Job Discussion Forums

[mep3]

My ideal city is like one from a Bruno Schulz story or a Dostoevsky or Dickens novel. I'm wondering if anyone knows which one in China fits the bill:

First and most important criteria is rain/overcast skies. Anyone know the big city in China that gets the most rain?

Next, it should be a BIG city, industrial, dark, gloomy looking, foggy is good, narrow streets, hilly. I've heard Chongqing is kind of like that, but it also seems the universities there pay very low.

Thanks for indulging me. I'm eccentric but benign M

[mep3]

Oops .... I just realized I should have posted this on the "off topic" forum. Sorry. I'd remove it but I don't know how. I'll post it there, anyway. M

[prof]

Gloomy?

Pick anything outside of Shanghai/Hangzhou/Suzhou!

[Steppenwolf]

Is there a Chinese city that's not "industrial", "gloomy" and "rainy" most of the time?

Guangzhou perfectly fits your bill, as do Guiyang, Wuhan, Yangzhou...to mention but those.

[Ben H Nevis Jnr.]

if you can tolerate a bit of sunshine, the long, dark, snowy and bitterly cold winters up in the north-east make up for the lack of rain during spring and autumn. the post-industrial rustbelt centres of harbin or changchun would be perfect. harbin has the russian district where you could indulge your raskolnikov fantasies, though overall changchun might be better. it's a vast run-down undulating sprawl with a strange windswept bleakness to it. actually dalian might not be a bad choice too. it has the hills certainly, and plenty foggy days when the mist rolls in off the sea, engulfing the tower blocks. it's got a spring in its step though. too much optimism perhaps and not enough pollution.

[Brian Caulfield]

Try Vancouver anywhere along Hasting street during the fall and winter months . But you must speak the Hong Kong dialect .

[tw]

[JadedMenhir]

The Jewel of Hebei, the Urban Splodge itself, the Primordial Pharmaceutical Pollution Paradise, Shijiazhuang!

[jammish]

[Areut]

[quote="jammish"]

[dajiang]

Panzihua, Sichuan.
absolutely horrible city imho.

zhengzhou, luoyang also.
but theyre central enough to escape from too easily.

try any large city in hunan.

[mep3]

I was in Dalian over National Holiday. It was very bright and sunny. It made me depressed M

[HunanForeignGuy]

[Gregor]

I don't know all of Dongbei,
but generally speaking, Liaoning does not fit the bill. Shenyang was described to me as grey and industrial, so when I get there, I was mildly shocked to find that it (as well as Dalian) gets FAR more than its fair share of happy sunshine. And it's not as nasty, grey and "communist" as The Lonely Planet would have me believe. (I was offered a job in Shenyang, and, having read the short blurb in LP about it being worth a miss, I was DELIGHTED to go there for a two-year contract!) Oh, it has its gloomy days, including its one requisite HAIL STORM in July, but they are few and far enough between to not really qualify under the OP's criteria.

Really, believe it or not, I can't think of a single region of China that has that sort of climate. Maybe farther north in Dongbei, like Harbin (I have that romantic vision of the city, myself, but I've never been there and get the feeling that it might be a bit more cheerful than you may want).
In the south, like Shanghai, Guanzhou or that area, you get a LOT more rain, but you still get more sunshine than most FTs there like to admit. And it NEVER, EVER gets actually COLD.

On the other hand, Dalian DOES get its fog, and it's got lots of hills. Maybe Dalian would be good.

[jammish]

Fully agree about the fog in Dalian, Gregor.

Here's a pic I took from the UFO hill in the summer, on a very foggy day

http://img169.imageshack.us/img169/7128/viewfromufohillrz2.jpg