Night Market @ 麦寮

After sticking around for almost 10 days, my work here is finally done. Taiwan is nice and all, but when you are away for that long... and I must admit that my productivity was on the decline.

One of the guys at work offered to bring me to the night market at the nearby town. While I was initially hesitant, the trip turned up really fun. The company was great, and there was a number of interesting sights.

There were a number of game stations, that I had not seen in night markets before. There were a lot of small pinball machines, and a row of basketball tossing machines. The latter had been featured in some Taiwanese variety shows, where the guests would challenge each other on the maximum number of successful tosses within the time limt.



There were also some game stations where people needed to catch fishes or prawns with nets or with small hook devices.


There were also plenty of food stalls, serving all sorts of delights. It was a lot of eating, a lot of looking around, and a lot of laughter. This was really what I had needed.

常州 - Second Look

Returned to China again to complete the work, and stayed at the Fudu Traders Hotel for the full 6 nights. It was certainly a lot better to be staying in 1 hotel room throughout, rather than moving every day... which was what happened in my previous trip ... 3 hotel rooms in 2 hotels for 3 nights. Changzhou was such a busy place that week.







I had no mood to go touring around the city even though I had more than a few nights of free time.

There was a time when I heard that the Chinese culture is strong on tea, and will not allow coffee to assimilate that quickly. However, a lot of people in the cities are beginning to indulge in a cuppa more and more. There are plenty of coffee clubs and houses in Changzhou, serving western food, local chinese food, and beverages galore. I had heard about Bread Talks in Beijing, and was not too surprised to see an outlet in Changzhou as well.

The shopping scene is quite nice and if I were in the mood to shop around, I would have probably gotten quite some stuff. But I was quite amazed by a nice-looking mosque that was along the shopping belt. It is a "寺", and I only realized it is a mosque after seeing the crescent and the star.

too much time ... thinking too much ...

sometimes, when i have too much time with nothing i'd really want to do, the tendency is to return to some memories of the past, to haunt myself... to revisit the hurt...

Inflight Entertainment - "The Holiday"

... it is strange how the mind searches for things that relate to the emotional state that it wants to identify with ...

I was channel surfing during the flight and chanced upon "The Holiday" which was already about 50 minutes into the show. This was one of those SQ flights that had non-on-demand services, so the movies would run at the defined timing with no options to pause, or to turn back time. It almost felt like the dark ages...

http://www.sonypictures.com/homevideo/theholiday/

i was amused by how corny Cameron & Jude's characters are in the show, but eventually, there was one scene that really took my breathe away. It was Kate's character, who talked about her past relationship. i could so relate to that ... perhaps it is not so uncommon to feel like that afterall.

The hurt wouldn't go away yet. In fact, I still have some difficulty to sleep well at night, an unusual thing for someone who never has problems knocking out in bed within a minute or two. But now that I am back in 常州, and will need to concentrate on work once again. 加油！

常州 - First Look

Was in China for 3 nights, in a place called 常州 (Changzhou). The trip from Shanghai was about 3 hours by car, due to the heavy traffic conditions. The roads, I must say, are quite well constructed, being new and all, but with the speed of development in other areas, it is unlikely that the road infrastructure can catch up with the traffic growth. But then, which city or country can claim not to have traffic jams. If there were no jams, could it be that there is too much of a redundancy in public infrastructure?

Did not have the time to go sightseeing during this trip, but saw enough of the city to know that progress is extremely rapid in places outside of the main cities of Beijing and Shanghai. We hear all this in the news, and through accounts from others, but physically seeing this is another thing altogether.

In contrast to 大庆 (Daqing) where I had worked in the most in China, the hotels in 常州 are extravagant, and the surroundings are very developed, and in some areas, not unlike Singapore.