Poor Man’s Time Travel

Having survived all 37 hectic hours of West Coast Tour ’07, it was off to Beijing on Monday morning or, for those of you here in the Far East, Tuesday afternoon. Ah, the International Date Line – while it sounds like a nightly news program, it is, in fact, the poor man’s method of time travel. Having arrived safe and sound, I’m now writing you this from…the future.

Sadly, there aren’t nearly as many robots, flying cars and spaceships as I had hoped for here in the world of tomorrow. Unless, of course, you count the plane that brought me – since I swear you can see the curvature of the Earth in the above pic of sunny Siberia that I snapped from my seat, I can only assume that our intrepid pilot somehow managed to convert the plane into a makeshift space shuttle. Hopefully one with a racing stripe. It’s probably worth noting that I once attempted the same experiment using a bright red wagon, three Halloween’s worth of bottle rockets, a lawn dart (I figured its fins would help cut down on wind resistance) and the sloped roof of my childhood home. Ah, the naivete of youth…but that was weeks and weeks ago, so I digress.

Aside from breaking orbit, riding in the second story of an aircraft and having the entire “nudeography” of every actress listed in the on-flight magazine recited – in exhaustive detail – by the microprocessor salesman sitting beside me, the trip over was pretty standard. The landing, on the other hand, was way out of the ordinary. Let me put it this way – if you’ve ever flown into LA and seen the fixed brown cloud that kind of hovers over the city, giving it a warm, smothering, “Lenny loves rabbits” kind of embrace, multiply that by about eleventy billion times and you’ll have some indication of what it’s like to arrive in Beijing. Suddenly I was longing for the clear, crisp air of Siberia…until I remembered that the plane’s map channel pegged the temperature there at about 80 below zero.

?My ride into the Yanqing district – about an hour and a half north of Beijing – was mainly spent talking to Chels, which was a huge relief given that I’d spent an entire layover in San Francisco and about eight bucks in loose change trying to dial internationally before I left. Ever since then, things have been great. The food and accommodations are better than I expected, the sets we’ve constructed are incredible and, aside from a 60 mph dust storm that found its way out of the Old Testament and into our base camp, the weather’s been “hazy” but cooperative. See what I mean at left.

I’ve ventured into the city and the countryside a few times and have to say it’s been a pretty fantastic cultural experience. There’s a definite mix of new meets old, with simple, seemingly anachronistic farming communities just a short drive from a bustling metropolis that is – in some ways – actually ahead of us in North America. Especially when it comes to DVD’s – seems like movies that are still out in the theaters stateside are already being sold in stores here… At any rate, I’m going about as far from hi-tech as you can go tomorrow morning, when I head off with some of the crew to check out the Great Wall. Pictures to follow!