Up, early, throw everything in the backpack(s) and off to the airport. Airport was pretty much empty so on the plane from Burlington, the pilot fired everything up and then announced he had to do a "system restart" which entailed turned all the power off and back on again (CTL-ALT-DEL?). Glad he got that straightened out on the tarmac. An hour later in Newark. I found coffee and alternated between walking around and reading for the 4 hour layover. At one point a family came to sit with me and all but one woman sat together and the woman sat near me, which I thought was a little odd until she started coughing up stuff. I tactfully moved and used some of the sanitizing hand stuff (man that stuff tastes bad), and moved far away. If I hear her coughing on the plane...
She was on the plane but she must have been far away, because I didn't hear her. I saw her at the baggage carousel in Beijing. Hope she feels better.
I sat on the plane with a guy from Texas who was born in China and was 1 of 4 kids to go to America. He was a mathematician and worked for.... wait for it... BP (British Petroleum). I took pity on him and agreed not to discuss the oil spill. He worked in the natural gas sector analyzing markets. After 13 hours his bottom line was, there is plenty of gas and oil, it is just going to be a lot more expensive. So start insulating you houses and looking at driving scooters...
The goods news is that the Boeing 777 had 97 movies you could watch any time you wanted, wow and I thought I wouldn't know what to do for 13+ hours. The bad news is it broke about 2 hours into the flight and the only entertainment we got was watching RedHat Linux trying to boot over and over and over for 11 hours. That's riveting stuff let me tell you, Oscar stuff!
I had 2 books and a netbook so I alternated between those 3 and nodding off for 13 hours. And talking to the BP guy. The flight goes up over the top of the earth and the map thingie worked in between the RedHat boots so you could see your progress hour after hour.
We landed to a warm 89 degrees at 2pm Beijing time (2am Vermont time), waited for the luggage (I think my backpack was the last thing to come on the carousel, but I usually think that), and lo and behold a curly haired kid named Jacob was waiting outside for me. He bought me lunch at the airport and then navigated our way to the hostel to drop everything off.
So I was ready to go to sleep but Dr Jacob said the best thing for jet lag was to stay up so we headed out and spent the rest of the day walking around, taking buses, meeting some of his school friends, learning how to dodge bicycles, scooters, motorcycles, cars and buses (note that buses take much long to stop than the others). We had dinner and a pint of cold beer, and navigated the bus system back to our neighborhood and wiggled through the narrow streets back to the hostel. Jake went back to school to finish packing and he will come collect me tomorrow at noon. Beijing is a real surprising eye-opener for me, people are gentle and happy, it feels very safe, but more on that tomorrow. It's 10 pm, I have been awake for too long and I gotta go to sleep.
A note from Jacob (writing right now): After sleeping in my school for the last night, I got back here at 11:30am, and found that our room's door was locked and the blinds closed. I had thought that dad went out (our original plan was for him to wait for me at 9am and, if I wasn't back then, he'd go walking and come back around noon), but as I was sitting and reading, one of the hotel people came and said, "Your father is asleep", and then let me in. "What time is it", a voice drowsily asked me. ''11:30", I reply. He says that he got up at 7 for a bit, but decided to take a "quick nap" before taking a shower. All in all, ~12-13 hours of sleep?
Another note: the picture above is our toilet, which happens to look like a shrine to some pantheon of ancient gods. I'd like to point out that the two flush buttons (for the numbers 1 and 2), which normally look like a full and a half moon, on this toilet are an ornate (gilded) dragon and phoenix. Or... phoenix and dragon? In any event (I'm not contemplating this further), it's a nice toilet.
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