Sorry for the long blog silence; after Andrew visited I had a bare 2 weeks to catch-up and then get ahead for my next set of visitors, my cousins Judy and Lisa from Chicago. They just left this morning on a-way-too-early flight back to the States, and I actually decided to capitalize on the fact that I'd be waking up at 4 am anyway, in addition to the Chinese national holiday on Monday and Tuesday, to take my own short trip to Shanghai, so I am writing this from the train. I don't think I'm on one of the new speedy 'bullet' trains that are so talked of since we've already stopped about 3 times, but maybe some other time. (In fact the new mayor-elect of Chicago, Rahm Emmanuel, overlapped with my cousins in Beijing to visit China to talk about learning how to build bullet trains in Illinois - we kept thinking we'd run into him, but we never did). (I was also hoping to see Nicholas Sarkozy, also in China this week, eating a scorpion at Wangfujing Night Market, but that didn't happen either, sadly.)
So far on the train nothing much has happened except catching up on the news, observing what Chinese people eat for breakfast on trains (a proportionately large number of them eat KFC, scary) and listening to the business man next to me's VERY loud telephone conversations that he has about every 15 minutes. Unfortunately I'm in the middle of 3 seats, probably because I didn't know how to ask not to be there when buying my ticket, but since its a day train and there is more space than on most flights, its fine. I was even able to (realizing I had made a drastic mistake in wearing my thermal underwear underneath my zipoffs) completely coverup with my vanderbilt hoodie jacket and slip off the themals without either of the two men beside me (or anyone else on the train) noticing. Woohoo!
I plan to be writing about Shanghai when I get back from that trip, but also will be posting about Judy and Lisa's time here in Beijing over the next couple of days.
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