Passau

Veste Oberhaus

“The fortress was attacked five times between 1250 and 1482. Twice, 1298 and 1367, the citizens of Passau themselves rebelled against the Bishop.”

After a couple hundred years of open government in America and the advent of domestic terrorism, many of our government buildings have been converted to secure fortresses.  Public union demonstrators recently took over the Wisconsin state capital.  There’s no doubt that given access, today’s “occupants” would be camping in, and shouting down all visitors to, government buildings in cities across the country.  Fortress America must now protect itself from its own people.  The Founders would conclude that our republic has been forfeited.  Reasonable political debate does not occur under the threat of force, at the point of a leftist spear.

Would love to be canvassing the SF Bay Area, seeking out Sunday late night light shots on our layover, but a thin slice of Burlingame will have to do.  That’s actually the moon at 800 iso along with a number of flights on final approach to SF.

From Kuala Lumpur to Hong Kong we flew over some incredibly beautiful resort islands off the coast of Malaysia in the South China Sea, then over a pretty broad swath of Viet Nam with its hundreds of thousands of rice patties in the south, and then a great circle around Hong Kong showing us all sides of it.  It’s about 4.5 hours from KL to HK, then another 12.5 hours from HK to SF.  The cell phone cam just didn’t do any of it justice.

Transferring between airlines in HK is pretty cool - they have a transfer lounge with reps from every airline.  You just give them your bag check claims, they go retrieve your bags from the inbound flight, and then re-check them on the new outbound flight with the new carrier to destination.  The nice thing is you don’t have to stand in line and go through immigration.  You just do a quick security screen and they release you to the outbound concourse to be on your way.  It’s definitely a better method from the traveler’s perspective than what they make you do at west coast airports which involves shlepping your bags and going through immigration.

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…on to Bangkok.

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Memo to the Obama administration, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith is the no. 2 best selling imported business and investing title on Amazon.CN, according to the China Daily.

We took a hotel car out north of Xiamen today to the next district to visit a potential manufacturer.  On the way to and fro we passed miles and miles of subsistence living, without amenities, comfort, or even glassed in windows to keep out the winter cold.  Farm plots in this area are small and intensely cultivated with many hand tied bamboo support structures.  The land appears rich and the people incredibly industrious, and everyone seems happy despite an absence of opulence and wealth.  I didn’t shoot any pictures of the poor blocks and dwellings today.  With so many working so hard to scratch out a living with only labor and very little capital, it didn’t seem fair to expose them to too much scrutiny.  Maybe some day in the future.

The pics below are in the city, quite a different scene there.

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On the waterway between Gulang Yu and the city of Xiamen you can see lots of tour boats.  Naturally you would expect some of them might offer dinner cruises since many look about the right size for that sort of thing.  So we asked the concierge at the hotel if he could recommend a dinner cruise.  This became a discussion among 4 or 5 concierge staff and us trying to explain what a dinner cruise was to them.  The up shot of it was that if we wanted dinner on a boat, they recommended we should “take dinner” with us.