Twice I've written brilliant, witty, and wordy entries for this blog. Once the hotel erased it, once the computer just went nuts. This time its short and to the point.

National Museum - great. Brand new, interesting building, first rate modern displays. I spent a long time with the ancient scroll paintings. Oddly there are some that they know the name of the artist but not when he lived. That's because the artist's name is part of the painting. We have western paintings that we can roughly date, but haven't a clue as to who painted them. The museum only allows 2000 tickets a day, but our guide got us in on the tourist guide arrangement (they add tour groups in addition to the 2000 I think).

Pandas in the Beijing zoo - pitiful. It was afternoon and they were sleepy. Still those that were awake were as far from the people watching as they could get, back in corners and no wonder. Thousands of people mobbed the area, zoo attendants with bull-horns yelled constantly trying to move the crowd on so that the place didn't pack up any worse than it already was. It was really noisy.

Modern architecture in Beijing - all over the place but no one can get you to it or show it to you. Our guide had car trouble conveniently on the freeway by the birdsnest Olympic building so I was able to get some good shots of that, but I had the feeling we were the first people ever to ask to see any of the incredible buildings going up all over the place there. By the time of the Olympics Beijing should be the archetectural capital of the world, so far as modern innovative buildings are concerned.

Nitey nite.

A full day in Beijing today. Up at 7, breakfast at the hotel buffet at 8, and at 9 a.m. we descended to the lobby to find Lilli, our guide, waiting for us. The car and driver were outside the door, hotel doormen rushed to assist us in climbing into our car, and we were off. First stop, the National Art Museum. There was an exhibit of current art from China. Interesting, some of it. I am not a modern art kind of guy, but I'm big on representational art. So are the Chinese in large part. Upstairs was a restrospective of Taiwanese art from 1960s to the current time. Our guide was especially taken by a conceptual artist who did things like rope himself to a woman for a year during which time he and she never touched each other. He has a number of 1 year projects -he lived outdoors in NYC for a year with only a sleeping bag, he stayed in a cell for a year, he punched a time clock once an hour for a year and made a movie of himself after each punch. It was interesting stuff in a way but I figured the guy was nuts and had found a socially acceptable way of living through art. She thought it illumned the meaning of life.

On to the hutong tour - the hutongs are the old lanes and alleys of Beijing and they are being destroyed at a quickening pace by the citys refurbishing for the Olympics in 2008. We rickshawed through some narrow lanes, and visited a family. They said that dad, who had fought the US in Korea, was now in his late 80s and had a government pension so he had moved to a new apartment building which he liked a lot.

Lunch was at a restaurant the locals liked. There was a little kid outside the door with a gong, and every time a new customer walked in the door, he banged it good and loud. The entire staff was good and loud. I think eating there if you understood Chinese would be a horror show. Perhaps you have eaten in SF's Chinatown restaturant with the waiter Edsel Ford? It was just like that. Everyone yelling, rushing around. Great food -we recommend the noodles -and by the way, Pepsi is virtually unknown in China, Coke is it. I'm in heaven.

In a shopping street (ie a road blocked to vehicular traffic which has a lot of shops on it) we found the pickle shop that Anthony Bordain featured on his show (have not found the scorpions yet) and wandered through the crowds. Everywhere it is the crowds, not least of all in the middle of the streets with cars, buses, and bicycles racing past them. Mary Alice hit a shoe store, which had made shoes for Chairman Mao, and now her, and it was off for duck.

Peking duck is a big deal in Beijing, and a must eat on every tourist's iteninary. Several restaurant's feature it, and we were booked into the main one. Henry Kissinger, Arafat, the Senior Bushes, all ate there. Being booked in advance is the deal. There was a long line of people waiting and we breezed past and got a table. How superior I felt to those huge tables of Western tourists eating their first ducks. Mary Alice and I had a private table, and we had come to an understanding of the basic premise of Chinese dining. You are not going to eat everything that they serve you because the good host always has more food than you can eat. They don't have doggy bags, either, so I hope the poor are getting the wasted food.

After dinner, what else? We went to the opera. The Beijing Opera, that is. Here again we got a taste of how the truly rich must live. Our guide got our tickets and led us past at least 100 people lined up to get in, we just sailed in and took our seats, ordered glasses of wine, and were ready for the opera. The opera here is light on plot or singing, and heavy on acrobatics. Astounding feats, and luckily for you, indescribable. When it was over we walked out the front door and there was our car with the driver standing by it, the rear door open for us. We hopped in and it was off to the hotel after looking at the lights of the Forbidden City at night. Its a hard life but someone has to lead it.

It was an interesting morning aboard the ship. Each category of passenger got a different color code for their luggage, and each color got a different disembarkation time, so we would not all be trying to leave the ship at once. As passengers going off on our own we were Light Blue 2, and were supposed to disembark at 9:30 a.m. Our main luggage was handled by the ship the night before. The Chinese came aboard with a bunch of money to exchange for those of us who wanted local currency. There was a large line in the ship's atrium and just when I was 3rd from the table the announcement came that they had run out of yuan and I was out of luck. I went out on the Promenade deck where Mary Alice was looking down at the dock. All of the luggage was there in neatly set up rows, by label category. Some China Post trucks came up and what appeared to be soldiers jumped out of one and began moving luggage. This looked bad. The Light Blue 2 tags were visible on bags to our right (and 70' below us) and we managed to identify our bags after a while. Then a private car drove up and some people lept out and began taking some of the Light Blue 2 bags and putting them in the car. What were we going to do if they grabbed one of ours? Leap the 70' to the dock, landing on a soft suitcase yelling "Put that bag back?"

A little after 10 am the call came for Light Blue 2 to get off the ship, and we did. We got our luggage and stood there on the dock facing towards all of China and stepped off into the unknown. In this case the unknown was whether the guide and driver I had hired via the internet would show up, and if so, where. After about 100 yards of bravely walking into the depths of Asia alone and unsupported, with nothing but our Visa cards and optomism reassuring us, we saw a sign being held up that said Eugene Denson. Our guide had come through, we were going to get to Beijing.

That is, if we could see it. The smog was much worse than it had been in May 2005. This time it was worse than Oakland, it was as bad as it had gotten in Alderpoint during the height of the forest fires. No one seemed to notice. It was National Day, a state holiday which lasts all week, and everyone was off work and out in the streets. We got into our hotel and went out onto the great pedestrian shopping street, Wangfujing Dajie, along with everyone else in China. Everyone has a camera and the flashbulbs going off were like fireworks. Before one huge department store a water fountain display began, to the surprise of the people walking across the unmarked sidewalk where the fountains were. Loudspeakers blared forth a Strauss waltz and the various fountains made patterns shooting as much as 40' high. It was warm and people ran into the fountains pretending to conduct the music, small kids played and splashed, dozens of people posed before the waters and flash bulbs were everywhere. My camera battery went dead.

I believe day before yesterday was the first day I saw deck chairs in use- finally warmed up or rather we finally sailed south far enough to make it attractive to sit outside. I sat in one and almost immediately fell asleep. I didn't even know I was tired.

Internet usage is 35 cents a minute for first-timers. Free for people who are on their second or higher Princess Cruise, I think. The difficulty is that when these PC's crash, and like PCs are reputed to do, they crash all the time, the clock ticking off the charges does not crash. People are constantly having to have their charges adjusted. It would be simpler to use Macs, wouldn't it?

Oddly most of the 20+ internet terminals are used by couples - one typing the other sitting a bit back and reading or commenting.

The internet connection seems to have never failed during the trip, which surprised me as we got into fairly remote seas. Always connected in today's world I guess.

Tomorrow we leave the ship. The big question is whether the tour company we have found and paid over the internet will actually show up. Do we really have those hotel rooms? Or will we be standing on the Xingang docks, luggage in hand, looking at the vastness of China and wondering how to get to Beijing. Hitchhiking? More later, I hope, from the mainland.

Nagasaki. Ring any bells? The Brits and Aussies on the trip don't have the same sense about this stop that I do, and I assume other Americans do. We dropped the bomb, not them. I did hear one old vet talking about us having to drop the bomb to save the estimated 1 million Allied lives the invasion of the Japanese homeland was to cost us. But historians have pretty well debunked that.

Anyway the ground zero tour was booked solid and we ended up on the Shimabara Pennsula which promised an old castle, samuri homes, and a Japanese boxed lunch. It delivered. The castle was really a fortress, rebuilt because the central government had all the local fortifications destroyed c 1870. Lots of great photos. The samuri houses were also photogenic, if reconstructed. Boxed lunch at a resort hotel. The staff comes out into the parking lot to greet us with a lot of bowing and gets us to the lunch room. The boxed lunch is everything we hoped for. Lots of different Japanese food items in the box. Oddly I can't get a coke to go with it. They have diet coke, which is what they were serving at the Western lunch two days ago back in Hakone park. But no regular coke, so I stick with water. At least they didn't offer me Pepsi. After lunch its off to the souvenir shop in the hotel where I find......a coke machine with regular coke. Why a four or five star hotel can't arrange to bring me a coke from their own machine which is all of 50' from the dining room I can' t imagine, and all the bowing in the parking lot doesn't mitigate it. Symbolic service rather than actual service. Still, lunch was swell. Mary Alice hit gold in the souvenir shop (you knitters just wait to see this).

A few years back the local volcano went off (1992?) killing about 50 people, and causing a mud flow which destroyed or buried a number of houses. Some are preserved in a museum, right in the ground just as they were the day after the mud flow. It is astonishing to see them. The spookiest thing is that one has a TV antenna on it. These are the actual houses still right where they were buried in the mud flow. Remember Stafford? This is that, only on a huge scale.

But I wish we had gotten to ground zero. That's unfinished business and I feel like I'll have to return to go there.

About 200 people on the dock to see us off. Spectacular harbor, sunset, the works. No pix however. I've been using a 1GB card in the camera which holds about 1000 photos, so for backup of the computer I simply don't erase the pix as I download. Great plan, when the card fills I pull the card and slip in another one which I have brought. So I'm up to 800+ photos on the card and the Mac stops recognizing duplicatates and wants to download all 800 or not at all. OK by me, lets do 800. Well 30 minutes in the Mac decides it is out of memory, can't complete the download and I'm stuck.Cancel download, toss some old programs I never use,look for what could possibly be using 80 Gigs of computer space. Free up a lot restart the download. Meanwhile the band is playing the ship is moving, the sun is setting, and I can't take any pix. So nothing but memories of the departure from Nagasaki. That'll have to do. It was warm and Mary Alice and I went to the very front of the ship. As we sailed under the bridge people there clapped, then we were past all land contact except the pilot boat. After a bit it pulled up, picked up the pilot and we sailed off into the sunset.