A lion guarding a gate in the Imperial City.

China

This was the part of the trip when I started to realize that the kind of camera you have DOES matter. A point and shoot camera cannot adequately cover a subject like China. To capture this land one needs a wide angle lens, a nice telephoto lens, and filters to cut through the haze. But unfortunately, 3 pocket-sized point & shoots were all I had. This is also the part of the trip when I started to question my ability to truly report, via Blog, all that my senses were experiencing.

First of all, there are more than a billion people in China. Many of them, who do not live near a city have never seen a non-Chinese person before. Such as the two gentlemen here, who asked to be photographed with me. They were polite but very curious. We didn’t speak each other’s languages, but photography and humanity were our common bonds.
	I have heard about Tiananmen Square before, but did not have an appreciation for its enormous size. Located roughly in the center of Beijing it is a gathering place for people from all over.
Tiananmen means Gate of Heavenly Peace.	The square is actually the courtyard that precedes the gate to the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City is a buffer to the Imperial City.
China is too vast, too multi-faceted to Blog. It requires description and interpretation that takes time to fashion. For the sake of this blog, which I try to keep reasonably timely, I will gloss over the subject and pepper it with snapshots. Later I will sit down to give China the serious treatment it so richly deserves.	As an example, The flag in Tiananmen Square is raised every morning in exactly 2 minutes and 7 seconds. That is how long it takes to sing the Chinese National Anthemn.