Jul/091
Learn, Play, Benign!
Pictures will be uploaded as I get better Internet access. Stay tuned.
For whatever reason, Chinese people seem to be fascinated with garments that have nonsensical English phrases on them. My favorite so far was a T-shirt with the three words: “Learn Play Benign” on its front. I’m not sure if the owners of garments like these actually know what they say or not. I suppose these clothes are equivalent to the tattoos that many Americans receive with some random Chinese characters. You know, the tattoos that we’re told mean something like “Awesome Dragon”, but more likely they say “I’m with Stupid.”
Tomorrow morning, Erika and I will head to Mongolia on a 31-hour train after having spent the last 9 days in China. We’ve seen a lot here in Hangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing from the Olympic Stadium (Bird’s Nest) to the Great Wall. Let me give you a list of highlights and a little history.
Shanghai, one of the largest cities in the world at ~20 million people, seems like a really cool place to live, but it doesn’t have a lot of sites to see. Considering its size, the city is to some degree lacking in history beyond a couple hundred years ago. I think the main reason for its wealth and size is, strangely, English drug dealers. In the 19th Century, the English declared war on China in the First Opium War. Essentially, they wanted to import opium to China to make a huge profit by getting the Chinese population addicted to the drug, but the Chinese government wanted to limit the amount of opium imported. Because the English had superior firepower, they won, and claimed “concessions” in several cities in China, one of them being Shanghai. The concession in Shanghai was a region controlled by the English called “The Bund” in the center of town. Throughout the next 200 years or so, violence would come into the country in many forms: peasant revolts, Japanese invaders, etc. Business owners from the provinces would flee the danger and come to international areas like the Bund because of the safety the English borders brought. Effectively, this concentrated a huge amount of people and wealth in cities like Shanghai and Hong Kong. Shanghai reminded me a lot of New York, with its modern stylings, skyscrapers, good subway system, and virtual indifference to foreigners.
Anyway, Erika and I spent two days in Shanghai visiting The Bund, the financial district called Pudong with its enormous Pearl Tower and a few of the tallest buildings in the world, the former French concession (yeah, the French were in on the concession business too), People’s Park, The Old City, and various different restaurants around town.
Traveling with a foody like Erika means food is going to be an important point of our day. Shanghai is known for its dumplings, so we made several visits to different dumpling stands: street carts and in restaurants. Generally they were steamed or fried and filled with pork and cost about 50 cents for 4-5 of them. Yum! Another specialty of the region is fresh seafood. In the evening, seafood restaurants will have their fresh catches alive in buckets and tanks on the sidewalk in front of their stores. If you want to eat there, you pick out whatever fish or animal you want to eat, they mark it somehow, cook it but leave the mark so that you know that you got your fresh fish. We went to one such restaurant, which was teeming with fish. They had about 10 different kinds of fish, squid, octopus, scallops, gooey ducks, razor clams, oysters, frogs, urchins and a bunch of things that I didn’t recognize. I ended up picking out something that looked like an enormous earthworm, because it looked the strangest, but the English translation for it on the menu was “intestine” despite the fact that it was some sort of wormy sea creature. E got a tasty looking fish, and the chefs cooked each up really nicely. Mine actually did have a similar consistency to intestines, so it will remain a mystery for the ages what I ate, but it was very delicious.
After a couple of days in Shanghai we went to Beijing for 4 days. Whereas Shanghai is a modern, international city, Beijing feels more historical and distinctly Chinese, and for good reason. It has historical buildings all over the place dating back to the 13th century and earlier. There is Tiananmen Square–location of Mao’s proclamation of victory for the Communists in 1949 and the student riots in 1989, The Forbidden City–home of emporers going back 8 centuries, The Summer Palace–an enormous park acting as an out of town getaway for royalty for centuries, Houhai–a series of artificial lakes constructed under Kublai Khan’s direction in the 13th century, the Bird’s Nest and Water Cube from the 2008 Olympics, and of course The Great Wall of China–the series of walls built along the Northern borders of China to keep the Mongol invaders at bay.
Most people (me included) believe that the Great Wall is one continuous wall defending the Northern border of China from Mongolia, but it is actually a series of disconnected walls built and rebuilt to keep out invaders. Erika and I spent a whole day walking along the Great Wall for about 6 miles at a section called Si Ma Tai, a relatively untouristed location 3 hours drive outside of Beijing. The only people on the Wall other than our group of 20 people who arrived together were Chinese locals waiting every few hundred meters to attempt a crummy t-shirt or cold water sale. Overall it was an amazing experience with beautiful vistas and a considerable amount of climbing (I clocked a net change of 600 meters of vertical distance on my altimeter watch–yes I’m a dork.) I want to look into coming back and doing a huge hike trekking and camping along all of the existing parts of the Great Wall, but I don’t know if the Chinese government will allow such a thing or just how long this might take. Badass!
The drive to the Great Wall was almost as exciting as the hike itself what with the crazy drivers here in China. Imagine if you will roads clogged with motorcyclists, bicyclists, buses, tractors, cars and trucks each carrying their respective loads. Now imagine that no one really cares about ideas like “right of way”, traffic lines or speed limits, they just care about getting wherever they are going as fast as possible, everyone else be damned. Now you have a good idea of how traffic is here. We saw constant situations on two-lane highways where drivers (like ours) would come up on slightly slower traffic and move into oncoming traffic or on to the shoulder to pass the slower vehicle accompanied by a honk to let the other driver know what was going on. The cyclists make everything seem more dangerous because they are everywhere, and one rogue move by one of the chaotic drivers could have devastating consequences for them. E and I were going to rent bikes at one point, but we didn’t find time and I was pretty nervous riding here even after lots of experience on New York City streets and riding the West Coast Highway from Portland to San Diego. I think it was a wise move not to join in the frenzy.
Well, it is late and I have to catch a train in 5 hours. I have loads more to discuss about the trip though, but I’ll leave you with a story.
The line to see Chairman Mao's embalmed body
In the middle of Tiananmen Square is an enormous memorial to Chairman Mao, which houses his embalmed body. Several days a week, people are allowed to briefly view his body in its crystalline tomb, so I coaxed E into going down one morning to check out old Mao. We arrived to find an huge line wrapping around the memorial mostly consisting of native Chinese. I approximated it at about 5,000 people. We queued up along with all of the other Mao-lovers and found that the line was moving at a good clip; however, about 30 minutes into the line we discovered that backpacks and purses were forbidden at the entry point. Erika, being the altruistic one she is (and not caring too much to see an old bloated Mao) was kind enough to take my backpack and wait for me while I continued in the line, but I held onto my camera as I was surreptitiously photographing the crowd and police who shouted at us to stay in line. I kept imagining that I was waiting to get a loaf of bread as one used to under communist rule in Asia. As I approached the security counter, now having waited about 60 minutes, I saw a sign in English that said cameras were prohibited along with backpacks. Oh no! Figuring that the jig was up, I started to leave, but then I realized that I could outsmart the Chinese officials. I stopped short to tie my shoe and I stealthily slid my camera into my sock (this is a little Canon elf, not some massive DSLR we’re talking about). When I got to the metal detector, I stuck my sunglasses in my pocket, so that when I beeped, I pulled out my sunglasses and they figured that was the source of the metal detected and pushed me along. Awesome! Of course, there were so many security around from that point on that I didn’t want to pull out the camera for fear of being arrested and sent to Chinese prison, but at least I didn’t get kicked out of line. Anyway, a few minutes later I got to see Mao in all of his discolored, waxy glory. He looks like a bright yellow, wax statue lying under a crystalline dome with a Chinese flag covering his body up to his chest. There is some speculation that his body may be fake, but the police usher you past him so quickly that it is hard to make any definite distinction. All in all, this proved an interesting experience to see so many reverent Chinese citizens cleary very somber about seeing this important historical persona. Maybe we should start embalming our leaders in the West and putting them on display to the public–first up, George W!
Mao's picture is on the front of the Forbidden City, near his memorial.
Jul/098
Eclipse a Success. Censorship in Shanghai.
Image of the July 22nd Total Solar Eclipse I took from Tianhuangping, China
Updating this blog has become problematic from China. Somehow my domain got on the censorship list by the Chinese authorities, such that I cannot access it from here in China. (It’s pretty amazing that a government can justify blocking access for their citizens to huge chunks of the internet—Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, any article mentioning Tibet, Falun Gong, etc.) My good friend Jeff Oishi has been kind enough to update the blog for me while I’m in China with emails that I send to him. Thanks, Jeff!
I find myself in Shanghai at 9AM about to explore the city. Erika and I have had a wild last couple of days since I last posted. At our location of Tianhuangping, a mountain observatory and hotel northwest of Hangzhou, we succeeded in seeing the solar eclipse! This is some feat considering that a large number of eclipse-goers were clouded in at many other observing sites. It was raining heavily in Shanghai, it was cloudy in Hangzhou, and even a mountain a few miles from our viewing location (that we had considered for observing the eclipse) was clouded out. Evidently there was a line of clouds right down the center line of where the total solar eclipse could be seen, and we got extremely lucky to view it.
Tianhuangping is a mountain resort and observatory, hosting a hotel as well as the new location of the Shanghai observatory (the old one is too close to the pollution of Shanghai). It is about 1000 meters above sea level in a nice little mountain/hill chain, distant from any cities with light pollution or real pollution. We anticipated a few thousand people visiting the remote location, from domestic tourist groups to international tourist groups because of the publicity it had received from our very own Jay Pasachoff over the previous year or two as the ‘best’ viewing location for this eclipse. And right he was. There was a large reservoir near the hotel that provided a beautiful backdrop to the main event that was to occur in the sky. The tourists would be herded around the reservoir in their respective groups, each delimited by tape with security and police keeping a watchful eye.
All of the real astronomical research being done by the scientists located on the roof of the hotel, but there was little room for our low-tech setup of a telescope. Instead, we had scouted out a location with the most picturesque landscape below where the eclipse would occur. The backdrop were these stunning untouched mountains lush with acres upon acres of bamboo. We were joined by another astrophotographer and graduate student, Michael.
The morning started at 5AM on Wednesday the 22nd, when Erika and I got up, had breakfast and headed out to beat the crowds to our telescope setup spot. We weren’t strictly supposed to be in our location, as it was up a hill overlooking the reservoir next to the power station for the whole complex. We tried to look official so that we wouldn’t be forcibly removed by the police or overwhelmed by tourists trying to hone in on our location. Because we arrived early, we got set up quickly and then Erika sat like a guard dog on the path up to our location, blocking any potential tourists with a steely gaze and hands on her hips. Several groups of tourists tried to come up to our location (Chinese, Scandinavian and German), but Erika was very effective at blocking them and convincing them that we were carrying out official business on the hillside. It worked most effectively when the police came to take us down. Well done, E!
Our setup was anything but official-looking. I had intentionally brought low-weight, low-tech and low-cost instruments for observation, as I intend to leave the equipment here in Asia, rather than carting it the rest of our way home. I brought a Galileoscope, a $15 2-inch refracting telescope, a couple of $15 tripods, and a solar filter for the telescope. Instead of a nice SLR camera like everyone else seemed to be carrying, I had my Canon wide-field, point and shoot SD880 ELF. I set up the telescope on a tripod with the solar filter and an eyepiece, then arranged the camera on its own tripod to peer in the eyepiece of the telescope in the way a person would with their eye. It worked pretty well after some fidgeting, but in the end, it wasn’t good enough to get any great photographs through the telescope. The most entertaining part about the telescope is that it has a big sticker on the side with a graphic warning against pointing the telescope at the Sun! Of course, we were using a solar filter to observe the Sun, so it was OK, but it was funny nonetheless.
Solar eclipses occur when there is an alignment between the Sun, the Moon and the Earth, such that the Moon (which is coincindentally a similar angular size in the Sky as the Sun) blocks all of the light from the Sun for a certain location on the Earth. They last anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes, and they tend to occur *somewhere* on the Earth every year and a half. This particular eclipse was the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century, lasting over 6 minutes in some locations (only 5:39 in ours). The shadow of the Moon passed in a 100-mile swath from Northern India through Asia to Southern China and then out into the Western Pacific.
At 8:20AM, first contact occurred, where the Moon slowly started to eat the Sun. This was not obvious as there was no appreciable decrease in ambient light. You needed to look through a solar filter in order to see the shape of the solar disk—no longer was it a circle, but now it had a little bite taken out of the side. The weather was relatively hazy and cloudy during this period. You could see the Sun relatively well, but there were periods when thick clouds passed in front of it and blocked it out. Everyone was very nervous that we weren’t going to see it, given the clouds, and the weather forecast for thunderstorms, but we were still hopeful. After all, many people (like us) had traveled thousands of miles to witness this event.
Over the next 70 minutes, this bite in the Sun got gradually bigger and bigger, as the Moon overtook the Sun in the sky. In the last 5 minutes before second contact (the beginning of totality), things changed dramatically. The light took on an eery color and brightness that I had never witnessed before; it was dark like twilight but the Sun was still overhead making it look very surreal. I was trying to get my equipment trained on the Sun so that I could get some more pictures, but I was to some degree stupefied by the situation and found it difficult to fiddle with telescope equipment.
At exactly 9:33:01AM, the Moon covered the Sun and everything got rapidly and extremely dark. The five thousand people around the reservoir went crazy, shouting and gasping. Erika shouted ‘this is outrageous!’, and I had to agree. When the Moon covers the Sun during an eclipse, it blocks out all of the light from the main disk of the Sun; however, light from the corona (Latin for crown), the thin, superhot region around the Sun still illuminates the scene. The corona is one millionth the brightness of the normal Sun (about the brightness of a full Moon). The sky is as dark as a night lit by only the Moon, but instead of looking up to see the Moon in the sky, you see this strangely-shaped donut, the corona around the blotted-out Sun. The cicadas that had been whining previously took up a fever pitch, probably what they do at dusk, and it made the situation even more surreal. Looking along the horizon in any direction, you could see reddish light, coming from the regions not in the direct shadow of the Moon, where the white light is scattered down to an ember-red by all of the air on the way to our eyes.
Erika shouted to look at the zenith and I could see a bright point of light, Venus, directly overhead. Of course, Venus had been there all morning long, but it had been virtually invisible since the light from the Sun up until then had been too bright. Astounding! I struggled to shoot a few pictures through the telescope and then of the wide field of the scene, but I couldn’t focus on anything but enjoying the spectacle of it all. Erika and I looked through the telescope (now with the solar filter taken off) to see the corona close-up. It was amazing to see the streamers coming off the disk of the Sun, representing the hot plasma caught in the strong magnetic field lines of the Sun.
After 5 minutes and 38 seconds, the Sun arose from the Moon’s shadow at third contact. As it arose, there was a beautiful diamond-ring image that I was unable to capture, but that Jay’s group got a good photo of. All of the partial phases of the eclipse that we had seen leading up to totality happened in reverse order, but no one was too concerned with them. We had all witnessed something breathtaking, and we were excited to talk about it, not to see the shadow recede slowly from the disk. After 30 minutes or so, we packed up our equipment and wandered back to the hotel, discussing all that we had just witnessed.
In the end, we got lucky. For much of China, the eclipse was nothing more than a brief darkness in a cloudy sky, but for us, it was a once-in-a-lifetime surreal experience. I got a few pictures, but I couldn’t capture the glory of it all. For that, you’ll have to travel to see an eclipse. Be aware that there will be a total solar eclipse over North America in 2017, visible from Oregon to Kentucky, to the East coast, so mark your calendars. It is not something you will want to miss.
For images of the eclipse from other locations, check out space.com or skyandtelescope.com or your favorite popular science media outlet. Maybe you’ll see one from Jay Pasachoff’s group.
Jul/092
Solar Eclipse Tomorrow!
I’ll make this short, since I’m on a borrowed computer.
Erika and I flew for 14 hours from Newark, New Jersey to Shanghai, China on a direct flight. It actually took us over Northern Canada near the North Pole! Fortunately (or unfortunately, I suppose), I had so much work to do prior to my departure that I didn’t get any sleep the night before our 11AM flight, and I was able to sleep 6 hours on the plane. Now I’m hardly jet lagged at all, which is a stunt considering it is a 12-hour shift off of East Coast time.
Initially we were fearful of being quarantined by the Chinese authorities upon our arrival in Shanghai. Recently they’ve been checking the temperature of all incoming passengers on planes to identify flu-infected people and prevent them from spreading it to China. Fortunately, they didn’t check temperatures of people on our plane, having stopped with the practice the previous day. I’d hate to miss part of the trip stuck in a Chinese hospital-prison.
First impressions on Shanghai and China. It isn’t as shocking as I expected. It is crowded, hot, and humid, but the environment is reminiscent of Los Angeles in terms of the greenery and climate. We didn’t spend any time in Shanghai, as we immediately left for Hangzhou a couple of hours drive to the southwest. We stayed there the night of the 20th and immediately left for a remote location in the mountains west of Hangzhou to observe the total solar eclipse occurring tomorrow.
You see, we were lucky enough to contact Dr. Jay Pasachoff, a leading solar astronomer, who is performing several research observations from this location in Southern China during the eclipse. The path of the total eclipse will travel from Northern India across Southern China and out into the Western Pacific Ocean on the morning of Wednesday, July 22nd. He was generous enough to invite us to join his research team in witnessing what many people consider to be the most sublime astronomical event visible on Earth.
I’ve taken loads of pictures from this site already, but I cannot access the photos yet, but Erika snapped this one with her iPhone. it should give you an idea of all of the observing equipment set up here, more telescopes and cameras that I’ve ever seen in a single place! Erika and I are very excited, but we’ll see if the weather holds for the observing tomorrow. It seems the forecast is calling for clouds, so we’ll just have to cross our fingers!
Jul/095
Shanghai to Stockholm!
Welcome to my site, everyone!
Everything is still a bit under construction, but this is going to be a site where I talk about science, put up photojournals of my travels, and more!
Stay tuned for my blog from Asia. I leave in about 10 minutes to go to Shanghai, China to observe the longest solar eclipse of the 21st century! Then I will spend the next 5 weeks traveling across Asia on the trans-siberian railroad until I reach Moscow, St. Petersburg, and finally Stockholm, Sweden. I’m calling it my Shanghai to Stockholm trip.
For now, just check out my itinerary:
I’ll post more soon!