Yet more photos of Zhizhang Bridge!
Tag: photos
From time to time I transform into a camera-toting tourist and take pictures. Then I post them using this tag.
Notable vehicles (Q1 2025)
Ever since arriving in Hangzhou in December 2022, I’ve been noticing stuff about cars here, and I’ve been meaning to share my observations.
Therefore, here are some facts about the automotive landscape in China (especially Hangzhou):
In addition to imported vehicles and vehicles produced in cooperation with foreign automakers, China has a lot of domestically produced car brands. I’d heard of them because I edited news articles for China Knowledge, an English-language news portal offering business, financial, and real-estate news about China. But to see all the different designs in person is dizzying. Never knew there could be so many different shapes of taillights. (LEDs have changed the world.)
There are “cars” on the road that are tiny, some with only three wheels. These glorified golf carts are mysteriously ubiquitous despite not being road legal. (Apparently, they have recently been officially banned in Beijing.)
Some courier vehicles have no driver. These may start to replace the much more numerous three-wheeled courier vehicles that do have drivers. (But who unloads them, I want to know??? Seems like you’ve still got a last-mile problem.)
There are many consumer model vehicles with AI self-driving features. “Already today, a quarter of all newly registered vehicles in the Chinese market are equipped with a Level 2 driving system for highway scenarios.”
There are often mechanical shelves for cars in underground parking garages to increase capacity. (They are super annoying to park in because you have to back in, and you have to do it very precisely, because there’s only about 6 inches of space on either side of the car. Miss and you damage your tire or rim—happened to Siqi twice.)
There are no vanity license plates, but sometimes the license plate kinda spells something by accident. My brain constantly wants the alphanumeric inscriptions to be real words; they’re usually not. Electric and hybrid cars have green/white license plates, whereas petrol cars have blue license plates. There are a lot of EVs in Hangzhou, maybe 20%-30%. (Here’s a 2022 report with some statistics.)
The highway infrastructure continually amazes me. It’s new, it’s massive, and from what I’ve seen, there’s no graffiti.
Intrigued? See below for 25 photos of vehicles and vehicle infrastructure.
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.
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!
Sightseeing in Shanghai
My parents’ visit is coming to an end, and they will shortly fly off from Shanghai Pudong Airport back to the US (via Seoul), and Siqi and I will return to our home and respective offices Hangzhou. But we have time to see a few more sights before we part.
See below for photos of The Bund and Yu Old Street (including some from 2010!), plus a couple of Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station, where Siqi and I caught the train back to Hangzhou.
The Shanghai Museum
Although the Wikipedia article hasn’t realized it yet, there are currently *two* Shanghai Museum locations: the old one on People’s Square on the west bank of the river in Huangpu District, which opened in 1996 and is shaped like a ding (an ancient round bronze cooking vessel), and the extremely new huge rectangular one in the east in Pudong New Area, which opened in phases in 2024 (February, June, December). The museum (in both incarnations) is dedicated to ancient Chinese art, and has galleries displaying bronze, calligraphy, paintings, seals (stamps or chops), ceramics, numismatics, and jade. It is waaay too big to see everything in one visit!
On our visit to the new location in the east, we borrowed some audioguide devices and went through the ceramics gallery and the jade gallery—and that was all we had time and energy for before dinner.
Casting around for a restaurant, we wound up at what turns out to be Tripadvisor’s first-ranked mid-range dinner restaurant recommendation for the whole city of Shanghai! It’s a Turkish restaurant called Efes, and it was fantastic.
See below for photos of the museum, lots of porcelain, and a bit of jade. Plus, read about what I discovered when I looked through photos from my visit to the old Shanghai Museum in 2010.
Hengshan Garden Hotel, Shanghai
How do you choose a hotel when you travel? I wanted a nice hotel in Shanghai, somewhere reasonably central, not too expensive, and not too modern and soulless.
I figured I could skip the research phase of hotel selection and just book the hotel in the French quarter that I remember staying at before, in 2010—if I could figure out which one it was. Luckily, in 2010 I took a photo of the hotel sign!
Still, booking was not as straightforward as I assumed it would be. The hotel had been bought by the hotel next door, so the name had changed, from Hengshan Picardie Hotel to Hengshan Garden Hotel. Upon arrival, we discovered they had closed down what had been the main entrance on the corner. In fact, not just the lobby, but also the rooms we stayed in weren’t in the original building I remembered. Still, the experience was fine overall.
See below for 10 photos of the hotel, then and now.
