China

Hey hey -
First - just for fun, there's a new link on the right of the page to a cool treadmill video from the group "OK, GO". Check it out. I appologize to those of you with0ut high speed internet service because that video and this posting (so many photos) might take about 3 months to download.

Finally i'm posting some of the better photos I took in China / Hong Kong. It was an awesome trip overall (very very humid), but there's nothing like the standard of living that we enjoy here in the USA. Beijing is huge with a population of 15 million, so everyone lives in high-rise apartment buildings, many of which looked to be on the verge of collapse. We were treated very well by our host, who took us to dinner nearly every night. There wasn't a whole lot of time to do sight-seeing or shopping because we were so busy. At night there wasn't a lot of time either, due to the dinners (which last a long time when everyone else is toasting and saying their many thank you's, and trying to drink everyone else under the table) and the fact that we were so tired at the end of the day. I didn't get very many pictures with me in them, but I have more I need to get from my co-workers, who did take photos of me with their cameras. Maybe I'll post some of those if they look good. So, here goes!:


This is one of several "temples" in the Summer Palace. If you ever go to China, the summer palace is the 1st thing I would see. This is what I enjoyed the most of all the things I saw. The palace is really just a huge compound of maybe a hundred or so buildings and large gardens, and a lake in the middle of everything. I'd say the place is at least 2-3 miles across. We walked around for about 5 hours and still didn't see everything there is to see. Here is one of the "boats" people would take to ride from one side of the lake to the other:

In the photo you can see there is a bridge in the background (far right), called the "17-arch bridge" - we walked across it to an island on the other side of the bridge. Jose, our project lead, told us (never could tell if he was telling the truth or not, joking or not, the whole time i was with him) that you are supposed to count the number of lion statues along the bridge and then recount on your way back - supposedly you can never get the two to match. He was right. We counted 72 statues on the way to the island, but lost count after 80 on the way back. I think we just weren't paying attention well enough.

By the way - As near as I could tell, there's really no religion in China, in the way we think of it. I guess there are some budhists, but of course there's no believe in the Savior. Instead there is a lot of doing things for "good luck". So you rub a statue, meditate at a temple, or burn some incense, or do something in honor of an ancestor or past emporer, and you'll have good luck. There were certain statues in the Summer Palace that everyone would touch or rub for good luck. Wierd.

This next photo is one of several "gates" in the summer palace. These types of gates have great significance in China. They are similar to the French Arc de Triomphe, or trimphant arches in ancient Rome. Long ago, each city in China had a gate from which the troops would leave and return (presumable triumphant).

Anyway, there are several LARGE gates (big enough to drive several cars through) much bigger than this one throughout Beijing. I think these smaller ones are built in honor of your family, or ancestors - not sure. It's good luck to walk underneath them. So many of the structures / buildings were very ornate like this (especially the roofs of buildings).


This is another building in the Summer Palace in the shape of a large boat:



This is me at the great wall of China. This is a preserved / restored section of the wall that is very popular (as you can tell from the 50 million other Chinese tourists). Our host told us that you're a real man if you walk all the way to the top section of the wall (about 1.5 miles, I'd say, but hard to tell with out Rick Baxter's expert distance estimation skills!) so of course I had to do it.

The photo below was taken from the opposite direction, once we reached the top (highest point on the wall in the photo to the left), looking back down. All these chinese people were just pushing and pushing to get to the final point just to touch it (for good luck). So about all I could do was get a quick self portrait. The older man just behind me in the photo is Peter, who is from Australia and was an IAEA guest lecturer in our class.






Peter was able to get a photo of me touching the end of this section of the wall (tourists aren't allowed beyond this point at this section of the wall). Can you see all the "Chinese grafitti" on the stone?


You can see that the wall is not very flat...So really the whole time is spent going up and down stairs. My legs were so sore the next day from so many stairs! What is amazing is that the wall goes right up the mountainside, and back down again, and then right up the next mountain. I was told that the wall was started some 2,000 years ago, but it was in sections. Essentially, each tribe or city created a small wall section to keep northern invaders or neighboring cities out. It wasn't intending in the beginning to be one long wall. But then one of the emporers (sorry - can't remember which one!) united all of China long ago into a single country and government, and had all the walls connected into a single long wall for protection against the Mongols and others. Took a long time, but they did it. It runs east to west across the northern third of the country, and is about 2,000 miles long.

This is a restaurant called "hot pot". There is a boiling pot sunken into the table, with a gas burner underneath. The pot is divided into two sides, one side is extra hot spicey, the other is a little more mild. you can't tell from the photo, but it was SO HOT in there! it was so humid already, and then you have all this steam in your face from the boiling pot - we were all soaking wet with sweat, steam, humidity - ughhh! All the food gets dumped into the pot, and then you pick it out with your chop sticks. Lots of fun. Nearly every restaurant had this format where all the food is in the middle (no such thing as ordering your own entre), and you all share the food. Eating was a lot of fun. Usually we sat at large round tables with great big lazy susans and they would just keep bringing food for about an hour. Eating takes a long time in Chinese restaurants because there's SO MUCH food, and you have to have a lot of toasts... so it was a little awkward for me becuase I was constantly refusing alcohol, even from our Chinese host. Every 10 minutes it was, "OK, now we have another toast. ... Scott, please try just a little ... this is very special 'Chinese water' (alcohol)."

Here are some photos of Hong Kong. We got to got to go there for a few hours while we were staying just across the border in Shenzhen ("shen-jen"). This is how the day went:

We ate breakfast early at the hotel in Shenzhen. Then took a taxi to customs at the train station. Once we got through customs, bought a ticket for the train (We couldn't figure out which destination/station ticket to buy, so we just got something that looked right, then stayed on the train until we thought we arrived at the right depot), and took the train down to the bay in Hong Kong. Once we got off the train we walked along the water way for about 30 minutes ("the walk of stars" - similar to hollywood blvd in USA, which is where I took my picture with Bruce Lee!) until we found a ferry to take us across the bay.

We took the ferry to the island side of hong kong and then took a bus to the tram. It was amazing to see all the sky scrapers. We rode the tram up the mountainside to the lookout (the mountain in the picture to the left), got out and looked at all of hong kong for about 30 minutes (except that it was very hazy and overcast, so there wasn't a whole lot to see, but the trip was still worth it).

The last photo below is the view from the top. Then we did the WHOLE thing in reverse - tram, bus, ferry, train, taxi, then bus ride to the airport, and plane ride back to Beijing - all in one day! I was so sick of getting in line and buying a ticket for yet another form of transportation. I told Jose that just for good luck, we should pay for a rickshaw ride around our hotel once we finally get back to Beijing that day.
Just so you know - it wasn't all play time - here's a fuzzy photo of me giving one of the lectures. You can see two sets of slides: one in English, and one in Chinese. It's hard to see the slides, but you might be able to zoom in on the chinese version.

That's all for now! Love YOU!

Scott