Seventeen hours of flying time.  The pods that we lived in for the last 12 hours are pretty neat…

Well over twenty four hours of elapsed time since I left home, when I arrived at the hotel in Beijing on late afternoon. I had expected the second leg of the plane trip to be mostly over the Pacific ocean, from Vancouver to Beijing, but in fact it was apparently over land most of the time – through western Canada, across Alaska and down the eastern coast of Russia to China. On the final hour of travel we flew over a beautiful range of mountains – they had sharp features and angled peaks, looking like they were chiseled out of the earth. I don’t know much about geology, but I was guessing that they must have been formed by glaciers because of their particular shape. You could see roads through the mountains and villages at the foot of many of them. Although my mood was decidedly anything but happy during this particular flight, for a moment of two flying over these particular mountains put me in a romantic mood. And then, just as suddenly as they had appeared, the terrain was replaced by the flatness of a pancake near Beijing itself. Having lived in an area of mildly hilly terrain with low mountains on the horizon all of my adult life, flat plains are not something familiar to my eyes. I could see roads stretching to the horizon – they looked pretty unnatural because of how straight they were. All of the roads I’ve travelled on each day adapt to the terrain they’re on by winding and zig-zagging a fair amount. But these looked like the efforts of careful planning.   Wish I had taken some photos.  Maybe Meredith will share some of hers with me and I’ll come back and post them.

Still in the plane. Descending to Beijing airport. A few features kept repeating them selves. Large rural buildings with red roofs and with blue roofs – peaked roofs, yet pretty flat ones. Along a number of roads, a few hundred feet of trees line either side of the road; yet the trees grow in very regular patterns, indicating that they were arranged and planted with the intention of providing travelers with a pleasant view. Later when we drove from the airport to the city, we passed these some of these groves and commented that they must be the ones that we saw from the air.

If I was flying and looking down on the United States, or even Ukraine, I think I’d have the sense that I could reasonably guess what I was passing over. I can readily recognize farms, towns, suburban residential developments, large shopping malls, and many other artificial features planted on the land by man. As the plane lowered over northern China, I repeatedly saw artificial topography that I couldn’t guess at. A series of farms, and nestled in between them a cluster of large buildings that looked to my eye like they didn’t belong – maybe local governmental centers, or religious institutions, or something else that I couldn’t guess at for the life of me. When we were still fairly high, you could make out little clusters of dwellings, say a couple of hundred… but whereas I’m used to seeing towns and villages organized in haphazard ways and with irregular shapes as seen from above, these looked unexpectedly strange to me. There would be a cluster of homes and roads, tightly packed and regular, and a distinct border to the collection – with no outliers, no random scattering of houses near the edges of that village. Too neat and tidy for what I was used to. Everything pointed to the idea that there was planning and building, and that nothing was left to chance and evolution. I wondered if this was an artifact of China’s central planning? Or was I overanalyzing and seeing something that wasn’t there. More likely I don’t understand enough about life here to be able to interpret what I see. That’ll probably prove to be true of much of what I see over the next week, I suspect.
The airport is about 45 minutes from our hotel, with the 5pm rush hour traffic that we encounter along the way. I see more English language that I expected – I’m told that this is an artifact of the Olympics. Most of the signage I cannot understand, though, and I’m immediately reminded that I’m a foreigner.

I’m stuffy and my sinuses are not doing well – possibly from the smog, I’m told. The hotel is quite nice, and the room is pretty comfortable.

We go out to dinner to strategize over our stay (we have arrived to hear some politically sensitive news involving our company and the Chinese government, and have enough concerns that we discuss whether we should abort our trip and head home; we decide it’s worth sticking around to see whether we can still make the trip work). Rather than the hotel restaurant, we wander across the street o something that we think is a restaurant (lots of brightly lit signs is bold color on the face of the building – the Chinese are not subtle when it comes to get your attention to a commercial concern). Although I’m tired and most brain cells have long ago stopped functioning, I’m really enjoying dinner. The textures in what is vaguely familiar as Hot and Sour soup are amazing to me – nothing at all like the Chinese Restarurant in Pine Bush. We ordered several dishes and shared them, and each one impressed me with rich flavors. I’m going to like eating here, I think. Wish I was in a better mood to enjoy it; maybe sleep will help.

Back to the hotel to get some sleep. But I’m not having luck adjusting to the time difference, it seems. After two and an half hours of sleep, at 3am I decide that I’m going to start writing my thoughts down in this blog.  I’m rambling on too long and nobody will be interested in reading this, but that’s ok because that’s not the point of it.  It feels better to get things out of my head and written into words today.