Category: freight

(Friday, March 18th, 2016)

I have a few scattered photos from the bridge, specifically of bridge instrumentation rather than just sights from the bridge. I will try to collect them in one place.

I am allowed on the bridge except when we are in port, and when we have a pilot on board. So, especially when we are going a long way, I go up to check on things and chat with whoever is up there, so I’ve learned a bit.

We have three radars, depth indicators, a charting system, a helm (power and steering), wind and current indicators (both speed and direction for each), and all sorts of communication gear. That’s all arrayed in a console that also has a small helm wheel and a traditional sized throttle control – a knob on a big chrome stick. I am sure that “throttle” is the wrong word.

In addition there are panels with warning indicators, switches for various things, and some emergency buttons.

Behind the console is an office area with racks of manuals and regulations and charts. When the captain of the Rickmers Shanghai found that they were diverted to West Africa, he and the 2nd Mate had some of those books spread out on a table in the office for a while.

In another nook, next to the office, are a couple of computers, and a couple of printers. Just outside the office, in sturdy metal cages, are several server computers. One of the cages has rope all around it, lashing it to the floor. It is obviously the “secure server”, eh?

The office and the computer nook are behind and close to the main console. Also behind and off to the side, near the stairs, is a small kitchen area. There’s a cupboard, a sink, a coffee maker, a small fridge, and a microwave. There’s also a toilet.

There is a lot of room to walk around on the bridge. It feels open and serene.

There are several pairs of binoculars strategically placed on the console and along the windows. I bring my own, tee hee.

There is a “Morse Code Flashlight” (it probably has a better name), in a rack, being charged, in one corner of the bridge. Could be how to communicate if other methods are thwarted. I remember knowing Morse Code once upon a time. I think for about 30 minutes. Must have been for a test. All of us have part of our brains dedicated to “pass through”, eh? Quadratic formula, anybody? Ha.

The bridge itself is not as wide as the ship, but there are doors to decks, at the same level, that extend to the ship’s edges. Often I’ve seen the Captain or a Mate on those decks, especially when we are docking, bunkering, or dealing with a pilot off the side of the ship. The windows (windshields? we do have a steering wheel, after all) all have sunscreens and wipers and washers available, and all are heated if necessary. You can see more than 180 degrees from the bridge, and can see 360 degrees if you step out onto those side decks. It is quiet on the bridge. We are well above the engine and the water here.

There are handholds all over the place, which is good because there are many things on the bridge for a passenger not to grab. Even though I’ve now been sailing for more than a month, I am not even close to any of the seamen in the ability to casually take on the roll and pitch of the ship when it is choppy, so I appreciate those handholds. I’m not falling down or anything like that, but it has not as yet become “natural”. On the bridge, I have to be careful about not accidentally grabbing the helm when we get surprised by a swell. Oops! They watch me.

Generally, the ship is not constantly actively sailed – that is, there’s not somebody standing with his hand on the helm all the time. But there is somebody always in the vicinity of the console. This morning we are out in the Pacific, away from land, and our 12-mile radar shows nothing, so the helmsman is standing back by the office, looking at the chop, and just keeping an eye on things. The Captain is on one of the computers.

There are two seats facing the control center, and each seat looks at a radar screen. There are three operating radars. There are two radars above the bridge and one on a small tower in the bow. Normally, at sea, the radars are set at either 6NM or 12NM (Nautical Miles) range. With a button push an operator can double or halve the range. A couple of days ago, on a choppy day, we set a radar at either 3 or 1.5NM and the whole screen lit up with hits, as we were detecting wave crests. Ha. Fun but not useful. Overlaid on the radar is our bearing, with a long line, and the bearing of the wind and the current, with shorter lines. The lines used to represent wind and current use their length to indicate, roughly, their magnitude. So you get a lot of information at a glance.

In addition to the radar scan, on the top and side of the radar screen are shown many other items. One example is drift, the difference between the bearing we’ve set with the rudder, and our actual movement, affected by wind and current. Also, in summary (the information is in other places as well) is engine rpm, our speed (which is usually a little different than expected due to drift), the rudder setting (degrees port or starboard from zero), and some information about communication that I don’t understand. The operator can change what shows along the sides. Trackballs and keyboards, secured to the console. No mice – they slide around too much. None of the screens on the console are touch screens.

The radars show dense weather and of course other ships. Connected to the radar is some sort of ship identification system. I assume there is a type of transponder, like for airplanes, but I am not sure. An operator can click on a ship shown on radar and get some additional information about it, so somehow that information is getting to the system supporting the radar screen.

On the charting system, right now, no land is shown. We see our position and bearing, and we see topo lines and numbers indicating depth. When we are near land the towns and cities are identified. We were close to Japan recently so I got a little lesson about the towns on Japan’s southeastern shores.

Our depth indicator shows, in big red letters right in front of the helm, the depth under the keel. I think that’s very important for some channel approaches. The depth indicator is not operating right now, as we have miles beneath us – we are near the Japan Trench, a pretty deep section. The chart says 6000 meters down. That’s a ways, eh?

In good weather I prefer being outside on the pilot deck, but often I enjoy the bridge. We have a long voyage across the Pacific and I intend to keep track of it a little bit. You’ll see that on the post called “Tracking Across the Pacific”. I started from just outside Shanghai and I’ll keep it up until we find ourselves anchored near Panama.

(Saturday, March 12th, 2016)

Today I spent a lot of time on the pilot deck watching some interesting loading operations. I probably caught a cold – it was cold and windy – but it was worth it. At dinner Captain said he saw me taking photos of his men working. I told him that it was extremely interesting. We talked (well, I listened and asked questions) ’till well after dinner. I remembered some tidbits that I hope are interesting to others – they were to me.

Heavy

Our ship is special because we are a heavy-lift cargo ship. The floor (that is not the correct term) in each of our holds is much thicker than usual. Our 2 middle cranes can lift 320 tons each, and our puny little end cranes can lift 100 tons. Our larger middle cranes have 2 hooks each – one of them is the 320 ton hook, and the other is a 65 ton hook (something like that), perhaps suitable for much of the common work. The maximum weight a crane can lift is relative to vertical – when a crane needs to span, its capacity goes down. Our cranes won’t attempt an overweight lift. They give an overload signal.

By the way, those cranes that you see dockside might look massive but in general can only handle 100-125 tons. Containers are limited by law to 40 tons gross weight, so many dockside cranes get by with 100 ton capacity or less. We are carrying a few containers on this voyage, but they aren’t the interesting cargo.

The Captain told a story in which some containers being loaded onto a container ship were mis-advertised as to weight – they were heavier than they should have been. He said that, at sea, it caused the container ship to tip over. I have a feeling that the story is more complicated than that, but it did make me think that the weight of everything being shipped is not exact – it is an estimate, and there’s a sense of “trust, but verify for the really important stuff”.

Our supercargo people (those directing loading), our officers, and our able-bodied seamen are all trained with heavy loads. Under 100 tons? Not heavy.

So, our ship might not look so different from some others, but it is built differently, and some loads demand a ship like ours. Even in an economy downturn that has lowered overall shipping, there are still jobs for these vessels.

Our captain is really into the heavy lifting. He likes taking on the challenges of loading really heavy cargo. The largest he lifted was 720 tons (not with this ship). A surprise for me: You can’t lift that from the dock as it is too heavy, breaks the dock. Oh my. You have to lift from a barge. So the barge and the ship can take the shocks because they are dampened by the fact that they are floating (pun intended). Then, you have to watch because as you lift, your object is still connected, still touching, as you unweight the barge, and the barge will move. Plus you are using two cranes in unison. Those are the lifts that get planned in advance.

Overlight is also tough. Some items are harder to lift because they require two cranes due to their size but are light and so move differently than expected, and the cranes are built to handle heavier weight. Some crane structures are that way (when we ship a long crane built of triangulated tubular steel), and the large wind generator blades are that way.

Included on our ship today: Many pieces of what looks to me like process control equipment, complete subsections enclosed in cages for the journey. 2 boats, catamarans. 4 mobile cranes – you know, those trucks with huge tires, and the tiny little driver’s cockpit, and a pretty hefty crane above. 4 of them. The 4 crane trucks were put in the middle, deep, and are already covered over with a mid-deck. That’s one of those eye-openers as to how big the ship is – it swallows some stuff that you already thought was big.

Thinking about weight… Today, taking some pictures was tricky because there was a lot of wind, maybe 30 knots, blowing me around a bit, making a steady camera difficult. I asked Captain if wind like that was a problem for the lifts. His answer: “No.” Ha.

Loading

The basic rules of loading should be easy, eh?

Rule #1: Whatever has to come off first, should go in last.
Too bad! Often, almost usual, is that the source location and the target location aren’t aligned so well.

Rule #2: Move the least amount of stuff the least amount of times.
Great idea. But. Quite often you have to wait on transport for just that item you wanted to put in one spot. And you have other transport, with their items, on time, waiting on you. You have to be flexible.

Rule #0: Safety tip: The ship must be balanced or it will rip itself apart when we start to sail.
Aha! Rule #0, above all others. Shoulda’ put it first.

Balancing

Even that is not so simple. Think of the ship as a 200 meter long half-tube. It is flexible, given its length and the amount of weight we put in it. There are at least these balance factors that must be considered:

— Moment
This is what the Captain called it, I might have used a different term but it’s fine. If you put too much weight in the middle of the ship, the long tube will bend like a sleeping parenthesis that can hold water. If you put too much weight in the ends of the ship, the long tube will bend like a parenthesis on its side that thinks it is a bridge over a stream. Either one will cause excessive flex when facing the dynamics of being at sea.

— Torsion
Let’s say you put half of the weight port-side forward (left front), and the other half of the weight starboard-side aft (right rear). You have set up the long tube to twist when at sea. Not a good idea.

— Shear
This one surprised me. The Captain said that the walls between holds are very strong but they can’t do everything. Let’s imagine that in one hold you put a lot of weight. In the hold just behind it you put nothing. Maybe you are saving that hold for the next port, who knows. Tons and tons of gravity are working to move the floor (sorry, I will find the right term sometime) of the heavy hold downward, and carry the connected wall with it. Tons and tons of buoyancy are working to move the floor of the empty hold upward. That poor adjoining wall is stressed. The thick floor helps but can’t do everything.

Given all that, it is a wonder they get started loading at all! Anyway, I was very happy to learn about it. There are some computer simulations and assists that they use, but so often other factors move them away from the “ideal” assumptions with which the simulations start. The mathematician in me wonders if there’s a solvable optimization problem in there, but I decided not to bring that up to Captain just yet. I plan on taking a peek at the simulation some time, but I need to find the right mark, um, er, helper, to get it in front of me.

Deck Arrangement

I think I’ve written about this before, but now I have the terms closer to correct, and I have some sizings.

They don’t use the term “floor” or “shelf”. Pontoons (I will caption some photos) are put into place to form mid-decks. There. We have the terms correct. But the bottom of the hold is not a deck and not a floor. I don’t know that one yet.

The pontoons are 3 meters by 10 meters, and each pontoon weighs about 8 tons by itself. When placed to form a mid-deck, the pontoon can support 40 tons per square meter.

Ballast

To help smooth out the balance, there are at least a couple types of ballast.

Usually there are pontoons left over. Planners tune the balance by arranging the pontoons as ballast, putting them where their weight will do the most good. Once the pontoons are put in place, though, that’s it for the voyage – just like the cargo.

In addition, there are 32 water tanks that are used for ballast. Sea water is pumped into and out of these tanks to change weighting. This can be done while underway.

And even that arrangement, complicated as it sounds, has additional factors to consider. All sea water is not created equal. Some places, US for example, require that the sea water in our ballast tanks must have come either from seas close to the US, or from mid-ocean areas that are at least 400 meters deep. I guess that they don’t want the chance that US waters might become contaminated with organisms that we might have picked up in shallow foreign waters. So, along the way, we must keep track of what we need to do with the ballast tanks in order to comply.

Crane Drivers

That’s what he called them, I think it is appropriate. We had a conversation about crane driver ability. This is my take: Like for programmers (I didn’t tell him that), there’s a huge difference between an excellent crane driver (give him a 10), a crane driver you can trust for the ordinary work but not so much for the special stuff (give him a 2), and the crane driver that seems to make ordinary stuff take longer than necessary, and who can’t help but damage things every so often (give him a -1). An excellent crane driver is also involved in the discussions about the tough lifts. That conversation we had could so have been about programmers. I wonder if there are more professions like that. I bet there are.

The dockside drivers are union, and go through certification. The supercargo people and our agents at each port know them, and know when we’ve got good ones. I did not understand from the Captain if we could request a specific crane driver to support us. I don’t think I asked the question correctly.

We have crane drivers on the ship. A seaman cannot move from O (I think “ordinary”?) to AB (“able bodied”) until they show proficiency in two major areas: driving the ship (helm work, able to take a shift) and driving cranes. Captain said that we have some good crane drivers on board. Almost always, because our on board cranes can lift more weight than the dockside cranes, the special lifting involves our on board cranes, so we get to use our crane drivers.

The Captain said that it is not just special heavy lifting that brings out differences. Often they need to “make a new mid-deck”, which involves moving several pontoons from either their storage location on board or from dockside where they’ve been moved. A routine task, even though there are many steps. Nothing tough. But an inexperienced or inept driver can take up too much time. Like changing a half hour job into a two and a half hour job.

Container vessels, no cranes on board, are so standardized that they align carefully at the dock, and the cranes are “gantry cranes”, with the hooks hanging from wires from a straight runner. All orderly. Boring to Captain.

A Little More on Bunkering

We bunkered yesterday while docked. Tanker on the other side. Multitasking! No smoking anywhere!

We carry 2600 tons of fuel oil and 400 tons of diesel. Diesel is cleaner burning. We use diesel inside of environmental zones, i.e. in ports in US and Europe, and, next trips to China next year, China. At 30-35 tons a day, we have 85-100 days of travel in us right now. I think that we are bunkering next in Houston.

(March 21st, 2016, but I’ll post this first, when I get to some good internet)

While at sea I used some spare time to fiddle with folders & etc.

Results:

1) The link to Raw Photos should still work, but I’ve split it up so that I can show some more refined (if that is the correct characterization) photo folders. The main level holds a file with a key to it all.

2) I also cleaned up some of my personal files on my PC. This is not that important, except… When I first connect Dropbox, Dropbox will be very busy catching up with all the changes, so it might take a while to get sync’d. Pictures I want to see uploaded to Raw Photos might not upload right away. Patience is the key for thee and me.

(Friday, March 4th, 2016)

Tomorrow morning I will get back on a ship, yay!

We are headed for Shanghai. I doubt that I will get off the ship there. I’ll not be posting until I get to another good internet place, which probably means Houston. If that’s the case, I’ll not only be able to post, but my Dropbox will update and a bunch of photos will become available to see online.

The short-term schedule for the Rickmers Antwerp:

— here in Xingang until March 6th
— in Shanghai from March 8th until March 10th
— in Houston (after crossing the Pacific and through the Panama Canal) April 8th until April 13th

After this post, there will likely be a month-long gap. I hope I have some posts ready to go by then.

I have been taking photos of vehicles that catch my eye throughout Asia. I’m including a few below. I doubt that they are practical where we live, but that could be just a lack of imagination on our part.

(Thursday, March 3rd, 2016)

Admin: I uploaded the photos in this post before realizing that I had not captioned them. Rats. It takes about 2 hours to upload, and I decided not to redo. I hope the photos are mostly self-explanatory.

—–

On Tuesday I took a day trip to Beijing, mostly to revisit places I enjoyed before, and also to ride a bullet train.

Everybody knows Beijing, so I won’t write much for an introduction. Beijing is one of the largest and most important cities in the world, with a long history.

This week a general assembly of the Chinese government is taking place, so the area just west of Tienanmen Square was busy, and had some extra security as I walked past. From what I could understand, there are about 3000 representatives. China is a big and populous place!

Beijing is polluted. Worse than Tanggu or Tianjin. The weather had changed significantly overnight in this north China area, becoming unseasonably warm, which was fine by me. I am not sure if the warm weather was contributory, but I certainly felt the pollution. I have been nowhere in the US that feels like that, even industrial cities like Gary, Indiana. Many of my photographs show it. It was not a “misty day”. That’s not fog. Okay, enough of that, it isn’t where I want to focus.

The bullet train was really fine. One of the best parts of it is that I didn’t get the sense that people thought it was overly special. It is more expensive than the regular trains, but it is not expensive, even in Chinese terms. And there is not one “bullet train”, there are many bullet trains in constant use, going all over the place.

One thing, though. Unlike some trains, you can’t just count on “standing room” and just show up. It is all reserved seating, and tickets must be accompanied by ID, not just for us foreigners but for everybody. On Monday I showed up an hour early for the first of two morning trains from Tanggu to Beijing and was shut out. I didn’t feel too bad, there were many locals who were surprised as well. So on Tuesday, with tickets bought Monday, I was ready.

When I first saw the train approaching it was smaller than I imagined it would be, much lower to the ground. I need to go find my photos of European fast trains I’ve taken to see if there really is a difference. Inside, kind of like an airplane but with lots more room. Kind of like an airplane interior that movie studios use, tee hee.

Smooth, electric, quiet, and we were moving before I realized, slowly leaving Tanggu and then all of a sudden things are going by a lot more quickly than usual and when we came near a highway I saw that we were more than doubling the speed of the fastest cars on the freeway. There’s a display at the front of each car, and our car was traveling 287kph, just a shade under 180 miles per hour. The only feeling of speed is if you look out the window.

So we were in Beijing quickly. You could easily commute Tanggu – Beijing, 100+ miles, without much stress. There was wifi on board, places to plug in your chargers, and trays like on an airplane, but, again, with much more room.

I decided to spend the day walking, as the train station was close enough to my goals (Tienanmen, Forbidden City, some hutongs). I ended up with tired legs and knees at the end, but saw most of what I wanted to see. I also thought that the walk from the train station to the center of town would give me an opportunity to see some of “regular” Beijing, and I think I saw some of that.

The train station is close enough in that you are inside all the freeway rings around Beijing, which makes walking okay. I followed some main streets until I felt confident that I was near to my destination to take more chances on side streets, much quieter and more interesting.

I came upon a hutong that was being demolished in favor of a new set of luxury apartments. I was surprised that they would do that, but I guess all hutongs are not automatically historical, and not protected. This particular hutong was not in the “main hutong area”, so maybe that was a factor. Hutongs are neighborhoods with semi-connected buildings, extremely narrow accesses (bicycles being walked, no cars), and many ancient buildings. I think that “hutong” is a word that describes both the narrow “street” (really alley) and the neighborhood.

I also walked into an older market area, some shops for locals, and some obvious shops (and pitchmen) for us tourists. I was the only foreigner around, so I was often being pitched by two vendors at once. Choices! I disappointed most of them. I feel sorry for one guy in particular. He had a bag shop. I love bags – I could see myself as a bag shop owner. But I have enough bags. So I dawdled, looking, and he saw “big sale” in his dreams. I almost bought something just because.

I finally found my way back on track towards Tienanmen Square, past some government offices and some fancy hotels.

The way that I approached Tienanmen Square was from the southwest, using an underground walkway to get across a busy street. In the underground part was a security check as good as TSA. Looked at my passport. I guess they are careful about visitors to the square.

I really like Tienanmen. It is a huge area. I know about some of the history of course, and it is easy to imagine a million people in this area. The haze contributed to an even greater sense of vastness. I didn’t go there to look at Mao or to visit any particular building – only to stand in the middle of it and imagine how it must have been for several past events. It feels like an important place. Guards were out and about, sometimes marching, sometimes standing, making their presence known. They all looked young to me – maybe that particular duty is for junior members. They all certainly looked serious, and were armed.

I think I stood out as the odd foreigner. Four or five times folks asked to take a selfie with me, or have someone take our picture. Quite fun. They were very friendly, made me feel welcome.

I went across the street to the Forbidden City. The second time through, 12 years later, wasn’t quite as exciting as the first. Some of the superlatives are lost on me, but it is still interesting that entire buildings were reserved for the purpose of, in one direction, progressively vetting visitors before allowing them an audience with the emperor, and, in the other direction, preparing the emperor to receive visitors. Or something like that. Each next inner circle was defensible. “Inner circle”, nowadays, is a political or organizational term, but back then was a physical reality. I was impressed by the size of the place, the number of rooms, the ornateness, and the overall sense of a grand plan. I could imagine people bustling about, going about the day-to-day empire business.

I did see some extras that we skipped 12 years ago. We were 4 then, it was hot, and we didn’t need to see it all. One of the extras was an exhibition of old clocks. Seems the emperors in the 18th century had a thing for clocks. There were some pretty cool clocks in there, some as big as a room. You know a clock is substantial when it has, in the back, its own stairway to the upper sections.

After the Forbidden City, it was fun to walk through a few little hutongs nearby. The juxtaposition is radical. And, literally, these hutongs were “outside the wall” of the Forbidden City, with a moat and a 30 or 40 foot wall in the way.

Out of legs, I took a cab ride back to the railway station. One of those “did we just go all the way around the city to get straight over here?” kind of cab rides, but oh well. And whiz whiz back to Tanggu inside the bullet, this time in the dark, so even less sensation of speed.

(Thursday, March 3rd, 2016)

A few days ago I visited Tianjin. I thought it would be a 10 or 15 minute cab ride, since I thought I was already in Tianjin, but I was wrong. Tianjin was about 20 or 25 miles from Tanggu, maybe 45 minute cab ride. Next time I will take the train.

I had no real notion of what I wanted to see. Looking at a map of Tianjin I could see that there was a riverfront walk, so I made that my goal.

Tianjin is a large city, at least 5 million or so. It is also a municipality of about 13 million overall.

In the cab from Tanggu to Tianjin I saw many places at which there were clusters of tall apartment buildings. It didn’t seem that they were connected to a town, but rather that a developer decided to fully build on a spot of land. I assume that the communities are somewhat self-contained, with maybe some shops and services. I also assume that they are connected via public transport to jobs in Tanggu and Tianjin. I didn’t see the amount of cars that I would have expected if this many apartments were in the US (with the possible exceptions of San Francisco and New York City apartment buildings).

I saw hundreds of cranes working on new developments. “Hundreds” might be a significant understatement.

Also from the cab I saw many areas of new tree growth. It looked organized, in rows, like huge tree farms. I didn’t see any forests – any natural or old growth.

I got let off in downtown Tianjin, and started walking towards the river. It was cold out. Beanie, hood, gloves, all that. And it was polluted. At least to me, who wasn’t used to it, there was a definite taste to the air, not a good one. There were more people with masks on than the few I noticed in Tanggu. The cold brought out scarves that were worn across the face.

The Tianjin riverfront was very nice. The river winds through town, and is calm. There are many bridges crossing the river. There are old bridges with ornate statuary and gold trim, a couple of industrial-practical bridges, and a few modern design bridges at all sorts of angles. The map I had was all in Chinese, but it was useful that each bridge on the map had a small drawing of the bridge, so I could tell by bridge style where I was on the river walk. I walked farther than I thought I would because I would decide, at each bridge, to walk “just up to the next interesting bridge”. Ha! The bridges won – eventually I had to turn around, without having run out of bridges.

All along the riverfront there were various small parks. Some had sculpture, some had organized “groves” of trees, some had long lines of places to sit. There were wider areas at which I imagine, in warmer times, there are probably street vendors. And there was a very large plaza in front of the Tianjin main railway station.

Set just a little back from the riverfront were some fancy hotels, looking very executive. And a little further back from the hotels were some taller buildings, but not competing with those in Shanghai or Singapore. Tianjin is a financial and shipping center. There were two tall buildings with “COSCO” on the side. One of them had a mini Eiffel Tower on top! That name is on the side of many container ships we used to see in San Francisco waters. “COSCO” that is, not “Eiffel”.

One older hotel right on the riverfront, I think a luxury hotel, had snow on its front lawn! Fun! It was obviously imported, although the temperatures certainly did not threaten any melting. It looked set up for either sledding or the most beginner type of ski or snowboard fun. It was ready for nighttime activity, with a bar nearby, and temporary lights. Nobody was using it in the middle of the afternoon.

Just off the riverfront, there was a small section of town called “Italian Style Town”. I cannot verify authenticity, since I have never been to Italy, but okay, at least it looked European and had some European-named restaurants. It actually was fun to walk through – it had a good feel to it. There was quite a bit of outdoor seating, cafe style, going unused for now. Many people were walking around. It was a touch warmer there, with less breeze in the protected streets than along the river.

All in all, it was a nice little trip – a bit of demystifying Tianjin.

On the way home in the cab, I saw a very long coal train. We were alongside it for several minutes. I don’t know if coal trains are a common sight in other parts of the US, but in the places I have lived they are rare, so it was an unusual sight for me. It reminded me how much of China’s (and the world’s, for that matter) energy still comes from coal. I knew that, but sometimes seeing it makes it more real. I also realized that I was “getting used to” the pollution, putting it towards the back of my brain. Seeing that train renewed my awareness.

(Wednesday, March 2nd, 2016)

I am in the Juchuan Magnolia Hotel here on 3rd Avenue in TEDA, also known as Tanggu, Tianjin, China. Since I see “Tanggu” around me more than TEDA, I’ll use Tanggu.

The Rickmers’ agent booked this hotel and Rickmers is paying for it, which makes sense. A couple of the Romanian officers, one of whom lives in Shanghai (he handles on-shore activities for Rickmers in Asia), recommended that this be my hotel, due to its proximity to a couple of pubs in which English is spoken and American/European food is served. That turned out to be a good recommendation.

My room is very good, with one of those “sleeps four or five” beds. This is my third hotel in Asia on this trip, and all have shared an interesting trait I haven’t seen elsewhere: At the door there is a place to insert your key card. It is where you can always find your key card, so that is nice. But the important part is that power to the room is enabled when the card is inserted. So, when you leave, taking your card, there is a slight delay and then all the power to the room is either turned off or changed to “unoccupied” settings (for example, hallway light only). Ashtray near the elevator:

The room overlooks a local soccer stadium, seating for a few thousand maybe, like a large high school stadium. The surface is something rubbery poured like a popcorn ceiling over concrete. It feels okay to run on, or do jump rope on, but it would be devastating to fall on without armor. It is in constant use by the public. The lights are on until 9pm. There are groups doing Tai Chi, groups doing exercises to music, people along the sidelines using some strength and flexibility equipment, and people jogging or walking around the track. It is motivational to look out my hotel window and see those people, so I have exercised a reasonable amount while here, even though it has generally been cold. “If they can do it so can I” I say to myself, and that’s enough motivation to get me out the door and over there.

I have taken several walks in different directions while here. Sometimes I have a goal, like getting to their waterfront “Bund” park, or finding the site of the August explosion, but other times I just take a roundabout path that ends up at one of two nearby pubs at the end of the walk. I’ll include a few representative pictures. Some of them are just my capture of regular city scenes – some fancy places with statues and all that, some regular storefront places, some working sections (hardware stores, scooter repair), and some mall and waterfront scenes.

They have shown Chinese professional volleyball on TV (I recognized some American and European players on some teams!), and the Chinese Olympic Woman’s volleyball team is featured on a car commercial. Wow!

I have not seen any suburbs. There are so many tall apartment buildings, maybe consistently 30 stories. To be fair, I am mostly walking, so I might not go far enough to see suburbs, but when I have taken taxis to a couple places that involve leaving the city proper, I still haven’t seen suburbs.

It doesn’t seem to me that Tanggu is a tourist destination city. Cruise ships berth here but from brochures I’ve seen they generally take a tour bus, a taxi, or the bullet train to Beijing for the Great Wall and all the Beijing city sites. So I think this is a pass-through place for tourists. When I am out and about, very few people, including cab drivers, understand English. One exception – there was an alien spaceship resting across the river:

Tanggu is mostly a port-support city, with international businesses that are connected to the shipping industry, or dependent on shipping. There are a couple big malls, many apartment complexes, some executive-type hotels, a downtown area with tall buildings (not like Shanghai, though), a well-developed waterfront amusement area, an extensive subway system, and many rail stations including two that support fast trains.

On my first night here I went to the recommended pub, only to find most of my ship’s senior officers! We couldn’t get rid of each other, tee hee. ‘Twas a fun night. It was also the last night of a week-long New Year’s celebration, so, a little later into the night, there were really loud noises just outside the pub. The noises were a local fireworks show that was really good, really long (45+ minutes), and right in the middle of a major city street. I mean with no barricade, nothing like that, cars had to choose to stop or make their way around the fireworks, as they were firing. Ha! I thanked them, of course, for welcoming me to their city.

I had a brief interaction with Tanggu police. Sorry, that was deliberately sensational, blame it on too much reading of US political stuff. Anyway, I was walking along a sort-of busy street, and heard a crunch behind me – that noise that you know in your gut is a wreck. A scooter and a car had come together. The car won. Always bet on the car. There were bits of scooter and car on the road, and the scooter rider was down, his ride trashed. He was in pain, a leg, but not bleeding, able to talk easily, and could use his cell. The two guys in the car also got on their cells. I stood so that traffic would have to move around us, and “asked” the guy on the ground if he wanted help up or wanted to stay there. He wanted to stay, but did take some water from me. When the police and ambulance arrived I was about to continue my walk, but the police wanted me (I think) to make a statement. I tried to mime to them that I had heard, not seen, the wreck, but it didn’t work. They took me to the police station, and found someone with English. We had it all solved in 15 minutes. They asked if I wanted to be taken back to where I was walking. I said no, I was just walking anywhere. When the English-speaking guy translated it for the others, he said they said “well you are sure to get there”. Same joke all over the world.

(Wednesday, March 2nd, 2016)

Waiting for my new ship, the Rickmers Antwerp, to arrive, I’ve been mostly walking around. Tanggu, Tianjin, Beijing. I’ll write three posts, and maybe another general post or two. First, I thought I ought to explain these names.

It took me a while to figure this out. I had made some assumptions that stuck in my brain, keeping me from listening properly and learning more. Some of this may be a repeat but there’s more detail for those interested. I’m not sure this is all exactly correct but as a working theory it has served me well.

I am in Tanggu, Binhai, TEDA. They are all ways of saying almost the same thing. I’ll explain later.

This part of China is best known as “near Beijing”, since Beijing is the largest city by far and the most well known. Beijing is about 100 miles from where I am now, in Tanggu/Binhai/TEDA. Beijing is west of here.

Tianjin is a very large city between Tanggu and Beijing. Tianjin is about 20 miles west of Tanggu and 80 miles east of Beijing.

The extensive ports here serve both Beijing and Tianjin.

Beijing and Tianjin are also municipalities, one of four in China (Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Chungqing). The closest analogy to American divisions is that if you think of “City and County of Los Angeles”, maybe “municipality” is similar.

Tanggu is (was) a district (a city within a municipality, think Long Beach inside of Los Angeles County).

The Tanggu area has a harbor, several ports, and serves both Tianjin and Beijing for shipping.

A while back an economic development effort (I don’t exactly know what that involves) resulted in a new entity, the Binhai New Area. I think that there must be special considerations for international business, because many international businesses came to the Binhai New Area. Tanggu, being within the geography of the Binhai New Area, ceased to exist as an entity, except as a place name. There are many things named “Tanggu” around, and it doesn’t seem to me that people are trying to erase it. It is just no longer a governmental entity. Binhai is slightly larger than the old Tanggu, encompassing a few additional communities.

Inside the Binhai New Area, there is an even more special development area called TEDA. I had thought that “Teda” was another town, next to Tanggu. Nope. TEDA is Tianjin Economic-technological Development Area. It is mostly over by the ports, but its presence is felt all over, and there are TEDA signs all over the Tanggu/Binhai area.

Binhai has about a million people. Tianjin City has 5 million, Tianjin municipality 13 million. Beijing municipality has about 21 million.

When I got in a taxi and asked to go to downtown Tianjin (I actually pointed at a map with Chinese characters and HOPED that I was pointing at downtown Tianjin!), I thought it would take 10 or 15 minutes. 45 minutes later, and a trip on a toll road, we were there. I almost told the driver that HE had made a mistake, but I held my tongue, luckily. Mostly I kept quiet because I had no clue as to how to start the conversation. That’s when I decided to “study up”, tee hee.

One more name: Xingang. Xingang is really just one of the port areas. It probably has some separate administration but I don’t think it is a town or anything like that. Just one of many ports.

“Tianjin” was recently in the news due to a large explosion at a storage location for dangerous storage in August of 2015. Many deaths and injuries – I see conflicting numbers. Ed showed me the location on a map. It is in the TEDA area of Binhai, which of course is “technically” in Tianjin (municipality), but a long way from Tianjin City. This makes sense – for international news, Binhai or TEDA wouldn’t make as much sense to people as Tianjin. The site is very close to where I am staying. I took a walk there, only took a couple of hours, but surprise surprise there were guards there so I didn’t get the pictures that I wanted. Here’s a couple, though…

I am learning to read Chinese street signs. It is relatively low risk – if I get lost I can get a taxi back to the hotel by showing the driver a card with the hotel name and address in Chinese. That card is important!

These areas have a long history due to their importance to trade as Beijing and Tianjin grew. Hundreds of thousands of years ago the Chinese domesticated dinosaurs (Tanggusauri) to pull giant freighter ships on an intricate canal system between Tanggu and Beijing. (One of the preceding sentences might need some fact-checking.)

(Saturday, February 27th, 2016)

I was dissatisfied with the small pics in “Many Photos” so I experimented. Here are some larger versions of the same pics. The pics in “Raw Photos” in Dropbox still have more resolution. The first 32 of these are visible in “Raw Photos”, but the rest won’t get uploaded there until I leave China and (might have to wait until we cross the Pacific) get to a fast internet service.

 

(Thursday, February 25th, 2016)

At first the internet in the hotel was far too slow to consider uploading some pictures. The maps took about 15 minutes each to upload, and they weren’t big files. But, this morning, after a couple of days of slowness, it was much faster. I took advantage of that and uploaded the already-on-Dropbox captioned pictures, and some more.

Here they are in this one post. They mostly catch up with existing posts, as far as content. I hope it all works!

Postscript: WordPress edited these to small images. Hmm. Well, they are better than nothing. All of these, in their full form, will be in the folder:

“– Captioned General Photo Copies” in “Raw Photos”

… once Dropbox works, probably when I get to Houston the first week of April or so.

So, consider this an unintentional tease.

Enjoy.

Whew! That’s it for today.