All the words are pale in front of fall

We went to West Virginia last week to enjoy the beautiful fall in America. The tropical area I came from -- specifically, Guangzhou -- is a tropical city. The leaves never turn yellow. I never experience a drive rolling over red and yellow leaves. Such a romantic scene which, until recently, I had only watched in a movie.



Here I introduce you the crew of the fall adventure: Paul, the driver, director and a Chinese/Italian/Japanese/English speaker. Yiming, a very very nice girl who's like an older sister. Me, it depends on how you look at me . Rongkun, one of my best friends in school.



An overview of old town Harpers Ferry.



A hike deep into the forest



Have you ever seen a bluer sky?



Hmm...this reminds me a famous quote out of no reasons: “You cannot step twice into the same river ” by Heraclitus. Life is like a river. It's moving on all the time. Never running back. You can only live a life once. So you have to choose the way you really want to live and fight for it.



Have you ever looked at the sky in this perspective?



First step on the foliage.



All things are changed by history. It used to be an canal.



If only I could live near it.



This railway is still used to transport coal from West Virginia. I don't know why West Virginia is still so beautiful in spite of the pollution coal mining brings.



You can tell how much I enjoy the season.



Elephant cloud



Haha, this tree looks fake!



Another fake tree.



Fake tree with the church. Here is the old town Harpers Ferry. I don't know much about American history. According to Paul's introduction, it's a very import town in American civil war. It's where the war began.



The bloody road in Anteitam battle field.



Thousands of men laid dead in the corn field fighting for their homes. But you can see nothing now. The corn is nourished just like the offspring of those soldiers. The road leading to today's countries are almost all the same--paved by the dead of their people.



Hmm...this simply reminds me of Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road.











Running is what one will definitely do on a huge lawn.




The museum of the American Civil War.



Historic resemblance. Can you see the same house and canon in the picture and the real world?




Well, if I am under an apple tree 300 years ago, the this picture could be a scene of how gravity "was" found.

Teagan's birthday party

My friend Teagan invited me to her birthday party this weekend. We stay over her grandma's house. It's such a lovely old house. For the first time, I tried my hand at carving a pumpkin for Halloween and beer pong. My pumpkin was not bad. Plus, I won the beer pumps.



This is the first challenge for a nice place. We had to cross a "river".




Making the pumpkin. This is my design: a two-face pumpkin--one is a mean Chinese face (my partner's suggestion) and another is a joker.




Another side of my pumpkin.




My pumpkin partner Marcos. He's half Italian, half Japanese.




Teamwork! (From the left: Teagan, Will, Marcos, and me)




Hmm....we had to put candle in it. So dogs won't eat it.




Yee....Freak you out!



We taste awful, but we can scare dogs away!



Cheese puffs




Guess what we are doing. Painting a pumpkin? No.
Making corn bread? Bingo!




This is how the cornbread looks like when it's done.





This is how to make pumpkin seeds:

Step 1: collect pumpkin seeds.
Step 2: Greg tried show us he's satisfied with the salt on pumpkin seeds in oven.




Turtle-neck kitchen mafia! (From the left: Susan, me and Teagan)



Conclusion:
A great party in a great place




Great house



and great season!

Animals Teach Us To Be People - Zoo Aquarium Ads

These advertisement are all designed by Madrid Zoo. They are very inspiring and creative. The advertisements are all under the topic of "Animals Teach Us to be People".

Chinese has a beautiful quote matches with it: 兽犹如此，人何以堪(shou you ru ci, ren he yi kan), meaning even animal can do it, how couldn't human beings. The quote is from the old believe when foxes die out of the homes, they still head to the home direction. Even animal can miss home as such, how could human stand the homesick?

Ok. Enough for Chinese class today. Let see the ad.


Bears don't discriminate when their young are female (Well, apparently, the girl has a Asian face. Yes, we have very serious problem of gender discrimination in Asia).


When a dolphin finds a hurt dolphin, he helps it stay afloat.


Elephants never abandon the elderly.


The only difference between panthers and leopards is color.


When two clans of gorillars meet, they always avoid conflict.


A lion never uses his strength to humiliate another.

Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. Deserve it or not?

News came out that Obama won 2009 Nobel Peace Prize while suspect burst out at the same time.

Did Obama deserve Nobel Peace Prize? I am afraid I would like to say yes.

Obama had very positive and forgiving attitude about international affairs. Although he had not even warmed up his presidential chair, he has made clear his standpoint of thawing the "Second Cold War". Let's overview what he's done in foreign policy:

February, Obama claimed a "new era" of relations with Russia and Europe as "break" and "reset". And then he reached out to Arab leaders by granting his interview in Arabic cable network, Al Arabiya.

March 19, Obama released a video addressing the Iranian government, trying to invite Iran into negotiations about nuclear activities. Although, his outreach hands were ignored by Iran.

April, in his speech in Ankara, Turkey, Obama said the United States "is not and never will be at war with Islam." , which largely relieved the tension between the US and the Islamic world.

June, Obama deliver a speech in Egypt calling for a "new beginning" in relations between Islamic world and US.

July 7, in Moscow, he responded to a rumored Israeli military strike on Iran: "We have said directly to the Israelis that it is important to try and resolve this in an international setting in a way that does not create major conflict in the Middle East."

September 24, he was appointed as president of the UN Security Council.

I think the truths have told us enough about how hard he has worked to solve problems by lowering the US's high eyebrows and trying to make the Middle East more comfortable in negotiating with the US. Those two things were bogging down US-Middle East relationship.

Some people feel smart in saying that Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize because he's black, claiming it as "new racism". This doesn't make sense at all. He grew up in US, accepted the "white elite education" (he went to a private and Ivy League) and now he represents US to the rest of the world. Harvard--Lawyer--US president. This is just a classic way of becoming US president. What's it got to do with skin color? Is he trying to eliminate racism in US as Martin Luther King? Not at all. He's more like a typical US elite. On the other hand, taking "new racism" to much into consideration is also a kind racialism. Could you just forget his skin color?

The log of the seasons

I woke up in a bright sun today. (No, I am not lazy. The point is it was a sunny day.) I brought my camera to the library to take some pictures. Suddenly, I felt I should keep a log of the season's changes. I will take pictures at the place once a week at the same time this month. After this, I will take photos once a month. Still at the same time, say 11:55am at the 4th of every month.

This is beginning of this series.
Date: Oct. 4
Time: 11:55 am


My favorite view from the library




Begonia (秋海棠) blooms in the autumn. I always have a sense that their flowers must be yummy since they look like a type of fruit.



Kongfu and Panda

How to interrupt

Today we had a group discussion on designing Microfinance products. Firou, MS, Ash and I were in a group. When we started to discuss, the discussion just keep going and going. Ash is from Turkmenistan. Like most Asian people, he isn't used to interrupting people when they talk. So he kept raising up his hand, hinting that he wanted to talk. At the beginning, no one noticed it. But eventually, we all laughed out loud. I recalled the days when we couldn't join the conversation ourselves.

I remember the first time I was in US, I found that I could never be involved in any conversation, because people kept talking and talking. Since it's very impolite to interrupt people in my home country's culture, I tried to wait for them to stop. But it took forever. Finally the conversation came to an end, and everyone was happy except for me--still waiting to join the conversation.

Here's the instructions on "How to interrupt":
1. Listen carefully
2. Whenever you want to say something, start to talk by using words such as "but", "I agree, but", or just open your mouth widely to attract others' notice.
3. Never hesitate when you start talking, or you will lose the ground!

I am sure that when I go back home, I will have learn how to wait until people stop talking again. I must have become very impatient now.

Ponyo

Ponyo is Hayao Miyazaki's new movie. This movie makes my heart really warm, which is something that Miyazaki's movies often do.They will make you believe in simple and good lives.

Ponyo is taken from the story of The Little Mermaid. The difference is in The Little Mermaid, the mermaid can't tell the prince she is actually a mermaid. But in Ponyo, the lead character Sosuke knows Ponyo is a "ponyo"(gold fish) at the very beginning. The famous author of The Little Mermaid Andersen's fairytales are always sad. The girl that wears red shoes dance till death; the swan brothers still have one wing arms, and even their sister has to collect thorns from tombs. Denmark is probably just too cold to write warm stories.

I like everything about Hayao except for one thing: I don't like those big figures in his stories, like Granmammare in this story or the moving castle in Howl's Moving Castle or the ghost in Spirited Away. They all symbol the "all controlling power" of the world, which I don't believe in.

Garfield

I saw an old lady walking her cat today (YES, WALKING).
The cat looks pretty much like Garfeild.
I wanna walk my cat too!


The cat looks like this.



Comparing to Garfeild.

The stupidest thing I have ever known

Yesterday, a Chinese flag was raised on the White House's south lawn to celebrate the 60th National Day of China. Many of my friends are thrilled about this event. Hundreds of Chinese people gathered to watch the flag rising. In order to put the event together, the chairperson of Association of Fujian Fellow Townsman proposed to Congress over 80 times. Many people think that this exemplifies that the growing status of China has been recognized by the world.

But for me, this is one of the stupidest things I have ever heard of. This is simply a case that not showing respect to another country. Rising a flag in the house of another country's president means “conquer”, especially on the important area. Think about how people put their own flag in another country after having conquered it. If the Chinese want to show their rising international status, why not just raise the flag in the UN? This behavior just represents how tolerant the US government is.

Consider this: if the Americans raised their flag near Zhong Nan Hai, how would the Chinese feel? As the famous Confucius idiom says, "What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others". Chinese are suffered the invasions of other countries for 100 years. If we don't want to be humiliated, how could we try to humiliate others?



The cheapest sort of pride is national pride; for if a man is proud of his own nation, it argues that he has no qualities of his own of which he can be proud.
----Arthur Schopenhauer

Fallen Princesses

These are the pictures taken by photographer Dina Goldstein. The images are very funny, and they continue after "when prince and princesses happily live together". But from another perspective, although we all know that fairytales aren't always the most accurate reflections of real life, they often show us how good life could be -- so that we will may not give up hope.




Snowwhite needs to take care of the kids while the prince watches a football game like some other husbands.



What if the sleeping beauty never woke up?




Even the luckiest Cinderella needs alcohol to overcome her problems.




Beast can be a beauty through surgery.




Don't forget Princess Jasmine lives in the Middle East.



How can the prince climb up the tower if Rapunzel's bald?




Not so Little Riding Hood if she's in the US.