On our way home

We're in Japan now, staying at a hotel near the airport. We have a nice view of the runway and it's pleasant enough.

The trip out of town was sort of exciting. We went to the airport by maglev train. That's magnetic levitation, not magical levitation, as Ronnie said. The train goes to the airport from some area in the middle of a bunch of high rise apartments, which narrows it down to, well, anywhere in the Shanghai metropolitan area. Anyway, it covers 31 km, or around 20 miles, in about 7 and a half minutes. The top speed is 300 mph, though it only holds top speed for about a minute and then it's time to slow down. Looking out the window was kind of like watching that kind of stop action photography, where the flower blooms in 10 seconds or the clouds fly by quickly. They had to delay the flight because the typhoon was passing over Tokyo and they wanted to wait for it to be gone, but because of the winds behind it the flight was only 2/3 the length of the flight in the other direction.

Ronnie and I had a discussion this morning about how we'd describe this trip to friends. "How was China?" "Oh, it was really great!" It's not the kind of trip that you bubble over about. We went to amazing, exotic places and saw things that most people don't get to. The great wall. Tibetan temples and the Himalayas. Clay warriors from BC. A stone forest. A vanishing river. The biggest dam in the world. A city sprouting a new skyscraper every week. Was it fun? Some of it was. It was all interesting. Time for life without a guide and an itinerary. We're not going to gush about this trip, but we'll never forget it either. China is a huge, weird, fundamentally unstable country that doesn't even know what it is or what it wants to be when it grows up. It's a big baby. Now we can sit and watch with a bit more interest and a bit more insight.

Okay, I've summed up 2 or 3 times already, and there may be more to come. In any event, I'll keep writing if anyone's reading.