Good Ol' USA

After a brief stay in Hong Kong, a couple nights in Seoul, and then a night in LA (ironically, my flight to LAX laid over in Beijing) to exchange some things from my storage unit, I arrived in Boston and surprised my sister who is in the States for a week from Paris with my 3 month-old niece, whom I met for the first time. My sleep patterns are all kinds of messed up. But, I am very glad to be back in the States.

I had the feeling when I arrived in Xi'an that I ought to head back, but I ultimately decided to trek on. The whole last week of my trip through China, I got stuck on a bunch of Chinese tour groups, which pushed my patience to the limit. The tour I joined to see these Buddhist grottoes at Dazu County near Chongqing, made a totally arbitrary stop afterwards at some knife store. The tourists were hearded into this room where they proceeded to stage a live infomercial on kitchen knives. I walked out as soon as I realized what was happening.

The "cruise" that I took down the Yangtze River, in reality was two nights on a squalid ship. Each night, I had to wipe the dead flies off my sheets. My recollections of that experience are mostly of the incessant commentary on the loudspeakers, destroying any semblance of serenity one might gather from the natural beauty of the gorges, and being hearded like cattle from various tourist attractions along the way.

The cruise concluded with a tour of the controversial Three Gorges Dam, during which I decided to end my trip when I got to Hong Kong. That night, when I put my bags through the x-ray machine at the train station at Yichang, my video camera got stolen along with my ipod. Aside from about $1500 worth of equipment, I lost the entire three months worth of HD footage that I was going to cut into a movie about my whole trip. That was the coup de grâce. At that point, it was clearly time for me to go home.

So now I am back home, home being anywhere in good ol' USA. Since I wasn't able to blog in China, I obviously have much to catch up on. I didn't see as much of China as I had originally planned, but I have learned much over the course of these past three months. I'm surprised that is has only been three months since I began this trip—it feels like a year. Unfortunately, I don't have much in the way of photos now to supplement my written entries. But I do have many valuable experiences and thoughts that I hope to share now that I have returned.