Day-36: Tianjin, China - Our Final Cruise Day

Day-36: Sunday, March 9, 2014

Beginning Location: Yellow Sea En-route to Tianjin, China

Final Location: Tianjin, China

With no tours for the morning we had a relaxing start to the day with breakfast served at 0800.

Our arrival into Tianjin was on time at 0900 with a relatively easy sea detail to our pier. The area of Tianjin where we are docked is all about ships. This is the primary port area for Beijing; there are container ships and facilities in almost every direction one looks.

Today is sunny, so there will be no snow and the temperature will likely warm into the low 50’s.

We spent our morning doing our preliminary pack, as tomorrow we’ll be off the ship by 0800 to continue our land portion of the China excursion.

This afternoon we toured Tianjin.

The ride from the Ocean Terminal serving Tianjin took about an hour to reach our destination. Along the way, one can’t help but notice the hundreds of construction sites. The new high-rise condo units are being built by the thousands, new power plants are being constructed and along the route into the city there must be a million or more new tree plantings supposedly with the aim of reducing the obvious air pollution from dust and traditional smog.

The port area is built on reclaimed land measured in square miles all owned by the government “for the good of the people”.

As for the condo units, the math is stunning; the government tears down the 1-2 story housing units built over the past 50-75 years, some appearing to be relatively new. As a replacement, the government builds a condo city. In the largest example we passed, the new high-rise towers were twelve wide by twelve deep, each building with 30 floors and 20 condos per floor (12x12=144x30=4,320x20=86,400 condos each of about 800 square feet for anywhere from one to three generations of one family. In other words, that “condo community” could have a population of a couple hundred thousand people. In actuality, many of the "condo cities" have nobody home, seems the government is building for the future, a day when industry arrives and the people follow. The extreme of such building schemes are the "ghost cities"; fully constructed towns, with condos, malls, schools, hospitals, etc. but no people.

Finally we entered the city of Tianjin. It did not have the glamour and glitz of Hong Kong or Shanghai and the people either didn’t have or didn’t show the disposable income we witnessed in Shanghai.

We arrived at our first destination, a clay model “research institute”, code for art school making clay models. The guide and the “institute” manager held a quick discussion. Finally acknowledging that as it was Sunday, there were no artisans at work making the clay models. After stalling for about 30 minutes, two workers were found and put to "work" on two clay models for us to see and photograph.

Stalling After Realization That It's Sunday

Miscellaneous sights of Tianjin.

Our second stop was at another “institute”, this time including a museum of “New Year” wall paintings. After a few descriptions of wood block sketching Sheila and I had the opportunity to produce our own sketch, which we proudly displayed and finally rolled to take home.

With two stops complete we returned to the ship. In summary the 5-hour trip was interesting from the perspective of seeing the evidence of growth in China but the two stops were of little interest. Here are a few of the sights along the way:

Observed sunset over the high rises and a new power plant.

After putting our jackets and other travel goods in our room we proceeded to dinner, our final shipboard dinner for this cruise. We were seated next to a couple from Centreville, VA. They like us had a Navy background, he completing a 28-year career in 2004 and moving to the consulting side of the DC working world. As a show of age, our conversation drifted to retirement communities. Seems that our new found friends had recently made reservations to live in a Williamsburg, VA area CCRC. What's a CCRC you might ask? I think it's a Community Center for Retired Curmudgeons or something like that; odd though, when you go to the CCRC web sites, everybody is always smiling.

We stopped by the Martini Bar and worked on the evening’s trivia challenge. If we had actually entered the contest we would have placed no less than second and might have actually won.

That was it for the night, I did a little Internet work and we closed out our baggage, placing it outside the door for pick-up and transport to storage awaiting tomorrow’s departure.

There's no room service available tomorrow, I guess we're on our own for breakfast.