Johannes Leistner

We found the Level43 bar to be a sleek and stylishly blue lit open air terrace on the 43rd floor, located at the busy Sheikh Zayed Road. From there we enjoyed spectacular panoramic views of Dubai’s skyline, including the Burj Khalifa of course!

view from our hotel room

the other day I got up early at around 5:30 in the morning to take some nice photos of the sunrise. I enjoyed myself so much by walking from one dune to another, feeling the cold sand under my feet. it was so quiet I couldn’t imagine ever being somewhere else so quiet before. every five minutes the light changed, it got brighter and brighter and the shapes of the dunes, the colour of the sand changed over and over again. that morning I fell in love with the desert completely…

seen in Muscat, Oman

imagine your city council would decide to rebuild the old part of your town and they would kindly ask you to move to the suburbs as your house was in the way of the new/old city wall - what would you think?

For Datong’s residents this became reality. Datong is reconstructing their ancient city centre as it was (more or less) during the Ming Dynasty. This $8.5 billion project will turn Datong into a Disneyland-style city with 40.000 residents moving away from the centre.

I wouldn’t believe such a story if I haven’t seen it with my own eyes. If you only think about the reconstruction of the city wall (see picture) this is already a massive project. The wall is 5 kilometres long, around 12 metres wide and 10 metres high (at least). Every few 100-metres is featured with a watch tower and not to forget the huge moat, surrounding the wall…

here you can see a part of Datong which happens to be inside the recently built city wall - yes you heard it right: they rebuild their ancient city wall in its old dimensions (more photos to follow tomorrow). part of this gigantic project is to break down all (!) buildings of younger age in the city centre and rebuild them the old style. all residents will have to move to areas like this one: Datong housing project

When we reached “the coal capital” Datong (population of approximately 1.41 million), our first impression was that this gonna be a depressing vacation. The smell from thousands of coal fires was every where and within the city centre the dead eyes of many empty houses were watching us. The late winter season with snow remains and frost added another grey layer of hopelessness… In comparison to the flourishing Beijing everything was dirty, noisy and ugly.

Follow my stream during the next days to find out if this impression remained or if it changed

my first train ride in China (from Beijing to Datong) was great fun! only tickets for the cheapest of four classes (which is called “hard seater”) were available, but at least we had seat reservations because the train got really stuffed as you can see here. together with an over 70 years old couple form the States, we were the only foreigners on board. but after the first of seven hours we got to know our neighbours well - even though only one spoke a few words English.

besides experiencing the atmosphere on a typical Chines train ride, it was very interesting to watch the landscape from the window: power plant after power plant, highways, factories, other railway tracks with coal trains on it, construction sides and so on… From this very first trip outside of Beijing I got a good picture of what the Chines economy is capable of! amazing!