I knew I needed to get out and about, lest I evolve chair-legs out of my butt, but credit is certainly due to Ms. M for getting me excited about a bit of travel when she stopped by Shanghai to lose to laptop – successfully, I might add. The other serendipitous thing is that Prof H, in whose house I’m sitting while in Shanghai, came back home for December, so I thought it would be nice of me to make myself scarce and give him his apartment back. So there you are, there’s always a good reason to go meandering, but sometimes it takes a bit of a push.
I decided to come to Beijing because I need to run an errand for someone, and I’ve got a few friends here that I haven’t seen in years, and well, ‘cause hey it’s Beijing! (That should be read in the same voice as the great Jack handy quote: “If you ever fall from a building go completely limp, and maybe someone will think you're a dummy and try to catch you, 'cause, hey, free dummy”) I lived here a couple of times while going to one language school or another, but I haven’t been here in a few years now, and as with any Chinese city over that period of time, I’m told everything is different. They demolished a pie-slice of the city to the north for the Olympics and built a huge park, and well, a lot of other stuff. I’m looking forward to exploring a bit.
The funny thing is that one of my old Beijing friends, J, who is now a wig of a rather large size, is heading to Shenyang for a couple of days and asking if wanted to tag along. Yeah. I do. Shenyang is a read pit. An eyesore and industrial failure zone. It’s like all the economic and climactic and psychic despair of the US rust-belt were focused into one sad little city. They lost their industry in the mid-90s and still haven’t really gotten it back. Well that’s hearsay, because I don’t know for sure. So why am I excited to go there? That was the first place I ever went in China. I taught there for a year. The people were wonderful – I met W there, who I dated for several years, and the food is really great homey country food. And there’s winter. Real crazy-cold blizzard winter. I love it. I know, I’m sick in the head. One trouble is that I haven’t been able to get in touch with anyone I knew from up there on such short notice, so I might not even get to meet anyone, but hey, still, I’m really looking forward to it.
So after that, a return to Beijing, meet up with some good folks from Qinghua U, and from the inky world of Public Relations, and then… then, where? Well, I’m thinking that I want to head down to Chongqing, and then head back down the river to Shanghai, but maybe there’s somewhere in the middle there that I might want to check out too. We shall see.
I guess I should close with a bit on the train I took to get here to Beijing. I decided to go the train because I really miss taking the train – I don’t get to take the train much in the US, and frankly I was feeling a bit nostalgic. Let’s see how long that lasts, eh? So it was the ever so swank D308 one-stop express to Beijing. You can see the extent of the swank in the photo down there.
Anyway, it was a little spooky because for the first leg of the trip – from Shanghai to Nanjing – I actually had the whole berth to myself. I had just started tempting fate by thinking it might be nice to have some random folks to chat with when we stopped to pick them up: one nice woman who made very embarrassed phone calls to someone in a hushed overly-secretive voice, and a couple. A talkative couple. At midnight. A loud talkative couple at midnight. After they finally wound down more than an hour later, a thought occurred to me. Is it always the way that the person most responsible for your sleeplessness will be the first to go to sleep? Also: big snorer, that man. And that only made me self-conscious. With all the dry recycled air in the train, I was worried that I’d be snoring too, so ah, well. Not much good sleep.
But I arrived happy hale and hearty in the nicely chilled capital of Beijing. I can’t do much wandering today because I’m saddled with my roller-bag, and I’m leaving tonight, so there’s no hotel. I figured I’d just take advantage of the fine folks at Starbucks and their Wifi and write you a note. Pity VPN seems to be balky, so I can’t get this posted right now, but hopefully soon.
