Photo of the Day 3.2.09


I’ve spent a large part of my day today checking in with friends of mine who live on the east coast of the US — my HEAVENS, but you guys are getting dumped on with snow! It’s for this reason I couldn’t resist posting this great photograph of New York taxis lined up and buried in the white stuff, shared by Global Voyager in the Gadling Flickr pool. Hang in there, guys. Spring is just around the corner.

If you’ve got some great travel shots you’d love to share, be sure to upload them to the Gadling pool on Flickr. We might just pick one as our Photo of the Day.

Buffalo, New York, attempts to attract visitors with its crummy weather

Only, the group of weather enthusiasts creating Buffalo’s interactive “Weather Experience Center” don’t consider blizzards “crummy.” Instead, they hope to capitalize on Buffalo’s changeable weather by feature it and other dramatic phenomena such as tornadoes and hurricanes in a museum-quality waterfront building.

One feature on the center’s drawing board is a “blizzard room,” where visitors can bundle into hats and gloves and experience the wind and snow of a blizzard. Also slated are an IMAX theater that will showcase tornado-chasing, and a glass-walled structure that will allow visitors to watch snow roll in off the lake while experts explain what is happening as it happens.

As a lover of extreme weather myself, I would be in to visiting an interactive weather center. It might not draw me to Buffalo, however, as I generally get a daily show 9 months out of the year from my living room window.

First possible blizzard since 1996 is gumming up Ohio

Catherine mentioned in her latest Gadling Take 5 post that it’s breaking up in Alaska where she lives. It’s socking in in Ohio. This is the first blizzard warning we’ve had in central Ohio for years. Streets are a real mess–so is Port Columbus International Airport. I just heard an interview with someone who is waiting at the airport for a friend to arrive. The friend’s airplane did arrive but the plane couldn’t land until the runway was clear. Since it didn’t have enough gas to keep circling the airport, it went onto Detroit to refuel and will be back. Flights out are getting canceled. I hope her friend likes Detroit.

We don’t get much snow here so people can be a bit reactionary when snow flies. Folks have flocked to the grocery store to stock up on food. It’s like people go into Little House on the Prairie mode thinking that they’re stocking up for months of hard times. From what I’ve heard, it’s going to quit snowing by tomorrow afternoon. If we didn’t buy food for a week, at my house, we’d still be able to find something to eat–shriveled potatoes, perhaps. I’m wondering, though, if I should have headed to the grocery store for loaves of bread and milk, the most popular items, according to the news. The hording tendency is catching.

These are the days that remind folks that no matter how much you plan, it just might not work out. You could end up in Detroit. Not that there’s anything wrong with Detroit, but only if that’s where you planned to head in the first place. Or-you could be stuck in Columbus.

Transportation in China is not for the faint of heart

I was looking the the images and videos from blizzard-crippled China this morning and it made me remember my 2004 trip there. Especially the photos from Guangzhou, China’s major southern city… I remember that train station! It was packed with thousands of migrant workers then, so I can’t even imagine what it must look like now, after hundreds of thousands of people have been stranded. (See Aaron’s post from earlier today.)

This photo, by AFP, is from Guangzhou: a man pushing his friend inside an already packed train. While nothing quite that extreme happened while I was there, I will say that the Chinese people do have an amazing ability to squeeze a lot of people into packed trains and buses. Getting inside is half the fun. It is like graduating from University of Darwinism – only the strongest and those with the sharpest elbows get in. At first, you feel like you shouldn’t participate in this. After all, you are on vacation and have time…but then you realize you will never get in if you always allow everyone to get ahead of you. So you start pushing and showing with the rest of them. When in Guangzhou…