People

The people of Beijing and the Olympics were fascinating.

The costumes in the mascots' parade...





Out in the city, the Chinese were very interested in the Olympics. A basketball game with China playing was on in this restaurant / bar. Even the band kept their eyes on the TV.



In line to get into the Olympics. Many parents opt for crotchless pants for their kids instead of diapers. We saw parents hold kids over planters and shrubs to let them pee.



You know those cute Oriental fans? They're actually very practical. Many people carry them and fan themselves to keep cool. Some men roll their shirts up to their armpits for extra ventilation. It's just that hot in Beijing in August.



Some men "paint" calligraphy in water on the pavement in parks. This man is drawing the characters for a poem. When the water evaporates, the art will be gone.



Inside the Olympic compound, nearly everyone is either posing for a picture or taking one of their friends posing. Many of those posing are pretending to hold the Olympic torch.



These girls were eating a snack while staffing a booth at the flea market. When they saw me starting to take a picture, they hurriedly wiped the crumbs off of their lips and posed.



There are tons of volunteer kids who seem quite nice. We joke that the way to use the ticket vending machines in the subway is to walk up to one, look confused for about 15 seconds, and a volunteer will appear. These volunteers also wanted us to pose for a picture with them. (I got their photographer to snap a picture with my camera, too.)



I don't know what this story is. I saw it and snapped it. Please let me know if you know.

Some Technology Stuff

OK, this is supposed to be "technical tourists." How about some technology stuff? Here are some things we used and how it worked out.

• The hotel had internet access, so a computer could help us stay in touch. I have a remote access VPN to get into email at work.

Hotel internet access was sometimes a little slow, but generally OK. Once internet access seemed to be down; we couldn't reach any sites. We tried to release and renew our DHCP lease with no luck. I happened to remember the ip number of a DNS server back in the states. We tried to ping that and got a good ping. Since it looked like we just weren't in touch with a working DNS server, I entered that server's address manually into our TCP/IP configuration.

• As mentioned earlier, I had heard stories about how the Chinese hack / spy on US tourists and that US Customs likes to search and copy incoming computers and took steps to avoid the possibility of having any confidential data that I could be forced to disclose.
  

It turned out Customs was a breeze. No crazy searches. I don't know if the stories are untrue, if I just got lucky, or if I just didn't look like someone hiding anything. But it's still safer than risking confidential data.

• We use Vonage for our home phone. We added a Vonage Softphone account. This lets us install a program on the computer and use the computer and a headset to do voice over IP (VOIP). We felt there were two advantages of this: 1) we wouldn't have to lug our Vonage box and a POTS phone to China, and 2) our Vonage box would require wired internet access. If there were a problem with getting that, the laptop could possibly get a connection through WIFI.
  

This worked fine. We had a US phone number that worked as such from Beijing. Occasionally, there were some odd delays and lost sound, but sound quality was usually very good. We actually even used it to call places in Bejing. For billing purposes, we were making international calls from the US to Beijing. However, we KNEW that was cheap on Vonage and we didn't know what the charge on the hotel phone would be.

• We activated international access for our cell phones, which should have allowed them to roam at over $2 / minute or text at 40 cents per text sent or received.

Mostly we left the phones turned off. When we did once try to call and text, it didn't seem to work right. Perhaps we needed to enter a bunch of international dialing codes since theoretically we were calling from China to a US phone?

• We brought a GPSr. We weren't able to find very good maps to load on it ahead of time, though.

This actually came in a little handy. I set waypoints at the hotel, near the Pearl Market, and near subway stations while riding past them in the bus. We were able to use it to help direct cab drivers and on foot when coming from a direction we weren't familiar with.

• For electricity, we brought a collection of plug adapters and a voltage adapter.

Oddly, the electrical outlets in the hotel seemed to be made for multiple types of plugs. Since most of our electrical stuff was designed to automatically deal with 110-240 volts, we were able to just plug it in.



Why is one outlet marked "UPS"? When you come in the room, you plug your key card into a receptacle just inside the door. This turns on electricity for the room. Removing the card as you go out turns off all electricity including lights, TV, and air conditioning. That one outlet doesn't get turned off. That way you can leave a charger plugged in and on when you go out.

Interesting Signs

OK, what trip to an asian country is complete without mention of Engrish signs. Signs like these are why I don't attempt to copy Chinese characters onto a slip of paper to use to tell a cab driver where to take me. I hate to think of the mistakes I'd make.

First, at Badaling (the Great Wall) there were a couple of snack shops.





Inside the Olympic compound, on some sort of scaffolding parts:


In the subway, on a door:



At the Terracotta Army site:


A store just outside of the Terracotta Army site. Perhaps it means that they haven't actually given up communism for capitalism.


A small restaurant in Beijing:



On top of the Great Wall:

Great Wall

The Great Wall of China. There are several places available for tourists to visit. This is the closest one to Beijing and the most built up, Badaling.



The really steep parts have steps. This is not the steep part.



The Great wall was built for defense. That included monitoring / observation and communication. It looks like these are some recent updates.





Looking back into the valley to see where I started the climb.


Looking ahead, you can climb down and wind off into the distance. (Of course, returning will require climbing back up.)









It's Sunday, so the Wall gets very crowded. It actually gets gridlocked.

Shopping

When people talk about shopping in Beijing, they're probably talking about the "Pearl Market." They do actually have some pearl stores there, but it's mostly knock-off clothes, electronics, fake, and stuff of dubious quality. Buyer beware rules. It's up to you to know if you're getting an unbelievable good deal on freshwater pearls, or a really bad deal on some beads.

Haggling is expected and intense. Asking "how much" is not a good way to try to get an idea of how much something sells for. It is just an opening to negotiations.



Sales can be high pressure. Vendors may shout for your attention. Some actually grabbed my arm to keep me from leaving their booths.




Another shopping experience is the flea market. Vendors bring their merchandise in and set up small booths, often with reproductions and knick-knacks. There might be some genuine antiques, but probably not anything really old. It's illegal to try to take cultural artifacts out of the country. Fortunately, the really old-looking stuff here is probably a reproduction.





Antique word processor and calculator. I wonder where the NATO ammo can came from.


In downtown Beijing, there are shopping malls that look as nice and modern as anything in the US.



There might not be escalators in the subway stations or Olympic stadiums, but the capitalists who built the malls included them.



While in Xi'an, we saw a Home Depot. I really would have liked to look around in it, but there wasn't time. It would have been neat to see metric 2x4s and drywall.

Xi'an and the Terracotta Warriors

About 210 BC, an army of more than 8000 terracotta soldiers was created and buried with Emperor Qin Shi Huang. They were discovered by accident by farmers digging a well in 1974.

I'd heard about this and thought it'd be great to see, but the site was so far from Beijing, I didn't think it was possible. Several other people in the group were interested, so we caught a train to go there for a day. The train ride was about 10 hours each way, but it was an overnight trip, nonstop, with sleeper cars, so it really wasn't bad.

When we got to the city of Xi'an, we found it very crowded and busy.



A policeman monitors traffic at the center of an intersection. Police apparently have corporate sponsorship in China.



The Terracotta Army site was about an hour bus ride outside of the city. The pits from where the warriors have been excavated are in huge covered structures. Not all of the warriors have been excavated. A very large amount of them are still buried. Some of the warriors have just been uncovered and haven't been pieced together.










(Click to embiggen!)









After touring the site, we went back to Xi'an. There, we saw the city from the top of the old city wall. Xi'an is a pretty big city, about 2.6 million. The city extends way beyond the wall. Now the wall perhaps marks "downtown" versus the suburbs.



You can rent bicycles and ride around on the top of the wall. It's about 14 km. around, but part was closed for repairs.



Next to the wall are parks, public exercise equipment, and other recreational space.