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If you want a postcard picture of the Summer Palace, one of Beijing's main tourist sites and rightfully so, I don't have one for you but you should be able to google it. In the meantime, here's a shot I took from one of the high spots of this incredible spread that a Chinese Empress had built for herself a couple centuries ago with money squandered from the Navy. A misuse of public funds for sure and I'm not one to condone malfeasance but hey... it's a nice place to go to to get out of the city without getting out of the city. Clearly it's not summer in this photo. I had already been back and forth to the States at this point and was in the middle of my second trip to China. These folks were strolling on the ice of the big lake which is one of the central features of the palace. A sort of abstract photo for a my-trip-to-China travelogue, I'll admit, but it does capture the feel of the place, the vast etc. of it.

Okay, here's one that's a bit more like a postcard. The Great Wall. I was expecting a stroll but it was more than that. Quite a workout. The last stretch of wall we climbed was as vertical as climbing a ladder, but with nothing to hang onto. Those are my classmates in front of me. We were happy to be going downhill at this point.





Not really in chronological order here but since they're like postcards we've got some shots below from my 36 hours in Hong Kong. I organized my long stroll through Hong Kong around trying to find scenes from Wong Kar Wai's movie "Chungking Express". I didn't find much but I did go up that long escalator that Tony Leung's flight attendant goes up. Eh, maybe it's not for you but I had fun. A good way to organize a tour but I was hustling so I didn't pause to take too many pictures.








I'm also adding some pictures I took in Fenghuang, another old town that's attracting tourists now and inspiring postcardy pictures. Really beautiful old place, in spite of the tourist kitsch. Baifan, the producer of the documentary I worked on, took us to Fenghuang after we finished shooting. He took very good care of us throughout the shoot and this was a nice topper to the whole experience.