Greetings from Trans-Siberia

The cruise ship people probably find this cruise somewhat unusual. I don’t think the casino is getting much business from the scientists on board, and few people go to the magic / acrobat / variety shows put on each night by the cruise director. In addition to all these typical cruise ship activities, the folks who chartered this particular itinerary have assembled a bunch of people to give lectures which are actually interesting to the people who signed up. One of the stranger ones was called “Geology and WWII”, and intermingled slides showing island formation in the Pacific as the plate slides over a lava vent, and the various expansions made by the Japanese in the years before World War II, and the various progress that the Allies made curbing these expansions. One of the linchpins of this progress was at Iwo Jima, an island south of the Japanese mainland where radar would detect Allied sorties made from New Guinea. Taking out this radar became a prime imperative, and it was quite difficult, among other reasons, because fighting is very difficult in lava flows. Another slide listed all the major battles in history fought in lava flows.

Anyway, it gave us an idea of what to expect when we reached Iwo Jima shortly before the eclipse — it was at the edge of the zone of totality, but we had enough time to make it back to the centerline before totality began.

The clouds and rain finally went away in the middle of the night before the eclipse — Ray was able to get up and see a bunch of stars from the deck. We cruised around Iwo Jima, and found many birds flying around the ship; some Dutch bird experts identified the primary species we were seeing as brown boobies, but they had seen at least six other species. One guy got a phenomenal picture of a brown booby about to swallow up a flying fish, by far the best picture I’ve seen anyone take of anything on the trip.

We headed up to the centerline, always concerned about the cumulus clouds which hung out here or there. But finally, as totality approached, the only clouds to be seen were a series of cute inclined puffy things on the horizon, which made the approaching shadow much more visible. As you have no doubt heard, it was a long eclipse, six minutes and forty-some seconds. The sun is particularly inactive right now, and there weren’t any prominences I noticed, though some photos we saw afterwards pointed out a few. I saw most of it through binoculars, and the corona was quite symmetrical and horizontal, with some cute tufts at the top and bottom. We easily saw Mercury and Venus, and it was easy to find Mars in the binoculars. A plane flew by the star Capella which was close to Venus.

Then it was over, and the boat turned and headed for Kobe. The weather held the rest of the day, and provided more stargazing opportunities after it got dark. I so seldom get to see the entirety of Scorpio, which is hidden from our house.

We’ve been parked at Kobe for a little over a day. There were several shore excursions available for purchase — some one-day tours of Kyoto, some overnight tours of Kyoto, and even an overnight tour that takes you up to Tokyo on the bullet train and back. That’s like flying to LA and taking an overnight tour to San Francisco, except that they haven’t bit the bullet train yet. We spent the days with our friend Ken, who translated Opcode stuff into Japanese and now translates Avid stuff. He showed us around various high spots, including a music-box museum, and several informal yet delicious opportunities to ditch the cruise boat fare and to have some authentic Japanese food. Alas, it’s all aboard an hour from now, and we’ll be at sea two days as we make our way back to China.

About 100 of the 1000 people aboard ended their voyage at Kobe. We considered that, but it was quite expensive to fly back to China. One of the people getting off warned us about the survey form we will be asked to fill out, pointing out that anytime we rate something as less than “excellent”, someone will lose their job or fail to be promoted. We’ll see if we can target the people who shop for the ingredients used in the food served on board, or perhaps the ones who decide that all soft drinks cost extra money, and that none of the dinners are served with included wine.

(Sorry the last few posts don’t have locations — I don’t have the GPS with me. We’ll update them when we get back to Beijing.)

 

Last night there was a chilled kiwi soup.  The chilled soups have actually been among the better of the food items available on the ship.  This one was mixed with what seemed to be milk which had gone bad, and if you don’t like that particular variety of sour and bitter, you’re out of luck.

 

 

 

Especially when traveling around the Roman empire, it’s common to encounter the ruins of a stadium, and one can easily imagine gladiators or lions and Christians putting on a show to the excited masses watching from the seats above.

As we went to the Olympic games complex in Beijing yesterday, I was wondering why people would be paying an admissions fee just to enter an empty stadium with no event happening, and then I remembered visiting the Roman sites. The Bird’s Nest and the Aquatic Center are both quite popular tourist destinations — many people were there in middle of a summer Wednesday. At least the Aquatic Center gave an impression of still being in use — there were sets for “Swan Lake”, the water ballet, around the main competition pools, and the warm-up pool is open to the public, after screening for swine flu.

The plaza between them is also quite massive — I would not be surprised if it’s larger than Tienanmen Square. And there still seems to be construction going on — I guess the Chinese economy hasn’t turned down so far that they’re not creating more business space around Beijing.

The neighborhood near our hotel has some fruit vendors on the street selling mangosteens — we’ve been picking up a few every chance we get since we won’t find them once we get back to the West. Or even back to the USSR. There’s a panel truck parked on the street near the hotel which is filled with mixed recycling, and a family seems to spend their days sorting it all out — it’s interesting that that job is so distributed.

Also near our hotel is a wonderful authentic Sichuan restaurant which the staff recommended. Everything on the menu has pictures, but they basically don’t know any English. We had some slightly spicy pork and vegetables inside a lotus leaf, some spinach with a black bean sauce with salted fish, and a beautiful plate which turned out to be mushrooms — a dozen of them about the size and shape of tongues atop a mixture of many other varieties. If we don’t hook up with a friend of ours who’s here on a pre-eclipse tour, maybe we’ll go back tonight.

Today we went up to the Summer Palace, which seemed even more packed with tourists than our visit last year to the Forbidden City. It’s a large park next to a lake, with a large Buddhist Incense Tower and several museums showing relics collected by the Empress Dowager Cixi and others who built and stayed there. The Summer Palace is all new construction, since Lord Elgin burned down the original in 1860. One of the more recent restorations was completed in 1996 and houses a furniture museum

Later: back to Little Sichuan is where we went. Tonight we had a wood ear salad with some white noodle shaped thing that might have been a marinated root, in sesame oil and vinegar. Also, eels ginger and celery with Sichuan Pepper and red pepper that was more like what you think of as an American when you encounter Sichuan food. And a cabbage and meatball soup. We didn’t go all out tonight like last night. The bill was under 100 yuan ($14.33, says Oanda of our 98 RMB bill)
I had been hoping all afternoon for a call from a friend who is on an eclipse tour passing through Beijing, but a combination of a 24 hour plane delay and a ruthless tour company whose checklist of must-see things is more important that the comfort of its customers, prevented us from meeting this trip.

We hadn’t been in the Temple of Heaven very long before the first groups of tourists approached for photos. One slides seamlessly from tourist to attraction. We were photographed by people from Guangxi province, Afghanistan, and Spain, among others, each bringing their own interpretation.

The Temple of Heaven is the center of the world in the Chinese system. There is a particular round platform with a small marble disk on it that is rather like Four Corners in the number of tourists who take their picture standing on it. Most visitors seem to proceed from the park entrance, to the center of the universe, to the two buildings north of it that you aren’t allowed into but can peer in the door and try to make out the wood ceilings. The largest temple is actually quite new, having been most recently burned down in the late 19th century and been rebuilt to the original plans, which did not include nails.

The accessory buildings have mostly been turned into museums, where you can see the various palanquins and portable altars for carrying sacred tablets and the remains of emperors and little gold censers and doodads all sorts. Make sure to notice the Qing dynasty urn handles. They have an insouciant wave to them that Alessi would patent if they had thought of them first, very modern.

Far to the West, where not so many crowds venture, is the Divine Music Administration. The Divine Music Administration buildings fell into complete disrepair after the fall of the Qing. They were used for storage, barracks, hutong housing, and the Imperial Japanese even set up a germ warfare research lab, for which the Chinese have erected a memorial stele. The Japanese were serious about that, to the detriment of the Chinese people. They were to the American biological warfare program what the Germans were to rocketry.

But I am not worried about having toured the site of a germ warfare lab because when we go to Chernobyl it will kill all the bacteria.

In the last ten years, the remaining tenants of the DMA have been evicted and the building reconstructed to the original specifications, and it is now a musical instrument museum and performance hall. There are explanations on the wall, some in English, of how the Chinese tonal scale came to be. Every note has been precisely laid out to astronomical specifications or other opinions of various scholars. There never was a Pythagoras in China, just a long accumulation of traditions and scholars who occasionally tweaked the frequency of a note. One of the signs on a neolithic bone pipe mentioned that you could play an acceptably good rendition of <here was the name of some Chinese folk song> on it, by way of indicating how one particular tuning system had transmitted down 8000 years of history.

We came back on the subway at rush hour, which was not more crowded than any other time of day. The Beijing metro is pretty sleek.  The only glitch is that their tickets seem to fade. We bought 4 tickets in the morning and by the afternoon our two return tickets were dead. Maybe they have a time limit, but the English translations didn’t go so deeply into the subject.

Last night we went to a carefully chosen Tripadvisor restaurant, the Dali Courtyard. Tripadvisor’s contributors are mostly impressed by mammoth Peking Duck restaurants but if you read between the lines you can sometimes determine who is best listened to, for your own tastes. (The Dadong chain makes good Peking Duck but they aren’t 4 of the top 20 restaurants in town.) Dali Courtyard might not be 8th best but it certainly is interesting, except their muzak playlist is only about 5 torch songs long. They just bring you food. Deep fried fungus, unknown mushrooms (we have so few mushrooms in America), fermented tofu skin, lemon leaves and shrimp tempura…really wonderful tapas. It takes a lot of work to find it. There is one red lantern in a hutong near the Drum Tower that tells you to walk down an alley. The taxi driver couldn’t find it even after calling them. But it’s worth it.  Dali Courtyard is at 39.94009 N, 116.39875 E.

It isn’t a good sign when the flight to an eclipse gets diverted for bad weather.  We were about 300 kilometers northwest of Beijing and had actually descended a little bit, when the captain turned northwest avoiding a bunch of thunderclouds and then came on the radio announcing that we weren’t going to Beijing, we were going to Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia, because the Beijing airport was closed due to bad weather.  We proceeded another thirty minutes and landed.  I’m writing this as we are parked on the tarmac.  A few guards are standing around and some locals are taking photos.  It doesn’t seem likely that we’ll get off the plane; I somehow doubt that Hohhot has immigration facilities to handle a 747 full of diverted eclipse chasers (we aren’t the only ones on this flight).  In fact, I’m surprised that a 747 can even land here.  Although, you must keep in mind that there are probably 40 cities in China larger than San Jose that you’ve never heard of, and any city you have heard of probably has 2 million inhabitants and a big airport.  And everybody knows Hohhot.

I can actually see the sun through the haze, if that’s any consolation.

(later)

After about two hours of waiting, we took off again and got to a very empty Beijing airport.  We rejected a van who would have taken us to our lodgings for about 400 yuan, and instead took a metered taxi and got there for 100 yuan, including a generous tip.  (A yuan was $6.83 yesterday.)

The place we’re staying is known to us as “Michael’s House in Beijing”, though no Roman script is visible on the outside of the building.  It’s delightful so far — a little courtyard in the style of the hutong houses that were all torn down to modernize Beijing, and all the guest rooms immediately adjoining. The bathrooms have a kind of Formule1 feel, with IKEA shampoo in a bottle, so you won’t feel like a Ming emperor while bathing but you will feel refreshed

Time to check out their hotel breakfast.

We just saw the 2003 DVD “The Story of the Weeping Camel” about a family in rural Mongolia and their challenges raising camels. The camels were two-humped with huge manes and beards, looking unlike any camel we’d ever seen. Highly recommended, especially the night before leaving for a trip to Mongolia.