It’s been a while

I’ve noted before that my high-school friend Bill Irwin found these pages some while go, and we’ve reconnected. Such are the benefits of social networks, including blogs, as well as, yes, Twitter and Facebook, if you can accept those. I’ve also noted that after five years of mostly daily blogging, I decided to back off starting in February, cutting back to every two or three days instead.

About a week and a half ago, Bill posted a comment to my most recent entry here. The entry is perhaps fittingly titled Don’t make promises... [you can’t keep]; fitting because my promise of two or three blog entries a week has not been kept — that most recent post is dated 7 September, and today is 25 October.

I didn’t publish Bill’s comment, because I wanted to promote it to a top-level entry. And note that it took me a week and a half to get to that. Here’s what he said:

Alright, Leiba, I’ve had enough. You inspired me to start out on my own blog and now you’ve stopped your own. Dammit, what gives? Gimme some feedback, dude, I don’t won’t to lose contact with you after all these many years...

Mea culpa; mea maxima culpa. First, I’ll say that anyone I’ve (re-)connected with through these pages will not be lost: you know how to contact me, I know how to contact you, and we can stay in touch.

That said, I do want to keep writing here, and I do intend to. It’s clear that once I gave up the discipline of daily, I lost the push to do it altogether; it’s been too easy to turn an every so often commitment into no commitment at all. I might have to re-think how I get motivated to post here. Because I do have a number of things set aside to say, but I haven’t made the time to say them.

And I won’t, probably, for the next few weeks either. I’ll try to get something out here and there, but I’m in the middle of a batch of (mostly business) travel. I was at the Internet Identity Workshop last week; I’m in Paris for the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group this week. And the travels continue until I get back from the IETF meeting in Taipei on 18 November.

For now, I’ll post, below a panorama of the view from my hotel room, looking north from Montparnasse (click to enlarge). The major buildings are, left to right, Tour Montparnasse (Montparnasse Tower, the black office tower on the far left), Hôtel National des Invalides (the gold-dome, a military museum and hospital/residence for disabled veterans), Observatoire de Paris (the white dome), Basilique du Sacré Cœur (Sacred Heart Basilica, on the hill in the far rear), Abbaye du Val de Grâce, and Hôtel du Panthéon (the domes in the foreground).

Inventing the Internet

I’m in Québec City this week for the IETF meeting. A group of us were having dinner last evening, and at the end of the meal, as we were paying, the waitress asked us what we were all in town for. We told her were were at a meeting to work on standards for how things talk to each other on the Internet.

So she tells us about a crazy lady who comes in the restaurant every afternoon. The lady claims to have invented a bunch of things, and one thing she says is that she invented the Internet. After someone makes the required Al Gore joke, I say, well, to tell you the truth, no one at this table qualifies but we do actually have some people in our group who actually did invent the Internet. She says It’s one person who did it?, and we say no, maybe eight or ten or so... and at least four of them really are here this week.

Fourth of July, Miami Beach

A photo, after a while of no posts

I’ve been too busy to post to these pages for the last couple of weeks, and I miss it. Too much going on with work; very busy with a couple of IETF working groups, along with other discussions and whatnot. And it turns out that Blogger has been having some problems, and some recent posts were removed in the process of fixing them, so it’s just as well, I guess.

So for now, here’s a photo from last week’s breeze through Amsterdam for a couple of days of meetings.

Is it art?

The item to the right (click it to enlarge) is on display at the Czech National Gallery at Veletržní Palác. As you can see, it comprises two white-painted wooden chairs that are tied together with rope.

There’s lots of other stuff at the (very extensive and interesting) gallery for which I don’t have to ask this question, but for this piece, here it is: Is it art?

What do you think?

We decline!

I’m back from Prague, and recovering from the trip. I talked about the Czech language after my 2007 visit, and mentioned the case endings. This trip’s given me something else to say about that.

After the IETF meeting, during the vacation part of my stay, I moved to a hotel called The Golden Tree. In Czech, golden tree is zlatý strom, and there were a few things around that said that. But that’s the nominative case. Hotel names are frequently (usually, it seems) rendered as U [something], where the word u is like the french chez, meaning at the place of. That throws it into the genitive case, so the proper name of the hotel is U Zlatého Stromu.

Czech has three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and seven cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative, and instrumental), so the combinations of endings as nouns are declined and adjectives are changed to match can be dizzying.

Unlike German (but like other Slavic languages, such as Russian), Czech declines proper nouns, including people’s names. And they decline everyone’s names, not just Czech ones, or ones that look like they might be Czech.

This trip included a visit to the Czech Museum of Music, which had an exhibit called Beatlemánie, about the Beatles. I had to see that, of course.

It was amusing to see the names declined. The most interesting was Sir Paul’s. He was Paul McCartney when it was nominative, of course. But when a display talks about The Solo Career of Paul McCartney, it becomes Sólová dráha Paula McCarneyho.

Paula McCartneyho ?

Oy!

Fever

That’s the good kind of fever.

Right now, I have the bad kind of fever, the kind where you wake up in the middle of the night and wonder whether the heat will turn your brain into a rutabaga, and hope that the fact that you’re thinking that means it won’t.

And I have two days of meetings at my company’s U.S. headquarters in Santa Clara, CA. I bet the folks I’m meeting with will be just delighted at my hacking cough and my nose blowing, yes, indeedy.

Making your airport friendly for laptop users

It seems that Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, at least in the H & K concourses, go out of their way to make sure there are no accessible power outlets near the seating. There’s a set of carels that have two duplex outlets each, along with a small shelf and an uncomfortable seat. But near the regular seating for the gates... rien.

People sit on the floor near the few outlets that an be found along the walls, but they fill up quickly. And sitting on the floor isn’t ideal, of course.

Contrast that with San Francisco, where I flew into, which has plenty of accessible outlets right around the seating areas.

While we’re at it, big kudos to the airports that provide free wireless Internet service. Neither ORD nor SFO do that.

Touring Beijing, appendix 3: Final Notes

Before we leave China, I have a final note, on the people and the country and the daily life.

Yes, it’s communist; yes, it’s authoritarian; yes, there’s the network censorship, and all that. There’s no political dissent. The press is controlled. There’s a lot of risk to speaking out.

But, day to day, there is no sense of oppression in these people. They are free to do as they like from day to day. They are happy. There’s little police presence (less than what I see in New York City, for example) and no sense that people are being watched. Apart from knowing that they can’t openly speak their minds, I feel that could be in New York, Los Angeles, London, or Frankfurt, as far as the daily life goes.

The missing stuff is important of course, and I won’t ignore that. It’s just that this is very much not Mao’s China, not the China of fifty years ago. It’s clear that one day, it won’t be the China of today, either. Things continue to change.

They’ve embraced capitalism in a big way, and the Chinese companies are competing with the rest of the world in a way that was not imaginable when I was a child. For that matter, even the idea that I might one day visit China, much less happily work for a Chinese company, was complete fantasy. I remember that when President Nixon went to China in 1972, it was a really big deal.

The world has changed, and continues to.

Touring Beijing, appendix 2: Language

Of course, you know that I couldn’t get away from the China stories without saying something about the language.

When I arrived, I knew none of the writing at all, and only two useful things to say: nǐ hǎo (你好, hello... literally, you good), and xiè xiè (谢谢, thank you). Nice things, but not sufficient for much.

By the time I left, I still didn’t know much more to say in conversation. But I learned some interesting things in general.

What surprised me the most, I think, is that I learned to read quite a few of the characters. For those who don’t know, each Chinese character represents one syllable... with multiple different characters representing the same syllable, with different meanings. Each syllable has a meaning in itself, and combinations of syllables can make words with meanings different from the component syllables. For example, 大, dà, means big/large. 学, xué, means science or learning. Together, 大学 means university.

A lot of Chinese is put together as concepts. Similar to big learning becoming university, we have the words for entrance and exit, 入口 and 出口, respectively. The second character, kǒu, means mouth, or, figuratively, opening. And so the words mean in opening and out opening.

Chinese for China is 中国, zhōng guó, meaning middle country, and you can see the character for middle or center in many other contexts, for shopping center, and such. And because Chinese doesn’t separate things into parts of speech in the same way we do, 国, guó, can mean nation or national, so you see it in phrases such as national museum.

It was easy, from looking at the names of the stops in the subway system, to figure out 北 (běi, north), 南 (nán, south), 东 (dōng, east), and 西 (xi, west). You see Beijing (北京, north capital) around all the time, of course, so that one’s easy. The others show up in many location names. And there are gates (门, mén) all over the city (Tiān’ānmén, for example, 天安门). It then becomes easy to read the Chinese name for one subway stop, in full: 北京大学东门, Beijing University east gate.

It came in very handy to have learnt the characters for the four directions: on Thursday of touring, I left the Jishuitan subway station and headed east, looking for the lakes (starting with Xi Hai, West Lake) to walk around. Not finding an entrance soon, I figured I needed to go a block or two south to find it, so I turned right. I soon saw the Xizhimen subway station, which I knew to be in the wrong place entirely: I had to be significantly south and west of where I thought I was — or else someone had moved the station.

Looking at the street signs, though, I could see that I was going west, not south, and that turning left at the intersection I was approaching would send me south. See the photo to the right (taken a few blocks later, after I’d gone south on Zhaodengyu Road and was about to turn east onto Ping’anli West Avenue), and note that, while the street names are written in English, the directional arrows have only the Chinese characters... which it was very nice to know just then.

I also learned more about the tones in spoken Chinese (though I didn’t learn to properly reproduce them). Apart from a neutral tone, there are four tones in spoken Mandarin, which is what makes it sound, to western ears, either sing-song or whiny, depending upon one’s perception. Imagine three pitches, high, medium, and low. The first tone, designated in Pinyin with a straight line over the vowel (ō), is a steady high pitch. Second tone, designated with an acute accent (ó) starts at medium and rises to high. Third tone, designated with a caron (ǒ), starts at medium, dips to low, then rises to high. And the fourth tone, shown by a grave accent (ò), starts at high and drops to low. The Pinyin markings mimic graphically the directions of the pitch changes.

The same syllable may have different meanings in written Chinese, depending upon the character used to represent it. But in spoken Chinese, the tone conveys different meanings. For example, 茶 means tea, and is spoken in the second tone, chá. 喳 is in the first tone, chā, and means twitter or chirp. In the third tone, 衩 (chǎ) means panties, and in the fourth tone, 诧 (chà) means surprised. As in, you would be surprised if you tried to order tea and chirped panties instead.

Touring Beijing, appendix 1: Food

Now that I’ve finished the daily travelogue, I wanted to say a couple of other things, in general, about visiting China. Today: the food.

Executive summary: I loved it!

On my first night there, I was in Shenzhen on my own, and decided to walk around and find a place to have dinner. I don’t know any Chinese, and, hoping for an English menu, I went to a nice-looking restaurant that was near two upscale, western-style hotels, figuring that my best bet was there. I went up the half-flight of steps from the street to the door, and said to the two young women waiting there, Do you have an English menu?

They smiled and laughed a little nervously. They didn’t even know the word English in English. That’s not surprising, now that I think about it; I don’t know the word Chinese in Chinese, either. I made a motion with my hands, and they smiled and invited me in, and handed me a menu. It had pictures. That will do, thought I, and I nodded. One of them led me to a table.

I started looking through the pictures, and very quickly a waitress appeared. And stood there. I soon learned that this is the way it’s done there: you’re expected to know what you want, or at least figure it out fairly quickly, and the waitresses will stand there until you order. There’s no way to get them to go away and give you a few minutes. On this first experience of it, I felt uneasy, and picked something out quickly, something that appeared to be chicken with hot peppers, many slices of fresh red and green hot peppers. I also got some tea.

The waitress asked me something else, and, of course, I didn’t understand. I looked blankly at the menu, looked back at her and shrugged, and she made a never mind sort of gesture and left. She soon came back with tea, and then later with my food.

One thing about the picture menus is that it’s easy enough to tell that a dish has meat, but it’s not so easy to figure out the kind of meat. What had looked like chicken with hot peppers turned out to be fatty pork and chopped fried egg with hot peppers. It was very tasty, and I’m glad I’m happy to eat any kind of meat (though I could have done without all the fat), but it was definitely not what I’d been expecting.

Soon, another woman, appearing to be supervising the waitresses, came by and tried to ask me something. But when I couldn’t answer her, she went to someone else and said something, and the latter scooped some steamed rice into a bowl and came over to offer it. Ah, xie xie [谢谢, thank you], I said, and they smiled. They’d been trying to ask if I wanted rice, and I didn’t know what they were asking, nor how to answer. They added the rice to my bill.

The meal — a large portion of pork/egg/peppers, rice, and tea — cost ￥24, about $3.70.

Breakfast at the hotel (included in the room rate) was steamed buns, fried noodles, and fried vegetables. They also had cold cereal available, and congee, rice porridge.

In general, I found the food tasty and excellent, and very, very cheap by western standards. In both Shenzhen and Beijing, one could easily eat for just a few dollars a person. The hot-pot meal we had on Monday night after touring the Temple of Heaven was extravagant, at about $12/person. I had my fill of noodles, stir-frys, hearty soups, filled dumplings and buns, and lots of fresh fruits.

One could easily break the budget in the hotel, of course. In Beijing, the Shangri-La is a fancy, western hotel, with fancy, western prices. The breakfast buffet there, all by itself, would have cost more than $30 if it hadn’t been included in the room rate. That’s at least three days worth of meals outside, just for one breakfast. The buffet was quite extensive, though, here including not just the Chinese staples, but a full selection of American things (eggs & omelets, bacon, croissants, and so on), lots of fresh fruits and juices, cheese and cold cuts, and even smoked fish and sushi.

I also learned two things that are different about eating Chinese food there and here:

When we do Chinese food family style, we get one dish per person and share them all. They will get more than one dish per person — a full meal for six will include at least ten different dishes, sometimes more. We had one meal of duck, pork, lamb, several vegetables, dumplings, snails... when we realized that they’d forgotten to bring the fish we’d ordered, we decided not to fix it; we’d had more than enough food as it was.

Also, they don’t generally get rice with the meal. They will often have fried rice brought as one of the last courses, to be eaten after everything else, not with — and definitely not with the other foods mixed into the rice, as many Americans do. As someone described it to me: in case you’re still hungry, here’s some fried rice.

Touring Beijing, part 7

Thursday, 18 November

I thought today would be the wind-down day, checking out the parks in the center of town, and just getting ready to have an early night for an early departure on Friday. I started with a good walk through Zizhuyuan (紫竹院), Purple Bamboo Park (mistranslated as Black Bamboo on their signs), which is on the way to the National Library subway station.

It’s a very nice park, and made for a nice stroll. In all the parks, people dance, sing, play musical instruments, do tai chi, and so on. I stopped and watched some of the dancing in Zizhuyuan. I’m talking about ballroom-style dancing, here: Latin dance, swing, waltz, that sort of thing. They finished a cha-cha and put on a waltz, and I invited a nicely dressed woman to waltz with me. I could only say xie xie (谢谢, thank you) to her, and she could say nothing else to me, but dancing is a language on its own.

I took the subway over near the lake parks: Xi Hai, Hou Hai, Qian Hi, and Bei Hai (another Zhong Hai, is government property, not open to the public), and my idea was to walk over to them and do a loop around them all. Only, I wound up getting disoriented on coming out of the subway (in New York, the exits are labelled by the corner they come out on, but in Beijing they’re labelled relative to the station; the southwest exit is not necessarily on the southwest corner of the intersection) and I walked in the wrong direction. By the time I realized that, I was south and west of where I wanted to be, so I just went to Di’anmen Avenue and headed east with a new plan: do Bei Hai (北海) Park, and see what I decide to do next.

I was delighted! Bei Hai (north lake) is one of the most beautiful parks I’ve been to. Everywhere you turn, there’s a new treasure, and I explored the park for the entire afternoon, finishing only when evening started to fall and I was losing the light. The lake is in the center, and all around there are gardens here, pavillions there, paths and buildings to explore. There was more dancing, of course (I didn’t partake this time). There were sing-alongs in some corners, and sing-alones in others. One group found a nook by a pond and had an accordion player leading some very nice singing. Over here, someone played a flute, and over there was a man playing an er hu (二胡), a Chinese two-stringed (er means two) bowed instrument with a characteristic tone.

By the time I finished in Bei Hai, I was ready to go back to the hotel, have a light dinner, pack, and turn in. I’d have another chauffeured ride to the airport, at 5 a.m. Friday. With three weeks away, I was ready to go home. But China was an interesting and fun adventure.

Touring Beijing, part 6

Wednesday, 17 November

This was my biggest walking day yet, because I was now on my own. The destination was UNESCO World Heritage Site number four: finally, the Forbidden City. I did the half-hour walk to the subway (National Library station), and took it to the Xidan station, getting close and avoiding a line change (I could have changed to line 1 and taken it one stop to Tian’anmen West, but that seemed excessive when I could just walk). I walked to Tian’anmen Square, walked around the square, then went under the street to the Forbidden City.

Tian’anmen (天安门, Heaven Peace Gate) is the south gate to the Forbidden City, and Tian’anmen Square is a large, open, public plaza across the busy street from Tian’anmen. The square is largely featureless, except for an unimposing monument to China’s heroes and, now, two large, wide, rectangular video screens that show attractive images in a cycle.

The Forbidden City (紫禁城), also referred to as the former palace (故宫), now houses the Palace Museum. I spent some four and a half hours there, checking out as many buildings as I could, and, as advice went, not missing the exhibits in the side buildings.

The former palace occupies a huge space in the center of the city, with nearly a thousand buildings, a series of impressive gates, and a magnificent garden. It was the palace for the Ming (大明) and Qing (大清) dynasties — the last two of the Chinese imperial dynasties — from the early 15th century into the first years of the 20th century. There’s been extensive restoration, to show it as it was during the times of the emperors.

When I was done, I went out the north gate, the Gate of Divine Prowess (神武门), and under that street to Jingshan (景山) Park, where I’d been on Friday night. I spent a while in the park, including climbing to the top of the hill again, and then walked up to Di’anmen Avenue (地安门, Earth Peace Gate), wandered a little in Hou Hai (it was too early for the bars to be hopping, but that didn’t stop at least 17 people from haranguing me to ride in their rickshaws), then continued on Di’anmen Street to the Ping’anli subway station. Back to the start, a half-hour walk back to the hotel, and a little farther to the Food Cube (with an interestingly mathematical logo: 10³, where I ordered some tasty noodles with minced meat, cabbage, onions, and mustard seeds. And a beer. The beer went down very nicely after all the walking.

I prefer having people to tour with, but the nice things about being on my own are that I can walk all I want to (about seven hours today, though much of that was strolling in the Forbidden City and its galleries), and I can make it a two-meal day. The breakfast buffet in the hotel is huge and can easily fuel the day, and I can have a lighter dinner, as I did today, after the touring.

The smog was much worse today than on previous days. Saturday, at the Great Wall, was quite clear (it was also outside the city). Sunday was hazy but still blue and nice. But by now the haze mostly blocked out the sun, and it’s apparent in many of the photos (I’ve picked ones here where it’s not so obvious).

One thing about the tourist spots in Beijing, though, is that they’re mostly related to the emperors, and mostly built during the Ming and Qing dynasties. So they’re mostly built by emperors with the same preferences. They have the idea that certain things are auspicious, and so there are dragons and cranes and tortoises (longevity) everywhere, the buildings are all of the same design and use the same colours, and so on. The result is that there’s not really much of a difference — Summer Palace, Temple of Heaven, Forbidden City — there’s a real sameness throughout them all. I didn’t feel like I was going to several different places, but to some extent spending multiple days walking around in the same one.

It’s still very cool, though, all the same.

Touring Beijing, part 5

Tuesday, 16 November

I had wanted to connect with another IETF friend to tour somewhere, on his last day there, but it turned out that he was planning to visit the Summer Palace and the electronics shops in Zhangguancun, so I apologized, because I’d already done them. On Monday evening, Ro said that she’d mentioned to the head chef at the hotel that she’d wanted to look for a Chinese cooking class while she was there, but hadn’t done anything about it. He responded, she said, by offering her and Ray a private dim sum class, and that would be Tuesday morning. If Dave and I wanted to join too, she’d ask if it was OK. We said we did.

The day started off even better than I’d expected. We met at 10 for the dim sum class, and the head chef took the four of us to a small, less-busy kitchen where we were joined by the dim sum chef. She doesn’t speak English, so the head chef (an Italian guy; more of that International stuff) was our translator. We made har gow ( 虾饺, shrimp dumplings, which I now know have pork fat in them) and shu mai (烧卖, pork, shrimp, mushrooms, and more pork fat). They served us tea (cha, 茶). All very pleasant, and it was fun to put the dumplings together. For the har gow, especially, the folding and pleating of the dumplings is important, and the chef did it wonderfully (of course). Beginners that we were, we didn’t do quite as well. But they all looked edible, and we made a bunch of both, and looked forward to eating them. When we finished, we were invited to take a short break and then meet back in the fine-dining restaurant for lunch.

We were really treated like royalty with all of this, and when we got to the restaurant, the wine steward was there serving us Chinese muscat wine, which (surprisingly to all of us) was not sweet, and nicely tasty. Then we got har gow and shu mai, but only one piece each, and not the ones we’d made (that part was obvious). Apparently (we didn’t ask), they threw away all the stuff we made. Probably, health regulations don’t allow them to serve those. I was disappointed. I wanted more of the dumplings, and I wanted to eat what we’d made. Also, it bothered me that they just got rid of all those dumplings. Anyway, they then served us a number of other courses: soup, and shrimp, and vegetables, and noodles with meat, and dessert... and another bottle of wine, this one red. All this, as well as the class, was complimentary, just because Ro had asked about a cooking class.

By the time we finished, I realized that I didn’t have time to do the Forbidden City today, and the others were going to the Summer Palace, so I decided to go with them and see that again, after all. We took a cab there, paid only the 20 yuan basic admission (I got the full, see-everything admission on Sunday with Alexey and Magnus, 50 yuan), and Dave paid 100 yuan ($15) to a guy who wanted to guide us. He was nice and his English was good, and he told us stories about the different buildings in the park, and the emperors and all that, and it was worth having the guide.

The guide taught me to say Bu yao! to the vendors who wouldn’t leave us alone, saying that it means no, and they would go away. I was skeptical about the actual meaning, thinking that it might really be something nasty. I tried it on one, and she did go away, repeating what I’d said, Bu yao! Bu yao! Hm. But I’ve since checked with others, and, indeed, Bu yao! (不要) means Don’t!, or, as someone put it do me, in that context, I don’t want it! Of course, that’s no guarantee that they’ll go away, but it can’t hurt to try.

The folks at the hotel had told us to check out a hotel/resort near the Summer Palace, called Aman, and it turns out it’s just around the corner from the east gate of the palace. It’s a very nice place, built to resemble the Summer Palace itself. I guess the idea is that you’re really treated like royalty there. I have no idea how much it costs to stay there, but we had drinks in their lounge. Then we took a cab to the Zhongguancun area, found a noodle place that Dave knew, and had huge bowls of Beijing noodles with vegetables and meats and broth.

Touring Beijing, part 4

Monday, 15 November

I had planned to head to the Forbidden City alone on Monday. I ran into IETF colleague Dave in the breakfast room, and joined him for breakfast. While we were eating, Ray and Ro came by on their way out, and we talked for a bit. They said they were going to the Temple of Heaven at noon, and we both said we’d join them. Plans are fungible.

In a while, Dave and I met up with them in the lobby and we cabbed it (half hour taxi ride, cost about $7.50) to the temple, and spent the afternoon, including a light lunch. As I said the other day, the Temple of Heaven (Tiantan, 天坛) is the largest of the four temples at the four main compass points from the center. It’s quite extensive, and easy to spent a few hours at, with areas for this purpose and buildings for that purpose, along with generally beautiful grounds and gardens. And it’s UNESCO World Heritage Site number three.

Entering from the south gate, one starts with the Circular Mound (圜丘坛), surrounded by the Lingxing Gates (棂星门), with a stone in the center, the Heavenly Center Stone (天心石), that’s a popular photo spot: everyone has to take a turn standing there having her picture taken (the Chinese often posing, everywhere, with a hand making a V, for reasons none of us know). Then there’s the Imperial Vault of Heaven (皇穹宇), followed by the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests (祈年殿). And, of course, a general walk around the gardens and grounds, which are beautiful and peaceful.

Many of the sites have long corridors (长廊), a popular feature (see photo, right) that provides a nice, framed walkway. At the Temple of Heaven, the long corridor is a place for locals to gather and play cards, play checkers, read, sing... and sell things.

Back at the hotel, the four of us met back again for hot-pot dinner. Very tasty. One of the things about hot-pot, though, is that you do it yourself, and the staff decided — perhaps because we’re westerners — to do everything for us. We joked that there were touch sensors and trip-wires, because every time someone tried to ladle something out of one of the pots, the waitress appeared, took the ladle, and said, Please, I help you. It was well meant, but we’d have rather done it ourselves.

Touring Beijing, part 3

Sunday, 14 November

Alexey and I had tentatively planned to see the Summer Palace (颐和园), so after breakfast I walked over to the other hotel, about a 30-minute walk, to meet up with him. He was in their breakfast room eating with some other IETF people. Magnus said he and someone else were going to the Summer Palace, and we said that’s good, that’s what we’d planned to do as well... so we wound up joining Magnus and meeting up with Ali. An American, a Russian (who lives in London), a Swede, and a Turk (who lives in Canada), touring together in China. Mutinational Я Us, eh?

So Magnus, Alexey, and I took the subway to the Summer Palace and waited a while for Ali. We got the all-inclusive entrance tickets for 50 yuan each (about $7.50). It’s really amazing how cheap things are there; did I mention that the subway fare is only 2 yuan? The walk around the grounds was nice... very full of tourists, especially in the areas around the main buildings and such.

There are some shops at the perimeter of the palace, and there, as with Hou Hai and anyplace else we went where there are shops or tourists, you get constantly harangued by people from the shops coming out and telling you to come in. People try to sell you tourist books, hats, food, trinkets and doo-dads, fake Rolex watches, and all manner of crap. They will follow you, chattering at you, and insisting, never taking no for an answer. Very annoying. It means that you can’t just look at stuff, without constant badgering. That part of the culture, I hate.

The palace grounds were fabulous, with many buildings, temples, bridges, gardens, and such. Imagine that this was their secondary place, where the empress would go in the summer when it was too hot in the middle of the city (and this is only some ten miles away from the city center, as the crow flies). The centerpiece of the palace grounds is Longevity Hill, so named on the occasion of the emperor’s mother’s 60th birthday. The hill overlooks Kunming Lake (昆明湖), and holds several temples and other buildings, all down the southern slope toward the lake (see photo).

We started at the palace around noon and finished around 4:30. Alexey had planned to meet with a friend of his, a Swedish guy called Roger, who’s lived in Beijing for the last 2.5 years. He was communicating with him on and off by text messages, as the plan kept changing. It was finally set that we’d meet him at the north gate of the Workers’ Stadium (工人体育场) at 7.

We walked from the Summer Palace through some neighbourhoods and past Renmin University (人民大学, People’s University) to a technology and shopping district called Zhongguancun (中关村)... there’s a big mall there, and also lots of huge, multi-story electronics shops, which Magnus and Ali wanted to check out. The one we went into (and possibly all of them) is set up with hundreds and hundreds of individual booths, as at a bazaar. Each small area is run by a different person, and they’re all trying to get you to come to their area to buy your digital camera, laptop, iPad, or whatever. Quite the zoo. And, of course, as with any other shops, you can’t pause for even a second to just look, without being swarmed.

Then we took a cab to the stadium and met Roger, who led us across the street and down an alley to a very comfy and tasty Thai restaurant. After dinner, Roger took us to a favourite bar for another beer before we left. A secret bar, he said. There are several hopping, noisy bars at the stadium, but this one, he told us, is quiet.

We went back to the stadium, walked partway around it to a hot dog place, went into the hot dog place (it’s 10 p.m. now, and except for the restaurants and bars the stadium area is deserted, so why is this hot dog place still open?), said hello to the woman behind the counter, and walked into the back. We went down stairs, and Roger pushed a button on the wall. A panel opened, and we went into an ex-pat westerners bar called Foo Bar. This seemed like something out of a movie. Pleasant bar — he was right: it was not at all loud. We stayed for a while, then left and caught a cab around 11. Roger stayed.

And the Summer Palace was UNESCO World Heritage Site number two.

Touring Beijing, part 2

Saturday, 13 November

Alexey had arranged with Jiankang, who lives in Beijing, for him to take us to the Great Wall. We planned to meet at 9. Jiankang was already waiting for me when I came out of the breakfast room, and we soon all gathered and headed north to the Mutianyu (慕田峪) section of the Great Wall. I’m glad we did that section, instead of the more popular Badaling (八达岭) section, for two reasons:

1. it was Saturday, and a beautiful day, and Badaling would surely be more crowded, and
2. I can more easily go to Badaling during the week, if I want to, because it’s closer and transportation is more readily available.

Jiankang chose Mutianyu for the first reason, and also because it’s near where he grew up, so he knows things in that area, including places to stop along the way.

He started by taking us for an early lunch, 11-ish, at a place where you catch your own fish. From a pool. They had some vendors selling stuff, and I went to look at the dried fruits, and so Jiankang bought us a potload of dried fruits, including a couple of kinds of berries and a bunch of persimmons. We gave up on fishing, and the staff netted out two fish, which we saw flapping in the net now, and had on our table 15 minutes later, along with two kinds of local field greens sautéed with garlic and sesame oil, a big bowl of fatty pork with chestnuts in a sweet brown sauce, radish and lettuce salad, sliced potatoes with onions, taro noodles, sliced Chinese sausage, and scallion pancakes. I think I got it all. That was for four people, for lunch. Have to get energy for climbing Great Wall, said our host. Oh, yes, and we had an interesting hot, milky, almond drink. And tea.

When we got to the Great Wall, we opted for the ski-lift chairs up, and the toboggan ride down. We walked the wall for a while, lots of up and down there, sometimes steep. Very impressive. It seems amazing that they were moved to build it, and the human toll of doing so is something I can only imagine. It’s quite a work of engineering. And it’s UNESCO World Heritage Site number one for this trip — there’ll be four before we’re done.

When we got to the toboggan entrance to go down, there were two young women in front of us, and we waited a while before we went in, figuring that they’d be slow. We gave them plenty of time to get ahead. It turned out to be insufficient; they were much slower than we’d imagined. I went first, and within less than a minute, I caught up with them and had to brake constantly to keep from creeping up on them. Everyone else caught up with me just as soon, and we didn’t have much fun on our ride down. Oh, well.

On the way back to Beijing, we stopped in a town and did a boat ride on a reservoir, ending right around sunset. We met two others back at the hotel, and we all went out to a nice Beijing restaurant, where we again got too much food (beef, pork, lamb, chicken, snails, several vegetables, dumplings, meat buns... we were totally stuffed). We finished the evening with a walk around Hou Hai (后海), a lake surrounded by flashy bars, with people constantly accosting us and trying to sell us things or get us to come into their bars.

I could have done without the accosting part, but other than that the lake walk was interesting, and the whole day was great!

Touring Beijing, part 1

I’m back in the U.S. And because I started the touring part of my trip exactly a week ago today, I thought I’d talk about what I did, one day at a time, a week later. But first, some general stuff.

My first week here was at my company’s headquarters in Shenzhen, just on the China side of the border with Hong Kong. I flew through Shanghai, and took an Air China flight to Shenzhen from there.

Shanghai Airport is beautiful, very nicely architected, and my passage through customs and immigration there went smoothly. So did the flight to Shenzhen. But Shenzhen itself is not a pleasant city. There’s nothing to see there, it’s dirty and crowded, and the traffic is horrid and chaotic. Cars very much have the first right of way, with bicycles next, and pedestrians take their lives in their hands (that part is true in Beijing, too, and all over China). The visit to headquarters was interesting, but if Shenzhen had been my only view of China, I would never want to go back.

After a work week there, I hopped another Air China flight on Friday evening to Beijing. Because I’d booked the IETF hotel (the Shangri La) for 14 nights, I got a reduced rate — I saved more than $50 per night — and I got personal airport pickup included. That was wonderful! As I emerged from the jetway, an airport employee was waiting with a card with my name on it. He escorted me through to the parking garage, where a hotel driver was waiting for me in a cushy Audi (quiet and smooth, not like a rattly, noisy cab). It made the arrival very pleasant, and I didn’t have to think.

Friday, 12 November

When the IETF meeting ended on Friday, I had some of the afternoon left and had decided just to explore the area near the hotel, maybe stroll through the nearby Zizhuyuan Park (紫竹院, Purple Bamboo Park). And then I saw a message from an IETF colleague I know:

When the meetings in the halls end in about an hour, I’m heading over to Temple of the Earth (DìTán, 地坛), the Lama Temple (Yonghe Gong, 雍和宮) and then to Fairy Su (sùji-nglíng, 素精灵) for vegetarian food. They’re all at the same subway stop. If you’re interested in going along for any of that, let me know.

Around 3:45, three of us left the hotel for the half-hour walk to the National Library subway station, and hit the subway during rush hour. It was packed, of course, and we were like sardines in a can. But the Beijing subway system is modern, clean, and very easy to use, with plenty of English to help. It’s also amazingly cheap: 2 yuan (about 30 cents) per ride, anywhere in the system. Compare that with New York, where the fare is $2.25, and will soon go up to $2.50.

We emerged near the Temple of Earth, paid a couple more yuan to see that. The temple of Earth is to the north of the center (the Forbidden City), Earth being associated with north. The Temple of Heaven is to the south, and Sun and Moon are to the east and west. There was little to see here, really; the Temple of Heaven, which I would see a few days later, is the big one of the four.

We then walked a way to the Lama Temple entrance, but, alas, it closed at 4:30, and it was now pushing 5. We were meeting others at Fairy Su for dinner at 7:30, so we had lots of time to kill and decided to walk. We started east, found the restaurant, and walked on, through an area of restaurants and local shops — clothing stores, plumbling supplies, and such. I enjoy walking through local, non-tourist neighbourhoods.

We decided that since we had plenty of time, we’d set a goal: we headed south to walk to the Forbidden City. On the way, we went past the National Museum of Art. It was fully dark by the time we arrived at Di’anmen (Earth Peace Gate), the north gate of the Forbidden City. We went into the park to the north, Jianshan Park, climbed the hill to the pavilions overlooking the city, and took some night photos. Then we headed down and back northwest to the restaurant, where a tasty meal was had.

The Summer Palace, Beijing

The meeting network will go away in the morning, and I’ll be cut off from the blog again. No more photos nor other posts ’til I get back on the 19th.

The Great Wall, Mutianyu section