So, I wonder if it’s true, any port in a storm, except perhaps Marsailles
Or, if you are a lothario type sailor, you would have a girl in every port.
Yes, the most common definition of a port is a place where ships dock.
And, while talking of ships we don’t call the sides left and right, we call them port and starboard. Just in case you didn’t know, port is the left side of the ship when facing forward.
And of course, ships have portholes, ie windows, traditionally round and rather small.
It could be an alcoholic drink, imbibed mostly after dinner with coffee and cigars, though no one seems to smoke cigars any more.
There is still coffee, for now. No doubt sometime in the future someone will link it to death and dying, and it will fall out of favour, like sugar, weedkillers and asbestos.
The best port seems to come from Portugal, strange about that.
You can port a program (app in phone speak) from one platform to another, which basically means from Android to Apple IOS, but not without a reasonable amount of work.
It can also be an outlet plug on a computer that accepts cables from other devices (USB) and many years ago, a printer port, and a serial port.
In certain places in the world a port is a child’s schoolbag, a definition I was not aware of until we moved to a different state.
In 1974 a 26-year-old farmer, Yang Jide, was drilling a well and found fragments of the terracotta soldiers and bronze weapons.
What was discovered later was one of the biggest attended burial pits of China’s first feudal Emperor, Qin Shi Huang. In the following years remains had been found in 3 pits, yielding at least 8,000 soldiers and horses, and over 100 chariots. The soldiers were infantry, cavalry, and others.
Emperor Qin was born in 259 BC and died in 210 BC. He began building a mausoleum for himself at the foot of Mount Li when he was 13. Construction took 38 years, from 247 BC to 208 BC. It was divided into 3 stages and involved 720,000 conscripts.
The pits of pottery figures are 1.5 km east of Emperor Qin’s mausoleum. Pit 1 has about 6,000 terracotta armored warriors and horses and 40 wooden chariots. Pit 2 is estimated to have over 900 terracotta warriors and 350 terracotta horses with about 90 wooden chariots. Pit 3 had so far yielded only 66 pottery figures and one chariot drawn by four horses.
Official records say it was discovered later that it was likely Xiang Yu, a rebel, intentionally damaged the Mausoleum and the soldiers in the pits, by setting fire to the wooden roof rafters, and these fell on and broke the warriors into pieces.
However, we were told that after the terracotta warriors were completed, the Emperor ordered the builders to be killed so that they would not tell anyone about the warriors, and then of those that remained alive deliberately smashed all of the artifacts.
The thing is, all of the terracotta figures that have been found are in pieces, and they need computers to piece them back together again.
The visit: The first impression is the size of the car park and the number of buses parked in the lot, and a hell of a lot more outside up the road an off on side streets. Obviously, it costs money to park in the parking lot.
The other first impressions; the numbers waiting to get in were not as many as yesterday outside the forbidden city, in fact, a lot less.
Be warned there’s a long walk from the entrance gate where your bags are scanned and a body scan as well, before admittance. This walk is through a landscaped area which it is expect might sometime in the future reveal more soldiers, or other artifacts.
At the end of the walk that takes about ten minutes, you can get a one-way ride to the second checkpoint, but we opted not to as no one else in our group did.
That walk is the warm-up exercise to an organized viewing of the exhibits after going through a second ticket checkpoint. On the other side, we had to hand our tickets back to the tour guide which was disappointing not to end up with a memento of actually having been there.
So, on the other side in the courtyard, the guide told us the most important parts of the exhibition, that we should spend most of the time looking at pit 1, and then spent a little time in 2 which is only there in the first stages of excavation. Then move onto the museum if only to see the replica chariots.
We do.
The chariots were small but interesting
The horses were better and intricately detailed
These are soldiers, perhaps complete examples of those types found in the end pit.
This is one of the archers. You can tell by the way he wears his hair.
Pit 2
The excavation of this pit has only just begun, so it is possible to see where they have carefully removed the top cover, and you can see the broken parts of the warriors lying in a heap.
Some parts of the warriors are more discernible closer up
These parts are carefully extracted and taken to the ‘hospital’ where they are digitised and the computer will match each part with the warrior it belongs to.
Pit 1
This has quite a number of standing soldiers that have been glued back together, but not necessarily complete and I notice a number if the statues were incomplete. And if they cannot find the missing pieces, then they are not added to or filled in.
The scale of the pit is enormous, and they have hardly scratched the surface in the restoration process.
What is there is a number of horses as well.
That’s at the front of the pit, a long line of statues, and what is clear is the location of the well where the first fragments were found by a farmer.
There are about eight lines of soldiers, and some lining the sides.
Midway down there is a large area currently under excavation
At the back is the hospital where the soldiers are reassembled. There’s nearly a hundred in the various stages of rebuilding. These days the soldiers are rebuilt using computer imaging.
The hospital area is where they are put back together
And these are some of the statues in various stages of reconstruction
Another two views of the size and scale of the reconstruction project
The coffee shop is also a sales centre, but there are too many people waiting for coffee and too few places to sit down.
In 1974 a 26-year-old farmer, Yang Jide, was drilling a well and found fragments of the terracotta soldiers and bronze weapons.
What was discovered later was one of the biggest attended burial pits of China’s first feudal Emperor, Qin Shi Huang. In the following years remains had been found in 3 pits, yielding at least 8,000 soldiers and horses, and over 100 chariots. The soldiers were infantry, cavalry, and others.
Emperor Qin was born in 259 BC and died in 210 BC. He began building a mausoleum for himself at the foot of Mount Li when he was 13. Construction took 38 years, from 247 BC to 208 BC. It was divided into 3 stages and involved 720,000 conscripts.
The pits of pottery figures are 1.5 km east of Emperor Qin’s mausoleum. Pit 1 has about 6,000 terracotta armored warriors and horses and 40 wooden chariots. Pit 2 is estimated to have over 900 terracotta warriors and 350 terracotta horses with about 90 wooden chariots. Pit 3 had so far yielded only 66 pottery figures and one chariot drawn by four horses.
Official records say it was discovered later that it was likely Xiang Yu, a rebel, intentionally damaged the Mausoleum and the soldiers in the pits, by setting fire to the wooden roof rafters, and these fell on and broke the warriors into pieces.
However, we were told that after the terracotta warriors were completed, the Emperor ordered the builders to be killed so that they would not tell anyone about the warriors, and then of those that remained alive deliberately smashed all of the artifacts.
The thing is, all of the terracotta figures that have been found are in pieces, and they need computers to piece them back together again.
The visit: The first impression is the size of the car park and the number of buses parked in the lot, and a hell of a lot more outside up the road an off on side streets. Obviously, it costs money to park in the parking lot.
The other first impressions; the numbers waiting to get in were not as many as yesterday outside the forbidden city, in fact, a lot less.
Be warned there’s a long walk from the entrance gate where your bags are scanned and a body scan as well, before admittance. This walk is through a landscaped area which it is expect might sometime in the future reveal more soldiers, or other artifacts.
At the end of the walk that takes about ten minutes, you can get a one-way ride to the second checkpoint, but we opted not to as no one else in our group did.
That walk is the warm-up exercise to an organized viewing of the exhibits after going through a second ticket checkpoint. On the other side, we had to hand our tickets back to the tour guide which was disappointing not to end up with a memento of actually having been there.
So, on the other side in the courtyard, the guide told us the most important parts of the exhibition, that we should spend most of the time looking at pit 1, and then spent a little time in 2 which is only there in the first stages of excavation. Then move onto the museum if only to see the replica chariots.
We do.
The chariots were small but interesting
The horses were better and intricately detailed
These are soldiers, perhaps complete examples of those types found in the end pit.
This is one of the archers. You can tell by the way he wears his hair.
Pit 2
The excavation of this pit has only just begun, so it is possible to see where they have carefully removed the top cover, and you can see the broken parts of the warriors lying in a heap.
Some parts of the warriors are more discernible closer up
These parts are carefully extracted and taken to the ‘hospital’ where they are digitised and the computer will match each part with the warrior it belongs to.
Pit 1
This has quite a number of standing soldiers that have been glued back together, but not necessarily complete and I notice a number if the statues were incomplete. And if they cannot find the missing pieces, then they are not added to or filled in.
The scale of the pit is enormous, and they have hardly scratched the surface in the restoration process.
What is there is a number of horses as well.
That’s at the front of the pit, a long line of statues, and what is clear is the location of the well where the first fragments were found by a farmer.
There are about eight lines of soldiers, and some lining the sides.
Midway down there is a large area currently under excavation
At the back is the hospital where the soldiers are reassembled. There’s nearly a hundred in the various stages of rebuilding. These days the soldiers are rebuilt using computer imaging.
The hospital area is where they are put back together
And these are some of the statues in various stages of reconstruction
Another two views of the size and scale of the reconstruction project
The coffee shop is also a sales centre, but there are too many people waiting for coffee and too few places to sit down.
A convoluted explanation on the reasons for this memorial came down to it being about the deaths of those involved in the 1923 Erqi strike, though we’re not really sure what the strike was about.
So, after a little research, this is what I found:
The current Erqi Tower was built in 1971 and was, historically, the tallest building in the city. It is a memorial to the Erqi strike and in memory of Lin Xiangqian and other railway workers who went on strike for their rights, which happened on February 7, 1923.
It has 14 floors and is 63 meters high. One of the features of this building is the view from the top, accessed by a spiral staircase, or an elevator, when it’s working (it was not at the time of our visit).
There seems to be an affinity with the number 27 with this building, in that
It’s the 27th memorial to be built
to commemorate the 27th workers’ strike
located in the 27th plaza of Zhengzhou City.
We drive to the middle of the city where we once again find traveling in kamikaze traffic more entertaining than the tourist points
When we get to the drop-off spot, it’s a 10-minute walk to the center square where the tower is located on one side. Getting there we had to pass a choke point of blaring music and people hawking goods, each echoing off the opposite wall to the point where it was deafening. Too much of it would be torture.
But, back to the tower…
It has 14 levels, but no one seemed interested in climbing the 14 or 16 levels to get to the top. The elevator was broken, and after the great wall episode, most of us are heartily sick of stairs.
The center square was quite large but paved in places with white tiles that oddly reflected the heat rather than absorb it. In the sun it was very warm.
Around the outside of two-thirds of the square, and crossing the roads, was an elevated walkway, which if you go from the first shops and around to the other end, you finish up, on the ground level, at Starbucks.
This is the Chinese version and once you get past the language barrier, the mixology range of cold fruity drinks are to die for, especially after all that walking. Mine was a predominantly peach flavor, with some jelly and apricot at the bottom. I was expecting sliced peaches but I prefer and liked the apricot half.
A drink and fruit together was a surprise.
Then it was the walk back to the meeting point and then into the hotel to use the happy house before rejoining the kamikaze traffic.
We are taken then to the train station for the 2:29 to our next destination, Suzhou, the Venice of the East.
This morning is a boat ride that will take us along a small portion of the main canal, and we head through a number of back streets, to a landing where there are a number of boats all vying with each other to get us passengers on boats.
But…
These boats don’t have a wharf to tie up to and then put out a stable gangplank. No. They just more into a concrete step and you take your life in your hands getting on. One wrong step and you’re in the canal. And not a very clean one at that.
That’s if another boat doesn’t come along and bumps you, knocking you off balance. We managed not to lose anyone in boarding the vessel.
This is where we get on the boat
We go along what appears to be downstream towards another larger canal, past tree-lined streets until the canal narrows and we’re looking at the backs of houses, which look very dilapidated.
And the canals? Well, it’s not quite like it is in Venice
Though some parts of the canal look better than others
What doesn’t bear thinking about is the electrical wiring which is a nightmarish spider web of cables going off in all directions. How anyone could troubleshoot problems is beyond me.
We pass under a number of bridges, and then, about 30 minutes after leaving, we reach a larger canal and do a 180-degree turn, and head back to a drop off point the will enable us to walk through a typical everyday Chinese market for food and the other items.
This drop off point is much the same as the starting point, a concrete step which is as hazardous as the first. At least we don’t have to compete with other boats for the landing spot.
We take a leisurely stroll down a small section of Pingjiang Road with small shops on either side, selling all manner of goods
but my interest is in the food and the prices, which at times seem quite expensive for so-called local people, so maybe because the tourists go down this street every day, the prices have been inflated accordingly.
I find it rather disappointing.
We walk to the bridge, go under to the other side crossing the canal and find the coffee shop which is also the meeting place.
So…
When is a coffee shop not a coffee shop, when it takes an eternity to make a cup of coffee, we waited 25 minutes?
We also ordered beef black pepper rice and it took 20 minutes before it arrived, but it was well worth the wait. Strands of perfectly cooked beef with onion, carrot, and capsicum, with a very peppery and spicy sauce, with a side of boiled rice.
A pizza was ordered too but it did not arrive at all before we left.
This morning is a boat ride that will take us along a small portion of the main canal, and we head through a number of back streets, to a landing where there are a number of boats all vying with each other to get us passengers on boats.
But…
These boats don’t have a wharf to tie up to and then put out a stable gangplank. No. They just more into a concrete step and you take your life in your hands getting on. One wrong step and you’re in the canal. And not a very clean one at that.
That’s if another boat doesn’t come along and bumps you, knocking you off balance. We managed not to lose anyone in boarding the vessel.
This is where we get on the boat
We go along what appears to be downstream towards another larger canal, past tree-lined streets until the canal narrows and we’re looking at the backs of houses, which look very dilapidated.
And the canals? Well, it’s not quite like it is in Venice
Though some parts of the canal look better than others
What doesn’t bear thinking about is the electrical wiring which is a nightmarish spider web of cables going off in all directions. How anyone could troubleshoot problems is beyond me.
We pass under a number of bridges, and then, about 30 minutes after leaving, we reach a larger canal and do a 180-degree turn, and head back to a drop off point the will enable us to walk through a typical everyday Chinese market for food and the other items.
This drop off point is much the same as the starting point, a concrete step which is as hazardous as the first. At least we don’t have to compete with other boats for the landing spot.
We take a leisurely stroll down a small section of Pingjiang Road with small shops on either side, selling all manner of goods
but my interest is in the food and the prices, which at times seem quite expensive for so-called local people, so maybe because the tourists go down this street every day, the prices have been inflated accordingly.
I find it rather disappointing.
We walk to the bridge, go under to the other side crossing the canal and find the coffee shop which is also the meeting place.
So…
When is a coffee shop not a coffee shop, when it takes an eternity to make a cup of coffee, we waited 25 minutes?
We also ordered beef black pepper rice and it took 20 minutes before it arrived, but it was well worth the wait. Strands of perfectly cooked beef with onion, carrot, and capsicum, with a very peppery and spicy sauce, with a side of boiled rice.
A pizza was ordered too but it did not arrive at all before we left.
Thrills, Spills, and just a dash of Romance 