-mails, and writing offline to prepare posts. The good thing is that I’ve translated about two thirds of the CCP central committee’s “cultural document” so far, so there’s land ahoy in that field.

Anyway, my posting frequency will remain somewhat lower than usual, during the coming weeks.

Train No. K-904: a Spring Festival Carol

A China National Radio (中国广播网, CNR) story, but in JR‘s own words).

Main Link: http://www.cnr.cn/china/yaowen/201201/t20120118_509073462.shtml

The train in question left from Xiamen (Fujian Province), with the destination of Taiyuan (Shanxi Province). And when a girl named Zhang Yaya (张娅娅), a Hubei Normal University student on her way home to Jincheng, southeastern Shanxi Province, suddenly didn’t find her suitcase anymore, a suitcase with a notebook and lots of relevant academic papers in it. A young man had left the train earlier and in a haste, other passengers said, and had apparently mistaken her suitcase for his own, as the two pieces of luggage looked very similar to each other. With help from other passengers, who had seen the young man leave the train, and a People’s Policeman’s cumbersome travels of four days and three nights through three provinces (Shanxi, Henan, and Hubei), the two suitcases were restored to their actual owners, who felt unspeakable relief (感叹“不可思议”), and felt the warmth of travelling home all the more (更是感受到了回家路上的温暖).

To address the reservations an insignificant minority of mean-hearted readers might have about this story, People’s Police inspector Li Hao (李浩) informs us that the young man’s suitcase contained some good stuff, too, and that if he had meant to steal Ms Zhang’s suitcase, he’d have placed an empty suitcase next to hers. The left suitcase’s contents also helped the police to find its owner, in Shiyan (十堰市), Hubei Province.

All the lucky travellers knew was that the policeman’s surname was Li, because he had only said that he was from the People’s Police, and that his family name was Li.

Fortunately, the press took care of the missing information, i. e. Mr. Li’s given name, Li Hao). Young people can be so careless these days (just JR’s personal opinion).

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Related

» Dragon (Zodiac), Wikipedia (as of Jan 19, 2012)
» Everything they possess, ChinaHush, Jan 12, 2012
» In Praise of the Times and the People, Nov 14, 2011

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Rain at Last / Blogging

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Weather Report

Rainpipe - Home while it Lasted

I prefer warm and dry days to rainy and cold ones. But after a spring like this one, it’s a relief to see that it’s raining, and that the rain has become continuous.

It feels good, too. When I was caught by a squally shower a few days ago, on my way home by bike, even that felt good. Some farmers may look at it as a bad joke, but it’s surprising how much of the crops still seems to recover, even if the first silage of the year was very poor.

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Blogging

All in all, the English-language, China-related blogosphere seems to have become much calmer than what it used to be – here, too. Probably for a number of reasons, but not least for these commenting rules, readers may think carefully before commenting on these blogposts, and that’s a good thing. But across the board, or where I’m reading, anyway, comment activites have slowed down. One might attribute that to a decrease of interest in China, at least among newsreaders, even if not in terms of business or investment. But the opportunities to read about China, including translations from Chinese-language sources, have broadened a lot.

Danwei has drawn its own conclusions:

So we have decided to change our focus. We’re relaunching on Danwei.com. We will publish periodic issues based around a theme, rather than daily news updates.

That said, Justrecently’s Beautiful Blog has never been about daily news updates. I merely focus on topics that interest me, and see this blog as, well, part of the internet. I may miss out on important trends or even big single events, and I take this opportunity to recommend every blog or website I’ve linked to at my blogroll to the right, underneath the comment section and the Three Represents (Net Nanny / Hermit / Good Ganbu). Besides, when looking at this blog’s statistics on a month-to-month basis, from 2011 back to 2008, “visits” have risen every year so far. So there seem to be some interested readers, and ClustrMaps (according to who the numbers would be much smaller than what the WordPress stats suggest) shows hits from all over the globe, including China.

So I’ll happily muddle on. No Facebook account, no YouTube channel (although I’ve given that some thought more recently – still pondering the idea), and no Twitter. A blog appears to be the ideal platform to write (publicly) what I want to write.

Observations along the Way

Today is Friday, the 13th.

Water is becoming a scarce commodity.

But this blog’s commenting rules are among the top-five reads today. That’s good.

Northern Germany: Dustclouds Rolling

If recent years’ springs and summers were meteorologically typical for most of the year, we could expect olive trees to grow here within decades. But every winter would probably kill them again. It seems to me, based on more recent experience, that Northern Germany’s climate is moving towards a two-season climate now, without real springs or falls – it’s been warm or hot from April through August or September, and cold for the rest of the past few years.

Osterwiese - Bremens sixteen-days easter market, opened on April 15.

Precipitation in general is down a lot, and the last rain, except for a few drops that wouldn’t even make you want to shelter, was some five weeks ago, The “water balance” (rain minus evaporation) for Germany in general has been negative since March 1 this year.

Hedges, shrubs, and trees: reaching deep and thriving.

In our region, this seems to have a bad effect especially on oaktrees, which are greening only scarcely, and on all kinds of plants with short-reaching root systems.

A sand storm near Rostock, on the Baltic seacoast, led to a crash of up to eighty cars on the motorway Autobahn 19 on April 9th, with ten deaths and at least 97 injuries. Today, I heard several dust cloud warnings for Lower Saxony’s (the federal state neighboring and surrounding Bremen)  autobahns on the radio, and as it was one of the never-start-thinking radio stations, they kept issuing jubilant weather forecasts – for the weekend and beyond, no rain is expected either.

That doesn’t look like a promising year for farmers. One  can water square meters, but not hectares, during a long dry period.

This post marks the end of my ten-days break from posting. It  wasn’t exactly consistent, but still relaxing.

Now I’ve brought my feedreader back to life. But I don’t feel like writing something about China yet. I might start with something Adam Cathcart appears to have been doing in recent days: reading, reading, reading.

And if you haven’t been to Pingtung Country (屏東縣), Taiwan, and aren’t likely to get there anytime soon, the best thing next to going there yourself might be to read this Pingtung-County-sponsored travelogue by Michael Turton.

Another cool and dry morning: moonset, sunrise, April 2011. Day temperatures go beyond 20 degrees C. now, while the latest night frost was only three nights ago.

Long Time no Break

My last break from posting was some ten months ago, and it’s time for another one. Why? Because posting has been a habit of mine for the past two years or more (I started quite exactly three years ago, with a rapidly rising posting frequency). Most habits need to be given a rest every now and then.

That said, I will keep checking for comments, free pending comments from the filter, and take care of stuff that isn’t in line with these simple-enough rules.

Bremen, Überseestadt

Number of posts to date (including this one): 1,280 (mostly of timeless value).

Scheduled break time (minimum): ten days.

Merci de votre fidélité, et à la prochaine.

Weekender: Cherry Blossom, moving Northward

Bremen-Walle (South), April 2011

No matter what an environment looks like, and no matter what’s in the news, it’s cherry blossom time again, even Bremen-Walle, a place which doesn’t necessarily epitomize beauty otherwise.

The earthquakes currently seem to come and go in Japan. Not surprisingly, the usual cherry-blossom tourism has suffered this year, too, while Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office is now no longer advising against all but essential travel to Tokyo.  (If the German foreign office issued a similar statement, many citizens would probably sense a political conspiracy to get them all killed. I have met people here who even reconsider  scheduled travels to China.)

It struck me this week that I have learned much of my Chinese language skills, as far as they go, from Japanese people. To learn Chinese must be easier for them than to learn English, and some of them are easier with speaking Mandarin than with speaking English.

But to listen to non-native speakers who are still fluent in Chinese is always inspiring.

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Related
Cherry blossom in Tokyo, Deutsche Welle, April 8, 2011
Sakura Latte, This Japanese Life, Febr 22, 2011

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Read-Only Memory: Potatoes by Myself

My special one knows how to build a greenhouse, or how to assemble complicated pieces of furniture. I’m not good at practical things. But I do know how to plant potatoes.

Nobody in the whole world but me seems to know.

“How many centimeters between the rows?”

Centimeters? No idea. But I can take that narrow blade myself, and draw a narrow track myself, and a second one.

“How much distance between the potatoes?”

I can’t tell. But I can place a few in a row by myself for starters, and let everyone else may copy the sample. There’s that inerrant picture in my head from childhood days, and it guides me across the field. I must have travelled thousands of miles of potato lines in that seemingly remote past.

There’s lots of sports in my adult life, and whenever I can, I will walk a distance, rather than riding it, but I haven’t done a single piece of gardening for decades. And I have no idea about how to attend to the crop later on. We’ll need to ask a knowledgeable neighbor. But the picture of a decent potato field has never left me.

Memory is a powerful thing, and rediscovering that brings back a unique pleasure of design.