We visited the “old town” retail street in Wuyi for lunch and dinner. See below for photos.
Tag: China
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.
Happy Year of the Snake!
The Western zodiac has 12 symbols, one for each month. The Chinese zodiac has 12 animals, each celebrated for a whole year. This year is the year of the snake. I like the idea of the zodiac animals in general, and I like snakes in particular.
Below are a handful of photos of snake products and decorations specially arranged for 2025.
Return to Lin Feng Mountain
Siqi and I went to this place on New Year’s Eve in 2022 and got some great photos of the early winter sunset.
» Previous visit to Lin Feng Mountain
We recently returned there with his parents. We went earlier in the day, and the visibility was better, so the photos are quite different this time!
See below for 39 photos of the observation tower and Hangzhou from the observation tower, plus mountains in the distance and plants up close, among other things.
“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.
Places visited in 2024
Siqi and I visited 2 European countries and approximately 9 cities in China in 2024. I took thousands of photos on my phone! The road trip that Siqi and I went on with my parents was particularly special. See below for an illustrated summary of where we went when.
Double dragon Chinese inside-painted glass ball
Item description / significance
This is an inside-painted (inner-painted, reverse painted) glass ball depicting two dragons chasing a pearl.
Bought where
in China on Xianyu, the Chinese second-hand marketplace app (from a seller in Beijing)
Age and origin
Painted in 2000, according to the inscription, probably Hengshui, Hebei Province, in northern China
What I like about it
What attracted me is that the quality of the painting (the level of detail) is high. Also, it’s dragons!
See below for information on the inscription and photos of this sphere, including photos from the seller.
Continue reading Double dragon Chinese inside-painted glass ball
Zhejiang Geological Museum, Hangzhou
Siqi and his mom and I visited the Zhejiang Geological Museum in Xiaoshan, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province.
See below for transcriptions of some informative but somewhat amusing English text, and photos of some of the awesome minerals on display.
“English” on signs
I included some funny English signs in the post about the journey to Longquan; I saw a lot all in on the same day, mostly in the same place. But I saw and took photos of others in various other places. Rather than put them in posts about those places, I’ve collected the rest of the strange English signs here. Enjoy!
