We are always the same age inside. Gertrude Stein
…but not on the outside. me
My first business partner was Sam Berland, and he had two pet peeves: people who said “Consences of opinion” because consences already includes opinion, and people who said “not to change the subject” and then changed the subject of the conversation. I used to argue with him on the use of the second peeve. And now, maybe forty years later, I think he might have been right. In my defense, when Sam and I owned bas in the 1970s, Sam liked to hold a weekly staff meeting. Like a lot of City Council meetings I’ve sat through, the staff meetings would often get bogged down by unimportant details to avoid the real problems. I would try to change the subject, not to change the subject, per se, from what seemed unimportant to me, but to what I considered actually important.
In this case, I want to change the subject away from what I think are the important issues of our time to something much less important, a trip to China 16 years ago. Issues like Ukraine is locked in a war of attrition with Russia (that Ukraine is either winning or losing, depending on where we get our information and what that particular commentator originally predicted). Issues like Trump running amok, or Trump and Epstein having sex with young children, or even whether Taylor Swift is really writing a screenplay inspired by her relationship with Travis Kelce, are all more important than an old trip to China.
Well, maybe not more important to me, but more reported on. I want to re-post on Michele and my trip to China twenty-six years ago for three reasons. When I first started this blog, I was using a platform called Typepad, which is now defunct, and I read that everything I blogged will soon be permanently deleted (shortly after I started blogging, at Michele’s prompting, I switched to WordPress as my platform, so most of this blog will stay around). When we went to China, we were twenty-six years younger, and much of that trip was to areas that would be much harder, if not impossible, for me to do today. Lastly, I process my photographs with Adobe Lightroom, which has vastly improved over the last twenty-six years, and I want to reprocess the pictures taken in China in 2009, when it was incredibly smoggy, making the photographs flat and grey.
In 2009, we flew into Hong Kong with no reservations except for a hotel reservation for the first night and tickets to fly out of Shanghai three weeks later (which, even then, was easier than it sounds because of the internet). I’m going to skip repeating Hong Kong and Shanghai because they are cities and, while very different than San Francisco or New York, or Paris, for that matter, are still very familiar with streets bordered by sidewalks and lots of buildings with stores on the ground level. The two things on our agenda were the karst formations around Guilin and the Li River and the Zhangjiajie area’s canyons, which we had read were similar to Zion National Park.
This photographic remembrance of our trip to those areas starts somewhere between Guilin and Yangshou.
