inside the frame: big dam Chinese weekend in Jingzhou see Wall eat food!

My hosts have determined that, when not learning about big oil machine manufacturing stuff, my social life and sightseeing here in China will never end. So this weekend in Hubei Province and Jingzhou City, I learned a lot and had a great time (as you might have discerned from the Scottish-themed rodeo bar night).

what means to have big dam Chinese weekend in Jingzhou see Wall eat food?

Damn! The Chinese sure known how to build a dam! Saturday my assigned host (who signs a mean Karaoke version of Mr. Denver's "Country Road") took me to Three-

Gorge-Dam. This practical project, begun by the government in 1997 to help prevent the Yangtze from flooding and to provide power to China from Shanghai to the Western provinces, has also been turned into a tourist attraction. Ah, how I adore the practicality of mind of these people. Fantastic! And who doesn't want to see REALLY big dams and humongous machinery? It's really a sight to see.

The corner stone of the dam project.

Dam!

big dam building materials.

no need for big dam building materials to go to waste... make them into an amphitheater.

all politicians should write poetry, particularly after swimming big rivers like the Yangtze like Mao did.

fishing boat from Yangtze and new equipment

Transformers 2 is a fabulous movie when screened in Chinese! What Saturday night would be complete without dinner and a movie? One of my new friends took me with her 6-year-old daughter to see Transformers 2. Oh yes, it was dubbed and, I think, perfect that way. I hope they make the third movie in Chinese - the evil robots sound even evil-er. Strange, though, popcorn here is sweet (my dentist is going to kill me). Later we dined al fresco on a boat on the Yangtze River and a fireworks show went off in the distance.

Didn't I tell you last week that Sundays are massage days? I'm going to try to keep the theme... But aside from a great massage, which was my friend's idea, we saw some really old stuff around Jingzhou City, which is a 2,000 year old city and very important to Chinese History. We went to a Buddist Pagoda built to stop the Yangtze from flooding in the 16t century. Apparently it worked and no one knows why. And we saw the Great Wall of Jingzhou that was craftily designed to keep bad guys out. Lunch was a zesty affair at a hot pot place (if you say you like spicy food here - you better mean it - the delicious seafood dish was so spicy I thought my lips would fall off). Someone needs to open a REAL Chinese restaurant in DC because I am going to miss all this business next year.