The timing is not surprising. I spent a 13 hour day mostly wide awake on a 787 (I think) flying in a great circle route within a couple hundred miles of the North Pole to get to Beijing. I crashed at what would have been about 4 AM back home. Biorhythmic adjustments will take a day or two.
Claudia will sleep off and on till closer to a 6 AM hotel breakfast. In the meantime I am hoping my third visit to the loo won’t deprive her of the sleep she missed on the plane. Gosh darn old man plumbing but hallelujah for Japanese toilets. I recently heard a PBS reporter extolling their virtues. They put French bidets to shame. I will admit to being a tad unnerved at taking the throne and immediately hearing a heater preparing to make some water comfy for ablutions to be performed after mother nature’s call had been answered. And to think I was talking about pit toilets with someone who visited China 15 years ago.
China’s America sized population plus a billion doesn’t all have such luxury but the very long drive past a great many megafrastructures from the airport to the Kerry Hotel did impress on me the great wealth of reborn China. After all the books we’ve waded through about it’s epic grandeur and humiliations I am pleased for the world.
After realizing what a hassle it will be to type out blog posts on my cell phone because of its anti-Google and Facebook Wall the happier I am to live in good old bumptious USA. As I write this Chinese censors are busy removing any mention of Winnie the Pooh on the Internet. Their leader has been compared to him unfavorably. Meanwhile back stateside every late-night talk show host would be risking a firing squad if they found themselves transported here.
We had time for dinner at the hotel and the realization that the massive study of English in China won’t guarantee easy fluency beyond Peking. We couldn’t even remember how to say “thank you” in Mandarin.
I did reach the blog on Baidu (China’s much less fussy Google) after a hotel receptionist fiddled with my cell. Some messages are coming through on email probably because I never got round to using gmail. As for photos to the Internet or Facebook. That is all up in the air. Look for them here if I can work it out.
That’s not a problem for the Chinese, all of whom are looking at their cells every minute of the day. Tough luck Google.
