Bloggogriff

Day 5, Saturday. One of my American-style indulgences last night was a vanilla Coke. In retrospect, this was a Bad Idea. Eric and Owen both slept all night for the first time since our arrival, as I can testify because, well, I didn’t. I had thought that Owen might get less attention in Beijing, but so far that seems not to be the case. Yesterday a young woman checking in at the same time as us asked for a picture with him, and this morning at breakfast the waitresses are cooing over him like mad. He is not at all ready to deal with the attention so early in the day, and sits very stiffly with his eyes averted until they leave him alone. Eric’s brother Kevin had warned us that on his trip to China, the “Western breakfast” at his hotel seemed to have been created by people who knew of some American foods but had no clue which ones were eaten at breakfast, so we are pleasantly surprised by the non-random nature of the hotel buffet, which has both Chinese and Western options. Owen is ...

Day 4, Friday. I wake in the night with a fever and sleepily try to calculate how much of Owen’s kiddie Tylenol will make an adult dose. Several teaspoons of grape-flavored syrup later, I stop shivering and fall asleep. Luckily, I feel fine in the morning, though a little annoyed when Eric tells me he had regular acetaminophen in his bag the whole time. Jun takes us to the Tianjin Museum, whose major exhibit concerns the history of the city. Tianjin was a center of colonial power in the early twentieth century, which made its political and economic history quite remarkable. I wish I could give more details, but since I mainly spent the visit trying to keep Owen under some kind of minimal control as he careened around the halls, I didn’t get to read much of the signage. What I did see was amusingly heavy-handed in tone (though unusually correct in its English): “The courageous people of Tianjin fought a mighty and tragic battle to resist the imperialist aggressors,” and so on. Or lat...

Day 3, Thursday. Our sleep, particularly Owen’s, is about what you might expect with an eight-hour time difference. I awake in the morning with an upset stomach of weirdly ill-defined symptoms: am I feeling nausea? Indigestion? Sore abdominal muscles from stair-climbing? Maybe a little of each. So Eric goes to breakfast alone and I nibble gingerly at Nutri-Grain bars in the room. Eric leaves for the lab, and Jun’s wife Minh arrives to keep me and Owen entertained for the morning. In the interest of time, Eric has suggested using the hotel’s valet laundry service to finish up the washing (or more importantly, the drying). Given the earlier towel episode, I ask Minh to handle the call to housekeeping for me. What unfolds next reminds me of the scene in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where Arthur Dent jams up the spaceship’s entire computer system with his request for tea. After an oddly long phone conversation, Minh reports: the laundry service, though listed in...

Hope everyone had a lovely day. We did.

Day 2: Coda. The trip would surely not be complete without some misadventures with the language barrier, and we get our first one after returning to the room that night. While bathing Owen, Eric notices that we only have two towels and sends me down to ask the front desk for a third. Unfortunately, the girl at the desk clearly does not know the word “towel” (don’t ask me how you manage a hotel without that one; I’m still not sure). I try pantomiming along with the request – “washing,” “two towels, three people” – but leave with a feeling that this has not been successful. Sure enough, five minutes later she appears at our door with an American woman in tow to facilitate the conversation. I show her a towel. Aha! “I call housekeeping,” says the desk clerk, and departs. The other woman, another professor in residence at the guest house, clucks in amused sympathy, “and she’s the one with the good English.” Five minutes after that we get a phone call: Sorry, not possible now, housekeepi...

Day 2: Wednesday, November 11. As the plane descends, I can see a definite yellow-brown smog cloud, and I recall all the media stories about Beijing’s air pollution during the Olympics. The Englishman sitting to my right asks if it is our first trip to China, informs me that Beijing has an excellent metro system, and warns me about the cold weather. Somehow, coming from darkest Scotland, I am not worried. Beijing Airport is quite a sight. The ceiling curves and soars fifty feet above our heads, held up by massive pillars. Abundant skylights and plate-glass walls let in so much sunlight that artificial lighting hardly seems necessary. Everything appears very new. At passport control, the line moves slowly but Owen is apparently a Fastpass; an official riding a Segway pulls us out of line and directs us to a station marked “business permits only,” where there is no waiting. Score one for travel with a two-year-old. When we reach the pre-security section of the airport, with the shops...

Day 1: Tuesday, November 10. Owen has been repeating “We go China now!” at intervals for the past 36 hours when Davey, the usual driver for Eric’s department, arrives at 9:30 a.m. to collect us. It’s an hour-long drive to Edinburgh. Davey, as per normal, talks for nearly the entire trip. He is a sixty-something man with a serious Dundonian accent, and I only understand about two-thirds of what he says. This, however, is not a problem, as one rarely has to do much in a conversation with Davey other than smile and nod. On arrival, I find myself impressed as usual by the general efficient cheeriness of Edinburgh Airport. It’s compact and uncrowded and yet seems to have all the amenities one wants in an airport, particularly including excellent baby care facilities. The flight from Edinburgh to Heathrow only takes an hour. We come in at Terminal 5, which, as you will know if you have ever been there, is the exact opposite of compact and uncrowded. After four months in Scotland, the array...