Though the looking glass, snarkily

After a long, long time away (but still in China), I've returned to bloggin. I feel bad about my absence but as I had guests visiting for approximately a month, I hope people can understand. (Note to self and others: not that I didn't enjoy all of my guests and what they brought to my experience here in Beijing but a month is too long. A week, maybe two. That's a reasonable amount of time.)

This entry is going to be a great disgorgement of pictures that have accumulated on my laptop over the past few weeks. Most are of Bonnie and me out and about, mostly in Xi'an and Suzhou.

I'm disgorging so that I can have space on my camera to show all the little stuff in Beijing that I've grown fond of (in certain cases, like my plumbing, "fond" is probably not the right word. Maybe "a tenuous detente" or "a hard peace" would be more appropriate.)

Here goes:

This is the Renmin Bin Guan (People's Hotel) in Xi'an. Very nice - 5 stars (which it was, more or less). Note the Sino-Russian, next to the Sino, next to the globalized capital. The many faces of China.

No trip to China is complete without seeing the Terra Cotta soldiers, which date from the Qin dynasty about 2300 years ago.

( Argg... damn you, Chinese internet, you've foiled me again. I'll be back. )

People have probably heard me tell this little factoid before but it bears retelling, not just to emphasize just how unbelievably hot the summer in Beijing is but also to show that, as difficult as it may be to believe for Westerners, the structure of truth is actually different in China than what is accepted in Los Angeles or Kiel.

In Mao's little red book, there is a rule that supposedly states that when the temperature exceeds 40 degrees C (~ 104 F) that all workers get the day off. (I say supposedly because while I have a copy of the little red book, I haven't been able to actually find this quote. Which is pretty understandable since Mao's discourse on the structure of capital, socialism and the revolution is so filled with poorly written (translated?) cliches that it is virtually catatonia inducing.) One might think that since it often gets to 40 degrees in Beijing and more commonly in the south that this rule would be less than fully applied, maybe only when the temperature gets to 42 or so. But in fact the way it works here is that the temperature is just never reported as more than 39 degrees. On the news, in the papers, China has a magically maximum temperature, which hasn't been exceeded in 57 years.