About my China entries: Emil says, "More pictures. Less philosophizing." (Of course, he's hearing all the philosophy as it evolves . . . )

So here are some pictures. These are from the day of the Opening Ceremonies - one of those handful of magical days that I know I will never forget. As far as I could tell, these Olympics have reverberated through China. 70% of the Chinese population watched those ceremonies on television (all 4 1/2 live, uninterrupted hours); only half the cabs were running (so that there would be fewer cars on the road and so that some cabbies could go home and watch. Once the ceremonies began, usually bustling HIT was deserted.

At any rate . . . At first this Friday outing was a typical outing with one of the classes - the students took us on some kind of local adventure every Friday. In this case, the members of Class 3 were my guides. Some of them had been with me a few days earlier when I saw this bicycle:







. . . and they knew I wanted to buy one. So they took me off to the bicycle store in one of the many malls to look for one. As it turns out, the one I had seen turned out to be inadequate on several counts, but boy, there were plenty of others . ..











(Ladies and Gentlemen, I did not buy a bike in China. Those of you who know me well will recognize this as an act of unusual self-restraint on my part. Those who know me really well will also realize that I am now kicking myself for that decision.)

After the bike purchase fell through, the trip was devolving into a clothes-shopping expedition . . .











. . . when Richard, clearly bored, steered it into a walk in the park and a gondola ride instead.








I was very happy about that; even if I liked shopping as an activity, I would never have found anything that fit me. The gondola was much more to my taste.

Here we are, going up. (Fanlin is drinking a Coke. They gave us complimentary 6-oz Cokes in glass bottles as we got on the gondola, and then they collected the bottles at the end.) Richard's in the middle, and Xuefeng is on the other side of him. Somebody else (whose name I've forgotten) was also in the gondola sitting next to me, and he's grateful that I didn't post his picture here . . . he's much better-looking than that picture.







The view from the gondola was superb. We're going from Harbin to Sun Island:











(There are people on that sandbar. With towels. "How did they get there?" I asked my hosts, who shrugged their shoulders and said, "They swam." They'd obviously never given the matter much thought, not being swimmers themselves.)



Harbin receding:







(Yes, it was almost that hazy. Part of it was a kind of particulate humidity (like being in the misters they use in Arizona), part of it was smog, and part of it was finely-ground construction dust. After a while you learned to accept it, the same way you accept being sweaty when you're camping . . . )



Here's the boat dock where we would later catch the ferry back to Harbin:











Once we hit Sun Island, there was just enough time to get a picture with my grandmother . . .











Some jaunty and famous Russian tune was playing behind her. (The people of Harbin owe a debt to the Russians, who saved them from the Japanese at the end of WWII. The park where the gondola starts is called Stalin Park, actually . . . We don't have too many of those here in the States.)

Here, taken just so I could say this, is a picture of a slow boat in China.







Here we are, approaching the flood monument in "downtown' Harbin.







And then it was down to Center Street, which was just alive with people and music:









As I noted on my Flickr page, these guys were singing "500 Miles," believe it or not. I thought, "500 miles. That's nothing."





St. Sophia's Church, the centerpiece of the downtown area.



And the sky just before we went to the restaurant:







Richard and Xuefeng ordering in the restaurant.







We spent a long time in that restaurant, having an excellent conversation.

And then we had a hard time getting a cab back to HIT, because only cabs with odd-numbered license plates were allowed to drive that far . . . I couldn't quite catch why. We said goodbye to Xuefeng and then Richard waited for me while I went to my apartment and changed clothes - and tried to take a picture of the fireworks that started going off outside my window (and probably all across China) as the opening ceremonies began.







You saw the official cafeteria scenes of the opening. Here's one that I got as we rushed to the cafeteria where the rest of our group was watching:






And here are scenes from our cafeteria:








And here's a movie. As we watched the athletes march in to the stadium, I learned how the Chinese "alphabetize" things - they go by the number of strokes it takes to make the first character in whatever it is they're writing. I learned this because, as it happened, the channel we were watching was only giving the countries' names in English. As the night wore on, we all wanted to know when the U.S. would come (towards the end; 15 strokes) and we'd get to see the torch being lit. Because the names on the screen were in English, sometimes the students would write the names of the countries in Chinese so they could count the strokes needed to make the first character. Here are Owen and Richard figuring things out.





(Remember the photo from the Summer Palace in Beijing where the retired guy was writing with a large brush on the sidewalk?)

==============

In the Beijing airport, and on the flight from Beijing to Chicago, there were an awful lot of people who had been to the Olympics - coaches, athletes, relatives, spectators. I hope that for many of them, the experience was life-changing. I saw a handful of competitors, though, and from different countries, for whom the Olympics was just another stop on the athletes' road trip. I also saw several spectators - again, from more than one country- who had seen a few events, bought a few trinkets, went to the Beijing Top 5 Tourist Spots, and were prepared to come home and tell everyone how exotic their vacation was. I can't tell you how lucky they made me feel. I don't mean to disparage either of those experiences - I've never been an athlete on a tour, but I spent many happy years being a scholar going to conferences, which is a similar experience, I'm sure. And lord knows, I have never turned down a vacation of any stripe, and have loved going places for eight or ten days and coming home and telling people how exotic it all was. But what I love better than anything is to go somewhere else to live for a while. So in the airport and on that flight, I was struck again and again by how I'd had just the perfect kind of vacation for me.

And in fact, on 2008-08-08, I would not have traded places with ANYONE, anywhere on the planet, not even with the people inside the Bird's Nest when the countdown began. I had a perfect day - It was a high point in the life of a country, a high point in the experience of being in China, a high point in the life of me.

You can't make this stuff up, folks, you know?