中国：从图片前四天 (China: pictures from the first four days)

Hello readers of GWMD
It's me
I've been wondering after all these days if you would like to see
Some pictures
Of Suzhou
They say that Suzhou is beautiful
But I ain't seen much beauty

Hello
Can you hear me?
I am far away in China dreaming of what this blog used to be
When I was younger and kind of free
I've forgotten how it felt before I had no time to write
There's such a difference between the quality
Of the posts from way back when...

Hello from the other side (of the world)
My body still think it's Munich time
It tells me "I'm sorry"
Despite everything that you've done
But when you try to sleep you'll have to
Wait till the morning

Hello it's your wake up call!
At least I can say that I've tried
To get used to being
In the China Time Zone
But it don't matter, it clearly
Will work out the day that I leave...

My office for the week

My home for the week

Giant buildings across the lake

Retired (?) boat at the sailing club

Suzhou waking up across the lake

Suzhou sunrise

Contrasts

Further contrasts: old and modern China

Morning lakeside jog

More buildings

Terrible attempt at selfie

"Suzhou Dushu Lake Higher Education Town" (苏州独墅湖高等教育区)

Swans... I think

Coming up with captions is getting a little tiring...

Something something lake buildings

We all need a little green and a little love

Jesus in China

Something we can all believe in

I did indeed see many other runners around the Suzhou Road Running Base!

Good! Because I could use some computer radiation reduction in my life

Crossing underneath the street at Suzhou Times Square

This particular Chinese food was actually delicious

And here I am eating it!

My own picture (see full moon!) of Suzhou Times Square area

And the ever-important Toronto Buffet Restaurant (did not attend due to sketchiness factor)

NOTE: this post represents an important milestone -- it is GWMD's 150th! We hope you enjoyed it.

中国: Day One

Twelve hours on an air-plane in the window seat imprisoned there by a sleeping old man in the aisle seat who wouldn't wake up resulted in a few things. I couldn't go to the restroom for a very, very long time and thus irreparable internal damage has likely occurred. I read one Harlen Coben novel front-to-back and the better part of a John Grisham and have to admit that the bladder thing definitely will have a stronger long-lasting impact on me. And I ended up Suzhou, China.

Suzhou is a great microcosm of modern China. It's a 'small' city of 11 million people situated about one hour from Shanghai. But it's being built for about 30 million who it seems are scheduled to arrive any day now. There are literally hundreds of very, very tall skyscrapers built and in the process of being built: office buildings and condominiums, stretching all the way into the clouds, with no residents. We arrived into Suzhou at night and nearly all of these apartment buildings were pitch dark. The city has multi-lane highways designed for the influx of eventual Suzhouians getting to work, but for now they are as empty as the 407. The MS building where I'm working is only eight stories tall and we're sitting on the eighth. But don't worry, because the government is building three (3) new 20-story MS buildings next door for expansion.

On the way from the airport we passed many Audis, Mercedes, BMWs, and other expensive cars. There were gleaming glass (empty for the most part) skyscrapers on either side of the newly-paved highway. And then all of a sudden for a short stretch we passed through the old China. The road turned to dirt and there were tiny wooden carts and huts selling food. People were bicycling in the rain and others were on antiquated scooters with all of their possessions tied to the back. There were people everywhere in the road going about their business (in the pouring rain) and after our driver nearly killed some (well, most) of them through his extremely aggressive and frightening driving, we got through that yet-to-be-upgraded part of the road and were back to modern China.

Alert: China is no longer cheap. Our ride from the airport to the hotel with the angel of death cost 350 CNY. That's about 50 EUR, and apparently 25 more EUR than it was exactly one year ago. Our dinner last night was about what you'd pay for a similar thing in Munich (but of a much more frightening character [the food here, I mean]). I've seen Maseratis (yes, plural) and Porsches.

And things are Westerner than ever. The next massive building over from the Four Points Sheraton (which, according to the poster in the elevator, has locations all over the world including London Ontario, Cambridge, and Kitchener-Waterloo!) is a Starbucks. The buffet breakfast this morning had an omelette station, and I filled up on pancakes. At the shopping area in the 'downtown' ("Times Square") where we had lunch there was H&M, Gap, Hugo Boss, Adidas, etc etc etc. Apparently this is how Times Square would look if it hadn't been pouring rain and rendering visibility more than 50 m ahead of you impossible:

Notice the three under-construction buildings. They don't built something and wait for it to fill up and then build something else. They build 30 buildings, then they build another 50, and then a further 100. And then, eventually, I guess people will show up.

If it stops raining tomorrow then perhaps I can put up some of my own pictures!

A Guest Blog

By Helga

            Hello.  It’s me, Helga.  With an “a,” not an “e.”  With the “e” it’s a boy’s name and I’m a girl.  Or so they tell me.

            I’m Canadian but I was born in Germany.  My parents, Pemulis and Joelle, are obviously confused.  I should have been born in Canada.  But I wasn’t.  I hope this won’t be a problem for me in the future.  I hope that when I go to school in a couple of years they won’t look at me all weird like and go, “Oh, she’s really Canadian.”  As if that were a major drawback or something.  As if I had to like Margaret Atwood, which I don’t.  That is, what I’ve read of hers hasn’t pleased me.  Pat the Bunny is a much better novel than The Handmaid’s Tale.  The characterization has so much more depth.  I mean, there’s Paul and Judy and Mummy and Daddy and they’re very real people with real feelings, not to mention a ring and a scratchy face.  Whereas The Handmaid’s Tale is some kind of futuristic schlock.  I didn’t care for it.

            But then I’m a picky reader.  And a picky eater.  Milk and cookies is about all I like at the moment.  Milk and cookies and Pat the Bunny.  And my Mom.  And my Dad.  But he’s into weird computer stuff that I don’t really get.  My Dad is a “data scientist,” which is a fancy term for “computer geek.”  That’s just my opinion, of course.  And I’m only 2 months old, so I could change my mind before another 10% of my life has gone by.  Which would be next Thursday.

            I’m learning new words every day.  Today I learned a German word: scheisse.  It’s a very useful word.  For instance, I’ve just taken a nasty scheisse and I need someone to get rid of it for me.  Hang on while I make my needs known.

            “Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa . . . .”

            (Much later)

            Wow, I must have slept in.  It’s 3 AM and I’m usually up by 2.  However, after that nasty scheisse and a quick bath and a change of clothes, I was starving and my Mom fed me and then I fell asleep and when I woke up I was in my bed and . . . hang on while I wake my parents.

            “Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa . . .”

            (Later)

            OK, that’s better.  It’s 3:30 AM and I’m ready to face the day.  Let’s go for a walk, Mom.  Or let’s wake up Dad and make him walk with us.  We’re a tight-knit family, my parents and me.  Wherever I go, they want to go too.  It’s touching.

            Next time I’ll tell you about my toys.  I can see them, but I can’t touch them.  Toys are like celebrities—you see them everywhere, but you can’t touch them.  When I get older, I’m going to grab all my toys and stuff them into my mouth and see if they taste any better than milk.  It’s not likely.

Beginnings

Hemingway once said that if you want to get busy writing, you better get busy living. It's been tough to do the latter lately so the former has therefore been suffering but just in the last few seconds I all of a sudden got some inspiration to write something quickly before making dinner and so here I am, in the vaunted (virtual) halls of GWMD working on a lead-in to this blog post with a bunch of empty words mainly for the purpose of warming up the fingers, brain, and mind for what might turn out to be an actual post in the imminent seconds and/or minutes. Before I go any further I should probably point out that -- as far as I know anyway -- Hemingway didn't actually say that if you want to get busy writing you better get busy living. But it does at least seem like the paraphrase of something that he might have said. I do believe, in other news, that (probably paraphrased) he did say that one should "write drunk, edit sober", but even that I'm not 100% in on the veracity of given that it was communicated to yours truly via the offspring of the US ARPANET.

Despite seemingly constant explicit complaints and other related passive-aggressive implicit hints/suggestions re the difficulty of life as a parent/caregiver, life has indeed been going on for the antecedent protagonists before H came along and hence you're getting this post. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. And since, despite our best efforts, we can never accomplish our dream of sharing all of these exciting happenstances with all of you readers and admirers live and in-person (virtually) on an as-up-to-date-basis as we would like, here I will relay to you as best I can why the following holds. If y is this blog post, which has as a necessary but insufficient criterion that one needs to be writing (virtually) to create it, and X is the set that comprises ongoing-as-of-late life events and can be summarized by its cardinality x expressed here more simply as getting busy 'living', then by virtue of y, because x is a necessary but insufficient condition for y, or, x + Z --> y, where Z are some other necessary conditions, that since y, therefore x.

Instead of proceeding by proof by induction, I will instead lean on the dependable form of the bullet-point list. And I have to get this done before going to make dinner so please use your imagination as appropriate for where details have been left unconsidered/filled-in:

1. While you might not consider it "living" -- and it most certainly doesn't qualify as living by, for example, Wooderson standards, i.e. it ain't "L, I, V, I, N" -- Joelle and I are masters of the TrainerRoad indoor power-based cycling workout world. Our FTPs (functional threshold powers) are rising faster than industry-induced global temperatures and come spring-time there will be nary a faster cyclist within 200 nautical miles of the Starnbergersee.

2. Work is always rearing its ugly head somewhere in the background and as of late it has seemed to induce a stronger feeling of stress than perhaps at other points in the past. When examining the objective facts, however, it seems more of a combination of regular-style work-related/induced stress and the added joy of point 0, discussed in the foreword to this post, just above. So ignore that negative connotation and proceed to points 2a and 2b, just below:

2a. Yours truly is off to China! Suzhou, to be exact. Should be interesting! Take a minute and Bing it up. Looks like a truly 'neat' place to go. The Venice of Asia. I will be there for a week at the end of February, schooling our Chinese colleagues on the art of the German workday.

2b. Deep learning. As of the start of February I'm on a new (and improved) project in downtown Munich. Well, I've always been in downtown Munich (at this particular job, I mean), and I'm not moving. But the project is new. There's the whole issue with NDAs et al., but I can say that it's deep learning and if you haven't heard of that well the name sounds pretty cool doesn't it? I will be learning very deeply indeed. Anyways, the point is that it's neat. Like Suzhou seems.

3. Despite der Arbeit being arguably on the up-and-up in the lights of sub-points 2a and 2b, number 3 is still, nevertheless, forcefully on the + side despite its 'anti-arbeit' message with its news of a giant break from it; arbeit, that is. The powers that be recently gave the official go-ahead for Pemulis's parental leave and as a direct result of same, the entire family will be making a 3-week stop in Canada in the month of May (9th to 30th -- mark your calendars).

Quod erat demonstrandum.