the heart thrills

RUBBING ALONG TOGETHER

Bangkok, 1 November 2014

I think it must be a scientific law that the closer you get to the equator, the more species you will find per square metre (or foot, if you wish) looking for their space in the sun. All that steamy heat seems to lead to a sustained biological ebullience. Certainly, in a totally unscientific survey, my wife and I have agreed that the number of species wishing to share with us our hot and steamy Bangkok apartment is considerably higher than it was in Beijing. There, over a period of five years, we catalogued a few, relatively small, cockroaches making a frantic getaway over the floor and that was it (although the rare cockroach sighting led to apoplectic calls to the front desk and demands for a thorough chemical spraying). Here, in just one month and a bit, we have seen:

– A little lizard, very pale, almost albino, which we first sighted peeping out from under the dining table, then from behind a column that we have in the living room, then in the cupboard under the kitchen sink. He looked very similar to this little fellow.

I have had a soft spot for lizards ever since I used to chase them as a boy across the walls of my grandmother’s garden in France, so I was pleased to see it. But my wife is not a lizardophile and demanded that I get rid of it. I rather reluctantly chased it around a bit and was secretly pleased when it disappeared of its own accord.
– A horribly large cockroach, which luckily was flat on its scaly back, dead, in the shower. But I have seen them horribly alive, skittering ahead of me across the pavements, always in the darker corners of the neighborhood. Disgusting creatures, I refuse to grace them with a picture ….
– A number of wonderfully large moths, which flutter in at night from out over the river and settle down for a rest. They are really beautiful, nothing like the dreary little things we have in Europe, so I’d be pleased to share my living space with them.

But my wife is having none of it, so with a sigh I shoo them out, using the pasta drainer to catch them and carry them out.
– Several species of bird which use the balcony railing as a favorite stopping place. There are those pesky pigeons which crowd our squares in Europe. But there has also been a beautiful bird, which I think is also a type of pigeon although my wife disagrees.

Cheeky little sparrows also hop on and off the railings, beadily eyeing any crumbs which might have fallen off the table that we carry out onto the balcony for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
– swallows, which my wife says she found early one morning twittering around on the living room parquet (we had left the windows open). Imagine that! I see them dive and swoop over the river

as I have seen them dive and swoop over summer fields in Europe. But I have never seen them stand still.

All this in the few square meters (or feet, if you wish) of our apartment. Expanding out a little, we’ve seen beautiful little birds, black with white tufts on their wings, fluttering silently on and off the clumps of water hyacinth which drift past us on the river. They have recently been joined by a lovely white egret.

And then there’s the Asian koel bird which I’ve mentioned before. I keep on hearing it, but I’ve never managed to see it. In the dirty, oh so very dirty, canal which runs behind the office, I’ve seen what I think is a monitor lizard swimming lazily (or sickly?) in the watery gook: the water is greyer than in this photo.

The same canal teams with fish, which some enterprising (or mad?) people fish from time to time. And we have a couple of next-door fishermen who put out their nets in the river while we are having breakfast, well out of the way of the busy river traffic. I’ve sometimes caught a gleam of silvery scales in the bottom of their shallow little boats.

But I presume that the number of species we can stumble across in the concrete jungle of Bangkok would be nothing compared to what is present in the real jungle – or what is left of it in Thailand. That pleasure awaits us still.

_______________
Lizard: http://naturestudent.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/20130121-162953.jpg (in http://naturestudent.wordpress.com/2013/01/21/lovely-lizards/)
Moth: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-R3HpNI3L0lM/TzdPTJ13xQI/AAAAAAAAAD8/TiXKoEuS1go/s1600/Samia+canningii.JPG (in http://norfolkbirderinthailand.blogspot.com/2012/02/thailand-moths-part-two.html)
Bird on the balcony railing: my wife’s picture
Flying swallow: https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8164/7244597922_bd666a00e8_z.jpg (in https://www.flickr.com/photos/clicks_1000/7244597922/)
Egret: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/Little_Egret_flying_-_Thailand.jpg (in http://c
ommons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Little_Egret_flying_-_Thailand.jpg)
Monitor lizard: http://cdn2.vtourist.com/4/6079856-Monitor_lizard_swims_khlong_Bangkok.jpg?version=2 (in http://www.virtualtourist.com/travel/Asia/Thailand/Central_Eastern_Thailand/Bangkok-1445238/Off_the_Beaten_Path-Bangkok-Khlongs_Canals-BR-1.html)

PERAMBULATING PARQUETS

Bangkok, 26 October 2014

My wife has been busy getting to know Bangkok in her usual favorite way, taking the bus (with me joining her on the weekends). When she told the very nice Thai couple whom we have befriended in the building that she takes the bus to get around, they stared at her and finally managed to ask, “the aircon buses?” When she said no, no, the normal buses, they tittered nervously. When pressed, they confessed to have not taken a bus in twenty years. (This reminds me of a scene early in our marriage. It was downtown Baltimore, 1978 or 9. We wanted to get somewhere, I forget where, so we approached a nice young man sitting on a bench eating his lunch and asked him what bus we might take. He confessed that he had no idea, that he had never taken a city bus in his life. We stared at him: how could it be that someone had NEVER taken a bus? The difference between a European and an American, I suppose. But I digress.)

It is true to say that the (non-aircon) buses of Bangkok are not the most handsome of buses. In fact, they obviously have had a hard-scrabble life.

And their technology looks – and sounds – very old-fashioned. For instance, whenever the drivers change gears (using a huge gear shift as big as the seated drivers themselves), it sounds distinctly like they are double-declutching (a term which I would imagine is meaningless to anyone below the age of 60). The drivers are always in a tearing hurry, no doubt due to being perennially bottled up in Bangkok’s terrible traffic, so getting on and off buses is an athletic accomplishment. To get on, wave down the bus, rush for the door, swing in as the bus already starts to move off. To get off, ring for the stop, balance yourself on the balls of your feet, hustle down the steps the moment the doors start clattering noisily open, and drop down into the street as the bus already moves off. And while inside, hang on for dear life as the bus barrels its way down the city’s streets, riding roughshod over every pothole and other imperfection in the road’s mantle.

But as I grimly hang on in the bus, bouncing up and down on the (really quite comfortable) seats, I cannot help but wonder at the beautiful parquet floor which the buses have. Look at that! Who has ever seen parquet floors in buses?

Well, “parquet” may be pushing it a little, but this is really nice wood they’ve used. No trash soft wood here, being rubbed to pieces by passenger’s dirty shoes. This is close-grained hardwood. I would be proud to have a floor of that in our living room, sanded down and waxed into a rich red-brown color, instead of the fake plasticized “parquet” which our miserly landlord has laid down and which rings hollow every time we walk across it. I wince when I see how this beautiful wood has been mercilessly screwed down onto to the bus chassis, with big, gleaming, screws. Aie-aie-aie!

The only thing that worries me here is the wood’s provenance. This is not plantation wood, nor I’m sure is it certified wood from responsibly managed forests. I fear that this is just brutally logged wood from Myanmar or Laos or perhaps Indonesia (Thailand has already cut down much of its forests).

Perhaps it would be better for Bangkok to shift to modern, gleaming, air-conditioned, buses with plasticized floors
and leave this beautiful wood standing in its wilderness, soaring up towards the sky.

_______________
Bangkok bus: http://www.langeasy.com/images2/bkk/bus2.jpg (in http://www.langeasy.com/cities/bangkok/bangkokpage1.html)
Bangkok bus floor: my photo
Illegal logging: http://www.globalpost.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/gp3_slideshow_large/illegal_logging_in_anlong_veng_ii.jpg ( in http://pixgood.com/illegal-loggers.html)
Modern city bus: http://i01.i.aliimg.com/photo/v2/280618923_1/SLK6111_Aluminum_Body_City_Bus.jpg (in http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=1468014)
Mahogany tree soaring: http://treepicturesonline.com/tree-mahogany.jpg (in http://treepicturesonline.com/mahogany_tree_pictures.html)

TUGGING AT MY HEARTSTRINGS

Bangkok, 9 October 2014

Our living room is small, but it has a magic view on the Chao Phraya River. Two of the living room’s walls are all glass and allow us a wonderful view up and down the river.

My wife and I maximize this view every morning by dragging our table out onto the narrow balcony which wraps around our living room and taking our breakfast – tea, cereal, and tropical fruit – all the while watching the parade of boats moving up and down the river.

Let’s be clear, the boats we see are not as handsome as these 1920s yachts.

I suppose the most striking boat we see are the long-tailed boats which skim across the river’s surface, their huge roaring motors in the stern peremptorily signaling their presence to one and all.

The water buses that ply the river aren’t so showy, but their raked bow gives them a certain allure.

My heart, though, goes out to the lowly ugly tugs which rumble slowly up and down the river dragging trains of barges behind them – slowly, so very slowly when the barges are full, slightly more jauntily when they are empty.

I sit there, watching them tug and strain, and will them on: “Go, little tug, go! You can do it! Attaboy!”

They may work hard, but these tugs are no shrinking violets. No drab work clothes for them. No siree, their owners paint them strong, happy colors, to signal how proud they are of their work partners. I mean, look at them!

As these tugboats pass, flaunting their color schemes, I can’t help but think dreamily of the tugboats of my youth, like Theodore the Tugboat

or Little Toot the Tugboat

or even Scuffy the Tugboat

Toot, toot!! Tug away, fellas! Job well done! I hope you get a rest and a good lube job in the evening. Toot, toot!!

__________________

Views of Chao Phraya river: my photos
1920s yachts: http://abrushwithsail.blogspot.com/2012/06/grand-yachts-of-1920s.html
long-tailed boat: http://swissnomads.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/long-tail-boat.jpg
water bus: my wife’s photo
tub boat and barges: my photo and http://www.panoramio.com/m/photo/47654772
colourful tugboats: my wife’s photos
Theodore the Tugboat: http://www.mtcw.ca/theodoretugboat/Tours.php
Little Toot the Tugboat: http://blog.keloland.com/lund/blog/2010/12/20/aunt-leilas-records/
Scuffy the Tugboat: http://www.betterworldbooks.com/scuffy-the-tugboat-sail-away-id-0375826963.aspx

SOUNDS OF BANGKOK

Bangkok, 19 September 2014

Well, we’ve finally moved to Bangkok. We’ve found ourselves a place on the Chao Phraya river, literally overlooking it. The open water gives rise to constant breeze which we can channel through the apartment by a judicious opening of various windows, obviating the need for air-conditioning – a minor miracle in this heavily air-conditioned city. When, as now, the evening’s storm clouds come rolling in, that breeze will rise to a stiff sou’-wester’ threatening to blow every light object into the river below and sends us scurrying around the apartment closing windows and doors. At these moments, I find myself back on my grandmother’s sailing boat, with her at the tiller imperiously ordering me and any other grandchild around to lash down everything movable as the summer storm rips over us and the boat starts to lean over at a precipitous angle.

During the day, that same breeze wafts into our living room all the noises of the river and its banks: the deep grumble of the tug boats slowly pulling the heavily laden barges upriver, the growl of the water-buses as they tack back and forth across the river from stop to stop, the creaking and groaning from the landing piers lining the bank as the wash of passing ships sends their platforms oscillating, the slightly atonal call to prayer from a mosque somewhere on the far bank, the more profane call to evening aerobics in a small park just downriver, the occasional siren from a police car racing over one of the nearby bridges, and just the ordinary household noises rising out of the houses below our balcony.

But for me, two sounds stand out from this medley. One is the piercing whistling used by the water bus conductors to guide the drivers when they berth at stops. I haven’t yet understood the signaling, but somehow the conductor makes the driver understand when to reverse the engine to slow down, then idle it, then start it again to move off from the stop. As I listen and watch, fascinated, I am suddenly back in Hyde Park looking on at a competition of Welsh shepherds using whistling to guide their sheep dogs into driving a flock of sheep from one place to another (I’m not sure the drivers of the water buses would appreciate being compared to sheep dogs).

The other sound is the cry of a bird. It is very distinctive. It starts with a low cry, which is followed in rapid succession by a series of ever higher and more piercing cries, finally reaching a crescendo and dying out. I have asked my Thai staff what the bird is called. They are still wrestling with the Thai name, let alone the English name. In the meantime, I am calling it the Fake Orgasm Bird. It reminds me every time of a night I spent in a cheap hotel in Geneva (cheap for Geneva, expensive for anywhere else), where I was woken up in the early hours by a Lady of the Night who was pleasing her customer by oohing and aahing at the top of her lungs. She sounded exactly like my Bangkok bird.

Postscript 22 November 2014:

I have finally identified my mystery bird! It is the Asian koel. For those who might be interested in its call, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU3T6jikQqg.

筷子, OR CHOPSTICKS TO YOU AND ME

Beijing, 6 September 2014

In our dying days in China – we leave for good in a week – it seems appropriate that I should write my last posting from Beijing about that most Chinese of utensils, the chopstick. I have a feeling that chopsticks and the Chinese food they pick up are probably the first contact which most Europeans have with Chinese culture (in the very broadest sense of that term), down at their local Chinese restaurant

where much fun is had by all trying to figure out how to use these two sticks

and where in recent years helpful instructions are printed on the paper wrapping around the chopsticks to help us ignoramuses figure this out.

Certainly, I rapidly found out when I arrived here that the Chinese generally didn’t expect me to be able to manipulate chopsticks and always solicitously asked me at the beginning of meals if I wanted a knife and fork. But after years of experimentation in my local Chinese restaurants back home and after hours of carefully studying the instructions on my chopsticks’ paper wrappings, I felt that my chopstick skills were good enough and I would grandly wave away these offers of help. Generally speaking, it’s worked and I have not made too much of a fool of myself, although slippery food still defeats me completely, and I do tend to end up with numerous stains on my trousers.

Although I am a firm believer in the adage “When in Rome do as the Romans”, and will therefore use chopsticks when in Beijing, in my heart of hearts I think forks are so much better than chopsticks. I mean, it seems so much more efficient to spear pieces of food

rather than tweeze them

while also having available the secondary possibility of scooping if needed (for peas, for instance).

And twinning a fork with a knife means that cooks can turn over the pesky work of cutting up the food to the eaters rather than have to do this work themselves in the kitchen.

But I will admit that chopsticks are aesthetically more pleasing than forks. Or at least they are to me (and here I pull out another venerable adage: “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”). Used to the grotty pieces of balsa-like wood offered to us in Chinese restaurants, it came as something of a shock to my wife and I when we were offered two beautiful sets of chopsticks on our first trip to Japan. They looked something like this.

That was some thirty-odd years ago. They have travelled with us everywhere we’ve gone, like talismans. When we first got to Beijing, we visited Qianmen, which is a pedestrianized road to the south of Tiananmen Square. It’s very touristy, full of shops, generally pretty awful. But there was one shop which drew me like a magnet, a clearly high-end shop which sold chopsticks

I went in and looked around. Beautiful, so beautiful – but hideously expensive. I was staggered by the prices and left empty-handed. I beg to differ with yet another adage, “beauty has no price”.

The shop taught me something I hadn’t known. Chinese chopsticks are bluntwhile Japanese chopsticks are pointed

Weighing it all up, I think pointed chopsticks are more pleasant on the eye than blunt ones – and you can spear things if necessary.

I leave you with a beautiful sunburst of chopsticks. Enjoy!

_____________________

Chinese restaurant UK: http://junk4lunch.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/wpid-img_20130808_hingloong.jpg [in http://junk4lunch.wordpress.com/2013/08/12/beef-brisket-noodle-soup-hing-loong-borough-high-street/%5D
Trying to use chopsticks: https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-GjkRDYGgO3Q/TWmPeRm9UMI/AAAAAAAADTc/CAllPWrsOCc/s1600/DSCN2786.JPG [in http://memoriesexpress.blogspot.com/2011/02/day-46-54cancun-vacation.html%5D
How to use chopsticks: http://www.askjohnenglish.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/chopsticks.jpg [in http://www.askjohnenglish.com/conversation/how-to-use-chopsticks%5D
Forks: https://retail.libbey.com/var/libbey/storage/images/retail-home/product-repository/appetizer-fork/211460-1-eng-US/Appetizer-Fork.jpg [in https://retail.libbey.com/Product-Repository/Appetizer-Fork/%28language%29/eng-US%5D
Chopsticks and shrimp: http://static5.depositphotos.com/1000383/493/i/950/depositphotos_4934044-Cooked-tiger-shrimp-with-thyme-twig-in-chopsticks.jpg [in http://depositphotos.com/4934044/stock-photo-cooked-tiger-shrimp-with-thyme-twig-in-chopsticks.html%5D
Peas on a fork: http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/x/peas-fork-15791390.jpg [in http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photo-peas-fork-image15791390%5D
Wakasa chopsticks: http://blog.everythingchopsticks.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/315-700_LS.jpg [in http://blog.everythingchopsticks.com/wakasa-chopsticks/%5D
Mother of pearl chopsticks: https://www.everythingchopsticks.com/images/CHP194.jpg [in https://www.everythingchopsticks.com/bone-chopsticks-with-scattered-mother-pearl-pi-361.html?image=0%5D
Chopstick shop in Qianmen: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-kGrxQQwS1ZM/Tx0jpZHQnuI/AAAAAAAAA5Y/bgbpkFFt0Yo/s1600/chopstick-shop.jpg [in http://englishcoffeedrinker.blogspot.com/2012/01/happy-new-year.html%5D
Chinese chopsticks: http://www.silvermagpie.co.uk/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/c/h/chopsticks.jpg [in http://www.silvermagpie.co.uk/chinese-chopsticks.html%5D
Japanese chopsticks: http://blog.everythingchopsticks.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/315-709.jpg [in http://blog.everythingchopsticks.com/all-about-asian-chopsticks/%5D
A circle of chopsticks: http://www.thecuriouscreature.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/32.jpg [in http://www.thecuriouscreature.com/tag/sushi/%5D

THEY HAVE TOO MANY SEEDS

Beijing, 26 August 2014

Suddenly, there are vendors on every street corner of Beijing hawking pomegranate juice.

As certainly as the appearance of vendors selling pineapples on Beijing’s streets is a signal that Spring is coming, so this new apparition is a sign that Summer is drawing to a close, with the pomegranate trees now heavy with fruit.

My wife and I have bought our cup of pomegranate juice. Peering down into that dark red liquid

I have as usual begun to ask myself questions about this fruit. It’s not from my basket of inherited foods. I never remember eating it as a child. Which is not surprising, really. It doesn’t grow well in the UK or France – certainly, my French grandmother had no pomegranate trees in her garden; peaches, plums, apples and pears, but no pomegranates. I have never eaten them in Italy either, even though they were brought to Italy during Roman times; their cultivation is limited to the far south.

That’s the thing, pomegranates are not a European fruit. I thought for a moment – given my previous discoveries – that they originated in China. But actually their historical tap root is sunk in Persia (today’s Iran), and the Himalayan foothills of the Indian subcontinent.

It’s been cultivated as a fruit for an awfully long time; they say it’s probably one of the very first fruits which we humans cultivated. And it caught on, being carried enthusiastically along the ancient trade routes. It was already being eaten in Jericho in 3,000 BC or thereabouts and in Cyprus some while later (in both cases, archaeologists found remains of the fruit in the cities’ ancient garbage dumps).

From the Middle East, it was but a hop, skip and a jump to bring the pomegranate to Greece in one direction and to Egypt in the other. This piece of fresco from a tomb painting in Egypt shows the delights of a private garden, with a pomegranate tree tucked away in one corner, no doubt a prelude of the delights which awaited Nebamun, the owner of this particular tomb, in the after-life.

Meanwhile, from their base in Lebanon, the Phoenicians carried the fruit to their overseas territories, notably Carthage. And it was from Carthage that the pomegranate arrived in Rome. Everything comes full circle in this picture, where a mosaic in the Roman style, laid down in the city of Caesarea in Rome’s near eastern province of Judaea (in what is now Israel)

depicts among other delights a pomegranate tree.

For their part, having welcomed the pomegranate into the homeland – the delights of the pomegranate are mentioned no less than three times in the Quran – the Arabs carried the pomegranate with them in their conquests of North Africa. Later on, the Muslimised Berbers of North Africa brought it to Spain. And it is in their palace of Alhambra in the city of Grenada, the last Muslim stronghold in Spain, that we find, weaved into the intricate designs on the walls, this pomegranate

To be found in the palace’s Golden chamber.

Perhaps it comes as no surprise to know that Spain is now Europe’s biggest producer of pomegranates.

Meanwhile, the pomegranate also travelled east from Persia, along the fabled Silk Road, through Central Asia and finally entered China through Xinjian. But after becoming one of the three blessed fruits of Buddhism, it also tumbled off the Himalayas and travelled into the heart of India, and probably from there it sailed, via the Maritime Silk Route, to south China and Southeast Asia. And from China it was but another hop, skip, and a jump for the pomegranate to be carried to Japan and Korea, where in truth it was appreciated more as a good candidate for bonsai-ism than for its fruit.

In passing, we should acknowledge that the pomegranate tree does have beautiful flowers

another reason that the ancients loved the tree, as evidenced by this other wall painting from Egypt

To be honest, I’m not sure I understand what all the enthusiasm is about. I mean, the juice is OK, but what I really like about a fruit is to sink my teeth into it. And all those seeds in the pomegranate

make that an unpleasant experience – bits of seeds getting stuck in my teeth, a sort of gritty munching experience, that sort of thing … I know the seeds are edible, but psychologically I’m not ready to crunch my way through a whole bunch of seeds. I’ll pick up a peach instead, thank you.

In my opinion, though, it’s precisely those seeds that made it so popular in the old days and encouraged its dissemination out of its Persian-Himalayan homeland. Not, I should clarify, because people liked to crunch their way through a pile of seeds 5,000 years ago (although maybe they did), but because those seeds were a potent symbol of fertility to those eaters. Remember one of the cardinal principles of sympathetic magic, which was potent then: if I eat something (or spread it on my skin, or wear it), I will absorb its powers. Clearly, all those seeds meant that the pomegranate was suffused with fertility. So it would be good to eat it, for instance, if I wanted to have lots of children. This old, old idea has been continued as a quaint custom played out in Greek and Armenian weddings

where at some point the bride breaks open a pomegranate and the seeds spill out (I’m sure I do not need to explain the symbolism of this). But this wish for fertility can be more generalized, and in this guise the pomegranate tree has been cast in the role of Tree of Life. Here, for instance, on this ancient Assyrian seal we see priests standing before a pomegranate as the tree of life, with the sun – another symbol of life – gently beaming down

And here we see the same symbolism woven into this carpet, made several thousand years later and several thousand kilometres away in the southern corner of the Chinese province of Xinjian.

Good ideas have staying power.

The fertility attributed to the pomegranate led to even more abstruse symbolism. Already in Egypt the pomegranate’s fertility transmuted it into a symbol of life after death: eternal fertility – which is why they liked having it represented in their tombs. Somehow, somewhere along the line, the pomegranate took on a similar symbolism for Christians, becoming a representation of Christ’s resurrection and promise of life after death. So here we have a pomegranate along with Christ in a Roman mosaic (again) from the 4^th Century AD, from, of all places, a small village in Dorset.

And here we have an incomparably more beautiful version from 1487 by Sandro Botticelli

Botticelli is telling us that both the Madonna and her child know of the suffering to come, but the pomegranate tells us that it will not have been in vain.

All of this doesn’t change the fact that pomegranates have too many seeds in them to make them a nice eat.

________________

Pomegranate presser: my picture
Pomegranate orchard: http://www.agritay.com/pomegranate2.JPG [in http://www.agritay.com/ie3.htm%5D
Pomegranate juice: http://www.simplecomfortfood.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/fresh-pommegranite-juice.jpg [in http://www.simplecomfortfood.com/2011/12/04/fresh-pomegranate-juice/%5D
Egyptian wall painting “Pond in a garden”: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/”Pond_in_a_Garden”_(fresco_from_the_Tomb_of_Nebamun).jpg [in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardens_of_ancient_Egypt%5D (fresco from the Tomb of Nebamun, Thebes, 18th Dynasty).jpg
Roman bird mosaic: http://www.mapah.co.il/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Bird-Mosaic-in-Caesarea-DSC-3039.jpg
Roman bird mosaic-pomegranate: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_V0EJcthPaew/TPtykNgTYNI/AAAAAAAAHtM/FDksj7TzZA0/s1600/DSC00340.JPG [in http://pazzapazza2.blogspot.com/2010/12/bird-mosaic.html%5D
Alhambra-detail: https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5178/5533757498_c68f320ab9_z.jpg [in https://www.flickr.com/photos/psulibscollections/5533757498/%5D (Alhambra: Cuarto Dorado, detail of stucco decoration, Date: 14th century, Alhambra: Cuarto Dorado (Golden Chamber), detail of carved stucco decoration with pomegranate motifs, 14th century, Nasrid period.)
Alhambra-cuarto dorado: http://myspanishadventures.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/IMG_4741.jpg [in http://myspanishadventures.com/the-alhambra/%5D
Bonsai pomegranate: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_nruXh-jwU5o/S_nWTS_IdSI/AAAAAAAAWB8/L1sJwhwiWVA/s1600/pomegranate5222010.jpg [in http://bonsaibeginnings.blogspot.com/2011_07_01_archive.html%5D
Pomegranate flower: http://ladyofthecakes.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/p1010002.jpg [in http://ladyofthecakes.wordpress.com/2013/06/22/pomegranates-in-the-making/%5D
Egyptian wall painting pomegranate tree in flower: http://www.vashsad.ua/downloads/image/7396/main3.jpg [in http://www.vashsad.ua/landscape-design/styles/articles/show/7396/%5D
Pomegranate seeds: http://m.cdn.blog.hu/ga/gasztrobakancslista/image/pomegranate-photos-5111.jpg [in http://gasztrobakancslista.blog.hu/2014/02/27/20_granatalma%5D
Greek wedding: http://simerini.com.cy/files/imagecache/full_image/files/node_images/6/5/5/329655/1_______________________________________.JPG [in http://www.simerini.com.cy/simerini/politismos/agenda/329655%5D
Assyrian priests with pomegranate tree: http://tabloidenoticias.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/sumerio.jpg [in http://tabloidenoticias.wordpress.com/%5D
Khotan carpet: http://www.metropolitancarpet.com/assets/images/Khotan7.jpg [in http://www.metropolitancarpet.com/html/body_pomegranate__antique_oriental_rugs.html%5D
Christian mosaic Hinton St Mary: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/Mosaic2_-_plw.jpg [in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinton_St_Mary_Mosaic%5D
Christian mosaic Hinton St Mary-detail: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/Classics/roman_provinces/britain/hintonst.marymosiac.JPG [in http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/Classics/roman_provinces/britain/image16.htm%5D
Botticelli: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-b-2sXs3aQeo/T-Yv5SWbaEI/AAAAAAAAAc4/tLnT8Advf0c/s1600/Botticelli.jpg [in http://aggiehorticulturegoestoitaly.blogspot.com/2012_06_01_archive.html%5D
Botticelli-detail: http://www.backtoclassics.com/images/pics/sandrobotticelli/sandrobotticelli_madonnaofthepomegranatedetail.jpg [in http://www.backtoclassics.com/gallery/sandrobotticelli/madonnaofthepomegranatedetail/%5D

MY SWEET LITTLE BIKE

Beijing, 21 August 2015

When I was young (“so much younger than today” as the Beatles sang so long ago), I was a fanatic of the bike. Well, at least during the summer holidays I was. I would spend them at my grandmother’s house in France, where there were always a bunch of bicycles, big and small, old and new, lying around and ready to be grabbed and ridden. My cousins spent the summer next door, so we would spend endless afternoons bicycling around the Beaujolais countryside which surrounded us – I’ve already written about this in a previous post.

When I was 10 or 11, my parents decided that it was time for me to have my own bike. They took me down to the main bicycle shop in the nearby market town. After a certain amount of negotiation, we agreed on a Peugeot bike. How I loved that bike! It was an exquisite light green colour, with a real leather saddle, four gears, silver mudguards, white-walled tyres, a little satchel hanging behind the saddle with all the equipment needed to mend a puncture, a pump hooked to the crossbar, lights that worked with a dynamo which clicked into place on the front wheel and which purred as I flew down the darkened lanes at night… As you can see, that bike has been etched deeply into my memory. I spent many a happy moment cleaning it, burnishing it, oiling it, pumping its tyres. Whenever I arrived for a holiday, after a hasty peck on my grandmother’s cheek, it was to my bike that I rushed, to give it a loving wipe and the first whirl of the holidays down the lanes.

Well, I grew up and moved on. The bike stayed mournfully propped against the garage wall, while I graduated to motorized transport – the moped first, then the car. I would give it a pat from time to time, and then nephews and nieces began to use it, then I stopped going to my grandmother’s house, then one day it was gone.

It’s not as if I betrayed my bike with another. Apart from a year or two when my wife and I were living near Lake Maggiore and did everything by bike – going to work of course, but also the shopping, the post office, the cleaning, and simply touring around – I just stopped riding bikes. It’s difficult to ride a bike in cities, you know, and then the kids came along, and then, and then … Even in China, empire of the bicycle (well, fast becoming the empire of the car), I never rode a bicycle.

Until now.

I won’t go into the details, suffice to say that by pure happenstance I’ve been given the use of a bike, and I have a place to park it safely, both at work and at home. So now every day, I ride to and from work. On this sweet little thing.

OK, it’s not a cool racing bike like this one

or this one

or even this one (whose green rather reminds me of the green of my Peugeot bicycle)

And it doesn’t give me an excuse to dress up in this unutterably cool way

Nor does it allow me to go around in this intriguing way

or this extraordinary way (apparently this bike works on water too)

But that’s OK, it allows me to reconnect with the bike. And it gives my thighs a really good work-out! My daughter will be very pleased to hear that. She’s always telling me and my wife to do more exercise.

________________________

the sweet bike: my pic
Racing bike-1: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-V3gpmEz-om0/UxP8LMHKuCI/AAAAAAAAACI/rDNuF4gP888/s1600/Imageu.jpg [in http://nurhayara.blogspot.com/%5D
Racing bike-2: http://www.conceptbook.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/bicicletta-aria-marco-mainardi.jpg [in http://www.conceptbook.org/aria-marco-mainardi/%5D
Futuristic bike-1: http://cfs16.tistory.com/image/5/tistory/2011/01/11/11/41/4d2bc34ce7c68 [in http://myblueday.tistory.com/6676%5D
Racer: http://cyclingnz.com/profiles/a497_DSC_3075.JPG [in http://cyclingnz.com/cnz5_profiles.php?n=54%5D
Racer-horizontal: http://proporzionedivina.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/day9buatois1web1.jpg [in http://proporzionedivina.wordpress.com/2011/01/%5D
Futuristic bike-2: http://images.lainformacion.com/cms/bicicleta-anfibia/2012_10_29_PHOTO-ff2bca1b09886ed6447d13ad8dbedb0b-1351511060-9.jpg?width=995&height=650&type=height&id=HejqmIQJgDeHTw3t1hrgo1&time=1351512206&project=lainformacion [in http://noticias.lainformacion.com/economia-negocios-y-finanzas/diseno-e-ingenieria/las-bicicletas-del-futuro_oe04bAJ4zY9qK4YrwN4UX1/%5D

SMOOTH ROUND GEMS

Beijing, 14 August 2014

There was a board game I used to play when I was young, I forget its name, but it had to do with pirates and their treasure. I suspect that the game was loosely based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, which the boys of my generation had all read.

“Harr, me hearties, pull strong, pull straight! Yohoho an’ a bottle o’ rum!” etc.

The purpose of the game was to capture the treasure, and like all good board games it had miniature treasure – miniature gold bars, miniature rubies, miniature diamonds, and so on. You stockpiled your treasure on islands, and you attacked each other to lay your grubby hands on everyone else’s treasure. I was fascinated by all that miniature treasure. I most lusted after the rubies. “Get in thar, lads, and grab t’ treajaye!”

This fascination of small boys like me with pirates and treasure was brilliantly tapped into by Hergé, the author of Tintin, who in two volumes caught the whole buccaneering spirit

and the subsequent hunt for buried treasure

Ah, look how that evil pirate Rackham the Red shows off his treasure to Captain Haddock!

And look how his great-great-great etc. grandson Captain Haddock’s head is sent spinning when he finally finds this treasure!

All that glinting gold! All those sparkling gems!

But I grew up, and grew more sensible, and found that I didn’t actually like sparkling gems (I still like gold, though …). I’m told that gemstones are cut and faceted to bring out their sparkle – or to use the correct language, their brilliance and their fire. Some fellow called Marcel Tolkowsky even went so far as to work out mathematically the best faceting to give gems so as to use the light’s reflection and refraction to maximize their fire and brilliance. But when I now look at my once-favourite rubies

or sapphires

or emeraldsor diamonds

I see nothing but cold, hard precision, stuff for the Rich Bitch.

This was forcefully brought home to me last Christmas when my wife and I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art during what has become our annual visit to our daughter in New York. The museum happened to be holding an exhibition of the medieval treasures from the Cathedral of Hildesheim in Germany. At that time – we are talking the 1100s – people didn’t know how to facet stones, so gems were mainly polished and rounded into cabochons. Take a look at these photos to see what I mean.

Here is a bible cover.

This is a cross.

This a reliquary.

This a liturgical fan.

The rounded shape in a gem is so much more simpatico, I feel, warmer, more approachable, so much more like us. I mean, we’re sort of round – more round than faceted. OK, it’s all a bit fanciful, but it is true that cabochons are much more like all those rounded, smooth, coloured pebbles that I’m sure we all picked up as kids on the beach and dreamily turned over and over in our hands.

I was certainly an assiduous pebble collector, a habit which I have kept up all my life. Everywhere I have gone, I have collected stones smoothed by the passage of water. I am always looking for interesting colours, striking striations, or curious shapes. Every time I find myself on a beach, my eyes will automatically drop and scour the sand or pebbles for interesting stones (or shells, or any curious flotsam thrown up by the sea). Even here in Beijing, far away from any beach, I have my collection of smooth stones, collected here and there.

So you can understand that in my sensible adulthood I have not been so interested in Rich Bitch jewelry like this

preferring “ethnic jewelry” like this.

(there is also a small matter of the price tag, but we’ll put that aside for the time being)

I insert here a photo of a wonderful necklace I bought my wife some five years ago. It’s a string of red agate stones. Very pebble-like, don’t you think? You see it here gracing her wonderful neck. I bought it in a little shop in Vienna which specializes in Asian ethnic jewelry.

In these preferences I feel a bond with my faraway ancestors. But back, back we have to go, beyond the Romans

and the Greeks

where too much gold intrudes.

Beyond even the Egyptians, where silver gets in the way

We have to go back to the Celts two Centuries before Christ.

and even further back to our prehistoric ancestors, 4,000 BC in this case

and 2,600 BC in this case

I’ve always felt myself to be a bit of a Cro-Magnon man. I think my wife sometimes agrees …

___________________

SCENT OF MY WIFE

Beijing, 3 August 2014

I’m very boring when it comes to using after-shaves, eaux de cologne, or similar perfumes. I use none. I don’t even like to use perfumed soaps. I prefer to smell of nothing. Very boring.

This dislike of perfumes extends to perfumes on others. For instance, I wince and move rapidly out of the way if I happen, on the street or in a corridor, to find myself walking into the scented wash following a heavily perfumed person. And I always stare disapprovingly at scented people if I find myself with them in elevators or other enclosed spaces from which I cannot escape.

As you can imagine, this scentophobia of mine, if I can call it that, is the despair of my wife. Whenever we are taking an international flight she always makes a bee-line for the perfumery section of the Duty Free shop, where she will try a spray of this and a squirt of that. She always asks me my opinion, and like any good husband I always take a sniff and murmur something unintelligible. She sighs and asks out loud why she bothers. Indeed, why does she bother? I suppose hope springs eternal.

But actually, once, just once, she tried a perfume, she asked me my opinion, I dutifully sniffed … and I blinked. I liked it! I actually liked it! It had a lemony-sort of scent which my nose really found quite attractive. Terribly pleased by this exciting development, my wife promptly purchased the perfume in question and has been using it ever since. Since my readers are no doubt on the edge of their seats by now, wondering what perfume it was, I am glad to announce that it was Chance Eau Fraîche, by Chanel.

I’m not sure that its use filled my wife with quite as much delirious happiness as this young lady is showing, but it did put a spring in her step and a twinkle in her eye. It also allowed me to close my eyes and go “mmm-aaah” whenever she gave herself a spray.

All was well until the perfume began to run out. A replacement became an impelling necessity. An inspection of shops in Beijing showed that prices were ridiculously high here, so I was given the task – gladly taken on, since I liked the perfume – of getting a new bottle on my upcoming trip to Europe. Which I did, in the Duty Free shop at Vienna airport. I triumphantly presented it to my wife upon my arrival. She ceremoniously opened the packaging, fished out the bottle, and gave herself a spray.

OMG, not the same! We sniffed, we conferred, we checked the packaging (I could have got the wrong product, it wouldn’t have been the first time), we compared it to the remaining dregs in the old bottle … No doubt about it, something was different. But what?

I went off in a frenzy of searching on the internet, starting with Chanel perfumes’ own website. Allow me to quote the blurb about Chance Eau Fraîche which I found there

A vibrant incarnation of the unexpected fragrance, now takes on a sparkling freshness. The unexpected floral bursts with a lightness and zest as notes of Citrus, Water Hyacinth and Jasmine Absolute are highlighted and energized with woody notes of Amber, Patchouli and Fresh Vetiver.

I must say, I thought I had reached the maximum levels of BS in descriptions of wines, which I commented on in an earlier post, but the BS written about perfumes beats them all. In any event, this description didn’t help me in figuring out what was wrong.

Another site, after breathlessly quoting the Chanel site blurb almost word for word, added this:

Top Notes: Citron, Water Hyacinth
Middle Notes: Jasmine Absolute, White Musk
Base Notes: Vetiver, Amber, Patchouli, Teak

What was this stuff about notes? A bit more research on my part taught me that there is such a thing as a fragrance pyramid, which looks like this:

This chart explains what all these notes mean (BTW, middle notes are also called heart notes, and top notes head notes), but it’s rather scholastic, the sort of thing a teacher would put on the board at school. Here’s a more colourful version of the same pyramid

Coming back to our problem with Chance Eau Fraîche, something must have happened to the top notes, because we smell the difference immediately. My wife thinks the Chanel people have cut back on the citron note. I think it’s something else – have they fiddled with the water hyacinth note? I wouldn’t be able to say because I have no idea what water hyacinth smells like. The closest I’ve come to the plant is clumps of it floating past the window on the Chao Phraya River last week in Bangkok.

In fact, I only know it as a horribly invasive species, which has more or less choked Lake Victoria in Africa to death. But it has a beautiful flower

which, it seems, was the reason it was taken away from its original homeland in South America and spread the world over.

But now that I’ve learned this stuff about notes, I shall have to sneak up on my wife some 10-15 minutes after she has applied the perfume and see if I can smell the middle notes, jasmine absolute and white musk – which are what, exactly?

Well jasmine I know, and I know that my wife loves it. But there are a bewildering number of jasmine species, several of which are used for fragrances, so completely randomly I’ve chosen a picture of the flower from jasminum multiflorum to represent the species.

As for this word “absolute”, I have learned that some flowers, jasmine being one of them, are too delicate to have their oils extracted through distillation. Instead, they are extracted with solvents or through enfleurage, a process where the petals are pressed or stirred into fats.

I think I would recognize jasmine if I smell it on my wife, but I’ve no idea what white musk would smell like. I have this idea that it would be very penetrating as a smell – “animalic”, as they put it in that second fragrance pyramid I give above. Come to think of it, I don’t even really know what musk is, or at least I didn’t until I read up for this post. Now I know a bit more. For starters, white musk is the name given to synthetic musk. For economic, and I would hope ethical, reasons, musk is no longer taken from its natural source, which is a gland of the male musk deer (I had vaguely thought it came from civet cats, don’t know why).

Nice looking creatures, although what strange fangs they have! The famous musk gland lies in a sac located between the poor animal’s genitals and its navel. Presumably, you had to kill the animal to get to this gland.

So that does the middle notes. After three-four hours, I can sneak up on my wife again and try to detect the base notes. And here again, I have to confess to much ignorance. I know what amber and teak are, although I have difficulties in understanding what essential oils could be extracted from them, but what, I asked myself, are vetiver and patchouli?

They are both plants, it turns out, which come from India or thereabouts. Vetiver is a grass, related to sorghum.

The essential oil used in perfumes comes from its roots.

The oil is described as smelling “warm and dry, and conveying earthy, woody, leather, balsamic and smoky notes”. I’m not sure how exactly that would register in my nose; I guess I will see.

As for patchouli, it is a bushy herb of the mint family with small, pale purple flowers.

If you thought like I did that the essential oil comes from the flowers, you would be wrong. It comes from a distillation of the plant’s leaves. It seems that it has a heavy and strong scent, so I guess I will recognize it when I take that surreptitious sniff at my wife’s neck.

As for amber, I quickly understood that we were not talking about real amber. Instead, the word is used to loosely describe a fragrance that is “warm, musky, rich and honey-like”, and also “somewhat oriental and earthy”. Like everything nowadays, it can be made completely synthetically. But I prefer to believe that the master perfumer who created Chance Eau Fraîche, Jacques Polge, used natural resins. In that case, the basis of the “amber” in my wife’s perfume will probably be labdanum, which comes from a species of rockrose found in the Mediterranean. The shrub has a lovely flower

but actually what is used in perfumes is the plant’s resin, which is usually extracted by boiling the leaves and twigs. To this can be added benzoin resin (obtained from the bark of several species of trees in the genus Styrax), copal (another type of tree resin), Dammara resin (from the kauri or dammar trees), vanilla, cloves and who knows what else. Labdanum’s fragrance is described as “animalic, sweet, woody, ambergris, dry musk, or leathery” and “very rich, complex and tenacious”. OK, let’s see what my nose tells me.

And teak? I guess that will be a woody smell …

Right, it’s time to go sniffing around my wife.

____________________

Chanel Chance Eau Fraiche: http://goods.tuanweihui.com/ueditor/php/upload/20131114/1384410621998.jpg [in http://www.wensm.com/zonghe/qita/9872.html%5D
Man smelling perfume: http://raindropsbasmatirice.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/1083376-clipart-man-smelling-an-aroma-royalty-free-vector-illustration.jpg [in http://raindropsbasmatirice.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/keeping-a-tradition-alive/%5D
Fragrance Pyramid: http://www.toutenparfum.com/miniguide/element/olfactive_pyramid.jpg [in http://www.toutenparfum.com/miniguide/petit_guide/smallguide.en.php%5D
Fragrance pyramid-2: http://www.lacedivory.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/FragranceFamiliesPyramid.jpg [in http://www.lacedivory.com/blog/2012/05/12/guest-post-an-introduction-to-the-different-notes-in-a-fragrance/%5D
Water hyacinth on the Chao Phraya River: my photo
Water hyacinth flower: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Pond_Water_Hyacinth_Flowers.jpg [in http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pond_Water_Hyacinth_Flowers.jpg%5D
Jasmine flower: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3b/Starr_030602-0071_Jasminum_multiflorum.jpg/800px-Starr_030602-0071_Jasminum_multiflorum.jpg [in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jasminum_species%5D
Musk deer: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9d/Moschus_moschiferus_in_Plzen_zoo_(12.02.2011).jpg/640px-Moschus_moschiferus_in_Plzen_zoo_(12.02.2011).jpg [in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musk_deer%5D
Vetiver: http://www.essentialoilspedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/vetiver1.jpg [in http://www.essentialoilspedia.com/vetiver/%5D
Vetiver roots: http://www.vetivernurseries.co.nz/uploads/images/3Months growth2.JPG [in http://www.vetivernurseries.co.nz/index.php?page=the-vetiver-system%5D
Patchouli: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HiPRjCwKAUk/UbWkXqtZyFI/AAAAAAAACPQ/IuvNYw7f8O0/s1600/patchouli+plant.jpg [in http://eleneetha.blogspot.com/2013/06/tonight-patchoulis.html%5D
Labdanum flower: http://www.biolandes.com/images/p-ciste-labdanum-espagne6grand.jpg [in http://www.biolandes.com/en-cistus-labdanum.php?lg=en%5D

PEOPLE ON THE MOVE

Bangkok, 27 July 2014

Well, I’ve received my transfer orders. I’m moving to Bangkok to take over our office there. So my wife and I have been down in Bangkok for the last week, looking for a place to stay. For the moment, we’re renting an apartment which we got through AirBnB. It gives right onto the Chao Phraya River, which runs through the middle of the city and around which the city grew. So as we have breakfast in the morning before we go out apartment-hunting we can watch the traffic on the river: the empty barges, riding high

the full barges, with water to their gunwales

the express boats crowded with commuters darting in between as they weave their way from bank to bank.

But what also catches my eye is this temple on the other side of the river

and it always reminds me of … China. Or rather, a certain corner of China, the Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture. This is way down in the south of Yunnan province, squeezed between Laos to the East and Myanmar to the West. A few years back, we spent a Dragon Boat Festival holiday in the prefecture’s main town, Jinghong, in a beautiful house which was built from elements scavenged from traditional houses that were being torn down in China’s rush to modernity.

It too gave on a river, the Mekong in this case (although the Chinese don’t call it that; it’s the Lancang River to them), and there too we could gaze down on the river while having our breakfast.

The temples in Jinghong are built in the same style as the one I see across my breakfast table, or at least the newer establishments are.

The older temples in the area are somewhat more sobre.

This very obvious echoing of the Thai style has a simple reason. The Thai people (Dai people in this part of the world, hence the name of the prefecture) originally came from southern China. Then, for reasons which may have to do with the southwards migration of the Han Chinese, a portion of them upped sticks in the first millennium AD and started wandering south through Laos and Myanmar until they settled in what is now Thailand. But they left echoes of their culture behind, reflected in the designs of the temples but also in the language – many of the signs in Jinghong are in Thai as well as in Chinese.

The local culture (Thai and non-Thai; the ethnic mix in this part of the world is quite bewildering) is threatened with submersion in the Han culture – recall that this is why the Thais probably originally started migrating southwards. Until the 1950s there were few Han Chinese in this part of Yunnan – they were afraid of the malaria, which was then endemic. But the Chinese communists vigorously promoted programmes which eradicated the malaria. They then brought in poverty-stricken migrants from other parts of China and put them to work cutting down the jungle and planting rubber trees in its place, so now the hills around Jinghong are monotonously covered with acre after acre of rubber trees. These are all clones from the same genetic line. Those who know about these things predict that sooner or later (probably sooner rather than later) a rubber tree virus from Brazil will arrive here and wipe out every single rubber tree: an environmental disaster of epic proportions.

In the meantime, the descendants of the miserably poor Chinese who were sent to Xishuangbanna to plant and tap all those rubber trees still live in miserably poor Chinese villages, scorned and resented by the local populations.

As I look at the temple across the river and reflect on all these historic movements of people, I am reminded of the current tensions in Thailand caused by more recent movements, tensions between migrants from Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, who do the dirty, poorly paying jobs which the locals no longer want to do, and the Thais, who have conveniently forgotten (if they were ever taught) that they too were once migrants.

“Plus ça change et plus c’est la même chose”, as Jean-Baptiste Karr, a French journalist and novelist, said back in 1849, and as my French grandmother was fond of quoting: the more things change, the more they stay the same. So true.

___________________

Chao Phraya river pics: mine
Yourantai-interior: http://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/01/b9/8b/a5/les-repas-dans-un-cadre.jpg [in http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g528741-d1749170-i28937125-Yourantai_B_B-Jinghong_Yunnan.html%5D
Yourantai-river view: http://www.cielyunnan.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Yourantai-24.jpg [in http://www.cielyunnan.com/hotels/hotels-xishuangbanna/xishuangbanna-yourantai-resort/%5D
Buddhist temple Jinghong: http://www.yunnanadventure.com/UploadFiles/Yunnan-Attractions/Xishuangbanna-Attractions/Mange-Buddhist-Temple-Jinghong-XishuangBanna.jpg [in http://www.yunnanadventure.com/attraction-p156-mange-buddhist-temple-jinghong-city
Temple Xishuangbanna: http://www.wildchina.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/img_8570.jpg [in http://www.wildchina.com/es/multimedia/wildchina-blog-details/yunnan-hiking-in-xishuangbanna%5D