An Excusable Absence

Sorry! I haven't been around in a while, I know. I actually have legit reasons this time, though.

Last week, I was in China! Yeah, that's right. That country with the billions of people and one-child policy and communist crazies. And as China has a firewall that blocks blogger, I couldn't blog.

Then, last night, my computer pretty much exploded. At first it started smoking, then the power plug started shooting sparks into my hand as I tried to unplug the cord. So I shut it down and today ordered a new computer. It should arrive in two weeks.

Each one of these things constitutes several blogs in themselves, but I only have about half an hour left in the work day before I have to return home. Where I have no computer. For the weekend.

So I just wanted to let you know what was up.

There will be multiple blog posts next week to cover these topics. This is because I have no classes right now and am basically just sitting around at my desk with nothing to do. Hooray spring break! Maybe I'll talk about that a little bit, too.

For now, a little anecdote about China.

It was Friday morning and my plane was arriving in Beijing. The flight had only been a short three hours, a mere hop and a skip from Osaka. As the plane descended and I thought about how it seemed to be landing altogether too soon, I thought back to Japan.

"To tell the truth, I've never been to a foreign country," admitted one teacher of mine. She's in her late 40s and exactly like a depressingly large number of her fellow countrymen and women.

But it's not just foreign countries. Japanese adults seem to rarely take any vacation time at all. Not because they don't have vacation time; they do have vacation time, though from what I understand it may only be as little as 6 days. No, it's because they'd feel bad if they left work. Vacation is, from a Japanese perspective, selfish.

This is one thing I'll never understand. Vacation is enlightening. It makes us more well rounded people. And most importantly for a business, it refreshes an reinvigorates us.

I thought about all of this as the wheels dislodged themselves from the body of the airplane. They were accompanied with a clunking sound like boiling water crashing through an old radiator. Nothing to worry about, though. This was hardly my first time on a plane and sounds like that are pretty well par for the course. If anything, it's a sign that all is well and working. Next to me, a Japanese man bobs his head in his sleep, his mouth making a funny little pout.

We had been enveloped in clouds for about five or ten minutes when the ground appeared beneath us, rising toward us like the back of a gargantuan whale. Then, with a jolt, we were down. The wheels of the plane raced across the asphalt, great gusts of air pushing on the wing flaps, trying to force them back down.

As the aircraft, now little more than an over-sized bus, finally slowed down, I took a look outside.

Beijing looked grey. The sky was invisible. Nothing was up there except static, like a tv at two in the morning on mute. Off in the distance, I thought I could make out the outlines of tall buildings. They were pretty obscured, though. Well, Beijing is a pretty polluted city, I thought. Everyone's heard the stories.

"Welcome to Beijing," chimed a flight attendant's voice over the intercom. "You may notice that the air quality is a little different from Osaka."

I took another look outside the window. Damn. Talk about an understatement. "A little different?"

Those weren't buildings I had seen in the distance. Those were trees. And they weren't so distant, more like sitting on the edge of the runway. Somehow, they had been so obscured, I thought they were far off buildings.

I was no longer in Japan.

~Jeffles