The Past Few Days

Okay, I'm back online. It's been a few days since the airport hotel in Beijing didn't have internet, and Want and Katie's apartment here in Singapore doesn't either. I'm in their office now at the university, with a view of the harbor. Later this week, once I check into the hostel, I should be on more regularly. Since I knew I was heading into a dark zone, I wrote my blog entries in a notebook, so I will enter them here, from the past 3 days ...

6/13/08
I wish now that I'd learned more Chinese. I'm leaving tomorrow, and in Singapore everyone will speak English, but all along while in Beijing I've felt a space between me and all the people of things I cannot say. That they can't understand. Many of them do a wonderful job with English, despite their limitations, and I would love to reciprocate that effort. Still, in any conversation (or at least an exchange of words), we reach a point of smiles and shrugged shoulders when we arrive at the banks of this river and can go no further, standing on opposite shores. There is a loneliness in this: walking through any public space and knowing that I am not able to communicate with the people around me. An isolation of incommunicable words, an alienation beyond my appearance. The word 'communicate' comes from 'commune' - here, I am as alone as these peoples' understanding of English makes me.

I've parted today from my traveling companions of the past week and a half. Our paths have diverged, and I think Leah's will be the road less traveled by. She is off to Southeast Asia with Clint and Ari soon; Chris will return home. Regarding the above isolation, Leah and Chris have been my stay against confusion - joyful, willing, and faithful travel comrades. Safe travels, to both of you.


6/14/08
It's strange that I wrote about loneliness and isolation yesterday, for today I've come face to face with another, more terrible, kind. It is a sad day when a friend or colleague doesn't come through for you, when you understand that you cannot trust them, and that you never will again. In this public forum, it is my intention to be brief, and vague. But for those concerned, know that - though I am left without a stay against this confusion - I remain in good company now, and am learning from the experience.

Today was a long day of travel: up at 4 am to go to the Beijing airport, flight to Hong Kong, layover, flight to Singapore where I met Want and Katie around 7 pm. Singapore - like Hong Kong - is a city built on a tropical island. The warmth, the jungle surrounding everything, the humidity in the air - they are all quite welcome.

The more I fly, the less I mind it, and I have actually begun to enjoy being in airports. During my layover in Hong Kong, I sat down with my iPod for over an hour near my gate and looked out the tall windows at the islands and the channel between them and the hills. These islands jut abruptly out of the water into high, forested peaks; there are no plains between, no gradual rise. I watched planes come in to land, queuing up in the sky to land, appearing as a dot of gray among the white of stormclouds, or the flicker of its landing lights. The peak nearest me was sporadically covered by the low clouds that drifted slowly across its side; as the vapors reached the slope and lifted over it, then down again on the other side - all in extreme slow motion - these tendrils appeared as a stampede of wild horses.

In the evening, here in Singapore, Want and Katie gave me an orientation to the public transportation system, and we went to dinner at a hawker stall - a local outdoor food court where they've come to know one of the cooks, an Asian expat from the former Soviet Union. On the plane here, I sat next to - and spoke at length with - a white South African who, at 44 now, had lived through apartheid. I also had my first Singaporean beer - Tiger Beer - which is decent: a bit like Coors or Bud, but a little more flavor (doesn't hold a candle to Belikin though :-)


6/15/08
I'm sitting now in Want and Katie's apartment in front of their seventh story balcony, the windows thrown wide, the sheer white curtains serpentine in the breeze. It's warm and humid here, even inside; we only A/C the bedrooms. But I got used to it quickly. Still waiting for rain. They say they get thunderstorms most afternoons, but not for the past few days. These storms break the heat, and I'm looking forward to that, too.

Today's been the kind I haven't taken yet on this trip - I've gone no where, except to the convenience store in the basement of the apartment tower. Slept in, read, took it easy. So ... more to come when I've seen more of Singapore (and probably once I'm at the hostel later in the week).