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.
Was it worth it? I’ll be PC and say yes. The truth was, the Great Wall was exactly as I had imagined it, and not particularly breathtaking for it. Nothing like the Grand Canyon, at least.
If anything, Beijing played the role of foil to Shanghai. Where Shanghai sometimes seemed overly concerned with how cosmopolitan it was — and by that I mean how many Japanese department stores it had — Beijing was the city with actual culture on the streets. I had heard the word “culture” bandied about before in association with Beijing, but I assumed people meant “history.”
It’s not just that. It’s young people. Young people. Who seem to enjoy dressing well, and hanging out, and doing things young people do. It’s old people too, with their pet birds (they take them for leisurely strolls in their cages) and the Chinese instruments they strum streetside on muggy afternoons. There was an unmistakable charm in some of Beijing’s neighborhoods — which makes it that much sadder that the government is so hell-bent on leveling these old places.
But that’s China’s story, and most of us know it chapter and verse by now.
On our last day in Beijing, Karen and I checked out of our hutong hostel and embarked on our respective journeys home: for her, a 10-hour train ride back to Shanghai, and for me, an 11-hour flight back to Los Angeles. I traversed the Pacific Ocean in the time it took Karen to get from Beijing to Shanghai.
Reflections from a moving train
And then I was home.
There was an appropriate but surreal parallelism to the way I arrived home, via bus and Metrolink, because everyone in my family was working and evidently couldn’t spare a day to pick up the one delinquent family member from LAX.
So, backpack strapped firmly to torso, I found myself riding a train again — in Los Angeles, of all places.
No cow-spotted landscapes outside or snow-covered woods. Look out the window of a Metrolink train bound for San Bernardino, and all you get is the rush of the 10 Freeway. There were no backpackers among the passengers, only weary commuters. They were going home from eight hours at work. I was going home from six months abroad. I shoved my way through them to get off the train, and after bravely bearing the burden of my things uphill to my mom’s new workplace at Cal State L.A., I put down my bags for the last time.
Until a month later, when I picked them up again to move to San Francisco.
Walking birds in cages…that is incredible.
My goodness this post ends beautifully.
come back. please. I’ll cook.