Daniel Gauss: New Yorker in Shenzhen

  There are not a great many places in Shenzhen where you can get books in English. The best place, by far, is Eon Books, which is located in the Book City complex. Indeed, the only other choice for me (an avid book reader) is to purchase books through jd.com or taobao.com To be candid, you can buy books online for less expensive prices, but I like going to Eon just to see what's there. Often if you purchase online you need to know what you want ahead of time. At Eon you can browse around and see what is available. They really do a nice job of presenting their books. There is a huge selection of children's books and academic books that a teacher at an international school or bilingual school might be able to use. When I taught at a bilingual school, I often came to Eon to get workbooks that I might photocopy worksheets from in English for my English speaking students. As you can see to the left, below, they have a number of places folks can sit and read. They also have a coffee...

                                                                  {{{click on image to enlarge it}}} I love this photo that I took a few years ago, when it was still possible to go to soccer matches in Shenzhen. This was probably from 2019. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, there have been soccer matches, but only in certain cities (for example, Shenzhen can play league games, but it has to play them in Guangzhou). Shenzhen has not hosted a match since 2019. This is a wonderful photo - totally accidental - I just wanted to capture and post the score on my WeChat moments.  Inadvertently I caught this quite joyous mom and her son. They typify the spirit at Shenzhen soccer games. The team generally sucks, suffers from rotten coaching and bad player selection, but the players work their butts off and try to make the games intere...

  So here are a few videos of a girl's band from Chengdu called The Hormones. They were playing at one of Shenzhen's premier venues for indy rock and hard rock music.  B10 is primarily a venue for the very young. There is a bar from which to buy alcohol, but there does not seem to be a problem with young people drinking in China. The bar is actually a Bionic Brew establishment - a bar/restaurant in Nantou Old City which is very popular among expats. So B10 is not really my kind of place (I'm too old) but it's good to see there is a nice, safe, clean venue for the young people of SZ to come to to hear cool bands.

Yes, those are storm clouds over Shenzhen from the terrace of my apartment in Bao'an. It rains a great deal over here. Sometimes the rain is really extreme, torrential. Sometimes the rain is light and only lasts a few moments. Sometimes the rain accompanies typhoons, which is currently happening. Some cities have nicknames - Chicago is the Windy City, New York is the Big Apple, Paris is the City of Lights...I was thinking that a good nickname for Shenzhen might be The Sponge. The city absorbs lots of people hoping to make a finanical killing and it also absorbs lots and lots of rain. After it rains, you get these huge snails that come out and start wandering around the sidewalks of the city. It's hard to gage the size of this critter, but he was one of the biggest snails I have ever seen, bigger than the length of my thumb. Much bigger. Maybe the size of the palm of my hand.

{{{You can click on images to enlarge them...}}} I don't think Donald Trump really understood international economics when he complained about trade imbalances between the US and other major economies. Of course if you have the number 1 economy in the word you will import a lot of stuff which is more cheaply produced elsewhere and export the expensive stuff. If you import more than export, it is really no big deal. In fact, I recall an economics professor saying it can be good for your own consumers and economy. In Shenzhen, a city that now has more billionaires than New York City, you have rabid importers of American and Western luxury items. These are the status symbols here. I once took a snapshot of the inside of a KFC in Shenzhen to show my brother how similar and different it was from American KFCs and I accidentally snapped a photo of part of the parking lot. My brother wrote back saying, "My God - who goes to KFC in that city? You have 5 Audis, 4 BMWs, 6 Mercedes Benze...

  This is one view from the top of Nanshan Mountain in Shenzhen. I am quite tickled that I accidentally caught a dragonfly in the image - dragonflies are ubiquitous in Shenzhen as the city was built on a swamp and is close to the ocean. If cities had logos or brand images, Shenzhen's would have to be a dragonfly...or a BMW...or a designer bag. In New York City I was your typical culture-vulture and there were a huge amount of cultural events to participate in, often for little money. I could go to free art gallery openings, get into museums for little money, go to recitals at Juliard, see foreign films at several movie venues, attend off-off Broadway theater productions, listen in at poetry readings...Or, I could stay home and read - buying used books from Salvation Army thrift stores was a favorite activity of mine. Shenzhen is a new city, only about 42 years old, and the priority for its development has been economics more than culture. The one really good thing in Shenzhen, for ...