China!

In less than twenty four hours I'll be on a plane heading towards China, where I'll be spending the next three weeks drinking tea and Tsing Tao beer, eating noodles and Peking Duck, catching high speed trains and tediously slow buses, walking down new hutongs and old expressways, listening to symphonies of traffic and melodious choruses of spitting, mis-reading Mandarin street signs and Dan Brown novels, visiting the Beijing Museum of Tap Water and the Great Wall, meeting kooky travellers and even kookier locals, dancing to David Bowie and Iggy Pop singing "China Girl" (okay, that's a joke), spending oodles of Yuan on Gucci face masks and Louis Vuitton bum bags, breathing in fragrant pollution and the blissful steam from lotus buns, touching the falling dust and the rising sky, dressing up as Mao and Deng Xiaoping at the same time, dodging taxi touts and suspect puddles, riding cranky bicycles and mud-brown waves, laughing at myself and others and generally doing all of the things I don't do in my normal life. I'm sure, however, that within days I'll be yearning for the intramanet, so this post is not so much a farewell as a temporary retreat from blogging, which I hope to take up again at some point in the future. Then again, I may never come back. Goodbye Melbourne, and thanks for all the potato scallops.

Comments

David Prater said…
hi laura! will do - in fact, I'll give him two!
Anonymous said…
have a hypno BONZA time mr plater and make sure you research those acronyms for the next baldy time klx
Bob Bunyip said…
So that's where you got to... hmmmmm?

And BTW: They're "cakes", Davey ... not "scallops"! No wonder you fled!
Bob Bunyip said…
Oh, and BTW2:

10 Things That Never Happen in Star Trek
1. The Enterprise runs into a mysterious energy field of a type that it has encountered before.
2. The Enterprise is captured by a vastly superior alien intelligence which does not put them on trial.
3. The shields on the Enterprise stay up during a battle.
4. Picard hears the door chime and doesn't bother to say "Come."
5. The warp engines start acting up a bit, but then seem to sort themselves out after a while without any intervention from boy genius Wesley Crusher.
6. Spock is fired from his high-ranking position for not being able to understand the most basic nuances of about one in three sentences that anyone says to him.
7. Scotty doesn't mention the laws of physics.
8. The Captain has to make a difficult decision about a less advanced people which is made a great deal easier by the Starfleet Prime Directive.
9. Worf actually gives another vessel more than 2 seconds to respond to one of the Enterprise's hails.
10. Counsellor Troi states something other than the blindingly obvious.

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