cruising the streets of nanjing

For street photography, I usually try to be as discrete as possible, but today I felt like getting some extreme closeups, so I went out with my giant white telephoto lens (Canon 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L, if you care). Good call--I was really pleased with the results. Here are some shots for you:

Dresses are a much more common part of regular women's fashion here than in the US. No special occasion required.



One of the more unfortunate aspects of Chinese fashion:



This poor kitty was on a leash outside a store, meowing like crazy:



This is a very common sight in summer here:



The balanced load, another common sight:









There are a couple Muslim restaurants on our street; this girl's family runs one of them.

a view on suntans: china vs. america

After my usual (or at least, what is becoming usual) Sunday massage, I decided to take photos on the street for a while. It was a great day for this. The sky is bluer than it has ever been on any day I've been in mainland China, and there are nice, white clouds to go with. It's hotter than Hades, but at least there's a breeze and the conditions don't look so bad.

Now, when it's sunny in China, you can bet there will be almost as many umbrellas out as there would be if there was a torrential downpour. For instance:











You see, the Chinese look at getting a tan in exactly the opposite way Americans do. Most Americans view a tan as a healthy thing. You've been relaxing, you've got a bit of color, maybe you don't even have to work. Some Americans will even pay to get a tan. Chinese people, on the other hand, see tans as a symbol of poverty and ugliness. If you have a tan, you work a crappy, manual labor job and have no pleasures in life to speak of. So, most forms of makeup have sunblock and/or whitening agents in them, and many people--including most females--will go to great lengths to ensure they get no sun. For example:









Now, remember--I said it was extremely hot. That wasn't a joke. The heat index is currently 103F, courtesy of 40% humidity (which is low--it was 80% on Friday). And that breeze I was talking about? It feels like standing in car exhaust. Therefore, people aren't exactly getting comfortable by covering themselves up like this and cruising around with their umbrellas or on scooters. But hey, as long as their skin remains a lovely pasty white, no big deal.

I love this place.

another view of the maldives: the streets of holhudhoo

The little lady and I decided to take an excursion one afternoon to Holhudhoo, an island not far from the resort paradise we called home for eight days earlier this month.

Holhudhoo is a small island of 2100 inhabitants. It's not a particularly nice place, with mostly run-down buildings and lots of mosquitoes everywhere (we have tons of bites to prove it). It was, however, interesting to see how regular people looked and lived.

As is the case in most of the islands we've visited, life in the Maldives was very, very slow. Nobody was in a hurry to do anything or get anywhere most places we went, and Holhudhoo was no exception.



Almost everyone in the Maldives is a Muslim, and by my estimation, more than 95% of the women wear the Maldivian version of the traditional head coverings.



A typical street on Holhudhoo:



There are no street numbers on buildings on Holhudhoo; every owner gives their building/home a name, like this:



The local language, Dhivehi, is Indo-European, but has a script that doesn't look like anything else I've seen, including Hindi and other Indo-European languages of the region.



The rest are random street photos taken with my beloved 135mm f/2L lens. These will give you a good feeling for what walking the streets of Holdhudhoo is like.

vacation in the maldives, part 1

Greetings from the Maldives.

The little lady and I left Nanjing on Thursday morning to fly to Male, which is the capital of the Maldives (if you're not familiar with where the Maldives is, it's an island nation to the southwest of India). We had a layover in Guangzhou, and with that factored in, the whole trip took almost 12 hours. Fortunately, we were able to get access to the first class lounges in Nanjing and Guangzhou even though we were flying coach, and that made the whole trip a lot more bearable. The trip was pretty uneventful until the last hour of the second leg, when we hit some rough turbulence that caused us to do a few rollercoaster-style ups and downs. This wasn’t a big deal as far as we were concerned, but people on the plane started screaming like we were going to crash (this has never happened to me before). Personally, I don’t think this ever would have happened if the plane had been full of Americans instead of Chinese people, but I can’t be sure.

It was hot and humid when we got off the plane, but that was to be expected. The airport was smaller than I had been expecting, but that made it easy to get out of. We were met at the gate by a representative from the hotel we stayed in that night, which was unexpected. Also unexpected was the fact that we were taken to the hotel via ferry. I had been expecting to just grab a cab and head over, but now I realize that that probably wasn’t even possible. So, after a short ferry ride, we got to our hotel. It was pretty decent, but very pricey for what it was. This has been the name of the game for the Maldives. Almost everything here is really expensive. Islands are typically like that, but this seems a bit extreme.

I woke up early the following morning and decided to catch the sunrise and wander around town a bit. Male is not much to look at, but the sunrise was pretty decent.



The Maldives is a Muslim nation, and Islam is the official religion of the state, with all other religions being banned. No wonder then that the country is also rated one of the most religiously intolerant countries in the world. Anyway, headscarves and burkas are not uncommon sights around here.



A few more random scenes from my wanderings around Male:









I went back to the hotel after an hour or two to get the little lady up, and then we wandered around town and found a place to eat breakfast. The place we found for breakfast was across from a hotel and had outdoor seating, so we sat outside and did the breakfast buffet. Our favorite items were Maldivian—curries, this tuna stuff mixed with hot peppers, etc.

More random photos from Male:





Fresh tuna, right off the boat. Tuna is in lots of Maldivian cuisine:



These next few photos are from the street market and fish market that we found near the fishing boats.











We saw a cemetery as we were walking around, so we stopped by. Non-Muslims were not permitted entry without prior permission from some council, so we just looked from the outside.



More randomness:



We were ferried back to the airport around mid-day so that we could fly to our final destination, the Hilton resort on Iru Fushi island. After we checked in, we were taken to a Hilton lounge to wait. We were given fruit juice and a quick back massage, and then we lounged on chaises until it was time to go.

This was the view from our waiting area:



That’s right, we took a seaplane to get to the Hilton. This was a new experience for us both, and while it wasn’t particularly comfortable, it was interesting. The planes are smaller than they look, and the experience is different in a few key ways—nevermind the water take-off and landings. For example:



Yeah, usually there is a cockpit door and you never see the pilot/co-pilot. Not true on Trans-Maldivian Airways. Anyway, our total flight time was about 50 minutes. We made one stop along the way to let some passengers off, and then continued on to the Hilton.

The Maldives consist of 1192 islands spread out over 26 atolls. Flying over the Maldives looks a lot like this:



Here is what our final destination looks like from the air (forgive the crappy photo—I was sitting close to the propeller):



The Hilton Iru Fushi is a resort on a private island owned entirely by the Hilton. There are 220 villas on the island, and they are about 60-70% capacity right now, which means there aren’t many people here. The island isn’t very big; you can walk around the whole thing in 20-30 minutes.

We didn’t do much the rest of the day, other than hit the Maldivian buffet that was being served that night. We both really enjoyed the buffet. Maldivian food is much like Indian food, except that it’s heavy on tuna and other fish in the curry instead of the usual chicken, lamb or whatever. We were really enjoying the evening until the bill came, and we discovered that the buffet was $85/person, not including tax. We did a bit more research on food prices that evening and found that all the restaurants in the resort are expensive, so we’re loading up on the breakfast buffet that’s included with our room and not doing much for dinner. In the two days since our horrifying Maldivian buffet experience, all I’ve eaten is breakfast, in fact.

I woke up early on Saturday morning and, naturally, hit the beach to catch the sunrise.









As you might have guessed, it’s not all blue skies here. This is the middle of the Maldivian rainy season, so there are a few short storms every day. It has rained every morning that we’ve been in the Maldives, but the storms pass quickly and then you get blue skies and clouds. It’s not perfect, but it’s totally manageable and hasn’t really put a damper on our activities.

After breakfast on Saturday, we stopped by the diving station so that we could get snorkeling gear for the little lady (she likes snorkeling a lot, I don’t like it at all). The walk to the station is one of my favorite things about the resort, for pretty obvious reasons:









The way they built the raised walkways over the water to the diving station, fishing boat dock and seaplane dock is like something straight out of a postcard. I love it.

Most of the villas on the island, excluding the ones over the water (the really expensive ones that we’re not staying in), have a private cabana. Here’s the little lady by ours:



We didn’t do much else on Saturday. We hit the gym for a while, went swimming in the ocean a couple times, walked around in the evening. Some photos from our walk:

A couple staying in a villa near ours arranged to have dinner on the beach that night. Considering the price of the buffet, I shudder when I think about what this must have cost. Pretty romantic, though:



One set of water villas at sunset:



We decided to walk by the water villas to see how the situation looked, and I have to admit, it looked very appealing, and the sound of the ocean underneath was very soothing.



I woke up early again this morning, so I headed out to catch the sunrise again. It was more overcast than the day before, but I still got some decent photos here and there:







I also went swimming for a while. The temperature is a constant 80-85F, with no big drop from day to night, so you can go swimming pretty much anytime you want and not feel uncomfortable. It only takes a minute to get from our villa to the water, which is great.

It rained again after breakfast, but that made for good lighting to take photos. The flowers are right outside our villa:





I like big, puffy clouds, and they’re fairly common here. One big difference between the ones here and the ones in MN is that in MN, usually puffy clouds are harmless and are nothing to worry about. Here, on the other hand, puffy clouds bring rain 100% of the time. So, when I see them blowing in, I know it’s time to get out of the water, run for cover or whatever. I took this photo right after a storm:



We’ve spent most of the day just lounging around in our place. We’ve got an internet connection, a Bose soundsystem with a plug for iPods/iPads, and air conditioning. There isn’t much to do here, but that’s kind of the point. Life is pretty great right now, and this is exactly the kind of break I’ve been needing.