English Wikipedia is mostly available from here in Beijing but there are some notable exceptions:
I’ve also noticed that although I can get through to some parts of IBiblio, I can’t reach others, including Cafe au Lait and Cafe con Leche. I can get e-mail from IBiblio but not use SFTP (which explains why those sites are fairly static at the moment.)
I knew I should have set up that VPN before I left the states.
Felis catus
Behai Park, Beijing, 2008-04-18
One thing this trip to Beijing has brought out is just how useful it would be to speak even a little Mandarin here, even if one can’t reasonably converse or understand spoken Mandarin. Maybe a week’s worth of basic vocabulary and phrases:
Today I spent doing a lot of the standard tourist things in Beijing: The Forbidden City, Beihai Park, Hutongs, and Jianshan Park; and the most interesting thing I noticed while doing this is that Beijing is not a tourist city.
Even in the Forbidden City, Caucasians were greatly outnumbered by Asians (all Chinese as near as I could tell). After I left the Forbidden City, it was over an hour before I saw another Caucasian and that infrequency repeated until I got to the Jade Islet late in the day. There were several tour groups wandering around the Hutongs, but they were all Chinese.
This did mean I stuck out more than I’m accustomed to, and was a target for every single person making their living off tourists: waitresses trying to lure me into tea shops, vendors hawking water bottles, “Rolex” salesmen, and rickshaw drivers looking for a fare. These were the most persistent. They’d follow me down the street, and just as one would give up, the next would jump in. You think they might have realized that I could not have possibly gotten halfway down the block without already refusing half a dozen of their competitors. I’m not sure why they thought I’d be different, but maybe they were desperate. There were hundreds of them, and not many potential customers (though most of the people I’ve seen actually riding in rickshaws are Chinese.)
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Before I get on the plane to China I thought I’d try to catch up on recent birding events, since hopefully even with Beijing’s notoriously poor birding and my inability to recruit a local guide, I’ll pick up quite a few species I’ve not seen elsewhere.
Saturday, April 5, I woke up at 5:00 A.M. to get out to Huntington Beach at 6:00. The occasion was the quarterly bird census at the Huntington Beach Wetlands Center. This is about 100 acres of mostly salt panne habitat along Pacific Coast 1, mixed in with industrial plants, housing, and roads. Somehow several large and small parcels have been saved from the sprawling development of Huntington Beach, and the hope is to save more. Restoration projects are scheduled planned to improve the habitat, so we’re counting the birds to track the effects of this eventual work. Plans are to dig a channel to flood some of the areas starting this September. Censuses have been ongoing for about a year and a half now to establish a baseline to measure the success against.
My team of four people (me + Tom Dixon, Pat Cabe, and Dick Cabe) covered the first three parts of Magnolia Marsh. This is a contiguous rectangle divided by habitat into zones 1, 2, and 3. Zone 1 is a narrow riparian strip along Pacific Coast 1. Zone 2 is mostly salt panne in the middle of the plot, and zone 3 turns from the centerline of the levee, southwest to the border of the salt panne. A small canal borders Zone 3 parallel to Pacific Coast 1, but was not included in our territory. Other teams covered zones 4 through 19, including several areas not usually open to the public.
California Ground Squirrel, Spermophilus beecheyi
William R. Mason Regional Park, 2008-04-11
