BEIJING – This space has been quiet for a while. It started without
any warning, any sign that I'd be silent for a few weeks. But after a
couple of days of not posting, I decided not to restart without
reason.
Walking down a main pedestrian lane on the Tsinghua Campus near sunset
I heard words echo through my head. "The humid, still air slowly wrapped around me like a sleath boa
constrictor." These weren't just the thoughts of a famished, parched
mind. This was someone who needed to start writing again.
So here I am. The past four weeks there have been dozens of vignettes,
sad and poignant, funny and amusing, that I'll probably never share
here. Everyone experiences these each day. Now I again want to record
some of these – the most notable, the things that stick out late at
night when I return to my laptop – on this space.
But first a few notes on more general topics, overdue housekeeping if you will:
1. Class at Tsinghua is over. Today I took my listening final, and
tomorrow comes speaking and on Wednesday Brown will test my grammar.
Regular undergraduate students have been finished for a couple weeks
now. My roommate successfully defended his biology thesis and is now a
graduate. I'll miss his commencement, which will be in the middle of
the month.
2. I'm missing his graduation because I'll be on the road. I haven't
mentioned my summer vacation plans on this blog, mainly because I'm
afraid they change, and they have, slightly. I've got a plane ticket
for Saturday on a direct Beijing to Delhi flight. It should be two
months before I return to Beijing. I'm not desperate to get out of
Beijing, and the reasons why I most want to leave – the traffic, the
heat, the humidity – won't be solved in India. But India holds a
special attraction to me, something completely different from China.
This is a group I've wanted to take for a long time. Hopefully I'll
come back to this in a future post when I'm there.
3. The Gazelle is gone.
I looked in my shoulder bag after class one Wednesday to see a bottle
of water slowly leaking over the contents. Inside were most of my
valuable possessions: school books, wallet, cell phone, iPod and keys.
I tugged at my shirt and started furiously drying things off in order
of importance: first the iPod, then the phone and finally the books.
Somehow the keys wound up lost. On that key ring were both keys to the
Gazelle. It was immobile.
Then I forgot about it. I never carried it to the Bike Doctor to
remove the lock or got someone to snap it off where it lay. After a
week, I couldn't remember where I left it. I looked around some, but
it was gone.
I've got a plan to capture a new bike, but that my friends, is another post.
