As usual, this is about the pictures, so click on any of the images to see them larger.
During our stay in China, we stopped in several old, actually ancient villages. Not necessarily extremely ancient by Chinese standards, but very old by mine.
NOTE: I am terrible with ancient villages, ancient temples, ancient just-about-anything. Don't get me wrong, I really love being surrounded by - and shooting - really well-worn places. And every time I know that I will be in such places, I dutifully bring a pen and notebook to record the name of the place, a bit of the history, etc. Then I get there and find that I only care about the image possibilities. Within these pictures are images from multiple locations. I do not know their names (I could find out, but I actually don't care). I know this makes me a terrible traveloguer (probably not a word). My wife knows all of the names and the details. She was not consulted in the creation of this entry.
The Chinese ancient villages we visited were very different from the "ancient" villages you might visit in the US. At a historic village in the US there are smiling people dressed in period costumes with their hands out to sell you $5 bottles of water and tricorn hats. The villages we visited are actually still villages and many of the really, really old buildings of the village are still lived in and worked in. There was surprisingly little effort made to separate me from my money. In fact,the prevailing attitude seemed to be one of wishing we had never come in the first place. While I took a couple of pictures of people, they generally made it plain that picture taking was unwelcome. Don't get me wrong, we did meet some great people throughout the trip. But some of these folks seemed tired of tourists.
Time really does seem to have stopped in many ways in the villages. The difference between the rural areas we visited and the urban areas is hard to measure. Life in the big cities is very cosmopolitan with nice cars, contemporary bicycles and many of the trappings of my modern life. In these rural tourist areas, you expect to find the occasional closet full of push brooms from Wal-Mart and Rubbermaid buckets. That is simply not the case. It is very easy to think that the way life is lived there now is pretty much the same as it has been for a very long time. The rusty bikes and carts are the way people get around and move stuff. The hand-made brooms are their brooms. That is the local barber shop.
In the villages, there are buildings open to the tourists. Many of these are beautiful, stark spaces with little ornamentation. We were travelling in very wet areas, yet several of these buildings were architected to connect the building with the outside. They contained large, interior courtyards open to the sky and very few walls. Many surfaces are of stone and frequently covered in moss as they are constantly wet.
They have cats there. Go figure.
