Archive for the ‘Beijing’ Category
My Personal Olympic Boycott
In the end, it won’t matter one whit. But I plan to watch exactly none of the Olympic coverage offered by NBC this year. In granting the Olympics to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the IOC guaranteed the most political Olympic event since the 1980 Moscow games when then-President Jimmy Carter refused permission for the US to field a team. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under Beijing, politics : Comments (3) : Aug 8th, 2008
The face of the Beijing Olympics
After much balyhooing around the use of pollution-cutting face masks, the U.S. cyclist team walked off their airplane in Beijing donning the aforementioned masks.
The part I don’t understand is why it’s such an insult. It’s no secret that the air quality is bad. Lots of native Beijing residents wear masks every day. If I were competing for the title of best athlete in the world, you bet I’d wear one too.
Filed under Beijing, culture, environment : Comments (0) : Aug 5th, 2008
China regulates reincarnation
Sometimes Beijing goes a little too far:
Chinese authorities issued a new regulation in July 2007 that requires all reincarnations – including the Dalai Lama – to be approved by the government.
Read the rest here.
Filed under Beijing, culture, politics : Comments (3) : Oct 17th, 2007
Dispatch from Beijing
The weekend in Beijing was great. We flew from Shanghai to Beijing, which is a little under two hours by plane. (The other option being 12 hour train. Yikes) Beijing looks very different than Shanghai. Both are very large, modern cities, but Shanghai is much more vertical with 25+ story buildings everywhere. Beijing has held on to a more traditional Chinese architecture.
We did the typical tourist activities, including the Great Wall, Summer Palace, Tienanmen Square, and the Forbidden City. I’m proud to report that we climbed to the highest point on the Wall (in the Beijing region), which is a non-trivial task. It’s essentially a giant staircase up the side of a mountain–some 4000 steps to the top. The views were amazing, even with a few hundred other tourists doing the same. It was funny to see how the crowds thinned in proportion to the elevation. I snapped quite a few photos, so go check out my flickr feed.
The palaces in Beijing were amazing. It’s plain to see that the emperors of China were incredibly powerful men. It must have been breathtaking for a peasant to come out of the field and see the level of grandeur. We had a great tour guide who shared some historical tidbits from various dynasties: One emperor was so enamored with his bicycle that he had all the thresholds removed from the doorways so he could ride inside the palace. Another emperor was worried about ninjas hiding in trees so he had all the trees in the courtyard removed. Worried further about tunneling invaders, he had the entire courtyard paved with 15 layers of bricks. My favorite was the emperor who was afraid of his ships sinking, so he built a massive ship from marble–since it couldn’t float, it likewise would never sink.
I’m back in Shanghai now for the last week of class before returning to Milwaukee. This experience has been amazing and I’ve learned more than I ever expected. I feel entirely disconnected from my life back in the U.S. and I’ve been doing a terrible job keeping up with emails. Nonetheless, I don’t want to leave!
Filed under Beijing, Shanghai : Comments (1) : Aug 28th, 2007
