Who’s been mucking about with the sun?

I’ve been sorting out lots of files on my computer, and found a story I wrote soon after Peter and I went to China the first time, and decided to do a bit of research. Here is the email to the family on the subject of getting my bearings as far as directions were concerned. I called it......

Who’s been mucking about with the sun?

Someone’s been playing games and not told me. I’m pretty sure about that.

Peter and I lived in New Zealand for much of our lives. New Zealand is in the south of the southern hemisphere, pretty much at the bottom of the world. The next stop is Antarctica. 

Winters were quite cold there, although it rarely snowed in our part of the country. However, we knew that the sun lived at the top end of the world and so we never bought a house with the main entrance to the house facing the bottom end of the world because that is where the howling southerlies came from and invaded your warm home every time you opened the door in winter.

Therefore we looked for houses that had doors facing north, east or west and that was very sensible. Our homes were designed for outdoor living in the summer, but more importantly to keep warm in the winter. We always knew which was east and west, and even though the sun moved around a bit up and down the globe, we knew it rose in the east and set in the west but lived up the top. No problem.

Then when we moved to Australia, we found that houses were designed to stay cool. In Queensland because even the winters are warm, there is a whole new mindset involved. So they have doors, and lots of windows that open in any direction so that any breeze will wander into your house and keep you cool. Very sensible.

Even so, the sun still rose in the east and set in the west, and spent most of its time up in the top of the world.

But about the time we came to live in China, someone made some changes. Either someone moved China or else someone has been mucking about with the sun. The Bible says that faith the size of a mustard seed (a really tiny seed) could move mountains, but I’m not sure about moving a country as big as China.

However, somehow, China seems to have been turned one quarter of a turn on the globe, because, and I kid you not, here the sun rises in the south and sets in the north. I have always had a really good sense of direction, and generally could find my way anywhere, (within reason). In Napier, the hill was north, the sea was east and everything else could be worked out. In Australia the sea is east, the storms come from the west and you can work out the rest. But not so here.

For some reason I have yet to find out, China builds all its houses facing the same way. There are rows and rows and rows of these high rise apartment buildings, usually built in housing estates, and they generally all face the same way. They have the long side of the building facing one way and the short end of the building facing the other way. And it seems to have completely messed up my sense of direction, because, it is an absolute fact, that the sun is now rising in the south and setting in the north and it does the same thing every day.

I am going to add some photos in here. These were taken from the top of the building on the left, the Financial Trade Building in Shanghai. The height is not so clear from this angle, but the Trade Building is quite a bit higher than the Jinmao Tower next to it, a rather lovely building when you see it up close. 

 The Trade building has a viewing platform on the 94th floor. It is 100 floors high I think. This is the viewing platform below. The 94th floor is at the top of the gap in the building, sometimes refered to as the can opener due to its rather unusual shape and the gap in the top. Part of the floor is glass so you can look right down to the ground.

Of course,here in Longyan you can go for days without seeing the sun, just a mist everywhere, all day every day. Sometimes you get the see the sun as a giant red ball as it rises and then a giant red ball as it sets, but that is all you see of it all day. In fact the first time we saw the sun set we were absolutely convinced it was the moon rising! It took us a while to figure it out; it was just too red for the moon.

Living in China now, I realise that I am at the top end of the world and things will be different. For those of you who have lived or travelled from the bottom bit of the world to the top bit of the world, or vice versa, you may have noticed the same thing. How did you deal with this?

At the moment the sun is whirling around directly over poor old Rockhampton, causing heatwaves and such. It definitely is not close to China because our highs here in Longyan are 10 to 15 degrees and our lows are 3,4,5,6, etc. In Beijing, (who would want to live there?) they are having lows of minus 15 and highs of minus 5. What joy! And I am told Longyan gets much colder in February, so course we are really looking forward to that!

Taken from the 94th floor. All the apartment buildings facing the same way, south I guess.

Alos from the 94th floor. More apartment buildings in Shanghai, by the river in Shanghai.

The Jin Mao Tower is in the front of this picture and the Oriental Pearl Tower is in the background. It will give you an idea of how high up I was. This is in the central part of Pudong, the centre of Shanghai. Most of the buildings in this picture are offices, hotels etc, this is the business district, so not necessarily built facing south. If you want to stay somewhere posh the Hyatt Hotel starts on the 54th floor of the Jin Mao Tower. They have an observation floor on the 87th floor.

Anyway back to the subject. I am still confused about east west north and south, and all that stuff and as my sense of direction is usually really good, I am quite sure someone has been playing games with the sun, and if  it was you, please could you put it back again? Or if someone actually has turned China one quarter of a turn on the globe, please could you undo it for me?

To use one of Peter’s latest words, I am somewhat discombobulated. Thanks.

My originial email to the family ended there but today I thought I'd find out why this is so. This link explains it a bit. I think it might be from old times when feng shui was important. It seems houses mostly face south, the direction the warm weather comes from. That makes sense to me.

 http://depts.washington.edu/chinaciv/3intrhme.htm

A special girl called Twilight.

Twilight was one of our favourite students at the first university we went to teach at, in Longyan. She was one of Peter’s students, and considering they were all very shy to start with, Twilight was pretty outgoing and confident. She got involved with anything happening on campus and was willing to give anything a go. She taught me some Chinese, although I was a terrible student, and she would run messages for us whenever we needed help.

Twilight on the right, with her parents in 2006.. They took Peter and I out for lunch one day when we were living in Longyan.

 

This is an excerpt from my book. I wrote a lot about Twilight. "The Chinese give a great deal of serious thought when it comes to naming their children. Twilight’s family name is Ma. This word means horse. Her first name means going a long way, being successful. The Chinese are inclined to use words as names, words with quite beautiful meanings. So her name meant ‘going a long way like a horse, and having a successful journey.’ It would be comparable to us calling our child ‘Happy Successful Kerr’.

When Twilight started university her father also chose her English name. We asked why he chose Twilight. She said because it not only means the end of the day but also dawn, so this name could mean the beginning of a day, a new dawning in her life, with a long happy day in front of her. Lovely isn’t it?"

Twilights mother cooked lunch for me when I visited Kunshan.

Twilight was a Longyan girl, and knew the place like the back of her hand. If we wanted to buy something she knew where to find it. China is a funny place when it comes to shopping. Although they have the shops along the streets, often shops are also on the second and third floors of buildings but all hidden away, and we were stunned at times to find all sorts of things one or two levels up. (When I was in Putian I couldn’t find the post office. There had to be one, but I never saw it. That’s because it was on the second floor of a building.)

Sometimes I would praise Twilight for finding some shop I wanted she would just say, ‘the sign is there’, but of course all in Chinese and unreadable by us.

Kunshan downtown. Note the motor bike on the right. Mother driving, father behind, holding a toddler all wrapped up against the cold.

 

So Twilight, like Alex, became part of our Chinese family while we were in Longyan, and we used her frequently as our translator.

While I was in China this month, I visited Suzhou, and Twilight is now a married woman with a baby and lives in a town called Kunshan, halfway between Shanghai and Suzhou. Once she knew I was going to Suzhou, I knew, come hell or high water, she was going to meet up with me, and so she did. We had two days together.

Twilight in 2013 with her baby and husband. Note the heavy clothes. It was around zero this day, freezing cold, having snowed a couple of nights before. One tiny heater was on, but everyone wears many layers of clothes rather than use heating.
 

Twilights apartment block. They live on the 8th floor.

 Her baby is two months old, and her and her husband run a small engineering factory. At the moment her mother is staying with them to help with the baby. Actually, having a baby in China is very different from what we are used to. The new mother has a woman, usually the girl’s mother, come and stay with them for at least the first month.  The new mother does nothing for the first month, and I have heard is not supposed to bath or do any work, concentrating on caring for her baby. In Twilights case, her mother is staying on for some months.

No space goes to waste. This little plot of veges was planted outside their factory. Someone is caring for this little garden. The blue is the side of a chook pen. Unfortuantely the cabbages did not like the recent snow, and they looked a bit the worse for wear.

Twilight and her husband came and picked me up from Sam and Ethel’s place in Suzhou and took me to their place in Kunshan, also driving me around Kunshan, as I had never been there before. It was a lousy day, cold, bleak and wet, but I have to say that Kunshan is a really nice place. It’s a new city, built around 10 or 15 years ago, clean, well set out, and most people seem to obey the road rules.

I took this picture above through the car window. You will notice several tall black things, one just to the right of the power pole. China has a couple of nice months of weather during spring and autumn, but the rest of the time its stinking hot or freezing cold. Up north although the winters are freezing, during the summer, the weather supports tropical plants easily. So there are many palm trees around the cities in China. But palm trees do not like the cold and snow, so all the cities wrap up their tender trees for the winter, giving them lovely warm overcoats.  Here you can see some palm trees with their winter coats on. In the spring they will all come off, and lo and behold, back to tropical trees again.

One of the buidings in Kunshan's downtown. It's a shame it was such a lousy day, none of the pictures give a very good impression of the place. But this is one town that I could happily live in. On a good day it must be really nice.

 

Twilight took me to her home for lunch, prepared by her mother. So we had a good meal of fish, pork, and noodles, amongst other things. Like all Chinese, they tucked away a large quantity of food and were constantly urging me to eat more, more, more. I just couldn’t keep up with the Chinese appetites, no matter where I ate.



Oh well, you'll just have to tip your computer sideways. I don't know why it has done this, the original is the right way up and I have loaded it and flipped it several times, but it will not load the right way up.

Twilight features a great deal in the book I wrote about our first year living in China. I had taken a copy to give to Twilight. Here I am holding my book, ready to give it to her. We were having lunch at one of my favourite restaurants in Suzhou, a little dumpling shop at the In City Mall. The last school I taught at was in this mall.

  She always had a soft spot for Peter, and has kept in touch with us over the years. After we finished our year teaching in China, we had three weeks travelling, and both Alex and Twilight came to Suzhou to meet up with us for a few days before we came back to Australia. It is rare to see Chinese people display emotion, but when we were at the airport, Twilight was sobbing her heart out as she was saying goodbye to us. She will always have a special place in our hearts.

 

Take a trip to China today!

My sister, Ricky Hunter, and I have both published books in the last few months. That's the easy bit. Then you need to sell the little blighters. Aha, you think, no problem! But it's not that easy.

When you write a book it is your 'baby', and of course you are in love with it, although there is a love/hate relationship too, because by the time you have edited the thing a zillion times you are at the 'nine months and one week' stage, when all you want is to get this birth over and done with. A book is no different.

Nevertheless, being brilliant authors is not enough. You have to tell people that the books are there, and that they would love to read them.

My book is the story of our first year living and working as ESL teachers in China. When you can't speak any Chinese and hardly anyone speaks English it makes for some interesting times. This book is a really great yarn about our planning, deciding where to go, and the experiences we had working our way into a completely different culture, and getting to know some of the wonderful students we had in our classes. We also had lots of hilarious situations, and some madly frustrating times, for example, leaving the airport after touching down in China, to find that none of the taxi drivers could read my instructions on how to get to a hotel we were staying at for a few days. While trying to find a taxi driver that could read our hotel name we were bundled in and out of lots of taxis.  We were stunned to think so many people were illiterate. Of course, we found out later that day, that my extensive preparations were useless because I had printed everything off in Japanese! How was I to know the difference between Chinese and Japanese? Twelve hours later Peter was at the police station being finger printed while I was on the phone trying to get help.

So why not take a trip to China today? You can do it without leaving home.

Book available at Create space at https://tsw.createspace.com/title/3862700 or the e-book at 

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/160463.

I have also included a lot of how-to information for anyone going to China either on holiday, but especially if going to work there as teachers or in any other field. Information such as how to use the buses and trains when everything is in Chinese, personal safety, getting a job, work contracts, housing, shopping, doctors and hospitals, and how to never be lost.

Tea culture in China

One of the reasons we are house sitting at the moment is that we came back from teaching in China and still had itchy feet. Not wanting to get into a rut just yet, we thought that house sitting would keep us on the move, give us the opportunity to travel around Australia more, and generally keep us young.

However, you might find that because of our time in China, I am inclined to go down memory lane, and down a few side roads. I have done that in this post. It starts off with the intention of telling you about our lunchtime cuppa and then I head off back to China for a bit. But I'm sure you'll excuse me for that.

Tea and coffee are our usual hot drinks. Milo occasionally  but we both like a nice coffee. However, if you want a decent cuppa, have you tried the real Chinese tea?

I am no expert on this, but the one I like best is oolong tea, partly fermented, grown around Southern China. I went to a rather dirty little city called An xi once.( It is said Arn she).  It is called the Tea Capital of the World. They are sort of tea middle men and supply much of the world with Chinese tea.

Now, I had no intention of getting carried away but I have. So here are a couple of pics from that trip.

Above is the entrance to what is called the Tea Capital of the world. Note the motor bike? There were hardly any taxis in this place, but they used lots of motor bike taxis, common in China. They always carried a spare helmet, which was pretty useless anyway. But I went on the back of one motor bike taxi. The driver was tooting and yelling all the way down the road to all and sundry. I have no idea what he was saying, but probably something like..."Look I have got the foreigner. The fat one!" It was all good fun.

Once sorted the tea goes into big bags to go to Chinese shops. Tea culture in China is massive, and tea shops are everywhere.

 Above, there are the most beautiful tins that they pack the tea in. I actually brought a whole lot of empty ones with me when I came home and I use them on the kitchen bench for my tea, coffee, sugar etc.

The tea is packed into little packets, then into these tins, about 12 or 15 to a tin. Each packet is used for one lot of tea, but can have water added 10 times as the flavor lasts that long. Below is a single packet. This is probably very expensive tea, it was sent to me by a special friend in China.

In the picture below we went to a garden and they had a huge tree in the shape of a teapot dragon with all the little cups around. Very clever. To compare, the next picture underneath is one of my Chinese tea sets that I have out in the dining room. It was a gift from another teacher in Longyan.

You can see the little cups on the tray similar to the cups around the dragon tea pot below. The little hedges are set out to look like a tray. In China the formal gardens are just beautiful.

 The women below were sorting the tea which comes in all sorts of varieties and grades.

Anyway, now that I have been sidetracked, and down memory lane for a few minutes I will come back to today. We have Chinese tea often at lunchtime. You don't need milk or sugar, it is green tea, so, good for you, and easy to make. However, I cheat a bit by using a little old tea pot I've had for ages with a strainer thing in the middle and two little coffee cups I've had for years. The real ones don't have any handles and they are hot to use, so these are much better with the handles.

When we left China we were given tea by many of our students and friends. It lasts for ages in these packets and tins.And not just one or two tins, we got them in sixes and nine tins at a time! I still have a couple of unopened tins in the pantry to be used.

Ah well, time for a cuppa and then off to bed.

Beautiful Dalian by the sea.

Beautiful Dalian by the sea.

Dalian city. Not really all that beautiful.

I will indulge myself in one more nostalgic trip down memory lane from my time in China. Dalian is a city in northern China and has a top-notch reputation as a tourist destination. I decided a trip there before I came back to Aussie for good was a good plan. This is the story I just pounded out on my computer on my return, but not edited.

 

 

Well, three days in Dalian sounded lovely.  My apartment is invaded every morning about 6 am by the neighbors redecorating their place…..noise noise noise, and I had had some busy weeks so a rest was looked forward to.

 The first hiccough was missing the plane.  It took far longer than anticipated to get to Pudong, I went via another train station and missed the plane….oh….had to rebook and it cost me another 500 rmb.  Got to Dalian about 5 pm, At the airport I asked about day trips, and yes there was a place to book day trips.  The girl there talked for quite some time and booked trips for the Wednesday, Wednesday night and Thursday and they would bring people back to the airport in time for my flight home.  Good planning.  The taxi to the hotel was only 38 rmb, that was good.  The hotel is old, but room is nice, on the 9^th floor overlooking the beach. Very peaceful.  Went up the road for a lovely dinner of fish and shrimps etc.

 The bed was actually good, a soft rock, and my back was ok.  Got up early on Wednesday, turned on the shower, no hot water.  Found out later I had to leave it running for 20 minutes before it warmed up!   Went to the restaurant for breakfast, which was included in the room cost.  Ghastly breakfast, very Chinese, all cold and I had two hard boiled eggs and some hot water out of a bowl.  That was it!

This beach would be full of people in the summer, but this was a very cold spring day. The windows needed cleaning too.

 The tour bus picked everyone up at 8 am and we picked up several other people and then met up with the main bus.  All hop on board and we set out for a big day out.  First place to visit is a fort.  This is a ‘history’ day.  Bah!  Who needs the history of Dalian?  Anyway we were getting it.  The Japanese were all over the place here in the past.  We were taken to a canon on a little hill overlooking the sea.  This place was free to visit.  Big deal!  Then I needed the loo!  I always need a loo, its part of my life.  I found it, but decided not to indulge.  Picture if you will, an old little outhouse, and as you walk in you are faced with three little cubicles the walls between the toilets about 3 feet high, no doors and everyone lined up and watching as you squat over a tiled area with a hole in the middle.

Back on the bus and on to the next thing, a trip in a boat.  BUT, the boat trip is not included in the price.  110 rmb to do this, but we get to see the Japanese headquarters etc, a good place to visit we are told.  The price also includes a cable car gondola thing to a look out up the top of a high hill.  Ok everyone pays up.  Muggins us.  Anyway, the boat has a long queue so we go to the cable car first.  This is a scary thing, it’s a garden slatted seat on a little pole attached to a wire that takes you up the steep hill.  I was wavering thinking “I don’t think I can do this!” when the seat came up behind, hit me in the knees and I was sitting swinging in this garden seat on a wire!  The only good thing was that it wasn’t that far off the ground, if I fell, I would break some bones, but probably live.

This was the view over part of the harbour. This was at the top of the cable car (slatted garden seat) ride. You can see the road at the very bottom of the picture and one of the chairs coming up the cable.
I got to the top and looked around, and what do you know…other buses drive up…free of course!!!  The scene is quite pretty, need the loo again, down lots of steps to a similar one as before but only me, so I indulge myself.

From the top, the swinging garden seat brings everyone back down to the bus and then we go to the boat trip.  We are lined up like little ducks, and given the obligatory life jackets.  Well, they were two slabs of polystyrene incased in bright orange material with long long tapes to tie up around our waists.  If the boat did actually have the audacity to tip, we would be trapped inside, all of us, floating against the ceiling like little dead ducks.  We get going, it is a little ferry like I used to use in Xiamen to go to school, quite safe, and the water is so calm, it makes me realize I do miss the sea.  We get part way out and the boat stops.  From here we can take a photo of the headquarters.  That’s all folks! A photo and turn back.  We don’t even get to touch land….hahah…this is China.

 From there we get taken to a shop, well we don’t know it is a shop it is a ‘place to show us local food!!’ well it is a huge place that sells dried fish and jewelry and everything in between.  Usually at these places the guides get a cut if we buy, they get a percentage.  We hang around for over an hour for the guide to come out and let us in the bus. I am not happy Jan!

 By this time everyone is starving.  Only one more thing to see, we are told, then lunch.  We are taken to a snake museum.  Snakes!!  Snakes alive, I can’t be bothered with snakes.  In Aussie we can out-snake China any day.  So I sit in the bus with my poor stomach having thoroughly digested breakfast’s two boiled eggs. 

 Lunch is eaten about 2 pm, this is not included in the price of the day trip either.  The restaurant is very ordinary, and the fish is not nice, and the mushroom and chicken is ok, but that’s all. On the tour  I met up with a young guy from America, Jeff, who is Chinese but lived in USA for quite a few years, so talked to him a bit.  

 After lunch, the highlight, a visit to the tiger park!  Well, we get there and drive around in the bus to see the animals.  Haha I should have known better!  A few mangy lions and tigers in small metal cages and two black bears, great big things that they feed lots of Coca-Cola to, and then into the next enclosure to see two tigers on the loose.  A truck comes in and they chuck two live chickens out and each tiger gets one chicken to kill, pluck the best way they can and eat, and then we go out again.  Not fabulous watching really.  Then we go to another place nearby and get out and go into this house shaped building.  Wow, three transvestites, really tacky at that, entertain us with a song and dance each, and in front of them is a green carpeted area with a long pond in it. I walk out, but it’s so cold outside, so go back in. It’s mid April, but spring forgot to come here, its still on the way, so most of the trees are naked and the wind is lazy.   In the pond are two croclodiles, one longish and one smallish.  After the tacky transvestites serenade us, two guys in special gear come out and pray to their gods for protection and one gets out the small alligator and swings him round by the tail. And then the next guy grabs the big one by the tail and hauls him onto the red carpet.  He pokes and prods to get the poor alligator to blink an eyelid, must be doped up to the eyeballs with sedatives, and he poses leaning against this poor half dead animal and then puts his hand in his mouth…ohhhh and ahhhhh comes from the innocents around, and then we come out.  What a blast!

One of the 'ladies' that had sung to us. The two crocodiles where asleep in the pool in front of him/her.

The final thing is a visit to Xinghai Plaza, the biggest one in Asia.  On reflection I don't know if I have got this name right, because according to the internet Xinghai Plaza is in the middle of town, and we drove around it, a completely different place. We never did get to see it, or the Polar place that was on our itinerary either. It was closed for the day...haha... Actually it is a very large piece of flat green grass with some trees and roads etc.  We just drive round here.  Then, thankfully its home time.  The news is on, there’s been a big earthquake in Qinghai, not far from Tibet, it’s a whopper, 7.1 but flattened the whole place.

There’s time for a rest before everyone gets picked up for the night tour.  The brochure promises two and a half hours to see the sights at night.  We get in the bus and go to the Russian area of town, just a few buildings with lots of tacky shops selling tacky souvenirs.  Back in to the bus, and round the town, which is okay but nothing like Shanghai or Xiamen at night!  In fact, Birdsville could outdo it I reckon!   Then to the Xianghai Plaza again. I need a loo, of course, so have to walk for ages to a fabulous restaurant, where I nonchalantly wander in, find the loo, go, and nonchalantly wander out again!!  Mmmm, I do this a bit here, being in a bus all day, loos rather preoccupy my mind, or the lack of, or the decency of.  I got onto the bus to be told that no one wanted to pay the extra 50 rmb to actually see the lights from the top of somewhere so the tour was over.  8pm!!!  So we are taken further down the road for a late dinner, and taxi back to the hotel to run the water again for about 20 minutes in time to get a hot shower.  Ahh…what a day….This is China.

The beaches around the edges of Dalian are quite nice, but the city itself, well its oldish looking and dirtyish looking and boringish looking and certainly unbeautiful and somewhat disappointing.

I won’t bore you with the next day tour, suffice it to say that the three holes of golf turned out to be hit three balls at a driving range.  The hunting adventure turned out to be fire two bullets at a firing range.  The beach turned out to be beautiful, well it will be when it’s finished its construction, although it’s all stones, no sand, the convention center will probably be nice too when its finished and there is a whole new city out there, one hour from town and it will probably be really lovely when the shops open and they actually get people living out there.  In the meantime it’s a ghost town.

Oh by the way, I really enjoyed the bit when the bus left some of us behind at the rock garden because we didn’t pay the 170 rmb extra to do whatever it was the others paid to do.  I still don’t know what they did, but I sure gave the tour guide the length on my tongue about leaving us in the freezing cold, nothing to do, no shelter, and no loo (Oh, such an important thing) for an hour and a half!!!  Pity she didn’t understand a word of my English, but she got the point!!  Umm, another hours visit to a shopping centre, that turns out to be another version of yesterdays dried fish and jewelry.  To help my flight home, a phone call comes to say my flight has been cancelled back to Shanghai, and I need to change it for another flight, so decide to leave a bit earlier than planned.

To finish off, I think Dianna and Margaret Thatcher would be mortified to see the waxworks of themselves, neither of them recognizable, and Dianna would be terribly miffed at the straw hair wig she was wearing, it was just dreadful, but that was free, along with a visit to a museum next door about rocks and we got to go to the toilet on the edge of some newly developing fabulous resort area.  At least this was a lovely western loo, and clean.  It was worth the whole 150 rmb on its own!!!  Ahhhh….. This is China.

Three Gorges Dam in China.

No matter where we are, no matter where our house sitting takes us, every morning Peter likes to read the newspapers online. He looks at the local ones, and the New Zealand ones to keep up to date with what's happening there too. Today he found an article about the Three Gorges Dam in China. Check out the pictures on this link.

http://www.news.com.au/travel/news/fast-and-furious-worlds-most-powerful-dam-in-full-operation/story-e6frfq80-1226435772794

Finally, after about 40 years of construction, this enormous dam has finally become fully functional. It’s the most amazing place to visit. When we lived in China we did a five day tour down the Yangtze River, down five locks that took us from the river level above to the river level below, about 200 meters difference, and then we went for a tour round the Three Gorges dam.

When I was young, I lived not far from the Arapuni Dam, sitting across the Waikato River in New Zealand. I got this photo from this website, I hope they don't mind me using this picture.

http://www.trevispa.eu/viewdoc.asp?co_id=517&pag=2

 

As you can see this is not a very large dam, but when you are a child driving across the top of it, it seemed pretty big. However, in comparison, the Three Gorges is huge. It is about 2 kilometers wide.  This is a photo I took in the display sections. This is a model of the area.

In the middle of the picture on the left is the dam itself. On the right of the picture in the middle is a model of the locks. There are five of them constantly in use, and boats huge and tiny have to go through this series of locks to get from the river level below to the level above. In the middle is what they call 'the lift'. It is possible to put a huge boat in here and lift it as if in an elevator right to the top.

We are on our boat going through the locks, on our way downstream. The one on the left is probably a coal barge. This is the type of boat we were on for our five day cruise. htp://www.193km.cn/cn/cruise/regal/2.asp

Whole new cities were built along the river to accommodate those people displaced when their villages and cities went under the rising waters. When the Chinese decide to do things they do them on a grand scale.

Part of the tour of the dam took us to a high lookout over the whole construction area. I think this must be part of the lock area.

 It looks terribly polluted, but actually the air all around here was full of mist too, there is a huge amount of water flowing through the turbines and churning out at the bottom of the dam. It was mid summer and the humidity levels were extremely high.

So having been there, its nice to know the whole thing is now working to its full capacity. The electric power it generates keeps a large part of Northern China going.