Beijing - December 17th

Yvonne and I went up to Beijing to train a company on Daktronics software. It was a quick, one-night trip.

View from the new Daktronics apartment early in the morning.

This cracked me up. This sign is in the airport's new T3. It helpfully tells us we are here, at 2F. Unfortunately it gives no type of reference as to where 2F is in relation to anywhere you may want to go.

Olympic Venues

Now that I'm in Beijing I wish I would have tried to get tickets for something. Actually, I probably only would be super interested in the opening ceremony. I'm not so big into sports.

But, being here 1 day before 08/08/08, my co-worker Yvonne and I had to check out the most famous things - the Bird's Nest and the Water Cube. Hundreds of other people also had this idea!

The Bird's Nest. The whole Olympic village was blocked off (obviously) so all photos are taken through the fence.

The Water Cube. LED lights behind the bubble-surface make it change colors.

I totally don't get this sign. No exploding cars from 6 AM to midnight? The taxi driver said it was to warning drivers not to bump into other cars, but I'm not buying that. Any other ideas?

CCTV

Daktronics has a few displays at the new, famous CCTV building. I went to Beijing to give them software training. It would have been cool to be allowed on site, but the control room behind the display was the closest I got.


The curved HD display is on the left (turned off.)

Beijing Air

Tuesday I went to Beijing to give training. Since everyone is freaked out about the air quality in Beijing, I thought I would post a few links about it.

Here is one article with lots of good links, like to BeijingAirBlog.com and Clean Air Initiatives Asia. Here are photos of US athletes wearing masks in the airport. That got a lot of attention, but no one mentions that locals wear those surgical masks a lot too!

I just learned that the average Air Pollution Index in Beijing is 100, which is six and a half times the World Health Organization’s guidelines for long-term exposure. Great. Shanghai's is lower, but not that much lower!!

Does Rolls Royce really make airplanes for Air China?

You actually don't see many white fluffy clouds here, so I thought these deserved a photo.

Beijing Railway South

I went up to Beijing to help with the data part of the displays that are being installed now at the new Beijing Railway South Station. It was a huge construction site, and my "head-back-turn rate" dramatically increased. I don't think many of the migrant worker men expected to see a foreign woman on the construction site.

The Chinese version of the Keyframe logo animation, created by Hugo.


The main hallway - it's HUGE!

Another one of the 11 displays, in the main hall.

Unfortunately, my laptop crashed! I was working the next day and it crashed. Then repeatedly blue-screened before even getting to the login screen. I was pretty freaked out that all of my data would be lost! That day I flew back to Shanghai and our wonderful IT guys Aaron and Michael had a new laptop waiting for me AND got all of my data off my old one. Whew.

Beijing's new T3

I think I have blogged about T3 earlier. The place is getting tons of attention, so I guess it is worth a couple posts. Here's a few more photos.

Security in Beijing is really up. So you definitely want to get there a few hours early (usually to only sit on a delayed plane.) But, due to enough frequent flyer miles on United, Jon and I have access to the business class lounge so we can chill out and work (or not if your laptop is dead) or read while killing a couple hours.

The pollution level is supposed to be down and the air quality way up, according to the media. However, the sky doesn't seem to have cleared up a lot to me.

Only half the private cars are on the road. At first I was really confused - the city seemed so empty but it should have been filling up for the Olympics? Then I figured it out... half the cars made it seem like there were a lot less people. There is a special lane for Olympic vehicles too.

The airport is new and nice. I did notice that they just fixed some Chinglish too. The escalators used to have signs that said "Take care of oldster and children" but they've changed it to "Take care of elderly and children." I should have gotten a photo earlier.

"Head back-turn rate"

In China, it is not considered rude to stare, and since us foreigners look so different, we get stared at a lot. (More than we are used to, anyway.)

When we were in Beijing for a meeting, we had a group of Dakkies at a construction site. The workers were breaking for lunch or something, and I got a video clip of all of the workers doing double-takes as they walked past our group.

My co-worker told me that the term for this is "hui tou lv" meaning head back-turn rate. If a girl has a high hui tou lv, she gets a lot of second glances!

Beijing

I was in Beijing for 3 days to meet with a client. Jon actually was in Tianjin and then got stuck in Beijing the first night, so we actually got to spend a night together during the week! :-)

The window washers here must be slightly crazy. No safety harnesses, just a rope. They swing around pretty good up there too.

Daktronics has a certain arena where certain games are being played at a certain big event in August. It was my first time to see our stuff in this arena. It was actually smaller than I thought it would be. Still cool though!

Yvonne, Aileen and Larry in the control room.

Beijing Photography

These are a couple of my favorite photos from the Beijing trip.

We were too late to go to the Forbidden City, but I got a great photo of one of the towers. Daktronics has a project there and one of the guys will give us a private tour. He has worked there for many years and even gave Jon a book of his own photography of the city he had published!

This was the passage from the Forbidden City to Tianamen Square. Thousands of people were packed into it as the Forbidden City was closing.

Tiananmen Square

Tianamen Square is absolutely huge! We were there when all of the party members were coming in for the national Communist Party Meeting so things were a little crazy! A lot of things were blocked off and security was everywhere.

Mao's Mausoleum.

This is what is pretty gross about China. People (especially kids) will pee or poop anyway. Not in a bush, or grass, or on a tree. Anywhere in front of anyone. This mom helped her kid pee in Tiananmen Square! I saw another kid squatting in front of Mao's Mausoleum! MAO'S TOMB! Nothing is sacred!

There was a virtual geocache at this monument that we logged too! We had to take a photo of us with the GPS to prove we were there.

Ming Tombs - Beijing

After the Great Wall, we visited the Ming Tombs. There are tombs for 13 emperors from the Ming Dynasty. Only 2 are open to the public. We went to Dingling, which is an underground mausoleum.

Then we went to the Sacred Way, which has animals on both sides of the wide paved path. It was nice and there was a virtual geocache there!

The Great Wall of China

Jon was in Beijing last week for work, so I came up on the weekend. Saturday morning we went to see the Great Wall. It is all rebuilt where we went. It was cold and rainy and of course I didn't bring my sweatshirt. Conveniently, there were about 100 different people ready to sell a "I climbed the Great Wall" sweatshirt to me.


We saw hundreds of people going to the right on the wall, so we went to the right. And we discovered why there weren't so many people going that way - it was super steep!! We climbed a part of it with steps that were more like a ladder.

Beijing Opera

We saw the Beijing Opera on Saturday night. It was very interesting. It has a very different type of singing, and amazing costumes. It had subtitles on LCD screens so we could tell what was going on.

Beijing Chinglish

I would appreciate it if one of my Chinese friends could translate what the Mandarin actually says. Maybe it means "Don't start a fire with your cigarette so that water is needed to put out the fire."

This isn't too bad. I like how it forbids graffiti.