tbaroundtheworld

Ending a trip with a loved one is very tough, and it's even harder when you have to put them on a plane and in turn, get on a plane yourself to somewhere else. Outside of long distance romances, vacations generally end with a pile of dirty laundry and a stack of mail to sort. When you meet someone in a foreign land, spend a week roaming around and then head in separate directions, the finality of it hits home harder. Gwynn and I caught a cab and spent an hour in the Beijing rush hour traffic arriving at the airport with plenty of time. I snuck her through the status line, this time without any question about her carry-on and backpack (the agent noting on her boarding pass that the backpack was “not full”) and we went downstairs to Starbucks where I tried to prove once again to another skeptic that it had table service. When Aidan and I were there in March, I'd been proved a liar and this time would be no different; while a gal in an apron did show up just as we were finishing,

My daughter Aidan’s trip back in March was constrained by real-world responsibilities. Not so much my work – no one seems to care if I’m around these days – but rather by her graduate school schedule. There was an extra day in the mix but we agreed that it was probably in her best interest to have a day back in the US before going back to school. And on our last day, she and I of course woke up to the biggest orange sandstorm of the year and so our time was even further reduced. Gwynn did not have this problem, her school year was over and so the constraint fell more to my schedule. But, we were able to take one extra day, and that day was dedicated to the zoo. Both of my kids are “zoo people” and I’ll admit that I am one too. While I think that they are certainly not the best thing I the world for the animals, they are what they are and not going to them isn’t going to make them go away. Rather I think our patronage allows the zoo management to make the best of the fact of their exist

We had a couple of days left on this grand tour and we planned to make the most of them. Problem was the Beijing weather had a different idea. It’s an odd thing here to have days of crystal blue skies but we somehow were allowed one after another. And the price of that clarity was a hot Beifang (literally place in the north part of China) sun beating down on our heads. My driver Jiang and I often talk about the weather and specifically how it is up here in the north. While we in the west hear about the sandstorms in the country’s capital, for whatever reason we’re inclined to think of them as aberrations. Jiang though has told me repeatedly that Beijing sits in a desert and what you hear about is consistent with how it should be. Back in March when my daughter Aidan and I got caught in the worst sandstorm of the year it was reported as an unusual event. Months afterwards I read in the local news that it had nothing to do with the fact that the Gobi is slowly creeping across the north o