Tank Man and The "F" Word

My third day in China was very busy. We visited the Temple of Heaven, Tiananmen Square, The Forbidden City and Kunming Lake. Let me see, so far I have been frisked by a security guard in Vancouver, saw 2 people being whisked away in the Beijing airport to awaiting medical tents and medical personnel, got lost in the Beijing airport, was contacted by CNN for an interview, conquered my fear of flying and climbed the Great Wall of China, what a frigging adventure!!!


Our first stop was the gardens surrounding The Temple Of Heaven. The Temple of Heaven was constructed from 1406 to 1420 and visited annually by Emperors during the Ming and Qing dynasties to pray for good harvests. Music and activities were everywhere.


I love traditional Chinese music, love the tones and shapes of their instruments, I recorded some musical shorts on video and posted it at the end of this post.

Along with the music there was Chinese Shuttlecock,

and Tai Chi going on.




One of my goals, besides viewing the eclipse, climbing the Great wall, oh yeah and seeing the Terra Cotta Warriors was to get me and a friend fake Rolex Watches, as well as pick me up a "I Climbed The Great Wall" t shirt, well I got my shirt the day before and the Rolex watches that day and had my first experience with the local street vendors, they are everywhere and there are some good deals to be had if you know how to barter.



Since you can't actually go inside the Temple I leaned over the railing to get a shot of the beautiful ceiling work.


After the temple it was off to Tiananmen Square, the largest urban square in the world.


I gotta say our tour guide was very knowledgeable, a walking wikipedia on the history of Beijing, mention anything he always had a answer that usually went on and on and on so much so my brain started to hurt with way too much information,Temple this, Dynasty that, but mention..."Tank Man"..................................................................................................................................
......................................................................ribbit............................................................., silence fell, now from what I've been told, there have been major advancements in the personal freedoms and choices of the Chinese peoples over the last several years but there is still one major topic or taboo that no one is allowed to talk about and that is the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

Our tour guide either skirted or changed the subject every time I brought it up, there is no information on the subject over there, for some strange reason I thought there would be an X marking the spot or some kind of monument, seems the government is trying to either delete or re-write that part of their history. When I asked "can you at least point to the approximate area where it happened?" he hesitated then slowly pointed straight ahead down by the trees and and lamp posts on the image below. The avenue it occurred on, and you can see cars in the image below traveling on it is called Chang'an, it runs between Tiananmen Square and the entrance to the Forbidden City. Even today Freight trucks are not allowed to use the road and no commercial advertising is allowed within 100 metres of the street.



The government blocked twitter, blogger and even hotmail due to the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, control the information flow, control the people.

That night I was watching the BBC news in my hotel room, they were reporting on a group of teenage students that were just quarantined at the Beijing Hospital, the reporter was saying the hospital was taking good care of them and that they were all having a great time, as he was reporting the camera was zooming in on the group about 30 or so yards away from the camera, behind a shoulder length chain link fence they were waving and smiling away to the reporters......., just kind of seemed a little staged, maybe not, maybe they were having a great time....behind the chain link fence.

This whole H1N1 thing brings up another question, the "F" word, what do the locals do if they feel a fever coming on? Do they sweat it out in hopes it's nothing too serious or do they pack their bags and expect to be away for a couple weeks? I asked the guide about this as well, he just laughed and said no problem, stay at home til better. The person sitting next to me on the plane was heading to Beijing from Vancouver to visit his family. I asked him how he felt about the virus and the quarantine, he said, China was a big place , lots of people and the government had to be careful.... that was it, then he went back to playing video games, he brought his laptop and was playing some cool space shooting game, and was actually very good, I dropped some hints about taking a turn, I even fixed his adapter for him so he could run it off the plane's electricity and said things like "cool game", and "how many lives do you have left", "I have a PS3" but he didn't take the hints, so I went back to watching "The Man From Planet X".

From Tiananmen square we entered The Forbidden City, 980 buildings and 8,700 rooms.
The Forbidden City was the imperial palace to the Ming and Qing dynasties, was built between 1406 and 1420 and was called forbidden because no one was allowed to enter or leave without the Emperor's permission. Such a huge place with magnificent buildings, again we did a lot of walking around, they kept it very clean, as we were waiting the hour it took for our guide to get through the lines to get tickets I got a picture of a cleaner and his cool witch type broom.


Kunming lake and the Summer Palace were our last stops that day. Once a summer resort for Empress Dowager Cixi, (Qing Dynasty) it is now a beautiful resort and lake for all to enjoy.

We also took a boat ride across the lake.


and saw some kites.



I'll leave you now with a video of some musical shorts, first a musical selection from the Tang Dynasty show I saw in Xian, then a quick change mask artist, some music from the park, a short of a singer from our Beijing hotel lobby and to end it off an actor from a play I saw, "The Legend Of Kung Fu" hitting a fish drum, fish never close their eyes, well they can't, therefore they are a symbol to monks to remain ever vigilant like them, next stop the Terracotta Warriors.

The Great Wall Of China

"He who has not climbed the Great Wall is not a true man" Mao Zedong

Well it's official......I am now a true man....for I have climbed the Great Wall Of China, and what an experience!!!!!




The building of sections of the great wall started way back in the 7th century BC, built by individual states to protect their borders from other would be invading peoples, it wasn't until the first emperor of China, Qin (pronounced chin, and where China got it's name) Shi Huang decided to combine all the walls in 221 BC in an effort to keep out invading Xiongnu from the north. His General Meng Tian used a labour force of three hundread thousand soldiers, as well as criminals, civil servants and conscripts to combine the individual walls and to build additional.

The wall is now around 8,800 km long. Built between the 7th century BC and the 16th century AD, it required a workforce of millions and at it's peak during the Ming Dynasty was guarded by a million soldiers.

Our tour group was taken to the Badaling portion of the wall, just north of Beijing, Bada means giving access to every direction, it was apparently a very strategic point in the wall. First constructed in 1505 by the Ming Dynasty, it is 7.8 meters high and is wide enough for 10 people to walk along abreast or 5 horses or 5 people with umbrellas as it was raining as we were touring.

Try to sneak through the small guard house openings with a bunch of other people with umbrellas, actually had my umbrella ripped from my hand by a couple people's umbrellas as they were squeezing by me, so here I was holding a camcorder in one hand a camera wrapped around my neck, a telephoto lens in my side pocket chasing down my umbrella.... I don't even like or use umbrellas, but had to keep the rain off my lens somehow, hard to keep track of everything and still take pictures of the momentous occasion.


I would stop every once in a while to touch and smell the wall and look through the tiny peepholes and imagined how it would have been back then fending off invading forces. The majesty and immenseness of the wall, what a feat of engineering to build such a landmark, the loss of life just in building the wall reaching into the millions, many were buried in the wall itself.



It finally stopped raining and left cool atmospheric clouds cutting across the distant wall and landscape, very cool effect. You notice how the wall seems to wind across the hills forever like a dragon. Dragons mean a lot to the Chinese people. A Dragon is a power of good. They fend off evil spirits, bring prosperity, good fortune and symbolise greatness, goodness and many blessings.


One thing you notice real fast is you do a lot of climbing, to get to the top of the section we were on takes a little under an hour, good thing it was cooler then it would have been if not for the rain, you get a real work out, but looking down from the top is an experience you will never forget. One thing I did is take a video of a walkthrough of the Great wall, just to give you an idea of the sights and sounds I experienced that day

Time went by way too fast before you knew it we were down and done and heading off to our next adventure on the tour, but all good things must come to an end, as did the military usefulness of the wall, it had it's time but the high cost of manning and maintaining it became too much, along with internal power struggles. A border General unhappy with his superiors let in the Manchus in 1644 to invade Beijing, overthrow the short lived Shun Dynasty and starting the Qing Dynasty.

The Galileoscopes Have Arrived

I am going to take a break from my China stories to bring you all an important announcement, I got my Galileoscopes in today and I gotta say I'm quite impressed. The image above was taken with my Canon 40D attached to the scope, not bad for a fifteen dollar investment.


I blogged about the scope once before here and said that to celebrate my daughter's wedding I would be giving 3 away. What I did is put the names on a piece of paper, threw them all up in the air and then just picked three off the floor at random, bet you never thought of that , if nothing else I'm original, more on the winners later.


First thing you notice about the scope is, that it is a kit , you have to put it together, lots of pieces, having said that it is not too hard to figure out, it comes with instructions even though I would have liked to have seen them more clear and detailed, like numbering all the parts at the start and then listing the number on the assembled drawing, I was left with a couple O rings that I still don't know where they fit, oh well that happens a lot to me and instructions.

This is critical... the foam enclosed objective lens, that is your main lens that fits in the front of the scope also contains your small lenses for your eyepieces. After I had put the scope together I started to put together the eyepieces and it was explaining how to assemble them but I couldn't find the lenses, looked high and low, went through all my packaging and bags then after what seemed like forever I thought I would check out the foam the objective lens came in, and sure enough they were there, they are so small and sandwiched between two pieces of thin foam taped to the side of the main objective foam that they got lost in the shuffle.


After I got the scope together which takes about fifteen minutes to a half an hour, I pointed it at the Moon, very good detail, again this only cost fifteen bucks, can't go wrong with that kind of investment, plus the learning experience you'll get while putting it together, again well worth the money and time spent.

I also pointed it at Jupiter and was able to see great detail and its four brightest moons even from my backyard. You will need to invest in a tripod, doesn't come with, I used my camera tripod to mount the telescope which worked very well. Overall a great buy and sure to increase the public's awareness and appreciation of the night sky, see what Galileo saw, he had the same type and size of scope. If you head over to the Galileoscope web site they have some cool downloads like observing and optics activity guides, bonus.

And now for the winners:

1. A Lil Enchanted
2. Lynda
3. Brad

Congratulations to all the winners,I know you will enjoy and put to good use this little scope.

I'll leave you now with a instructional video on how to put the Galileoscope together, something I probably should have watched.

Darkness Falls On Shanghai

I'm back and what an experience visiting China has been. Initially I decided to go because of the Solar eclipse, it didn't take long before I was forgetting what the main focus was as well as what it was slowly becoming, a sensory delight.

Touching the Great Wall Of China, smelling incense in the Jade Buddha Temple, walking in the Forbidden City seeing up close and personal the Terra -Cotta Warriors and hearing the chatter of a thousand voices in Tiananmen Square on a Saturday. I took the above image while our tour driver was taking a shortcut down the back-roads where the common people live, shot through the window, says a lot, a part of China we never toured but through the lens I was able to capture a moment in time.


Coming into China is an eyeopener. Right off the plane you follow signs that have arrows and say baggage, they basically just guide you to numerous checkpoints where you will be asked a series of questions and asked to show your passport, oh, and walk through a temperature sensor. Not once but twice the person right in front of me was whisked away to a waiting tent and to what looked like health officials, probably checking for signs of the H1N1 virus. She was with a group of teenagers, they reassured her they would wait, I never saw the group from then on.

There are numerous guards that line "baggage lane",(as I like to call it). they're just off to the side, and everyone is wearing protective masks, very intimidating to say the least. At the final checkpoint, there was a yellow line where you had to stop before you proceeded through to be asked the same questions and once again show your passport and go through another temperature sensor, I guess I was a little over the yellow line and a security/police/army type scary guy with a mask rushes in and shouts something in Chinese and pushes me back.......well I didn't know whether to shit, salute, or go into shock, come to think of it I probably did a little of each, now don't forget I had just come off an eleven hour fight from Vancouver, I wasn't a happy camper or feeling 100%, couple that with the fact that I was one of the lucky ones to be selected for a pat down at the Vancouver International Airport Security Check-In , and I mean pat down, hands down the back and front of my pants, told to assume the position and checked again, at least he thanked me for my cooperation.

After the final checkpoint you see another baggage sign with an arrow pointing to an escalator, you take this down, not to your waiting baggage but to a train station where you wait for a train that will take you to another building to finally get your baggage, congrats you pass and don't go to quarantine.


Then there is the matter of blocked social networking sites, stuff we take for granted like blogger and twitter. Another reminder that Bob wasn't in Kansas anymore. Of course this story has a happy ending , I made it home alive and well, the planes didn't crash and burn, I no longer have a fear of flying and I had a most excellent adventure. I even got lost in Shanghai while traveling down some back roads, finally got my bearings and made it back to the hotel.... again adding to the adventure.


I have lots of stories waiting to be told. I took over 1,200 images and 6 hours of video, but for now I will leave you with a video I took of the blackness that fell on Shanghai during the Total Solar Eclipse, we didn't get to see actual totality but we did experience the premature night fall which was quite the experience in itself.

Total Solar Eclipse In Shanghai (well, not quite total)

I have heard from Bob again. He got a couple of good Partial Eclipse images before it clouded over.


Here is part of the email he wrote to me -

"Colin it has been amazing here. So many stories to tell and pics to show but internet time is hard to get and I'm very busy and of course I can't get blogger here. At least we weren't totally blocked out with clouds and was able to get some partial eclipse pics before it totally clouded over, very super cool, and the sky went black like night for 5 minutes. Had people lined up to see my images and then thanking me. Chinese people are very polite, met lots of interesting people during the eclipse. I got a super video of the darkness and the reaction of the people around me when it happened which I will post when I get home."

Bob made the CNN website. He was a contact person in Shanghai and called them every 30 minutes or so to let them know how it was going. Here is a link to the CNN article. The CNN producer saw his website and emailed him to see if he'd be interested in doing an interview. How could he refuse?


"I have lots of stories and images to share when I get back, an experience of a lifetime! Bob"

On behalf of Bob, take care everyone, Astro-Nuts