Weekly photo challenge: Foreign

Is it becoming harder to find the completely foreign? Shanghai Yu-yuan district

Yellow arch of MacDonalds is a frequent sight

Or – a little further north near People’s Square,

I have been told there are about 300 Starbucks in Shanghai

When I was in Shanghai Botanic Gardens with my grandsons, it just felt like “being with the boys”. Now, when I look at photos and wonder what they were thinking in each of these, it seems to me that ‘foreign’ can be anywhere unknown, in  the thoughts of another?

Ali, in the bamboo grove

and, in another part of the Botanic Gardens, some weeks later

Louis, watching the fisherman fish?

This theme made me think about what “foreign” means to me, especially as my computer is full of photos from four continents. [I'll have to try getting to the others but not making any plans.] Foreign is simply any part of a culture which is not like the place I grew up in. So Macdonalds and Starbucks are foreign, in that definition. I am comfortable in many different cultures, and uncomfortable in others, some things seem familiar, some foreign, but no way are these the same sets, they do not match.

 

Weekly Photo Challenge: Solitary

Weekly Photo Challenge: Solitary

I am just lucky I suppose. Being given solitary experience is a huge opportunity. There is so much to discover and then share. OK OK this is a photo challenge: Here goes

Recreation Grounds, Huangpu, Guangzhou, China, January 2011.

So, who is solitary?

The woman in silhouette?

The runner in white sweatshirt?

Not all those tower blocks with hundreds thousands millions of people?

None of them

the solitary is me behind the camera

this picture of the recreation grounds in the Huangpu district of Guangzhou was a shortcut from where my chinese in-laws lived to the nearest Starbucks, for my coffee. I took photos.

You would not believe, but I really had not taken it in,

the recreation ground belonged to the local Chinese Army Barracks

White western woman taking photos…maybe I shouldn’t be publishing here…

On my next attempt to walk through the rec, I was banned. Very polite, very young, very unshakeable chinese guards told me I could not enter.

No different from anywhere. Probably nicer than most places. I had to walk all the way round (about 3 miles of street) if I wanted that coffee.

The solitary different person does not take photos of army territory, even of innocuous running track.

I may not have been the only western person in HuangPu, though until my son arrived I might have been, Guangzhou is a huge city with many westerners, but this is not one of the areas where they usually live. I do think I was probably the only western white-haired elderly woman in the whole of the area. What on earth did I think I was doing?

 ’Solitary’ seems personal, it says “I am the only one, I’m by myself”.

An opportunity…

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Coffee…

Coffee … its a few years since I stopped drinking coffee after about 3/4pm on the grounds [haha] that it kept me awake, and I can’t do decaff – after all if I am going to drink it, I might as well get the caffeine too. But I just did not make the connection with coffee addiction, after all, its only coffee and of course I could do without it completely if I had to. Then I began visiting China where as everyone knows, they drink tea.
That first visit was 2004 and I thought I would just do without as coffee was not then easy to get, and so I discovered my ‘need’ for the stuff. Last week sitting in a Costa in Xintiandi, Shanghai, and a bit aware that I haven’t been writing any decent poetry lately, I passed the time with a trip down memory lane. Still not writing decent poetry!

Coffee in China
Now a blend
from all the world
translated according to local taste.

Way west in Guizhou
unobtainable
unless one counts
the supermarket offering instant

Expensive Nescafe
Individually
pre-packetted, ready,
already with unwanted sugar

Nescafe taste
revived memories
long-ago Belfast bedsits
first real coffee in the Wimpybar

Lonely in Guangzhou
bustling modern
shops and concrete
Wonderful saviour Mopark Starbucks

Guangzhou also
has a coffee house
customers falling over
sofas low in a dark reek of smoke

I found it near
Lotus at Chebei
Dark Italian in a tiny cup
Imagined Berlusconi transactions behind me

Twenty Eleven
Guangzhou, Shanghai
Starbucks, MacCafe,
local Coffee 80 and cool quiet UBC

And Costa
“Italian style
full of flavour and aroma
now highly acclaimed worldwide”

Quite so.
Advertised promise
kept everywhere.
I miss my coffee finding adventures.

and I am still addicted but do enjoy the wandering about ending up somewhere with good coffee and now, often, wifi. I feel like an authority on Edinburgh, Belfast, Palmerston North NZ and New York, Rhode Island, Boston in USA. The winner has to be New Zealand where a really good tasting mug is standard fare, with USA a long way second. And the reason I like Starbucks is that at least I know what I am going to get, but I have just switched that allegiance to Costa.