If you’re still reading this blog, I’ll have to count you among my true friends. Or I should be thankful you haven’t cleaned out your RSS reader.
A few weeks after I returned to L.A., for the purpose of applying to an internship I furnished When in Roam as proof that I have a blog, but I qualified the attachment as languishing — the “plight of travel blogs whose authors return home.”
That’s what I did, and that’s what explains the silence. I returned home.
I’ll be honest. You missed out on quite a bit — an entire city or two, in fact. Blame it on burnout.
Beijing-bound
After several weeks bumming around in Shanghai, I realized with a start one characteristically lazy afternoon in Leslie’s apartment that I had less than a week remaining in China. With that, I grabbed my bags (and dutiful friend Karen) and hopped the fast train to Beijing. The fast train taking 10 hours and the slow train taking 12.
Little did Karen and I know, our farewell Papa John’s the night before in Leslie’s living room left us all with a little parting gift: some throat bug that spent a day or two sprouting tentacles in our systems.
After reaching Beijing, I touched base with Leslie, who with an appropriate amount of misery complained of a sore throat. What a coincidence; I had one too. Oh, and for that matter, so did Karen.
And so I spent my last few days in China trying to make the best of Beijing, a city I had never before been to. I had a choice: party hardy, or sleep well and get myself right. Turns out I mostly chose the latter. In fact, I was mostly better by the time I spent a day climbing the steep inclines of the Great Wall at Mutianyu — but that’s what did me in, again. I spent another day bedridden after that, swilling Gatorade and popping Tylenol capsules like Flintstone’s chewables.
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