Lakeside flies
(A sculpture at SIP’s Jinji Lake: Suzhou, China)
Happiness and prosperity to you in the New Year, and welcome back to new posts here! I’m back and have passed the trials of dodgy broadband and an extended Christmas break to bring China back to you, finally!
This sculpture appears on almost all the literature, adverts and photographs of the SIP (Suzhou Industrial Park) area of Suzhou, where we live. From all the posters, and incidentally this image, it looks absolutely enormous. I could see it from afar when Ying and I spent an evening at the lakeside and I insisted on seeing it so I could understand why it is so prominent on all the posters slung over bridges and construction sites. Once we arrived at the foot of it, the sculpture proved itself to be far tinier than I expected. It rivals the skyscrapers for height in the posters, yet in fact is only as impressive as a two-storey house. In this photograph, however it seems more striking, especially next to the fluttering kite in the background.
By the lake, there are rental huts peddling anything from kites to little boats for the water and even bikes made for two, three, four or five people. In fact, they must rent out single person bicycles as well, though these weaken in popularity when put next to the multiple passenger models. One man was flying a kite so high that we actually lost sight of it in the sky. Ying attempted to ask about such a dangerous maneuver, but the gentleman was surprisingly uncommunicative considering his prominent position by the waters edge. Later we noticed several other passers by quizzing him, obviously equally baffled by line of twine slicing into the sky without an end of any kind.
Happy New Year!
I’m glad to see and read new stuff here.
Talk to you soon.
MAZ