from beijing with love.
day 1
GUESS WHAT my old junk camera finally died, stopped saving pictures to memory. so my dad gave me his old camera. he killed the zoom after dropping it fifty times then drop-kicking it across the baltimore airport, but holy fuck. its awesme to have a camera that sees depth and colors correctly.
beijing is the most polluted city i have ever seen, and i've visited manhattan and spent 10 years in hong kong which has at least thrice the density of nyc. hell-o Smog. they say the moon shines brown at night. im going to assume that means you should, at least, be able to see it, and that it's either a new moon tonight or my window's facing the wrong direction. :C
today we went to the lake that genghis khan once mistook for a sea, the dirty peasant. its been commercialized these past few years, very east-meets-west. the starbucks has a pagoda's roof. there are also private homes, fancy resteraunts, and lots of dogs and cast-off chairs. we rented a paddle boat on the lake and crashed into many bricks but successfully negotiated the bridge.
day 2
and one for chaoskirin:
the biggest animal statue I saw the whole place over
last night the wireless internet i was stealing dropped out mid-way through that LJ post. today, we visited the Summer Place, which is best known as the vanity project that Empress Dowager Cixi blew almost all her navy's capital on, leaving a bunch of leaky bamboo buckets to be utterly annihilated by the Franco-British Allies' warships. pretty much, she tripped up the course of Chinese history and national pride to the present.
but boy, could she interior decorate. among other things, there was a big damn lake, a temple with prayer wheels bigger than my body, and a palace (within the palace) to house the birthday presents that princes, emissaries, and chinese nobles had given cixi. most of this was off-limits to the public because of re/modelling/building for the 2008 olympics, but i got this shot through a hole in one of the screens.
:'( yamanaka nayoko for empress!
GUESS WHAT my old junk camera finally died, stopped saving pictures to memory. so my dad gave me his old camera. he killed the zoom after dropping it fifty times then drop-kicking it across the baltimore airport, but holy fuck. its awesme to have a camera that sees depth and colors correctly.
beijing is the most polluted city i have ever seen, and i've visited manhattan and spent 10 years in hong kong which has at least thrice the density of nyc. hell-o Smog. they say the moon shines brown at night. im going to assume that means you should, at least, be able to see it, and that it's either a new moon tonight or my window's facing the wrong direction. :C
today we went to the lake that genghis khan once mistook for a sea, the dirty peasant. its been commercialized these past few years, very east-meets-west. the starbucks has a pagoda's roof. there are also private homes, fancy resteraunts, and lots of dogs and cast-off chairs. we rented a paddle boat on the lake and crashed into many bricks but successfully negotiated the bridge.
day 2
and one for chaoskirin:
the biggest animal statue I saw the whole place over
last night the wireless internet i was stealing dropped out mid-way through that LJ post. today, we visited the Summer Place, which is best known as the vanity project that Empress Dowager Cixi blew almost all her navy's capital on, leaving a bunch of leaky bamboo buckets to be utterly annihilated by the Franco-British Allies' warships. pretty much, she tripped up the course of Chinese history and national pride to the present.
but boy, could she interior decorate. among other things, there was a big damn lake, a temple with prayer wheels bigger than my body, and a palace (within the palace) to house the birthday presents that princes, emissaries, and chinese nobles had given cixi. most of this was off-limits to the public because of re/modelling/building for the 2008 olympics, but i got this shot through a hole in one of the screens.
:'( yamanaka nayoko for empress!