Travelogue: China: Wxman writes:

Decorations on buildings at Summer Palace
(Doubleclick photos to enlarge)


Walkway at the Summer Palace

From: WXMAN
Date: Apr 15, 2007 4:50 PM
Subject: Trip to China





Well, we're back from China and over the jet lag (I think). It's much worse coming back west than going east. What a trip to remember! The Chinese really know how to treat visitors. We felt like we had moved up in the social hierarchy a few steps! They took care of absolutely everything, from meeting us at the airport (at 11:30 pm), to showing us around (even on Sunday), to treating us to very elaborate meals, to putting us up in a suite in a country villa, to paying for my arline ticket in cold Chinese cash (that'll take me about 2 weeks to redeem in the US). It was truly a great time.

I "worked" Monday through Wednesday lunch, but really the only things I did were give a talk on Monday evening (after playing ping-pong, how cool was that?) and holding question and answer sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday morning. Since I've been working on automated cloud detection for about 10 years now, it wasn't too difficult. Most of those 3 days were spent at a semi-rural location about an hour north of Beijing where most of the NSMC staff were temporarily located and working on the software for their next meteorological satellite. They work very hard when they are on a special project like this, in two shifts per day, but I don't know how many hours per shift. But they also play hard, mostly at badminton, tennis, and ping-pong.

The remainder of the time we were in a nice downtown Beijing hotel. We visited the Great Wall, Summer Palace, Forbidden City, Tienamen Square, some gorge I don't remember the name of, and did some shopping.

Just like you've heard, the amount of construction taking place is awesome. It's non-stop, around-the-clock, literally almost on every block, from downtown to the countryside. Like I read somewhere, that's what an annual economic growth rate of 8% looks like.

The food we had was good, but after the 3 days at the villa that had no western food at all, the first thing we did was hit the Pizza Hut! J was quite pleased with himself for eating octopus. I think I we probably did to, but how to know? We ate a lof ot things we couldn't identify! Thankfully, the hotel in Beijing had a breakfast buffet that served very good Western-style food.

I've attached some pictures we took. Here's a brief description of each:

1 - outdoor walkway at the Summer Palace
2 - decorations on buildings at the Summer Palace
3 - pig-tailed staff receiving instructions and "psyching up" before restaurant opening
4 - old fashioned transportation
5 - country dwellings just yards from our rural hotel window; white on the hills was a flowering tree or shrub
6 - A view from the Great Wall
7 - A view of the Great Wall
8 - at the Great Wall
9 - View of Chairman Mao from Tienamen Square