Willem's Planet

I’m on solid ground here in the airport lounge and happy to report nothing is a-wry.   I got my boarding pass as well.  It’s an All Nippon Airlines flight masquerading as a Continental flight that will take me to Hong Kong.    I snapped all the pictures the last hour or so.   Oh, no Tin tin books but I did get two Doraemon books from which I will post some pictures later.

The pictures :  I’m at Terminal 1, the International terminal / view outside of Terminal 1/ set your watch to Japan time, 16 hrs ahead of Seattle time/  the Narita aiport mascot points to something / my childhood favorite Kit Kat candy bars are available in green tea and wasabi flavor here / the red lettering ‘K’S COFFEE SHOP’ looks like Starbucks but its not, it’s Beck’s Coffee Shop /  ever seen a paper hippopotamus?  it’s from the origami art store, as is the scene from Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf !  he heh / check out the tuft of hair that the Gap Japan dude is sporting / and a Newsweek magazine showing 3.11 (as the day of the earthquake became known)

I am at Seattle-Tacoma airport.   A Boeing 777 is going to fly us to Tokyo’s Narita airport.  There is also Haneda airport, closer to the city.    I see there was another tremor of 5.8 that shook buildings in Tokyo this Saturday morning there.    The layover time for the flight from there to Hong Kong is 3 hrs so I hope everything will be OK.   I’m not used to earthquake tremors!   (Is anyone?)    I actually need a little extra time since  United couldn’t issue my Tokyo-Hong Kong boarding pass – I have to get it in Tokyo.   (The connecting flight is is on ‘another’ air-line :  Continental.     So given that Continental and United are merging, they still have some merging to do!     I can also check out some of the souvenir and book stores at the airport.      Maybe I will find a Japanese-language Tintin book to add to my collection (classic European comic strip book from the 30s now translated in 50 languages).      I can also look for a book with the Doraemon character that I have seen on sweatshirts that my China colleagues wear.     Doraemon is an earless robotic cat (!) who travels back in time from the 22nd century to aid a schoolboy Nobita Nobi.     The character is a Japanese cultural icon and was riginally a manga series which later became an anime series and an Asian franchise.

I leave on Saturday and that means I have to jump at it and make the purchases I need to so that I can pack on Friday.   At the top of the list was a replacement for my raggedy computer backpack.  The woven ballistic nylon is indestructable but the shoulder straps and stitching into the bag are getting frayed and that’s trouble.   This is basically an identical replacement for my older bag : a Victorinox Architecture 2.0 Big Ben Business Backpack.   It works very nicely for me as a computer bag that looks good enough to go to work with, with plenty of additional pockets and zips – and at the same time it doubles as a weekend city-backpack as well.    This new one has a so-called Fast Pass feature – you tear open the velcro that holds the computer section to the backpack and try your luck with the TSA official what might just let the whole thing go through the scanner without one needing to take the computer out.   Hey, anything that speeds up the process and reduces the number of items I have to stuff back into the bag, right ?

The gorgeous tiger picture arrived in the mail fom World Wildlife Fund.  I send them a little money sometimes for their efforts to save the wildlife on earth.    I hope we can save the world’s tigers a little while longer – what magnificent beasts they are.

The Korean Air plane at Hong Kong airport was at the gate next to our Asiana Air plane.    My three checked bags as well as I made the 45 min connection in Seoul – I had to make a run for Gate 49 ! and here I am in Seattle.      It was raining all over South Korea and the newspaper reported that a large number of schools closed for the day, over concerns of radioactive particles from Japan coming down in the rain.   Well, I thought — and what about the air conditioning at the airport, and the airplane? .. should I care?.  Let me sit back and drink my Korean pilsner beer (called Cass, probably too light and mild for most beer lovers, but I liked it fine).    As always I kept an eye on our flight path over Japan.   We flew almost directly over Tokyo, then turned north, brushed by the Aleution islands in the North Pacific and then down to Seattle.

P.S.  Yes, I refer to the 1962 Bob Dylan song in the title of the post.  I love the words, but note that Bob Dylan is on record to have said he did not refer to nuclear fall-out or rain from that, in the song.   The opening lyrics :

Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son ?
And where have you been my darling young one ?
I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways
I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

I made it to Hong Kong airport after taking care not to slide  in my Dameisha hotel bathroom (picture of the sign posted in there).  : )     Even at 9 in the morning we still got held up in Shenzhen traffic, but I allowed plenty of time to get to the airport.      I’m flying back through Seoul, South Korea and then on to Seattle.

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.