Swine flu has made it to Beijing!

no, it's just me. but i do enjoy a good swine, when it's still alive and snorting.

so i've made it back to big b, after a long night of hard seat traveling with the rest of us country bumbkins. hard seat costed a hundred yuan less that sleeper class, and i told myself "it's not my first day in China, i can make it", picturing myself happily sleeping despite sitting (i am proud about the unfussiness of my sleeping ability). little did i know that darkness is a luxury kept only for the sleeper class. as in an experiment, everything was left lit, enough reason to push the number of non-sleepers to a majority, which (in a democracy as a democracy) was glad to exert its rights by smoking, laughing, shouting, and of course - loudly playing bad quality music in horrible quality sound out of cellphones. now that's one chinese habit the world could do better without.

but i did manage to sleep, and made it back to the good old warm city, the improved version of the menacing cold city, to which one pale february afternoon a young ambitious traveler came, equiped with nothing but a fully-stamped passport and a dream of studying Mandarin (three-months-old nostalgy... how pathetic can you get?). now it carressed me with its giant buildings, reassuringly showing me how small i am, and with its huge yet already familiar transport system, in which i sat sorrounded by various bejingers, all of them just too cool for school (in comparison with the kaifengers' "too poor for school"). there's nothing as efficient as an underground system in order to remind me how far i am from home.

meeting again with local friends - amongst them the great teacher Zhang, sure was a treat, on top of it new friends, such as the nice mister Ping, who ran into me in this nice Taoist temple, "White Clouds Temple", and showed me around. he has spent a year in Israel back in 1990, studying its agriculture.

so all in all it's been a refreshing two-day experience. tommorow i probably get a new passport, and head back to Henan.