Turpan–Hottest Place on Earth?

I’m not sure if it is the hottest place, but it is definitely the hottest I’ve ever had a chance to visit. Day time temperatures get to around 65-70C, which is around 150-160F! The bellow giant thermometer shows 65C. This is the home to the Bull Demon King and Iron-fan Princess.

Do you think people live in those conditions? Of course they do. They adapt to it and make very interesting architectural changes to their houses.  

Turpan is located in western part of China, in Xin Jiang province, about 150 miles east from Urumqi. We rented a car from our hotel – with a driver – to take us there. It was not cheap, but money spent is totally worth the experience we got from the trip, and convenience of a good car, with good AC, with local driver who knows how to drive Chinese highways is really priceless.

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Hot, Sweaty Night in Beijing

After walking for a few hours around Beijing downtown we decided to give our feet some rest and do some people watching. I believe this is right off WangFuZing street, which is a one of those streets in the center of Chinese capital overloaded with bunch of supermarkets and restaurants, packed with people.

While getting our burned feet some rest I decided to take a snap of passersby’s.

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Getting Ready for Business

Young Chinese, or maybe she is Uyghur – highly unlikely as she is wearing pants, girl is getting ready for business in Urumqi China. I believe those are apples or some type of other fruit, covered in some kind of glazing, probably sold for about 30-40 cents (2-3 Chinese Yuan) per stick. We just visited Hong Shan Park (Red Mountain) and were walking back to our hotel when I saw her standing along near this decaying apartment building, patiently getting ready for another round of selling cycle, hoping to make a bit of living on whatever tiny profit margin she will get from it.

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Happy Chinese New Year!

Well, my friends, it is Chinese New Year (春節), I wish everyone happiness, peace, good health and prosperity. Have a drink and celebrate!

This photo is from Chinese New Year back from 20 year ago – 1992, nothing fancy, but a lot of good memories!

It was my first year in China and we went out to celebrate Chinese New Year to one of the local restaurants. As you know China invented gun powder and maybe for that reason or some other cultural reason they go really out of control with fireworks. Back then they were not fancy as far as color or flying abilities, but boy, they were so loud. When I first came to China, maybe on a second or third day after arrival I heard from far away what sounded like an automatic gun, AK47 or similar. I was puzzled to hear this sound, as I knew no one has guns there and definitely not going to shoot it in Beijing. A few days later I discovered that it was fireworks making those sounds. They made belts of them, by attaching each individual firecracker to each other, hanging it somewhere and then lighting it at the bottom. In a few seconds you have couple minutes of intense firepower. The kicker is that those belts came in different sizes – I mean, the power of individual firecrackers in them. I remember some of them being at least one inch thick, like little bombs. Tie them together and let fire one after another, that is some crazy fireworks!

So on Chinese New Year they went really nuts, those belts were hanging on the door handles, tree branches, air conditioners etc, and they lighted them up right around midnight, all at the same time.  Talk about deafening damage to your ear drums – I felt like I was going to be deaf after that for sure.

So anyway, I found this photo in my archives from 1992 Chinese New Year. Fireworks at its best.

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Beijing Hu Tong Red Door #5

It is time for another one of these pretty doors. I have a few left. You know, if I visited Beijing fairly often, or lived there, I could even start a serious project to document every Hu Tong Red Door in Beijing. There are must be hundreds of them there. I took less than a dozen just on one street while walking from our hotel towards  downtown. We didn’t take big streets, instead went though the hood, so much to see. All of these doors will soon disappear as government expand new developments in the city and take over the land.

Anyhow, this is #5 in this short series of Red Doors. You can see other if you look under Beijing category on the right.

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