Galleries

Flying from Beijing to Shanghai, Susan and I boarded the Viking cruise ship Yi-Dun.  We had the pleasure of a Shanghai city tour in which we viewed an ancient garden containing ornate buildings from the Ming and Qing dynasties. 

The skyline of Shanghai is impressive, containing the world's third tallest building, the Shanghai Tower with 128 floors, at 2073 feet high.  (The world's tallest building is Dubai's Burj Khalifa at 2722 feet high.  The second highest is the Merdeka in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at 2227 feet.)--source Wikipedia

In this blog I will share photos from several ports that did not receive blogs dedicated to them.  After the photos, I summarize my thoughts and lasting impressions of the world cruise.

I first heard of Cape Verde Islands in the title of a jazz composition by pianist Horace Silver, The Cape Verdean Blues. 

What a difference the distance of three sea days between Cape Verde and Madeira makes!  The country of Madeira, like Cape Verde, also discovered and settled by the Portuguese, is the opposite of Cape Verde...

We began our China tour in the capital city of Beijing.  Though Beijing is a city of 21 million people, it is very clean and efficient...much above my expectations which were colored by my experience of the crowded cities in India.  We toured the famous Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square on our first day, and on the second day we toured a section of the Great Wall of China.

It has been said that the American healthcare system is not about health, nor is it a system.  Rather, it has been described as a pyramid scheme run by insurance companies with government collaboration, in which exorbitant premiums are collected from those who can afford to pay.  Profits are maximized by simply paying out less in benefits than what is collected in premiums.  The sicker the American population is, the more profits can be made by the insurance companies.  Care is withheld from the uninsured... 

Our recent trip to Georgia and Alabama was our first occasion to travel since Susan and I arrived back from Israel, Jordan, India, Dubai, and Nashville on March 5, 2020.  Society, including our company, Healing Healthcare Systems, shut down totally at the end of that week...