Category: Travel

The first two pictures are from Tuesday.   They show the departure hall at Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital International Airport.    Condé Nast Traveler magazine named Beijing Capital International as the World’s Best Airport in 2009 ! Terminal 3 is very large, second only to Dubai International Airport’s Terminal 3, says Wikipedia.

Everything was gray upon our arrival at Shenzhen airport (this is around 6pm in the evening)- the airplane, the tarmac, the building, the sky.   Shenzhen’s Bao’an International Airport is more convenient than Hong Kong for connections to cities in China from the south, but the airport has work to do to improve its limited spoken English.   (Admittedly I may have work to do to improve my Mandarin).

I’m staying one more night in the Pattaya Hotel in Dameisha before going home tomorrow.   Yes!

A colleague of mine on the project lives in Beijing came by the hotel and picked me up for a hot-pot dinner.   Those are flowers that I’m holding that went into the hot pot along with mushrooms, tofu, green leafy veggies and little hand-rolled balls of ground beef, pork and chicken.   The liquid in the pot is actually a mushroom soup .. all very very good!   (Did I have some famous Beijing duck?  asked people back at work.  No – I’ll catch the duck next time.  Best to be part of a group since in many restaurants they serve up a whole duck).    The spectacular arch building belongs to China Central Television (CCTV) and is in the central business district.   The ones on the next picture are from banks and insurers.   

After dinner we stopped at a plaza called The Place also in the Beijing CBD.  The LED screen was the biggest in the world at one time.   (I suspect the four-screen high-definition LED display that now hangs above the center of the pitch in the Dallas Cowboys’ football stadium is bigger.   Or is there a bigger one already in Dubai?)   And check out the welcoming message on the screen that my colleague texted to me from his phone !   

The final picture is of the Forbidden City’s entrance at night.

It took a 5 hour round trip from my hotel to make it to the The Great Wall and back, but I had to do it.  Cannot come to China as many times as I do and not go to the Great Wall, right?    The first picture I borrowed from Wikipedia because it offers several insights : that the wall started as several walls built by different emperors, was built over a long period of time (of course) and is not one continuous wall.     The section I visited is a reconstruction, as are all the tourist view points to some extent.     I hired a driver and guide from the hotel and they took me to south east of Jinshanling, the Mutianyu section of the wall (a white dot on the map below).    It is some 70km to the north and east of the city (my Google Latitude location was taken at the Wall).  The driver took the less-traveled roads which saved us from getting stuck in traffic.   It can easily take two hours one way.

Lanes of willow trees along the way starting to bud in spite of the very dry weather (typical in spring).   The next two pictures shows one of several gates indicating the name and entrance to villages along the way.

Here is the arrival point at the Wall.   I passed on sitting on the deck to sample the pure Italian coffee (sign on the right).   I also did not buy anything !    The next picture shows a steep and somewhat hairy ski lift ride up to the Wall.   One can also walk up there.  My excuse for not doing that is that I was short on time !   Then there is a toboggan slide which one can take on the way down (on the left).   I was game to do that but the line was very long, so we just took the ski lift back.    There are sections of this part of the wall that are amazingly steep.   And of course the Wall has to be built on the ridges of mountainous terrain – it cannot be built in a valley since that would invite a bridge to be constructed right over it.

This China Daily newspaper article puts everything nicely in perspective : the Forbidden City lies on a north-south axis from the Bird’s Next stadium down to the Temple of Heaven.   (Click once on the picture to enlarge it).     It also reports that Beijing will speed up the protection of its cultural sites over the next 5 years even though it already applied for World Cultural Heritage status.  (Kind of shocking that these sites do not already have that status).

These sites are very large, each occupying dozens of large city blocks, so one needs walking shoes !   I managed to get to the Forbidden City, Tian’anmen Square and the Temple of Heaven in about 6 hrs and then called it a day.

These two pictures are right by the JW Marriott hotel, the Da Wang Lu station on Line 1 and the Deutsche Bank Towers right next to the China Central shopping mall and Starbucks Coffee.    In the day the trains are crowded but I preferred to deal with that instead of being stuck in a taxi in traffic in the city!    In 2010, the Beijing Subway delivered over 1.6 billion rides, including a single-day record of 6.82 million on March 4, 2011.   All but two of Beijing Subway’s 14 lines were built within the past decade.

The next set of pictures are from the Forbidden City.   The Forbidden City was the Chinese imperial palace during the Ming dynasty and for some 500 years.   It’s a world-famous place along with the Palace of Versailles in France, Buckingham Palace in England, the White House in the U.S. and the Kremlin in Russia.   It is located in the middle of Beijing  and now houses what is called the Palace Museum.   The front entrance with Chairman Mao’s portrait is free and opens into a big plaza.   Inside vendors sell China flags, maps and food and drink.  (Next picture)  200 years ago the price for access to the Forbidden City would have been immediate death but now it is only 60RMB ($US10) !

This is the Hall of Supreme Harmony (Taihe Dian) – the grandest hall in the palace and the largest wooden structure in China.   There are 11 gargoyle-like creatures on the curved corner of the roof,  the most of any of the halls, indicating is importance.

This plate is on one of the many doors inside the gates in the complex.

The next few pictures are from Tian’anmen Square to the immediate south of the Forbidden City.   Tiananmen Square is the largest city square in the world (440,000 m² – 880m by 500m).   It has great cultural significance as it was the site of several important events in Chinese history.    My pictures below in sequence are of the China Museum, the Monument to the People’s Heroes and a monument in front of Mao’s Mausoleum.

The final few pictures are from the ‘Temple of Heaven’ park .. a large park with open spaces and several structures.   It was constructed from 1406 to 1420 and visited by emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties and used for annual ceremonies to pray to Heaven for good harvests.

Well, I’m out of the apartment, into a hotel in Dameisha (view from the hotel room shown, what a beautiful day) and went to Shenzhen airport at noon for the 3 hr plane trip to Beijing.  A fellow project team member lives in Beijing and we shared a taxi and sat next to each other on the plane.    That’s an Air China plane, like the one we took, and the Terminal 3 building at Beijing Capital Airport with the skylight windows looking like dragon scales.  (The airplane window is scratched, not my camera lens!).   That’s my colleague’s handwritten instructions with my hotel name for the taxi driver.  Let me just note that watching someone write Chinese characters is like watching a magic trick unfold in front of one’s very eyes.  : )

The next few pictures all show the sun setting in a cloudless sky, coloring it into beautiful shades of pink and orange.   The outskirts of Beijing actually reminded me a lot of the winter sunsets we had in South Africa where I grew up!  (A town called Vereeniging, an hour’s drive from Johannesburg).  There are 5 ring roads (freeways) around the city and the hotel (my Google Latitude location in the picture) is toward the east of the Forbidden City, which is at the center of Beijing.

The two big web sites for booking airfare inside China are Ctrip.com and eLong.com (pictures below from the eLong site).   eLong.com is affiliated with the USA’s Expedia.com (‘the world’s largest travel company’ it calls itself).    Why didn’t I just use Expedia?   The fare I looked at was $100 cheaper on eLong.com.   With the eLong website I could pay with my US credit card the way we do on websites in the USA, with credit card validation and payment authorization done in the background.    The Ctrip site needed a faxed or e-mailed copy of a form I needed to print and sign, pictures of the front and back of my credit card,  as well my passport picture page.   No! Too much work! and I felt I would put my credit card information at risk for abuse (more so than entering the number on a secure website).      But both sites charge a 3% credit card fee on top of the ticket price. 

And where am I headed?  I have Beijing and the Great Wall of China in my sights for the upcoming Chinese holiday weekend.    The project team is taking a break before the final push to get our system up and operative in May.

Just a few more pictures I collected for fun in Shenzhen over the weekend.

1.   The brand new Don’t go breaking my heart movie (named after the 1976 Elton John-Kiki Dee duet? not sure)  showing in the Golden Harvest Cinema.    I wasn’t brave enough to go and see it (thought it would be all in Chinese) but I see the trailer at    http://www.mediaasia.com/dontgobreakingmyheart/   does have English sub-titles (and yes – totally what we would call a chick flick in the USA).

2.  Looks like there’s scuba diving at the start and a cocktail party at the end of the blue line of this schematic of the Shenzhen metro lines  !   The Eiffel Tower is a miniture one, from the Window of the World theme park.

3.  Or there’s always Starbucks for coffee, this board from the location at Coco Park shopping mall .    Here is a partial translation  :    星巴克 xīng ​bā​ kè is Starbucks  and 40 周年 zhōu​nián is 40 th anniversary of Starbucks/ 可可  kě​kě is cocoa and 卡布奇诺kǎ​bù​qí​nuò​ is  cappuccino  –  the drink denoted by the characters in the five pink stars/ 巧克力 qiǎo​kè​lì chocolate –  an ingredient in one of the popsicle cakes/  (T)all  (G)rande (V)enti –  Starbucks for large/ even larger/ and enormous.

4.  The model for a cell phone advertiser on a phone booth on the sidewalk is borrowing the iconic pose  from Marilyn Monroe in movie The Seven Year Itch (1955).

Here’s the view from my hotel room on the 26th floor.  The green hills in the background is the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), and the waterway in the background is the border between mainland China and Hong Kong SAR.    So here is how you do it to go to Hong Kong ‘on foot’ from Shenzhen.    Take the Shenzhen Metro to the Luohu Port, walk through the China customs, then Hong Kong customs, then hop on to the Hong Kong Metro.   It is totally worth to pay extra to sit in the First Class compartment, because it’s a 40 min ride into the city.   For me, the Tsim Tsa Tsui station in Kowloon is where you want to go if you only have a few hours.

The last Saturday in March is time for Earth Hour, so the picture  shows a little media event getting ready to watch the skyscrapers across Victoria Harbor go dark.      I walked around some more to check out the people and the scenery in Kowloon.    The ‘Power of Imagination’ billboard is advertising Canon digital cameras.  I love it even though no camera will ever take a picture of a guy dressed in Goth with red roses and ravens in the sky, and penguins and mountain goats in the garden of a 17th century palace.    The next picture is for the movie Sucker Punch, an American action-fantasy flick with an ensemble female cast, shot in Los Angeles and Vancouver.    One of the stars is Jamie Chung, a second-generation Korean American from San Francisco.

And then in the Swindon bookstore I just had to snap the cover picture of the children’s book with the Big Bad Wolf about to eat a surprised little Red Riding Hood with her red cheeks.  The wolf put a big smile on my face  : ).

The project team got the weekend off – we needed it!   I could not get a hotel room at a decent rate in Hong Kong because of the Sevens Rugby Tournament there,  so just to get out out my apartment I came to Shenzhen for the weekend.

Pictures . .  Texting ‘We’re stuck in traffic?’ I’m watching you : )  /  Finally arriving at the Hyatt Hotel / Inside the luxury shopping mall by the hotel; no shoppers in sight on a Friday night, though / They are all outside enjoying the spring weather / The Di Wang*building aka Shun Hing Square which I have shown before.. / .. sending out a single green laser beam at times; not sure what the purpose of this is.  In Hong Kong some skyscrapers put on a whole laser show at times/  and as I noted before the ‘King of the Land’ is about to be dethroned by the King Key Financial Plaza building.  That’s the Agricultural Bank of China building in front of it.

*it means King of the Land

The flight path actually took us north of  Sendai over the northern tip of the main island Honshu (north of it is Hokkaido island; the other two big ones are Shikoku and Kyushu).      We arrived on time in Seoul.   That’s a shot of Incheon International airport with Korean Air planes,  late Thu afternoon.      I checked my location on the Google Latitude map on my phone just for fun.     The map detail for North Korea is completely blank – not surprisingly so, I guess.

The flight to Hong Kong was another 3 1/2 hrs.    We arrived on time but there was a delay with the baggage, and then a long line at the Hong Kong exit crossing and a luggage inspection for me at the China Mainland entrance crossing.    So it was 1 am by the time Mr Wu stopped with me at the apartment in Dameisha.

Yes, I finally made it to the airport for my next trip out to China.    The system we have worked on for 15 months now will go live on May 1.    The Asiana Airlines check-in is in the far south end of the Seatac airport’s upper level, where I found this airplane.

Today I fly to Seoul and then to Hong Kong and we fly over Japan (!), so I even with all the information I have regarding a realistic view of the risks of radiation exposure I am still interested in the exact flight path we will take.   I found Monday’s flight path on flightaware.com.    It does look like an adjustment was made to avoid flying directly over the area where the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is.   But 1. the radiation levels are reportedly down anyway and 2. the wind direction has been such that it has blown most of the radioactive particles out over the Pacific, anyway.   (There is even a headline question Seattle Times : Is the US West Coast at risk?  Answer : no, no – NO).

慢走  màn​zǒu ‘Walk Slow’/ Don’t go yet! / Please stay a while longer!

Man Zou is a common phrase in Mandarin that translates literally to ‘Walk Slow’.   Used as a farewell, it is a way of reminding one another to be careful and mindful on our journey, and take the time to see things along the way. Walk slowly and you won’t fall. .. from the web page describing the documentary I saw last night on the KCTS9 public television channel.

The documentary is of four American friends (from Seattle) and their Chinese guide set out on a mission to bicycle more than 1,000 miles between China’s two largest cities : Beijing and Shanghai.   (They did it in 28 days).  I could relate to their experiences in such a heartfelt way : the chaotic traffic, the foods Westerners are just not used to eat, the friendly people (still finding Westerners strange and stare-worthy, especially in smaller towns), and people doing hard, hard manual work without complaining.

.. and here is a picture from Hong Kong airport I forgot to post yesterday.  It’s ‘The Dew Drop’ (see me in there?) by artist Lee Chin Fai Danny (2005).  The plaque says ‘Nature is all around us.   Yet often we look but do not see. Next time you see morning dew, take a look at just on dew drop.  See your surroundings reflected there. Look closely and you will see a reflection of yourself.  So why not pause and try to look at ourselves, objects and people around us from a fresh perspective?’

I found this picture in the check-in hall in Hong Kong airport.   The dashing aviator is billed as Hong Kong’s first : a Belgian named Charles van den Born.   The picture was taken in 1910 and he was 35 years old at the time.

Then there’s the nose of the Cathay Pacific plane as we boarded*, and I found a nice picture of the flight path on-line (11h 42 mins and 6,951 miles).

*We were scheduled to fly on a Boeing 747-400, but now looking at the picture I’m not so sure it was one.

Here’s this morning’s breakfast : clockwise from the bottom there is a little samoosa, noodles with soy sauce, chicken and beef dumplings, glutinous rice in lotus leaf and fried tomato.   All very tasty.

And below that is last night’s view now that the sun is shining.    Now it’s time to clear out and go to the airport!

This Sunday morning finds me in Shenzhen’s JW Marriott hotel on Shennan Boulevard, Shenzhen.    I just had to get away from Dameisha for a little weekend break – what’s left of the weekend after working on Saturday, that is.

All the pictures are in and around Shennan Boulevard (Chinese : Shen Nan Boulevard).    It is a broad east-west road in the city and the Luobao line of the Shenzhen Metro runs under it (the Metro is the red line on my Google Latitude picture).     The big red flower is at the Mix-C shopping mall.   The Shenzhen Stock Exchange is nearby.   Vendor stalls – selling iPads and mobile phones, and prize draws with promises of sporty red BMWs and flashy watches –  are right there as well.   A stock broker handed me his business card.   The going assumption is that all foreigners are loaded with money – a reasonable assumption I suppose, because it takes money to travel here, right?    I love the feng shui square hole in the Panasonic building across the street.    Close by is a green skyscraper :   Shun Hing Square (Chinese: 信兴广场/地王大厦), also named Di Wang in Shenzhen.   It reaches up to 384m (1,260 ft),  is currently the tallest in Shenzhen*, 6th tallest building in mainland China, and the 14th tallest in the world.

*soon to be overtaken by the Kingkey Finance Center Plaza scheduled for a June 2011 opening.  I do not have pictures of it but will hunt it down on my next trip to the city.

The night-time pictures were taken in the vicinity of the Marriott hotel.   The Shenzhen Metro is within walking distance which is always great to have.   I found a nice little shopping mall with Starbucks and a ‘New York Deli’ around the Che Gong Miao metro station (last two pictures).

Here are the Canton Tower pictures !

From top to bottom : View from outside/ inside the elevator; the Tower tops out at 107 floors/ in a city of 12 million you build apartment buildings by the dozens/ last night’s bridge looks tiny/ the view toward the Asian Games Stadium built on an island in the Pearl River with the plaza behind it; the very tall building is International Finance Center Guangzhou/ doing the don’t-look-down picture in the glass floor booth/ the Spider Staircase connects 10 floors at a time by stairs/ view upwards from the ground floor lobby/ double-click the picture to see how the Canton Tower compares with the other towers in the world/ artwork at the base of the IFC Guangzhou/ PwC building close by in the financial district/ sidewalk art for the Games/ new film bill-board (I forgot the name of the film)/ new apartment buildings/ more skyscrapers in the city center on the way back to Guangzhou train station

 

We worked a half-day and got our freedom at 12 noon.   Since my coworker Will decided to meet his cousin in Shenzhen and go check out Guangzhou, and jumped at the chance to go with.    Always a little easier if you have travel companions  to help you figure out the logistics in a foreign country.

Guangzhou is a 1 hour train ride up into the Pearl River delta from Shenzhen (see my Google Latitude picture) and is also known as Canton or Kwangchow.  It is the capital of the Guangdong province and one of five National Central Cities and a key transportation hub and trading port.    It is the third largest city in China and the official estimate of the city’s population at the end of 2009 was 10.5 million.

We splashed out and are staying in the posh Ritz-Carlton on the Pearl River (it’s one night only, and we found a special rate of $150).

Pictures .. first one is of all the train riders making for the train at Shenzhen station.  The train is very nice and we had numbered seat assignments – so no need to push and shove!   Next one is of our arrival at Guangzhou station where we got a taxi to the hotel.    Wow! I said as I looked out my hotel room window.  The plaza below was constructed along with the stadium for the 201o 16th Asian Games, held in November last year.  The stadium is built on an island in the Pearl River, and the picture of the bridge is also close by, across the Pearl river.  All of the following pictures were taken in and around the plaza.   The spectacular tower is the Canton Tower, more pictures to follow since we plan to go up in it on Sunday.    The tower is the tallest TV tower in the world, and the tallest structure in China at 610m (almost 2,000 ft).   It opened in September 2010 after 6 years of design and construction.

On our one day off from work it rained in Shenzhen today.  Ah well, better luck next weekend, right?  Two colleagues and I went to the Shenzhen Electronics Market, a really big ten-story building in the city center.   The first picture is just of the street nearby, the second from inside the building.  There are thousands of sellers in the building, most with one booth and one display case to sell anything  electronic.   The giraffe on the escalator says mind your head (especially if you are a giraffe?).   How about a panda web cam, or a Hello Kitty one?

Next we went to have some lunch as always at McCauly’s Irish Pub, and then to the shopping mall for a few  grocery items.  The mall is called Mix-C for some reason.    Valentine’s Day is tomorrow, and people were lining up for pictures with the romantic hearts backdrop.      I am sure I do not have to explain why the 2011 on the sign has bunny ears and carrot 1’s !

And finally – one of the newest tall apartment buildings on the way back to Dameisha .. this one is called the Spring and Sea.

The first picture is from the Cathay Pacific automatic flight tracker, and shows us making a bee-line for Hong Kong with Shanghai to the north and Kaohsiung (Taiwan) and Baguio (The Philippines) to the south.    Next up is the familiar-by -now border crossing into mainland China flashing by while we are in the mini-van taking us in by road.    And hey! the Google Latitude mapping application on my iPhone works even here and shows exactly where I am right now : in Dameisha/ Shenzhen (Dameisha is in the far eastern outskirts of Shenzhen).   Neat!