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| China 2019, May 1st to 10th Beijing and Xi'an |
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As usual, I drone on and on. So if a section of this is a topic of interest to you please read it, otherwise just scroll down to the thumbnails. The thumbnails below will each take you to another page that has a specific collection of photos. Oh, the last 2 thumbnails are actually videos. They are a bit large, so may stutter if you don’t have good internet speeds. I’ll list how long each is so you know before you start it. The Trip I landed in Beijing on Tuesday, May 1st, after about 20 hours of traveling. I spent 1 full day in Beijing then took a bullet train to Xi’an where I spent 4 days visiting friends and seeing sites in the area. Then I took a bullet train back to Beijing where I had 1 more full day of touring before flying out the next day. I maintained a very aggressive schedule pretty much the whole time. According to my fitness app I walked an average of 8 miles, and climbed the equivalent of 19 flights of stairs, per day of my trip. For me, that’s a significant increase in activity. LOL Discovering culturally unique aspects of a place are one of the reasons to go somewhere. And China certainly had plenty to discover in that respect. As pedestrians they are very focused on getting where they are going, so social niceties are minimal or non existent, in places like subways. And this is to be expected to one degree or another when you are in cities that have a population of 21 million, or the smaller 13 million in Xi’an. If they all acted like Texans they’d never get anywhere. But in general I found them to be friendly enough when you get into a one on one conversation. As drivers … well, lets just say every car ride was a bit of an adventure. There appeared to be only 2 very general rules for driving a car or scooter. Rule 1 was “don’t exchange paint”. And the lesser strictly followed 2nd rule was “ A larger vehicle has right of way, maybe”. All other aspects of vehicular activity were open to on the fly roadway negotiation (IE: a game of chicken) and situational interpretation. The Food I found the food in China to be absolutely fantastic!!! (we won’t discuss the Big Mac eaten out of convenience and hunger, or the other stupidly massive burger from some chain restaurant named “superboom”) I have a list of what I ate, but I don’t have photos of all of it. Sometimes the hunger over ruled my intention to photograph all my food on this trip. You can Google any of the items listed below if your that curious. If you follow me on Instagram you did see photos of some of these dishes. Róu jiā mò (Chinese burger), Liáng pī (cold noodles), Bīngfēng (Ice Peak) This is an orange soda that was similar to Orange Crush, Niúròu bāozi (Steamed bun with beef) This is excellent for breakfast. Suān tāng shuǐ jiāo (dumplings in sour soup), Má jiāng liángpí (cold noodles with sesame paste) Oh my god this is fantastic!!!!!, Biang Biang Mian (DO LOOK THIS UP. One of my favorites) Paomo (lamb stew with chunks of bread) This is another favorite of the trip, Húlu jī (gourd shaped chicken) Another fantastic dish, liángpí, Jiānbing guǒzi (crepe and egg street food) My favorite breakfast food, Century egg (ok, this one wasn’t all that good, but not as bad as you’d imagine) Congee (Another good breakfast choice), And a go to dish for me was often just rice with beef curry. And of course on my last night I had Peking Duck. The owner of the restaurant even came over and took a photo with me. It was very good. The Photography. I’m not overly pleased with this trip from a photographic stand point. Much of this falls on me, but other times it was just the nature of the location and timing. Short version, I think I got some pretty good photos, but most are just “ok”. Longer version, if you care to have sympathy or empathy as a fellow photographer - I apparently had gotten some dirt on my sensor before I eaven left for the trip. And to add insult to injury, water spots got onto the back glass of 2 of the 3 lenses I had with me. Since I didn’t reallyhave time to review my photos on a real screen I didn’t catch this until the night before I flew home. Then, for some reason I can’t fathom, my camera settings had been changed so that it wasn’t saving RAW files. Fortunately I did manage to catch this mid way through the trip. But this discovery really sucked and caused a brief bout of serious depression. Many photos where taken knowing I had to greatly under expose to get the shot, as no flash or tripod where allowed in many of the dark exhibition halls, but I knew I should be able to get a usable photo when editing the RAW image. And, as you photographers will know, you just can’t work a JPG as much as you can a RAW file. Then there was often the fact that there were a gazillon people milling around between me and the subject. Normally I'm very patient and will wait a very long time to get the shot. But for most of the trip I had other people waiting on me and a schedule to keep. So doing a 30 minute waiting session just wasn’t an option. And then there was the usual variable of the weather, which wasn’t great for photographs much of the time. So, what you see is what I got. I hope you enjoy some of them. |
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