Quanzhou crabs

These crabs live under the ancient Luoyang Bridge in Quanzhou, Fujian.

Turtles basking on a raft in a pond at a Buddhist term in Fuzhou. The pond is designated as a fang sheng chi 放生池, i.e. "pond for releasing living creatures".

Little fish to crawl out of the mud for a breath of air (or maybe to hunt other fish). Dianxia Town, Fuding City, Fujian.

Direct flights Australia to Wuhan

Australia's Jetstar (a Qantas subsidiary) is to start direct service from the Gold Coast airport (south of Brisbane) to Wuhan on Sep 29, 2015

And I was wondering about those posters in Wuhan buses four years ago...

Wuhan's Tianhe airport already has direct service to a few international destinations, including Seoul (INC) and Paris. A commuter rail connection from the airport to Wuhan's 3 main railway stations is supposed to open by the end of this year.

The Freat Soviet Eccyclopedia

More wonders of OCR:

Bibliographic information
Title: Freat Soviet Eccyclopedia
Published: 1980

https://books.google.com/books?id=vnOFYI3g-N4C

Google Maps Sprachbund

A while back, as an experiment, I set my interface language for Google products to Macedonian. In reality, only a small portion of all the Google label, legend, and message texts may be available in that language, so I also had to pick a "backup" languages, for which I choose Bulgarian (I think by default, as it is the closest related language).

So you would imagine that the text I would see e.g. in Google Maps would be a mix of Macedonian and Bulgarian, plus the original language of the region being mapped? Wrong! There are actually four languages I often see. And the fourth is... Kyrgyz!

In the example above, the standard Google Maps messages are in Macedonian (e.g. "Пребарувајте во близина", i.e. "Search in the vicinity"), the country name is also in Macedonian ("Соединети Американски Држави" = the USA), while the object name is a translation/transcription of the "West Side Avenue Light Rail Station" into a curious mix of languages:

• "Запад" must be the Bulgarian or Macedonian translation for "West" (the proper adjective form would actually be "Западна", but we cannot expect that!);
• "Сайд Авеню Лайт Рейл" is the Bulgarian transcription for "Side West Light Rail". (We know that it's Bulgarian and not Macedonian because of the letters й and ю; Macedonian would use ј and ју (or just и), respectively. In principle it could be Russian too);
• and finally "станциясы" is the Kyrgyz for "the station". (The word would be spelled the same in Kazakh, but for many other place labels I saw words that were definitely Kyrgyz, e.g. "аэропорту" rather than "аэропорты" for "the aeroport"; Kyrgyz has something called "labial harmony", which Kazakh doesn't).