Just Two Subway Stops to the Forbidden City

The Moat and Wall of the Forbidden City, Beijing, China (May 21, 2016)

China is 13 hours ahead of the time zone where I live, which is as bad as it gets since it completely invert the sleep/awake cycle. Being able to function after such a time slip requires some adjustment, so I planned to arrive in Beijing two days before the start of my meeting. Adjusting to a new time zone however works only if you resist hitting the bed during the day, and stuck to the sleep schedule of the new location. That means keeping busy while the internal clock gets in sync with the sun.

Forbidden City Moat

I decided to spend the first adjustment day visiting the Forbidden City, just a short subway ride from my hotel. It is in fact quite easy to move around in Beijing. The city has 18 lines, 334 stations and 554 km (344 miles) of tracks making the Beijing subway the second largest system in the world (after Shanghai). All this is quite recent, since only two lines where in operation before 2002, with the largest expansion was completed for the summer Olympics games hosted in 2008. Since I read about how imposing was the wall and moat surrounding the Forbidden City, I convinced my graduate student that went along for the trip that we should get off the train before the main entrance, and walk a little along the wall. According to my map that meant walking for just a couple of stops, strolling through a modern boulevard leading straight to the back side of the Forbidden City, and then walking along the moat to the main entrance facing Tiananmen square on the opposite side. The weather was pleasantly warm and sunny, and the air exceptionally clear, without the dense cap of smog that the city is notorious for. What could go wrong?

Well, what went wrong is that I apparently don't know how to properly read distances on a map. The distance between the two stops turned out to be over 3 miles, and took a couple of hours to navigate in the heavy traffic of the big city, to then arrive at the entrance of the Forbidden City, which is something that in itself takes at least a full day to visit. My graduate student was not amused, and she is still reminding me of this episode every time she want to point out how my judgment may not be up to the task when we explore new directions in our daily research work. From that point onward she got in charge of navigating our excursions on the city's transport system. The trick for a successful career in academia is finding students that are smarter than you...

The Moat and Wall of the Forbidden City, Beijing, China (May 21, 2016)

Flying to the Far East

Somewhere over Iowa (May 19, 2016)

When I was a student in Pisa, I spent countless hours watching the world pass by, from the window of the intercity train that would ferry me back and forth between the city where I was studying, and the one where my family lived in the North of Italy. It seemed a very long trip at the time (about 200 miles that the train would cover in 4 hours), even though in my current midwestern frame of reference it is but around the corner. I relished watching the life of strangers pass-by from the second class window, like an unscripted movie pasted together by a director not quite awake from a surrealist dream. A way to suspend one's own thoughts by borrowing fleeting moments of other people's life.

Des Moines Airport

Since I came to the US, trains ceased to be my main method of transportation. The distances here are much larger than in Europe, and the trains themselves are just a shadow of their past glory, when they opened the Frontier to civilization (our particular variant of it) and genocide (of the people that had already civilized these wanted lands). In the US you either move by car, (the mechanical overlords that control America's suburbia commuters' life) or you fly. I started to fly a lot. To the observatories on top of remote desert mountains where I would use giant pieces of glass to pierce the sky (or, most often than not, the hated clouds) in invisible light. To far away cities where I would meet like-minded astro-obsessed individual, where we would discuss in conference the mysteries found in these observations. Even though the pace of my travel has decreased since moving to a University (teaching commitments) and since I started to use space telescopes (you don't really have to travel to space to use them), I still fly a lot. In about a decade I clicked over three quarters of a million miles, on just one of the many airlines that had been ferrying me around. This is more than 4 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

The next few posts will be about one of such trips. Mid-May this summer, as soon as the classes ended and the students were given to know their fate after the final exam, I packed my carry-on luggage and drove to the Des Moines airport, ready to fly to Beijing via Chicago. This was my first time in China, a country I had been always curious about, but never visited before. As I was traveling light, I made the objectionable choice of leaving my DSLR camera home. All the photos you will see in this series, including the ones in this post, were therefore shot as JPEG with an iPhone 6, and subsequently processed with Lightroom on my computer. In the next posts I will talk about the conference, and the places and people I visited in the trip. I hope you will enjoy coming along!

Chicago O'Hare Airport (May 19, 2016)

A Trip to Boston

Boston, MA (June 7, 2014)

The Summer Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, this year, was in Boston, Massachusetts. This was the perfect opportunity for me to return to the city where I lived for 12 years, before moving all the way to the middle of the country. The meeting was at the Westin Hotel in Copley, which is close to the Hancock tower, the tall blue building in photo above, right at the center of the city.

Sara Seager in Plenary

Summer AAS meetings tend to be smaller than the January meetings, yet there were almost 1,200 astronomers in town. The format of the meeting is the usual for the AAS: a number of plenary sessions spread through the day with parallel sessions in-between, where shorter talks were grouped thematically and delivered in smaller rooms. Two of my students were giving talks in the parallel sessions: one about his search of brown dwarf companions hiding in the periphery of extrasolar planetary systems, and the other about measuring the efficiency of star formation across the Galaxy. While the parallel session talks are delivered as brief "science" updates and tend to be very technical, the plenary talks are intended for a general astronomy audience, and tend to provide a broad overview of the field for non specialists. They are fun to attend. The picture on the left shows Sara Seager, extrasolar planets superstar from MIT, talking about the characterization of planetary systems found by the Kepler telescope, and the perspectives offered by future missions. Very timely, as the continuation of Kepler itself (the K2 mission) has just been approved by NASA (albeit at the expenses of other, equally useful, space telescopes). K2 is a cool hack: Kepler was designed to work with three reactions wheels, gyroscope-like devices that allow the precise pointing necessary to achieve its legendary photometric accuracy. Down to two wheels after malfunctions, Kepler was due to be retired until clever engineers figured that they could use the solar radiation with the remaining reaction wheels as a stabilizing force, the same way a sailboat use head-wind to coast against the current. Devilishly smart: it is rocket science after all. The K2 mission will operate differently than before, and its focus will be more on the stars hosting planets, rather than finding more planets like Earth: this is however as important as the search for extrasolar planetary systems, as pointed out by my Iowa State colleague Steve Kawaler in his excellent and entertaining plenary talk.

The meeting finished on Thursday, so I spent the last day of the week visiting the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), which was my workplace for the 12 years I lived in Boston. It was nice to see everybody, including the part of my group that is in California (also in Boston for the meeting), and one of my graduate students there with a fellowship to finish her thesis. As a plus, I discovered that some of my CfA friends, including my old boss, had been converted into manga characters, as a part of a collaboration between US institutions and the Tohoku University in Sendai. How cool is that?

Fenway Park

I will talk more, in future posts, about the plenary talks at the AAS and my CfA visit. Let me finish this long overdue entry with a comment about the photos. As you have certainly noticed these are cameraphone photos, shot with my iPhone 5s, and processed in-phone with Snapseed. I didn't bring my "real" camera (the Nikon 700) with me, as I often do in trips that are mainly work. This trip was actually borderline, as I stayed in town for the weekend after the meeting, and went around shooting along the Charles river (top and bottom photo) and in the neighborhood of the hotel (which was just behind Fenway Park, the famed and sacred home field of the Boston Red Sox, photo on the right). But I have already amassed a quite large selection of Boston quality photos in the years I have lived there, so it was fun just walking around happily snapping snapshots with a phone, layering artsy textures in accordance to the mood I felt while I was pressing the shutter. After 5 years in the corn fields, one forgets the diversity of life in the large human conglomerates of the East coast cities. I have been frequently to Chicago, but it is different. One ends up living in the suburbs, and the suburbs of Chicago are not different than the suburbs of a midwestern university town. Boston (and Cambridge where I worked), had a unique pulse, which is difficult to replicate in the middle of the country. Or maybe I am just getting nostalgic?

Boston, MA (June 7, 2014)