eclipse!

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TODAY WAS THE DAY OF THE ECLIPSE: David first: Wow was today great (of course I mean the Eclipse )!!! I skipped Breakfast b/c I was tired of eggs and bread ( that is the only good thing they had ) so I ate a Granola Bar in the hotel room. We had free time, so we went to China Post and bought some stamps. Poppy looked at Postcards but he thought they were bad. We came back later, and this time the lady showed is Olympic Stamps that come with Olympic Postcards! Anyway, I'll skip the lame parts and get to the real catch: The Total Solar Eclipse! When we got to the site, I thought I was going to die from thirst in the before the first contact of the eclipse. Though I survived, and they gave me SPECIAL eclipse glasses that let me look at the sun without being blinded. I also set up my temperature experiment with
Joe: Joe had a temperature device that told us the temperature. We put one prong in the ground, one a centimeter above ground,and one half a meter above ground. Anyway, the eclipse was FABULOUS! It looked great, in so many ways! I'll tell you about the temperature results later...
FROM GRANDPA: David was indeed blown away by the eclipse . A celestial event is, indeed, celestial. As the sun was occulted everyone oohed and aahed as the daylight diminished, a dusk seemed to come in and the colors of the sky and landscape changed. We watched as (in the words of our Chinese tour coordinator) the" dog at the moon." And then at totality there was Venus, Mars, Saturn and Mercury. Mercury! It was only 94 seconds -- but it was awe-inspiring. All our conditions were perfect -- clear, cloudless sky, reasonable temperatures and a (smile) typical Mongolian (almost) grasslands for us to observe the whole sky.
We have pictures and sound recordings and maybe even a movie -- but more on that later. We now must begin a long, arduous trip home with a long day of two flights on Saturday (tomorrow) and another two flights of even longer duration on Subnday. David and I long for a hamburger -- and some of the travails of travel are getting to us, but they dim in comparison to all that we saw and felt.

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