Tuesday, 10 November 2009

Just a quick post today.

Sorry for a bit of terseness, but it's Miles' birthday today, and I have a lot to do, and it's not going to be easy, because it's really just pouring rain here in Shanghai.

We just got back yesterday from our quick four day trip to Beijing. While Miles was off being a gentleman and a scholar at something called the Beijing Forum, I went off on a pair of all-day bus tours. The first one took in sights in Beijing (The Summer Palace, The Forbidden City, Tien An Men Square, and The Temple of Heaven). The second one went out to one of the Great Wall sites (Badaling) and took in one of the Ming Emporer's Tombs on the way there. (If you've never heard of the Beijing Forum, it's a kind of academic extravaganza — with the theme The Harmony of Civilizations and Prosperity for All — put on annually since 2004 by Peking University with support from The Beijing Municipal Commission of Education and The Korean Foundation for Advanced Studies.) After the forum had wound down, we went together on a half-day tour sponsored by the forum to the Olympic Stadiums (Bird's Nest, Water Cube) and Beijing's 798 Art Zone. You can see pictures of all of this tourism here, here, and here. The forum also hosted the National Ballet of China for a dance recital at Peking University Hall: Journey into a World of Ballet. It was quite a busy time. All the more so, because I got sick (what started out as a hay fever type of allergy morphed into a cold or maybe the flu). I'm better now, but I'm going to take it a bit easy for the next few days.

Our way back from Beijing was not quite smooth, unfortunately. Our aircraft had some mechanical problem, could not take off, and they taxied us back to a gate where we were deplaned. Then all hell broke loose. Sadly, China Eastern didn't seem to have much of a procedure in place for dealing with the cancellation of a flight. The idea seemed to be to put half the passengers onto a flight within a half hour, and the other half onto a flight leaving an hour later. This message was not received by the passengers with equanimity. We thought it might come to fisticuffs between some passengers and the poor China Eastern staff, but the worst in the end was some mild form of battery committed with a boarding pass. But the shrieking! We stayed well out of it until most of it had died down, then got our boarding passes for the later of the two replacement flights and made our belated way back to Shanghai.