Remember Burma and Tibet?

... and the cute Panda bears in China? I hope you do because had you forgotten and tried to go back and look them up again on the blog over the last couple of weeks, you would've certainly found all of my writing, but not any of the pictures... (Thanks, Lott, for catching this!)

Well, the good news is last night, I went through and fixed everything, so the pictures are all back. I even tried to fix my spelling and grammar errors - I do tend to proof-read my posts, usually, but it seems I'm still not all that good at it. There is no bad news - everything is just back. There are some boring technical details, which you are welcome to skip, but I'll type up anyway, just in case you care (and because it gives me a forum to bitch at the governments of Burma and China for their idiotic internet policies): Burma and China aren't the types of countries that particularly encourage free and unfettered expression, such as blogging. They attempt to control it by using a standard, heavy-handed, Communist-style approach: you cannot access blogger.com or blogspot.com from a computer in China or Burma. As with most standard, heavy-handed, Communist-style approaches to solving problems that shouldn't really be problems in the first place, the approach doesn't work. I was obviously able to post from Burma and China - all because there's a million proxy servers out there that computer users of China and Burma utilize to get around their respective governments' idiotic restrictions. In Burma, the proxy would usually be already installed on most of the internet cafe machines... In China, they had wi-fi, so I got it on my laptop. There was, however, an issue - routing all your requests to blogger.com through a server in, say, Holland, made your [already slow] internet connection speeds that much slower, so I gave up on uploading pictures to blogger, putting them on my site instead, then simply referencing them from the blog. It actually took a bit of work to get the process all figured out, but pretty soon, I had it down to a science (which makes it kind of sad that I had to spend three hours undoing all of my cross-site magic last night). And this magical science worked great... all the way until last month, until I had to transfer the site from Arnie's server to one of my own - a process which allowed us to discover that when you cancel your account with 1&1 Hosting (whom I'm reluctant to recommend at this point, btw), they insist on hijacking your domain name for a month and using it to redirect traffic to one of the other sites they are being paid to host (and some nice man in Hyderabad, India will be powerless to do anything about it). This, naturally, means that all the images I had uploaded to my site from Burma and Tibet had now evaporated, so the blog posts that were pointing to them were now picture-less... So, that's the annoying technical reasons - if you are unclear on what the hell I'm talking about (or even if you are), never fear - the photos on the blog are all back now! (Unless you are reading this on Facebook, which imports my blog posts, but doesn't update the imported snapshots when I change them, so if you want to take the time to navigate their ineffective UI to get to some of the posts from last February, you will discover these elusive picture-less posts... But you shouldn't do that! You either don't care at all, in which case you should've stopped reading ten minutes ago, or you'll just use the fairly intuitive navigation tools you get at safety3rd.blogspot.com)

And as a reward for indulging me in my little rant, here's a few of these 'recovered' photographs:

Shwedagon Pagoda - Yangon, Burma

The Golden Rock on Burma's Mount Kyaiktiyo at sunrise

A fisherman on Inle Lake

The plain of Bagan just before sunrise

Snake Temple outside of Mandalay, Burma

Cute pandas in Chengdu, China

Tibet's Potala Palace, flanked by the Himalayas

A terracotta general: Xi'an, China

China knows Scale

I took the train from Lhasa, high up in the Tibetan plateau, on the Western reaches of China to Xi'an, an ancient capital sort of in the middle of the country. This took 36 hours - it's a big country. 4th biggest in the world, larger than the continental US (but that's why we bought Alaska...). So, the land-based transportation really is on a large scale here. Having arrived in Xi'an, I found the scale hadn't really been reduced very much.

The most famous attraction in Xi'an is, of course, the ancient army of terracotta warriors (and horses, as the Chinese name informs you... but nobody cares about the horses!):

A little over 2,000 yeas ago, emperor Qin Shi Huang wanted to have an army around in the next life, so he had one buried with him. A terracotta general pictured here

The actual statues I had somehow found a bit underwhelming - I'm not sure what exactly I'd been expecting, but the warriors get built up so much that actually finding them to be perfectly regular and life-size was a bit of a letdown. I think I had expected some sort of gigantic dragon warrior things... or something like that. This is also first and foremost an archaeological site, so you generally can't just walk up to a warrior for a photo op. So, the warriors might not be all that intricately designed, what they do certainly have though is scale - China has always known how to build things on an impressive scale!

A group of soldiers

You want more soldiers?

How about a few hundred more? This is Pit 1 (of three), it houses over 6,000 warriors (and, yes, horses), and they are still digging for more. The other two pits are a bit smaller - Pit 3 is the command center with only 72 statues, while Pit 2 is estimated to contain over 1,300, but it remains mostly un-excavated still.

The whole thing is the size of a fairly large airplane hangar

The whole thing, by the way, was, of course, a burial sight, so it was, naturally, buried, and lost... for centuries. Until 1974, when a local farmer stumbled onto a piece of Pit 1 while digging a well.

Other emperors of the time weren't to be outdone, and we also visited the Tomb of Emperor Jigdi. This guy really chose to forgo artistic decoration of his next-life servants, and squarely focused on the numbers:

There are thousands of warriors, similar to these, that had been buried here, along with cattle, servants, carts, decorations, etc.

Back in Xi'an, the scale shone through some of the ancient city's most famous landmarks:

The city walls, built in the 13th century are still intact and stretch for 14km around the heart of the city

The city's most notable attraction (other than the warriors) is the Big Goose Pagoda, which, not so surprisingly, isn't all that interesting in its design, but is quite massive

Nothing to do with scale here - just a nice view of a rack of candles outside the Big Goose Pagoda

The Bell Tower, framed by some early spring blossoms

My favorite bit of the city was actually the giant and frenetic Muslim market (Xi'an was the ancient terminus of the Silk Road, and consequently still has a sizable Muslim population. Along with a large mosque, which looks absolutely nothing like any mosque I had ever seen, but a lot like a Chinese Temple... hmmm...), the best part of which was the amazing street food being prepared on open flames at every street corner

A food stall at the market

And, of course, Chinese New Year was still in full swing. If you haven't been paying attention to the website (and why haven't you, really!? - http://www.safety3rdblog.com), this was my comment on my second morning in Xi'an

Chinese New Year officially becoming old @9:03 this morning when I woke up to more firecrackers outside... and ensuing car alarms

But other aspects of the New Year were a little more endearing:

The North Tower all lit up with Christmas, uhmm, Chinese New Year's, lights

Decorations around the city

Some sort of an impromptu dance and comedy recital in the streets

Probably not professional, but well prepared and rehearsed, judging by the costumes and the general sense of choreography

The biggest problem with the New Year, however, wasn't the firecrackers. It was the fact that everybody goes to travel over the two week holiday - be it visit family, or go sight-seeing, everybody goes, and all the transport is full. I had by now decided that I was ready to leave China behind and booked a ticket out of Shanghai to Taiwan, so this left the small matter of getting to Shanghai... The trains were booked out for seven days in advance, I didn't want to try getting involved with black market train tickets, so I ended up on a bus, as China chose to remind me about scale a little more:

It's a nice enough-looking bus, reminds me of the super-comfy Argentinian/Chilean buses... but that was a mirage

Even though I had already traveled 36 hours pretty much directly due East by train from Lhasa, Shanghai, and the Easternmost border of China was another 18 hour bus ride away. And while the bus looked like one of the nice South American buses, inside the economies of Chinese scale dictated that we squeeze in as many passengers as possible, meaning not just seats designed for relatively short Chinese people, but seats to make even relatively short Chinese people uncomfortable... I did get my few hours of sleep on the bus, in spite of the appalling lack of leg room, but I'm not feeling all that anxious to take any further bus rides in this country at the moment!