This is the first of the never ending, but what guarantees to be, staggeringly monumental series of photos of downtown Wuxi taken from my 21st floor apartment.  You will see Wuxi in so many aspects, you will feel more inadequate than you already do and are.  Yes Sir!  21st century photos taken by a 18th century classical liberal from his 21st floor apartment.

Here is Wuxi on a foggy (smoggy?) day:

Here is the same view at night:

Notice how the light shines through the smog.

Here is Wuxi on a day where the cloud (smog) ceiling must be very high:

Millions of Toys executed.

Coup in Burma

The wife is telling me that it will be 25 days before I  can get the Internet at home.  I am trying to find a way to get it sooner, but till I have the net at home, my blogging will be less frequent.

It will be Tony's first Golden Week; he being only 36 days old today.  So I won't be doing much outside of being with him.

I see, from my 21st floor view, that the Kempenski building has a huge video screen in operation.

Thousands of dead little insects piled on the flood lamps on the school deck.

Da Shan, currently the most famous Canadian in China, will be coming to our school October 6 at 1400 if you are interested. 

Passing accident scenes is a daily occurrence when one lives in Wuxi.  The usual scenario involves a car and a bus.  One night last week, I saw one such accident aftermath and then another about half a block later.  The first accident the car driver was clearly at fault as the bus was rear-ended.  The second accident looked to be the result of the bus cutting off the car.  Two accidents so close together was a first for me.  I wonder if I had defied the odds by not having seen two so close together in the three years I have lived here.

I spent the last day and a half moving.   I have no Internet at home and my muscles are all stiff.  I will have much to show you eventually.

On the lunar calendar, today is the fifteenth day of the month number eight so today is Mid-Autumn Festival Day.

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival Day to most of you!  A rare few of you can eat shit!  Especially, that asshole driver who cut me off as I was trying to cross at a crosswalk.  I had the satisfaction, though, of letting my bag rub against the side of his car.

I will celebrate this special day by moving.  I will sleep in a new bed tonight, as will Tony who had his new crib built for him now that we are in the new apartment.

October 1, 2007 is Communist China's national day.  It marks the founding of the People's Republic.  The week of October 1 to October 7 is a holiday week for many Chinese.  Here is a  two part Youtube video series depicting what I did last year:

Part 1:

 Part 2:

Here are some ideas.

One month ago, Tony K a.k.a. Boy Tony was born.  To celebrate I took photos of him in a fabuous baby blue outfit.

I caught this pair of ladies sleeping near our school:

David Warren, in an article praising Alan Greenspan, the former Chairman of America's central bank, mentions an ancient Chinese system of bureaucratic examinations.

Helena, a former trainer at HyLite, is now a mother.  Details are sketchy to your intrepid AKIC correspondent but it seems to me that Helena gave birth to a girl.  Cora is a girl's name right?  Even in this day and age?

This is a photo of Helena not Cora. 

This is actually the first video I ever took of Tony.  He is not even an hour old yet.  He is still snug in the blanket so tightly and nicely wrapped by the nurses.

Maybe, I will do some moving this weekend.

Yesterday, I published a photo and then erroneously reported that the restaurant there that was famous and legendary for serving baozi and jaozi had shut down.  It hasn't shut down.  It is still operating besides the pile of rubble.  But the question I posed about where I will now eat my baozi and jaozi still stands.  I won't eat there till they have cleaned the area.

I have a new video on Youtube featuring you-know-who:

My wife says he is one of the poo guys: a pair of gentlemen who cause her so much grief.

And speaking of the wife.  This Youtube video of her, that I shot 5 months ago, just had its 5000th view:

Here is the apartment we are moving into:

Where is Typhoon Wipha?  It may hit Wuxi Wednesday night (tonight as I type this entry).  Here is how downtown Wuxi looked Wednesday morning.  Will it look the same tomorrow morning?

Where are we moving to?  The 21st floor apartment in the Wu Ai Road complex.  We got the apartment this morning.  Here is the view from out our front window downwards.

I caught Tony in a pensive serious thinker's pose.

He looks like a three name thinker in the manner of John Kenneth Galbraith, William F Buckley, Sir Kenneth Clark, John Stuart Mill, Sir Isaac Newton and Richard Milhous Nixon. 

Look how this street musician wired up a car or truck battery to power her amplifier.  Amazing.

The case beside her feet contains a saxophone.

And finally.  Where will I buy my baozi and jaozi now that this famous restaurant, Xi Sheng Yuan, on the corner of Zhongshan and Xueqian Road has been torn down?

From the Shanghaiist:

China's commercial center of Shanghai was evacuating 200,000 people on Tuesday ahead of the expected arrival of Typhoon Wipha, potentially the most destructive storm to hit the city in a decade, local media reported.

Whipping up waves up to 36 feet high, Wipha was moving northwest across the sea north of Taiwan and was forecast to make landfall south of Shanghai early Wednesday, weather reports said.

"The typhoon is very likely to develop into the worst one in recent years. We are still observing it. It's hard to say at this moment," said a man who answered the phone at the city's meteorological bureau. As is common with Chinese officials, the man identified himself only by his surname, Fu.

This won't hit Wuxi as hard.  But, I can recall Wuxi getting the tail end of a typhoon two years ago.  The wind was something else.  Umbrellas, destroyed by the wind and then abandoned, were flying around like pieces of paper.  I have been told schools in Wuxi will be closed tomorrow.

Typhoon coming the experts say,

So there will be few students coming today.

But the ones who are, are real hardcore.

Scratch again everything I said in the last entry.  My wife phoned me with bad news.  The landlord signed a lease without someone else.  We made an appointment to make the contract at 1500.  But someone made an appointment for 1300.  We are just shit out of luck. 

So we will have to sign a contract for the apartment on the 21st floor, if that is available.

The apartment owners use several agencies to find renters so they can have many lookers.  That is what happened to us.

Fucking asshole motherfucking shit burger.  I am so fucking livid.  This whole apartment search has become total worse case scenario: last minute scrambling to get a less than suitable place; and it is going to rain cunts and assholes on moving day.

All I said before about moving to another apartment is not true after all. This morning, my wife went to look at another apartment and we have decided that we will move to that apartment instead of the one from which I took photos of downtown Wuxi.

This apartment is in the same complex (Wu Ai Jia Ren) as the one I said we were going to get . The apartment we will move into now is on the third floor and has more space at the same price. So we will have an easier time setting up Tony's crib. However, it does not have a desk and it is close to the river. Luckily, I have a table I could put the computer on but it is not as good as having a desk. Being close to the river and on the third floor means mosquitoes. We may have to buy a net for Tony to sleep under.

I will have mild regrets about not having a magnificent 21st floor view. But this apartment seems to be a better place for living. The best of views can become boring after a while.

It is raining today which is a bitch. I hope it don't rain tomorrow. I want to get some moving done.

This new apartment will mean I will be walking to work more often. To get to it from school is actually easy. Go on Zhongshan Road in the direction of Renmin Road, turn left on Houxixi. Go to the end of Houxixi and cross a pedestrian bridge and you are at the complex.

They are building a new Ramada Hotel in the Hui Shan district of Wuxi.  Here are some photos of it:

Above, the Ramada is the tall building in the background.

Above, you can see the entrance.

The photo below shows the progress being made, as of yesterday, at our apartment building:

Somewhere on the right on the third floor is our apartment.  The Ramada is not too far from here.

And of course, how could I not do a blog entry without a photo of Tony?