My host gave me 3 weeks to plan my travel, but I was already scheduled for two other overseas trips so I couldn’t put my passport through the normal (or even expedited) visa process. So my host suggested that I travel on the 72-hour Visa-Free Transit visit  process. I had never heard of this and was skeptical (if not a little reluctant).

The 72-hour Visa-Free Transit rules say that you need a travel itinerary where your departure time is less than 72 hours after the time your inbound flight is scheduled to land. AND, you need to be heading to a different country from which you came. I booked a flight from Chicago to Beijing that landed Monday afternoon. Then I booked a return flight to Tokyo to leave Thursday morning. My Tokyo flight had a 3 hour layover for me to connect with a flight back to Chicago.

BTW, there’s lots more rules: you cannot leave Beijing, you have to be from one of the approved countries, and more. Please don’t go by what I say here, go research this yourself.

This worked. But I had to go through several document checks, with each step adding some doubt and uncertainty.

Ticket counter.

When I started the trip, my airline required me to show my China visa at the ticket counter before they would give me a boarding pass. Not surprisingly, everyone in line ahead of me had a visa. When I got to the head of the line, the poor agent had no idea what I was trying to do. He said “… you have to have a visa to get a boarding pass.” So I pulled out a print-out of an FAQ from the Chinese Embassy that explained the 72-hour Visa-Free Transit  policy; I pulled out a TripAdvisor.com posting, and I pulled out a print-out of a travel blogger’s experiences (including photos). I showed all of this to the agent and only a brief 5 minutes later he gave me a boarding pass.

At the departure gate.

I thought that once I got a boarding pass, I was set. But no. At the boarding gate there’s a roped-off line with a sign saying secondary document checks. I was the first in line. I gave them my visa-less passport, my itinerary, and print-outs from several web pages. The first agent I saw, she didn’t know what to do; she took all my papers then said she was calling her supervisor. Well he came, and didn’t know what to do; they both consulted with someone else. They asked me to sit down; they’d get back to me. Well finally a ticket agenda who knew how to read Chinese came to the gate and she knew what to do right away. They stamped my boarding pass and let me on. This was more drama than I wanted, but understandable.

Chinese immigration hall.

After my long 13 hour flight, with some anxiety I got off my plane at Terminal 3 at the Beijing airport. After a short walk I get to the immigration area. Much to my delight there were two lines dedicated to 72-hour Visa-Free Transit visitors. I went to one of the lines and it was closed?! I politely asked and an immigration agent pointed and said “Foreigner.” This meant I should get into one of the 6 or so lines with a big title of foreigner over the agent’s station.

I got into one of the lines. It was long but it moved fast. Clearly everyone in front of me had a visa. Gulp, was my immigration agent going to know what to do? I gave him my passport, my itinerary, and I said “72-hour Visa-Free Transit .” He apparently knew what I was talking about. He called over one of his associates and they directed me to a separate desk where my travel itinerary was checked. The agent took out a special, big-ish stamp, stamped my passport, and let me pass. Overall, very smooth. Yeah!!

Once I got passed immigration, there was a big back-lit poster celebrating the 72 hour transit visa — implying a welcome for all of us visitors entering under the new process. Thanks, I am glad to be here, so it was OK.

Return Trip

I landed in Beijing on a Monday afternoon; I left on a Thursday AM flight. Exiting China at the Beijing airport was very smooth. My passport and boarding pass were briefly checked, stamped and then I went through security, very much, like normal.

I was surprised by the reaction of my host. I got some adventure-traveler bonus points from the him and other members of the local team because I was willing to try the new process, but in retrospect it wasn’t that hard and hopefully my story can help others.

Summary

In summary, make sure you have a printed copy of your travel itinerary, and make sure your departure is to a different country from where you came, and make sure your departure time is less than 72-hours from your landing time, and read the FAQs for all the details of the rules.

References

• Beijing 72-hour Visa-Free Transit Policy link from Beijing Capital International Airport website
• Things to do during your 72 hours visa-free transit in Beijing article on China.org.cn travel section
• Beijing starts visa-free transit policy new feature on ebeijing.gov.cn
• Answers to Frequently Asked Questions Concerning 72-hour Transit Visa Exemption for Foreign Nationals FAQ posted on China-Embassy.org
• China: Visa-free transits article on TripAdvisor.com

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The traffic along Chang’an Avenue was really heavy and he couldn’t park close, so  he found a section of the street two blocks away where he waited for me.  With a finger pointing to the square, he set me off on a solo walk.

I started east walking by the architecturally unique National Centre for the Performing Arts (really beautiful!), I then followed along Chang’an Ave passed the Great Hall of the People and reached the north west corner of the square.  I saw the Tiananmen Gate, the iconic entry way to the Forbidden City, with the picture of Chairman Mao on it… this is one of the most common images you see in tourists pictures.

Tiananmen Square is physically across Chang’an Ave, south from the Gate.  The plaza area is fenced  on all sides, and if you look at the pin on Google Maps, it’s right at the entry I went through.  The entry is a guard station that scans all packages and backpacks.  I was waived-through no problem.  Overseas tourist types like me, while not common, looked welcome.  I would say most of the visitors to the square were citizens of China from other parts of the country (lots of tour buses).

While at the square I briefly walked by The National Museum of China, Mausoleum of Mao Zedong, Monument to the People’s Heroes, and very popular flag pole.  I got there right at sunset and 100s of people were gathered around the flag pole as the soldiers, in a very solemn ceremony, lowered the flag, right at sunset.

When the flag was lowered, the Tiananmen Gate lights were turned on.  It looked really nice!  A couple of people from a university came up to me, in excellent English welcomed me to China, asked me where I was from and with pride shared some of China’s history with me.  Very memorable.

But it was time to go.  I didn’t want to keep my driver waiting.  I haven’t been to China in over 8 years and it was very nice to be back. I had a really nice Tiananmen Square Walk.

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So pressed for time (I wanted the lighting from sunset), I took a taxi to Chinatown.  I saw the Jimi Hendrix Shrine, and I started a nice walk through Vancouver downtown.  I walked north and west through Chinatown, into Gastown, all the way to the Waterfront, then I headed south along Granville street all the way back to my hotel.  A really very nice loop through the city center.

Along the way, I saw: some historic buildings in Chinatown: Bank of Commerce, Carnegie Centre, and the really thin Sam Kee Building.  I crossed under the Chinatown gate walked through Victory Square Cenotaph, the Sun Building, the Dominion Building and as I entered the Gastown area, I saw the famous Gastown Steam Clock.

I followed Cordova Street west toward the Waterfront Station.  From the Granville building plaza, I got a fantastic view of the Burrard Inlet harbour area.  I saw a helicopter take off from the Helijet Terminal; I saw the gigantic DP World Centerm Container terminal and the very nice looking Canada Place area jutting out into the harbor.

Walking south along Granville, I passed by the Birks Place / fka Bank of Commerce building and the Vancouver Block building with its iconic neon clock.  I walked past the Granville Mall shopping area, made my way through the theater district, and I had dinner at a nice pub, then headed back to my hotel on Howe Street.

Vancouver Downtown Walk – Chinatown, Gastown, Waterfront, and Granville at EveryTrail
EveryTrail – Find the best hikes in California and beyond

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For this posting, I share a few pictures from my mobile phone.  I took a couple of pictures from the restaurants I visited:  Andrés D.C and Cafe Amarti. For lunch one day, my host took me to Club Colombia.  i stayed at the 101 Park House hotel.

My hotel and my company’s offices are in the Santa Bibiana Barrio — look East and you can see the Eastern Andes mountain range.  My meetings were in the El Chicó barrio.

The weather was in 70s during the day and in the upper 50s at night.  Not bad for a city 8600ft up in the mountains and on the equator. Really very nice.

Next time I will come back and do some sight seeing.

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I briefly saw the historic plaza.  I then walked back to the opera house via the famous Calle Madero pedestrian shopping street.

Along the way, I saw Torre Latinoamericana skyscraper, Banco de México, Edificio de Correos / Palacio Postal, MUNAL / Museo Nacional de Arte, El Caballito equestrian statue, Palacio de Minería, Museo del Ejército y Fuerza Aérea, Biblioteca del Congreso de la Unión, Zapaterias leon shoe store, Metropolitan Cathedral, Hotel Majestic and Gran Hotel, Palacio del Ayuntamiento, Edificio La Mexicana, Templo de San Felipe Neri, Palacio de Cultural Banamex, Edificio High Life, Templo de San Francisco, Casa de los Azulejos, and finally the Benito Juárez Memorial.

Later that evening my hotel told me that it was a protest.  I never sensed any hostility, but overall I think it was good that I only stayed briefly.

Tips:

As a general practice, the security organization at my work asks all travelers to Mexico City to only use pre-arranged cars.  My hotel was happy to help.  To get to the Centro Histórico my hotel gave me a ride; to return, they arranged for me to get a ride from the Hilton right next to the Bellas Artes.

Overall, I felt safe and was really glad I went for this walk.

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We started at Gordon Beach, this is the recreational area behind the Crowne Plaza hotel.  We walked north passing by the Tel Aviv Marina, Atzmout Beach,

Tips:

The whole walk was either on a sidewalk, paved trail, or board walk.  This is very well suited for bicycle riders, skaters or just business travelers out for a walk.  The Mediterranean Sea was always in view and made the whole experience wonderful.

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For starters, I knew that v1.9 had deprecated many of its old methods. In fact, I learned from the upgrade web page, , that v1.9 comes with a special migration plug-in. I was pleased to see this and used this to address most all of my updating challenages.

For example, $.browser() method was deprecated. The migrate script reported this to me in the Chrome console, as follows:

Chrome console:

With a little digging, I was able to find that I was using an old version of blockUI. When I changed to the new version the warning message went away.

I also got the following warning messages related to type changing and the change to the andSelf() method:

Chrome console:

Again, it took a lot of digging, but I was able to isolate the problem to my tmpl.js script. I was using a really old version. I think with a little more skill on my part, I would better be able to use stack backtraces or some other Chrome tool to find these quicker, but this problem was hard for me to find.

Since I was also using an old version of jQuery-UI, I stumbled upon a couple of breakages triggered by curCSS:

Chrome console:

For some reason, also, the dialog() method wouldn’t display text in the “OK” button and it would always popup at 0.0 (upper left), so I upgraded to jQuery-ui v1.9.2.

One last thing for Updating to jQuery 1.9. I had to change all of my .live() events to .on(). The migration guide clearly covered this.

Here’s an example from my website:

//$('#journal input').live('keydown', function(evt) {
$(document).on('keydown','#journal input', function(evt) {

This was easy to do; I had to do it in 6 different place, and it worked the first time.

Updating to jQuery 1.9 was a little more painful than I would like, but feels good to get caught up.

Ok, now that I’ve converted to jQuery v1.9, I can try out some of the new things.

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My original index.html file used the following

<head>
...
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/smoothness/jquery-ui-1.8.16.custom.css">
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/style.css">
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/screen.css">
...
</head>

where style.css borrowed heavily from a prior version of H5BP and most of my custom styles were in screen.css. To me, all of this worked, but I was delighted to follow H5BP’s lead and refactor my CSS to use normalize.css.

My new index.html file looks like this:

<head>
...
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/smoothness/jquery-ui-1.8.16.custom.css">
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/normalize.css">
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/main.css">
...
</head>

where normalize.css is version v1.1.1 taken from the H5BP github repository. The main.css is the H5BP file with my custom CSS inserted at the designated spot (“Author’s custom styles” section).

So I didn’t trust that this work work very well. I have always been kludgy and I mostly hack together my CSS; I am happy to align with a framework like H5BP, but I wasn’t optimistic that this would be easy.

So, I took an intermediate step to Add Normalize to my HTML5 CSS by creating a temporary file called indexnormalize.html. In Chrome, I setup two tabs, one with my index.html and the other with my indexnormalize.html and I did side by side comparisons, liberally using the “Inspect Element” developer tool built into Chrome.

After about an hour, I was done. It wasn’t that bad. Here’s a summary of the tweaks that I had to make to my CSS:

Background color. My web page has a black background. I have been setting it using the body tag, and I should have been using the html tag. The comments in normalize explain why this is better and there’s a whole series of blog postings explaining why my prior design was clueless (at best). Reference: Understanding the HTML versus BODY Element in CSS 

/* Part of file main.css */
/* old: */
body {
 ...
 background-color: black;
}
---
/* new: */
body {
 ...
}
html {
 background: black;
}

Drop down menu padding. The way my drop down menus were defined, the normalize.css margin and padding mucked things up. Rather than redesigning my menus, I added some CSS to compensate.

In normalize.css the following tripped me up:

/* Part of file normalize.css */
ul {
 margin: 1em 0;
}
ul {
 padding: 0 0 0 40px;
}

To fix this, in my custom css I added:

/* Part of file main.css */
#page-bar {
 padding: 0 0 0 0px;
 margin: 0 0;
}

Nav tag. My menus use the nav tag and so does normalize.css. I had to also fix the margin and padding there, too

/* Part of file main.css */
nav ul {
 margin: 0;
 padding: 0;
}

Printing styles. Also, I had to go into a different section of main.css to edit in my print styles. In the section titled “Print Styles” I put the following at the very end:

/* Part of file main.css */
...
 tbody, tr, img { page-break-inside: avoid; }
 tbody { border: 1px solid #999; }
 #head, #foot { display: none; }
}

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LOVE Statue, LHotel Montreal

LOVE Park, Philadelphia

While walking on rue St Jacques in Montréal last week, I was surprised to see the iconic LOVE Sculpture.  It was in the front garden entrance area of LHotel Montréal  (formerly L’Hôtel XIXe Siècle).

Just last month, I was in Philadelphia’s City Center area and saw the same LOVE Sculpture in John F. Kennedy Plaza just north of City Hall.

So that’s two LOVE Sculptures in one month! The one in Philadelphia is famous; tourist go to LOVE park to see the sculpture and fountain.  So what’s Montréal doing with one?  I decided to do a little homework:

The LOVE Sculpture, designed by Robert Indiana, was originally done for the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 1970.  Versions of that design has been installed around the world. The sculpture in Philadelphia was installed in 1976, and the one in Montréal was dated 1970.  This one surprised me.

Well, the one in front of LHotel Montréal was installed in 2010.  The new owner of the hotel has a marvelous art collection and the LOVE Sculpture was one of the many pieces of pop art installed for public viewing.  See the article from Maclean’s: Guess who’s shaking up Montréal ? June, 2010.

In Philadelphia, the LOVE sculpture was put in as part of the bicentennial in 1976.  A couple of years later it was removed.  The city missed it so much, it was put back and remains a feature of the City Center. History from LOVE Park WIKI

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It turns out that my server (it’s a fedora linux system  running in my basement, I am the system admin) required a change to the DNS settings. I knew these changes were going to be needed, but I wasn’t sure when and this error was the first symptom that told me I should have planned ahead a little better.

I was changing ISPs and my home network DNS settings needed to change from 192.168.100.155 to 192.168.100.164.

• I edited my /etc/resolv.conf file,
• I edited the files under /etc/sysconfig, and then
• I restarted my web server.

And everything was fine. But it wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Here’s some notes for my reference and the potential benefit of others:

/etc/resolv.conf

For a quick test, go to a command line and try to ping yahoo.com. This didn’t work for me. My old ISP’s DNS server had gone offline. This was expected, and I need to update my settings.

The file /etc/resolv.conf is the key file that gets looked at for “every” DNS lookup. Anything on your Linux system that uses gethostbyname() checks this file. In theory all I have to do is edit this file and it should fix my “RSS Error: WP HTTP Error: name look-up timed out” error.

/etc/resolv.conf

# Generated by NetworkManager
nameserver 192.168.100.164        # was 192.168.100.155

The quick test is to ping yahoo.com. Sure enough it works fine.

/etc/sysconfig

We know from experience, that the /etc/resolv.conf file is generated by the Fedora NetworkManager configuration service. So go into /etc/sysconfig and find all matches to the old IP address and switch it to the new. For example, I ran the following bash command line to find the files I needed to edit:

[root@kozik2 sysconfig]# grep -r 192.168.100.155 * | grep DNS
networking/profiles/default/ifcfg-eth0:DNS1=192.168.100.155
networking/devices/ifcfg-eth0:DNS1=192.168.100.155
network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0:DNS1=192.168.100.155

I went into each of these files and edited the 155 to 164. This way, when the NetworkManager gets run next, my /etc/resolv.conf won’t revert back to its old settings.

Not enough, I needed to troubleshoot

So I thought I knew what I was doing. If I fixed the DNS IP address, but I was still getting the “RSS Error: WP HTTP Error: name lookup timed out” error on my blog’s dashboard and the posting pages were very very slow to display. Something still wasn’t right with wordpress.

Since ping now worked, I decided to run tcpdump and see what’s going on:

tcpdump -n port 53 | grep 192.168.100.155

It just sat there. Good, I thought. Next, I then to retrieve my dashboard page, and then the tcpdump started rolling unsuccessful requests to the DNS server at .155 to resolve dashboard.wordpress.com. Ah, I forgot one last step!!

Don’t forget to restart the webserver!!

I forgot that on initialization, php reads from resolv.conf once and then continues to use that same IP address! A simple run of the following command fixed everything:

service httpd restart

I then refreshed my dashboard page and everything came up fast and normal.

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