Newport Aquarium

I was in Cincinnati for work and had a morning off so I went across the river into Kentucky and visited Newport Aquarium.

The aquarium has all kinds of interesting wildlife.

I've been here before so I tried to shoot something completely different this time.

Sometimes it's hard to tell who's watching whom.

Shooting thru glass makes for tough reflections, but sometimes that results in interesting photos.

Either she's texting or shooting photos with her phone, I think I was the only one taking photos with something other than a phone.

It's interesting how crocs have eyes with vertical slits...

... and frogs have horizontal slits.

One of my favorite parts of the aquarium is all the glass tunnels.

How wonderful the world must be looking through the eyes of a child.

The jelly fish room is very cool but so hard to photograph. It's dark so you have shoot wide open. The auto focus can't seem to focus on blobs of goo so I switched to manual focus which didn't work much better.

Several of the tanks are round so you can shoot right through them which makes for some strange photos.

This wasn't inside the aquarium, but outside one of restaurants on the river walk and it was freezing outside.

The rest of China

Three Gorges Museum. It rained all day while I was touring the city.

The People's Great Hall. It was across the square from the Three Gorges Museum.

Everyone was very friendly there, especially the kids. I got the impression that most hadn't seen any foreigners, if you said to "Hi" to them in chinese they laughed and giggled. Maybe I was saying it wrong.

The mall next to my hotel, it was very upscale, as nice as any I've been to at home.

Near my hotel was a park with this fountain that had shows every night.

The park also had music every night, and people came out and exercised. It was something like a combination of Tai Chi and dancing.

Everywhere I've been in China there is KTV everywhere. I've been in one, but I hear KTV is a karaoke bar.

This one is hard to explain, it's a restaurant with a bathroom theme, all the seats are toilets, needless to say we didn't eat there.

I flew home through Beijing, this was 3pm in the afternoon, and that little dot is the sun. It was so hazy from pollution you could barely see the sun.

China

I was surprised at some of the "things" we saw on the road. This a 3 wheeled motorcycle and they were everywhere, and there were no limits on how much you could load on them.

The kids were a blast, we had quite a few take pictures with us like we were celebrities, I have to admit it was pretty fun.

We had time after the Panda center so we toured an "old" town, although I think it was really brand new, just built to look like an ancient Chinese village.

Everywhere you looked in China was an interesting mix and the very old and very modern.

Two of my co-workers.