Final post

This is our last post to meckleychina.blogspot.com. Thanks for reading and for all your comments and emails.

Our future adventures will be posted to meckleyearth.blogspot.com. See ya there!

Tomorrow, after 5 days in Kunming, we fly to Myanmar (Burma) where there is no Internet access. So we don't expect to make our next blog post - at meckleyearth - until the second week in February.

-john and sun-ling

Moving on

John just had a BIG birthday. We decided it's time to start the next phase of our adventure. We are quitting the tech world. The plan is to work in Shanghai until the end of the year. After the new year, we will head south to travel in southern China and northern SE Asia. When it gets too hot to run around, we will retreat to our house in Raleigh. In the fall we will come out to travel again for 6-9 months. We have no idea of how long and how much traveling it will take to get rid of this travel bug ...

We are back

We are back from Japan. A short report will follow this weekend - longer reports to trickle out over the following weeks and month - but for now one photo taken at the Nagasaki Kunchi Festival.

The adults patiently await the Dragon Dancers but the children are just plain frightened.

Checking in from Japan

A short hello from Kanazawa, Japan using our new gear - the Nokia n800 and Asus access point - in our hotel room.

Just got back from the rooftop traditional Japanese bath. Great!

New lab (toys) for the road

Being the Luddites we are, we held out on the digital camera until right before we came to China. That turned out be THE greatest toy for John, even more than his guitars. In fact, we are so in love with it, we are reluctant to upgrade and decided to buy a few "accessories" for it, since taking our Thinkpad on the road is out of the question.

Here's what we bought:

Asus WL-HDD 2.5 ( Wireless AP 80Gb HD = NAS)

Transcend TS-RDM2R (Multi-Card Reader)

Nokia N800(MID - Mobile Internet Device or Tablet PC or UMPC)


With this setup, we can

• Backup photos from the camera onto a hard drive by taking the CF card out of the camera, inserting it in the Transcend card reader, and connecting the card reader to the Asus box via mini-USB
  


• Get on the Internet directly with the N800 when there is a wireless connection (hopefully a free Wi-Fi hotspot) or through the Asus AP when only a wired connection is available.
  


• Look at photos on the hard drive with the Nokia using file sharing over the wireless LAN.
  

This setup is like componentizing (is that word) a laptop. We will have a full run with the new setup in Japan, where we may be found on Skype occasionally.

(Technical details:

• We have had "The 800" for 10 days now. Very good engineering. We bought a jacket for it. It runs Linux with the Opera browser.We had a fun time installing xterm/shell and trying to remember vi. ;-)

The 800 with its jacket.

• It look me several days to find a device like the Asus. It is a wireless router as well as backup hard drive. I am so glad that they make such a device!


• We had hoped to plug the camera directly into the Asus, but we had to buy the Transcend. It is a bit of an overkill.


• Everything is working as planned, except I cannot get to CIFS to work 100% on the Nokia. Talk about ironic. The workaround is to use FTP to look at the photos.
  
  
  

Trip Report - Nanjing and Yangzhou

Finally a brief report from our trip last Spring to Nanjing and Yangzhou. The cherry blossoms and plum blossoms were in full bloom as were the rapeseed.

Rapeseed you say? Canola oil is made from rapeseed. China is the world's largest producer of rapeseed and the fields outside Shanghai were bright yellow with rapeseed blossoms.



We stayed in an old Art Deco hotel in central Nanjing, checked out some historic architecture, made a side trip to Shecun Town before heading over to Yangzhou on Saturday morning.

While Nanjing, the former capital, is on the busy southern bank of the Yangtze River, Yangzhou is just an hour away on the north bank. The highlights for the tourist are Shou Xi Hu (Slender West Lake Gardens) - and the many canals that thread through the town, including the Grand Canal.

Canal lit up at night.



At Slender West Lake: One willow, one flowering fruit tree, one willow, one flowering fruit tree,and on and on.


And finally the famous Five Pavilion Bridge.


We had a great time. The photos from Nanjing and Shecun town are here.

The photos from Yangzhou are here.

And a short video of the rickety bus ride back from Shecun Town is here.

And last but not least, my experimental Google Map of Shecun Town. Feedback on this is most welcome.


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japan videos

Here are all the Japan videos.

Boarding a Bullet Train

Riding the Bullet Train

Okuno-in Monks

Meiji Shrine 360

Kiyomizu Temple - Kyoto