Any trip starts at the beginning, and my beginning was Evergreen's office in Taiyuan. I flagged a cabby and got a fair fare to the airport (These days I'm harder to dupe). Not far out we pasted a construction site -- a sure sign I was still in China -- and I was rereminded that this country is development crazy. I mean it, they're really going to town. Before me were 7 skyscrapers emerging from the earth. These bones of an embryonic city were swaddled in green tarps encrusted with mud, suggestive of a kudzu infested wood. There were cranes bending over their work, too. They formed inverted Ls on the horizon. Then it was gone, and I was at the airport.
Plane travel is plane travel.
2000 miles (and 100 pages of Mark Twain) later, we landed in Guangzhou. None of the signs were in English. Wait, not true, one was. The sign that said STAN, that was in English. Mia held it. She is a Chinese girl studying for her masters in interpreting and was a friend of a friend. Now she is a friend. If I had a sweetest-girls-I've-ever-met list, Mia would be near the top. So gentle, so generous. She acted as guide while we bus-hopped across town to her university. We had dinner together, then for a haircut (you're welcome Mom), then into a Christian bookstore, then to the hotel where Mia had booked me a room. The next morning we bus-hopped again.
These busses are something else. I feel like I'm back in middle-school and getting stuffed into a locker... with 50 other people. Or imagine a moshpit, but with 80-year-old ladies. Funny story: I was slouching on the bus when this woman with the face of a happy raisin says "Stand up straight! The best doctor is yourself. I'm 80 years old. When my mother was pregnant with me, she was sick. That's why I have this black spot on my neck." I got this secondhand via Mia, my personal translator. My posture has improved dramatically since then.
Next up I took a subway to the train station. Then a speed train from Guangzhou into Hong Kong. There must have been 20 countries represented in our car. My favorite was this cute little Arabic-babbling girl, maybe 6 years old. For two straight hours she laughed and danced up and down the aisle. I didn't laugh and dance up and down the aisle. No, boring me, I just read another 100 pages of Mark Twain.
Then the end. We were there.
