What I have been up to

I am back, after eight days in Beijing and Shanghai, plus two on the plane, plus another four in San Francisco on the way there (because my sister wasn’t going to San Francisco without eating at Fisherman’s Wharf and it sort of spiraled from there). I still have my traditional Souvenir Cold, complicated by a massive case of jet lag, which means I haven’t unpacked and have been mostly being a cat napping place for the last several days.

To preemptively answer a few questions: No, it wasn’t a business trip. My walking buddy, who is a demon bargain-hunter, found an 8-day package tour that was too good a deal to pass up; my sister and my father decided to join us. (When I told one of my crit group members I was going to have to miss the monthly meet-up because I was going to China, she looked at me and said, “You always have the best excuses …”)

We climbed around on the Great Wall, walked through Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, saw the pandas and the Temple of Heaven, had tea in the old city, went to a silk factory, and assorted other things, most of which involved shopping. It was a very busy, not to say hectic, eight days. I got the first six inches of the silk shawl knitting project done (I think; I’ve had to rip it at least seven times already, so I hope this is the final try) on the airplane.

The weather was good the whole time – that is, sunny and not too cold (given that we’d come from -17 F, our notions of “not too cold” were a lot more elastic than most of the rest of the tourfolks’). The air pollution gave most of us sore throats by day 7; it reminded me of Los Angeles when I visited as a kid in the early 1960s, before they put catalytic converters on cars and took the lead out of the gas and did various other air quality things.

My sister took most of the pictures with her good camera; I just have a couple on my iPad. For example:

This needs no label. I took it on day one, because Mao’s picture on the gate into the Forbidden City is the iconic I-have-been-to-China picture, and I wanted one that I took myself (in addition to the much better ones that I’m going to get from my sister eventually). I didn’t touch it up, so you can see the pollution haze in the air.

This also needs no label. Second day, outside Beijing. I did not climb to the top, because I have a trick knee and the steps got to being almost knee-high in the steep parts. I did make it to the second tower, which is the pointed roof behind the first squared-off tower. It looks as if it’s part of the front tower, but it’s actually across a wide platform and up another bunch of steps. The one that looks like the second one, about halfway up that long steep climb, is really the third tower.

I did not get any writing done on the trip, not even a trip journal. This is unusual for me, but the combination of the pace and the time change was a bit more than I could manage. Which just demonstrates how much one’s creativity depends on both one’s circumstances and one’s physical condition. A lot of the time at home, I tend to blame my lack of productivity on lack of time, when it’s really lack of sleep and/or lack of energy due to running around at such a frantic pace that when I do have a couple of free hours, I veg instead of writing.

And that’s about as much on writing as you’re going to get today. By Sunday, I should be less foggy-headed and able to address Liz’s question about how to find people to crit your work (at least, I think that’s what she meant). See you then!