the first and second pictures were taken in tian yi square in ningbo, china.

these look to be freshly transplanted poppies.

william

this is in a small nursery in san men

william

I got all these, William. I also checked out the album. I am struck by how immaculate everything looks. Does the countryside look the same or do you get out of the cities at all?

Thanks for taking the time to show us another part of the world.

glenda

Yeh no trash anywhere. Americans would not appreciate those old looking trees. What is the building facade with no building?

this is what the weather has looked like for the last month and a half

william

William it looks like that here too.

glenda & helen- unfortunately china as a whole is not very clean. a lot of cities are very trashy. i try only to show the good and not the bad. i think it is not tasteful to show shortcomings of places rather the opposite. i will post some pics of the streets where they cook by the sidewalks. conditions are deplorable.

the facade was being used for wedding pictures by the old church. i saw 5 weddings in less then an hr.

rilliam

Oh, William, please explain about the boy in the bubble. What is he doing in there? Is that some kind of recreational activity? like paddleboats? How did he get in? What keeps it from leaking? And did you try it?

And do you know what the large flowering bonsai was? It looks very old!

Dorothy

dorothy- if you click on the picture you will see a browse arrow on the upper right side of the picture. there should be another picture of someone inflating the bubble. it is recreational and i am too old to try. it has a tether cord so you can retrive your child, if you desire!

i have no idea of the species of the old plant. when we stopped on the way back to the main factory, no one was around, i was gonna ask.

william

"it has a tether cord so you can retrive your child"
That made me laugh William. It makes me think of the times when I had to chase my son across the pool to get him to go home. I wish I'd had a tether cord for him when he was little.
It looks like a fun activity. They would eventually run out of oxygen I think since it would have to be air tight to keep out the water.
That tree is amazing. I don't know how they manage to keep them alive and healthy for so long.

ceresone,glenda, helen, christie et al. i know y'all are farm girls but have you ever put up straw like this?????????

rilliam

Would you believe I have never put up hay in any fashion!

We moved to the country in 1976 and what hay we had was put up with neighbors equipment....the most I ever did was drive the truck for the guys to toss the bales on.

That is very interesting looking. Hope someone can chime in and tell us what it is and how they do that.

William that is the clearest, sunniest of your pictures with the most normal looking trees. Glenda if you drove the truck, you helped put up hay. I found a saying that fits me on a post by a nutty radical person. The saying is great though - The difference between adventure and adversity is attitude. My father used to put up hay and from years later it was an adventure. At the time it was adversity. My only participation was driving the truck and I am not a good truck driver. I consider myself to have helped put up hay.

I've never seen hay put up that way. Very odd.

I was "hauling" hay by the time I was in kindergarten. We used square bales then and my brother and I went ahead of my dad and rolled the bales together in twos or threes so my dad wouldn't have to do as much walking. We had to go fast to keep up. My mother drove the truck and my dad would stack the bales in the bed of the truck. I also remember switching off with my mom and driving at a very early age. I had to scoot up to the edge of the seat and look through the spot under the steering wheel and over the dash because I was too small to see OVER the steering wheel. Then when we put it in the barn, we had to move the bales closer to the edge of the bed as my dad stacked it in the barn to make it go faster. My brother and I both loaded bales onto the truck and stacked hay when we got older (in our teens). I couldn't do that now. I'm not strong enough.
It's a bit unusual now to see a field full of square bales. My dad has all of his hay put into big round bales now like most others. I think some people still prefer the smaller square bales for horses. For the non-farmers, square bales have to be moved into a barn or they would rot (and they're quite heavy). Big round bales can be left out in the field. I assume in William's photo above, the hay was put up into the tree to keep it from rotting. ???

yes- that is why it is in the tree. the farners pull what they need for their animals from the tree.

when i was a kid i worked on the naval academy dairy farm (gambrills, md )in the summer loading square bales on a trailer. right behind the square baler. fresh hay is a lot heavier then old hay.

this is where the naval academy kept their famous navy goats the west point academy always tried to kidnap before the big football game.

william- who is getting quite old!

All I've ever done is drive the truck too, first for DH as a young wife as he loaded the small bales and more recently for my Dad as he speaared the big round bales with the tractor prongs. Dad stores his hay in a barn. I can tell you that the process goes a lot faster with the tractor and flatbed trailer than with pickups and hand labor.