China - First Few Days
I’m taking off the second half of July to take a vacation to China. The internet access situation here isn’t too bad, so I’m posting what I can, when I can. Here’s an update for my first few days, complete with photos.
We flew from Washington, D.C. to Chicago, then boarded the United 747 for the 13.5 hour trip to Beijing. The trip was long, but not especially eventful - the weather was fine, and we even got in a bit early. We arrived in Beijing around 2:30pm, and went to the university where we would stay for the first night. After a brief rest, we went out for dinner with some family. The effect of the time change was a bit disorienting, and after dinner, we fell quickly asleep. We were awake again by 2am.
The next morning, we set off for our first destination - Chengdu. This is a city in Sichuan Province, in Southwest China. While Beijing was warm, Chengdu is positively hot. Our first destination on arrival was lunch, which featured some Sichuan dishes, but wasn’t nearly as spicy as we expected. After that, we set off for the . We took some pictures of the Buddha, but given the temperature (mid-high 90s) and the number of other tourists, we opted not to walk down the face of the statue. The Buddha is tremendous, and carved into a rock wall overlooking where three rivers meet.The following day, we set off for Mount Emei. This is one of the four sacred Buddhist mountains in China, and we were quite excited to see it. We took a chairlift up to the base of the mountain, then hiked up to the Wan-nian Temple. This Buddhist temple was also packed, but was full of interesting things to see.
. This Buddhist temple was also packed, but was full of interesting things to see.. This Buddhist temple was also packed, but was full of interesting things to see.After touring the temple, we hiked all the way back down. It made for a pretty long hike, but there was fantastic scenary. We also toured a tea factory, and had a much spicier Sichuan dinner before retiring for the evening.
July 17th, 2006 at 9:14 am
Your links are broken — what attribute is “xhref” supposed to be?
July 17th, 2006 at 9:21 am
A sweaty Jacob is a sight to behold.
That must be after the spicier Sichuan dinner.
Hit the pictures link on the main page.
July 18th, 2006 at 1:47 pm
Would be nice if the Web 2.0 guru knew how to make links work.
July 19th, 2006 at 11:26 pm
If it wasn’t a typo, I wonder if its China’s proxies. With transparent proxy technology, they probably operate like Man in the Middle attacks, and sniff for Wordpress blogging and break links.
Paranoid? eh, kinda.