Google Earth Rocks!
Monday, June 19 2006 Filed in: Chinese
Culture
Have you seen
Google Earth? You really should check it
out. It's the most amazing toy.
I played around with it a few months ago when if first came out for the Mac. I obsessed on tracking down interesting sites, finding our home, etc, it's amazing. It has a searchable globe constructed out of satellite images complete with terrain elevations, etc. Not every area is available in high resolution (our home is in a low-res blurry area) but lots of places are high-res. If you're interested in China you might get a kick out of looking at The Forbidden City in Beijing. We got to tour it when we traveled to get Kai, so it was exciting to see it from space. You'd be amazed at the kind of detail you can make out from these images. I'm sure the government has even better imagery to play with, but this is pretty good. The images below are not as high of definition as possible to view in the Google Earth program, as I've shrunk them down a bit to fit the web-page.
Having looked around Beijing, I was curious if I could find other places we visited in China. Here's a picture of Shamian Island in Guangzhou.
The big white building on the south side of the island is the White Swan Hotel where we stayed. This was pretty easy to find as I knew the layout of the island and could just sort of look along the Pearl River in the spots where it flows straight, west to east, through the city.
The other cities we stayed in were available in high-res as well. I wanted to see if I could find Kai's SWI. Unfortunately you can't search China by street address... yet. So I still haven't found it. But I did find the hotel we stayed at when we were in his province. This one was not as easy as the White Swan. My search for this one was much more of a high tech Where's Waldo.
Here's China...
Here's Shijaizhuang...
Where do you start? All you can do really is pick a place and begin. I had a set of landmarks to work with and I'll show them to you in a minute. My mom was staying with us this weekend and she watched me doing this Sunday morning. She thought I was nuts. I probably am, but here's the picture of the hotel we stayed in...
Now here's the landmarks as I've labeled them above...
(A) is our hotel The Hebei Century
(B) is a middle or high school courtyard we could see from our hotel window. See the narrow strip of blue rooftop?
(C) is a destinctively shaped building we could see out our window...
(D) is the mall across the street that we hung out in and annoyed the shopkeepers with our inability to speak the local language...
(E) is the park across the intersection we visited ...
Pretty good, huh?
So now on my hunting list are the temples we visited, and of course, Kai's SWI. If you are planning on visiting any of those places, please do me a favor and bring along a GPS device. exact latitude and longitude would make this a LOT easier!!!
If you'd like to visit these locations in Google Earth, you can click on the links below to download the KMZ files. Opening these will take you to the the location in Google Earth if you have it installed on your computer.
Shijiazhuang - Hebei Century Hotel
White Swan Hotel
I played around with it a few months ago when if first came out for the Mac. I obsessed on tracking down interesting sites, finding our home, etc, it's amazing. It has a searchable globe constructed out of satellite images complete with terrain elevations, etc. Not every area is available in high resolution (our home is in a low-res blurry area) but lots of places are high-res. If you're interested in China you might get a kick out of looking at The Forbidden City in Beijing. We got to tour it when we traveled to get Kai, so it was exciting to see it from space. You'd be amazed at the kind of detail you can make out from these images. I'm sure the government has even better imagery to play with, but this is pretty good. The images below are not as high of definition as possible to view in the Google Earth program, as I've shrunk them down a bit to fit the web-page.
Having looked around Beijing, I was curious if I could find other places we visited in China. Here's a picture of Shamian Island in Guangzhou.
The big white building on the south side of the island is the White Swan Hotel where we stayed. This was pretty easy to find as I knew the layout of the island and could just sort of look along the Pearl River in the spots where it flows straight, west to east, through the city.
The other cities we stayed in were available in high-res as well. I wanted to see if I could find Kai's SWI. Unfortunately you can't search China by street address... yet. So I still haven't found it. But I did find the hotel we stayed at when we were in his province. This one was not as easy as the White Swan. My search for this one was much more of a high tech Where's Waldo.
Here's China...
Here's Shijaizhuang...
Where do you start? All you can do really is pick a place and begin. I had a set of landmarks to work with and I'll show them to you in a minute. My mom was staying with us this weekend and she watched me doing this Sunday morning. She thought I was nuts. I probably am, but here's the picture of the hotel we stayed in...
Now here's the landmarks as I've labeled them above...
(A) is our hotel The Hebei Century
(B) is a middle or high school courtyard we could see from our hotel window. See the narrow strip of blue rooftop?
(C) is a destinctively shaped building we could see out our window...
(D) is the mall across the street that we hung out in and annoyed the shopkeepers with our inability to speak the local language...
(E) is the park across the intersection we visited ...
Pretty good, huh?
So now on my hunting list are the temples we visited, and of course, Kai's SWI. If you are planning on visiting any of those places, please do me a favor and bring along a GPS device. exact latitude and longitude would make this a LOT easier!!!
If you'd like to visit these locations in Google Earth, you can click on the links below to download the KMZ files. Opening these will take you to the the location in Google Earth if you have it installed on your computer.
Shijiazhuang - Hebei Century Hotel
White Swan Hotel
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