To skip forward in time a little bit: I spent most of the day Sunday, 29 Oct, waiting in line in the Beijing Airport, and left at 5:00 PM (Beijing time) on the transcontinental flight to Newark. Due to the wonders of the International Date Line and the odd coincidence of the end of Daylight Savings time, in local time, my flight landed about 35 minutes after it took off. (Funny, it felt longer than that.)

I had a long layover (twelve hours) last night in Newark, and booked a hotel room for the night on the hope that I would sleep. Curiously, I could not, which was not my experience on the way out. So now, as I write this, I’m waiting in the Washington Dulles airport for my final flight, having slept about 5 hours in the last 40, give or take. We’re now working our way into the late evening Beijing time, and by the time I get off the plane in Charlottesville, I’m afraid that (1) I’m probably not going to stay awake long and (2) switching back to EST might be harder than the switch to Beijing time.

The point of this little rant is to apologize for and to explain the lack of recent updates. I still have three days of travelogue left to fill in, and I took lots of pictures and notes. So don’t worry, those posts are forthcoming; it just may take a couple of days. Personally, I blame the non-Euclidean geometry of the planet.