See below for photos of 8 vehicles that caught my attention.
Year: 2025
Wuyi Old Town
We visited the “old town” retail street in Wuyi for lunch and dinner. See below for photos.
Wuyi Fluorite Museum
There’s a trip.com page about this place, and a couple of stilted English-language news articles that mention it, and that’s all.
Hello, Wuyi Hot Spring Fluorite Museum!
See below for info on 4 Guinness World Records related to fluorite, and photos of the minerals on display.
Continue reading Wuyi Fluorite Museum
Trip to Wuyi, Zhejiang Province
I live in China. I’ve had the thought that while I’m here, I should look into buying minerals that are mined locally, since presumably such treasures can be had for a fraction of the price they sell for after being exported.
I had the impression that China is known globally as a source of fluorite. I did an online search, and went to a geological museum in Hangzhou, and learned that the county of Wuyi (population 462,462), which belongs to the city of Jinhua, has fluorite mines and a fluorite museum. Therefore, during the Chinese New Year Holiday, I went with my cooperative husband and in-laws to Wuyi in search of beautiful stones. I assumed, since Wuyi has fluorite mines and a fluorite museum, that it also had shops selling fluorite products. If it does, we couldn’t find them! Nevertheless, our road trip shopping quest was successful.
The trip is documented in this post and five others:
- We visited the museum, which had some really beautiful stuff in it.
- Subsequently, I bought a veritable trunkload of hunks of fluorite.
- We walked around in Wuyi’s “old town” shopping/eating area.
- I spotted some interesting vehicles during the trip.
- I took photos of some interesting “English” signs during the trip.
We stayed two nights (February 1 and February 2) in the Vienna International Hotel in Wuyi. There are… 26 miscellaneous photos from the trip below.
The Novels of E.M. Forster
I recently read seven works by E.M. Forster in order of publication:
- Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905)
- The Longest Journey (1907)
- A Room with a View (1908)
- Howards End (1910)
- A Passage to India (1924)
- Maurice (written in 1913–14, published posthumously in 1971)
- Aspects of the Novel (1927)
Forster is known for the mantra “Only connect,” a quote from Howard’s End. Perhaps his best-known novel, which I read previously, is A Passage To India. My favorite of the novels is A Room with a View, which I read and posted about previously.
See below for some thoughts on Forster’s writing.
Gray ceramic donkey
Item description / significance
The seller labeled this as a horse, one of the 12 Chinese zodiac animals, but this is obviously a donkey. Approx. 13 cm tall, 24 cm long.
I say “obviously”, but why, exactly? Upon consideration, I can say: It’s a donkey first and foremost because the ears are long. Moreover, the face is short, and the tail is rope-like, like a lion’s tail. Also, there’s not much mane, and although many donkeys are brown, gray is possibly the most typical donkey color. I rest my case.
I have named him Eyeore, because he seems a bit downcast.
Bought where
on Xianyu, the Chinese second-hand marketplace app
Age and origin
like new, age and origin unknown
What I like about it
The realism. He looks like he could get up and walk away, but doesn’t want to. His form and coloring are natural. He isn’t cartoony or cutesey or anthropomorphized. He isn’t decorated with colorful abstract patterns.
The lack of accessories. He’s not wearing a halter, saddle, or saddlebags. He’s not pulling a cart. He’s at rest. Perhaps he belongs in a nativity scene…
See below for something surprising I learned, plus photos from the seller.
Silo: Seasons 1 and 2 (2023-2025)
Silo is the grown-up version of City of Ember, which I love (the book version, at any rate). It’s also based on a book series. It’s sci-fi dystopia in which 10,000 people live in a city consisting of an underground silo. The world of the Silo, stratified vertically into different classes of citizens with different roles and lifestyles, is interesting in itself, but the characters bring it to life and drive the plot. The characters all have goals that motivate and explain their decisions (and conflict with other characters’ goals), and they all learn as they go, shifting their allegiance, or not, as suits their aims and principles and the information they happen to have.
Like all good sci-fi, Silo is about big questions made into relatable stories…
If you lived in an underground Silo, wouldn’t you want, first of all, to prevent your fellow citizens from threatening the existence of your world, even if it meant following orders and not asking questions, or concealing (or distorting) the truth? If the stakes are survival, don’t the ends justify the means? Curiosity killed the cat; it could kill you too—and 10,000 others with you! Is knowing the truth so important? On the other hand, is it possible for humans to happily ignore huge unanswered questions? What kind of truth requires such secrecy that people have to die for it? Aren’t we better off finding out whatever there is to find out, and knowing whatever there is to know? And anyway, isn’t it our nature that we will inevitably seek the truth, even if it doesn’t make us better off?
Who do you identify with: those who are willing to kill for the sake of secrecy in the name of safety, or those who are willing to die for the sake of solving a mystery? In probably every dystopia story, the audience is meant to side with the rebels. Silo, while clearly siding with the characters who seek the truth (as per the tagline), makes a pretty strong case for the local tyrant: there’s no twirling of mustaches here. Every issue has as many sides as there are characters, because every character has his or her own individual perspective. And yet, in the end, the truth matters.
Season 1 kicks off with a couple of mysterious deaths, but the greater mystery is whether the world outside the Silo is as inhospitable as the residents have been led to believe. Juliette, a gifted engineer responsible for the health of the Silo’s generator, is thrust into a new role that she leverages to find the answers to increasingly dangerous questions. Above all, she’s tenacious. Whatever she does, you root for her.
Season 2 is gripping in the sense that you want to know what happens to the people you met in Season 1, but it’s less gripping in the sense that the biggest mystery of Season 1 has been revealed. Moreover, Season 2 bounces between two separate plotlines. Circumstances are more strained; Season 1, even when people die, is more about solving intellectual puzzles, some of them political and all of them secret; Season 2 is more political rather than less so, but now there are many more overt physical conflicts: explosions, gunshots, arrows, and more than enough water to drown in!
There’s not yet any release date for Season 3, but it will probably start airing in 2026. 🙁 I’m tempted to read the books, but I also believe that would be a terrible idea, so I’ll wait until I’ve finished watching the show; then I’ll read the book series and compare.
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (2024)
This was fun. Silly, but with strong themes of hope, friendship, and family.
Wikipedia says: Polygon said Carrey’s “gloriously deranged one-man, two-character musical” contrasted with the “utter sincerity” of Reeves, who made Shadow a “weirdly likable little ball of pain”. Sounds about right.
“English” on signs (January 2025)
I understand almost no written Chinese. But my eyes and brain still pay attention to text in my environment in China. The result is that English text jumps out at me wherever there is any. English text appears even in places where there are few if any people who might be expected to read it. And since there are few if any people who do read it, getting it exactly correct is not a priority; thus it doesn’t tend to turn out exactly correct, though usually it’s clear what was meant, just from the context.
The fun is spotting surprises.
Surprises include signs that give instructions that I usually don’t see on signs; signs that are so badly translated that the meaning is totally lost; signs from The Department Of Signs That Say The Opposite Of What They Mean; signs that display lorem ipsum or other placeholder text; strange ways of writing familiar ideas; spellings that reveal how people write or pronounce English words when they don’t really know which letters and sounds should be there; and grammar, capitalization, and punctuation mistakes that highlight how difficult English is from the perspective of someone whose language follows different principles altogether.
(As you can see, much fun is also in the analysis!)
Meanwhile, English words on clothing can be surprising because they aren’t necessarily expected to mean anything at all! In the English-speaking world, my impression is, the people who create or wear clothing decorated with Asian writing are mainly anime/manga geeks who’d be likely to know what it says—although, to be fair, there are amusing corners of the internet dedicated to photos of mirrored, error-ridden, insulting, or nonsensical Asian-language tattoos, which you’d think people would be more careful with than clothing! But in Asia, many people wear stuff with English words on it, and even if they can read it, maybe they don’t always bother to: the English is just decoration.
Below are three samples of weird English: two safety stickers (those are almost always good for a laugh) and a garment featuring decorative (rather than correct) English.
Japanese cast iron rabbit
Item description / significance
This is a small Japanese cast iron rabbit. The rabbit is one of the 12 Chinese zodiac animals. It was the zodiac animal of the year 2023.
Bought where
on Xianyu, the Chinese second-hand marketplace app
Age and origin
new, Japanese
What I like about it
It’s a rabbit. I like all the Chinese zodiac animals… but some animals are more equal than others. In this case, the rabbits come out on top, not the pigs!
The material. Small cast iron objects are satisfyingly dense. There’s a typical “seam” around the middle, a result of the casting process, that gives the object a symmetrical front and back.
The shape and texture. Unlike porcelain, cast iron doesn’t really permit fine detail. The surface is coated with something smooth, but it’s rough underneath.
The color. Something has been added to the surface that sticks in the cracks more than to the other parts of the surface. This highlights the shape of the rabbit more than a uniform dark black would. This bronze green color is typical, but I’ve also seen white/grey, brown, blue, red, and yellow.
See below for information on Japanese cast iron and more photos.
