A trip a month...

...keeps my camera busy? ...diminshes one's bank account? ...keeps one happy and sane? (But of course!)

Whatever the reason, it's time to be off again, this time to Zhongwei (中卫) in Ningxia Province and Xiahe 夏河 in southern Gansu. Expect this to be rough: we're beginning with a 22hr. on a hard sleeper train, and our return trip is uncertain (will we get back to Beijing in time for Andrea to go to class and I to work?), depending on the reliability of Chinese travel agents (...). These national holidays stress me out.

On the positive side, there will be deserts of vast proportions, hairy camels, grasslands, Tibetan monasteries, more grasslands, and of course, the sparkling cleanliness of rural China. I very much look forward to it all.

Last month I was in Nanjing & Shanghai, and it was most relaxing. I crashed the wonderful hospitality of Zhenzhen (who lives in a mountain terrace), woke up at 10am, looked for plum blossoms, and wandered around in the nearby mountain.

All this confirmed a realization—slowly dawning all this year—that contrary to what I believed growing up, Beijing is not the best place to be in China. In fact, right now, sometimes it's not very pleasant at all. When you think about cities like Kunming and Nanjing—warm weather, trees galore, clean air, less crowded, no traffic jams, cheaper living—you wonder why you are in Beijing at all. Not that I have lost faith in my home city (for it is still home, despite all the years away and all its annoyances and flaws), but it does make me want to get away. Home is not home because you'll always want to live there, but because you'll belong to it and know it even if you are several elsewheres away.

I've stayed up too late packing again; some things never change.

in which surprising resemblances to greek heroes are discovered

Like Achilles, I seem to be rather weak in the foot area. I rather excel at injuring my left foot.
(Why just the left?)

Most recently I dropped a drawer on it, but fortunately from a low height. Just prior to that, I got the same foot stuck in the bus door. Rather than screaming or otherwise calling attention to the problem, I stood there in a dreamy daze, thinking to myself, "Hmm, my foot is stuck in the door. This hurts. Quite a lot. I wonder if anyone will notice?" Then after a few moments I realized that I had to open my mouth. (This is typical of me: in high school I sprained my ankle and decided the best course of action would be to Not Tell Anyone.)

And on top of everything, the same disobedient left foot hasn't completely recovered from falling off a bike in Vietnam. My biking skills, on the other hand, have improved admirably in the same span of time. I biked around 18km on Saturday, to the Botanical Gardens and back, and it was surprisingly easy, even. It no longer bothers me that I have to share the road with, god forbid, other bikers, or cars, or motorcyclists. Dare I say I'm ready for the mountains?

beijing snapshot, saturday night

Sanlitun on a Saturday night is strangely heartbreaking. Not heartbreaking in the way you might expect, young lovers wearing each other to pieces in dim bars and hidden rooms. But heartbreaking, more fundamentally perhaps, because behind the French restaurants and gleaming mirrored lounges are broken-down lots, full of demolished rubble and low ramshackle 'houses' that look like they may fall apart with a slight push.

On a Saturday night, people here are sitting beneath awnings at a makeshift night market. They’re eating Y2 per bowl of cold green bean noodles, and grilling kebabs from meat that has been sitting out on a wooden board for perhaps far too long. Hasty menus advertising fried rice and noodles are scrawled on plaster walls. Men loiter, smoke, hunch over wooden tables in the shadows.

A woman wrestles with a bouquet of long-handled mops: everything sold here is strictly functional. Bright pink plastic slippers, cleaning detergents, buckets, water bottles. A sign on a the wall points to the grains store around the corner.

But less than 500m away, on a very different Saturday night, clubbers are dancing behind the impregnable walls of Mystique. Water flows down the walls at Alfa, where people dance and press up against one another in black booths. Other people burst into spontaneous laughter as they lurch down the street. There are stores with Y3000 wooden tables and spas that offer baths in milk and rose petals.

It’s really the same scene as in any modern city, but here the surrounding contrast is more jarring and startling. The space between is so much smaller, the 2 different worlds separated by just a few meters, but also overlapping becasue they share the same roads and the same names.

And then there are the people who work here, in these sleek, elegant places. Do they live nearby? Do they care they are here? They smile and they smile and they are so nice, but I wonder, what are they really thinking, as I wave goodbye.