The Romance of Travel

 (A bit of a miracle that just when it seemed I'd have absolutely NO Wifi connection of any kind, I figured out a workaround. Including the ability to keep posting Blogs! So here are the last two.)

Here we go. 1:00 am in the Hangzhou jet-lagged morning with 8 hours before I teach for 6 hours and not much chance of sleep ahead. Partly my fault, because arriving at my hotel, I decided to “lie down for a bit” and slept for five hours straight. Usually, I would force myself to stay awake until the new evening time, but hey, through that decision, I literally made my bed and now I cannot lie in it. 

 

Meanwhile, had a nice dinner reunion with my host Tonny and good friend/ student/ colleague/ translator Cao Li, a lovely person I met on my first trip to China in 2006 and taught later in Salzburg, San Francisco and in other trips to China. We went to a restaurant and sat briefly at a table with a No Smoking sign over our heads and three people at the table next to us smoking. The waiter just shrugged his shoulders and we got up and left. 

 

Back at the hotel, Li helped me translate with three different people who came to my room to try to connect me with WiFi and an hour later, still nothing. They promised to come back tomorrow with more people and I’m picturing a Marx Brothers scene from A Night in the Opera where some thirty people gather to try to get it to work until one knocks at the door, I open it and everybody falls out. I’ll spare the reader the details about how my efforts asked me to get a code but it was impossible to send it to my foreign phone or asked for something else that I needed WiFi for in order to sign up for WiFi. The song Hole in My Bucket and the novel Catch 22 came to mind. 

 

Ordinarily, I could ride out the long night watching Netflix or catching up on e-mails or researching a thing or two for my class tomorrow, but that’s the price you pay for outsourcing your whole life to be dependent on electronic connection. I do have a good book, my cards for Solitaire, my Crostic book. I could get started on collecting my poems from the last 50 years or so and consider putting them in a publishable form. I could give myself a little meditation retreat and sit a few hours of zazen. I could pull up the list of poems I’ve memorized and kept in a folder and re-thread the challenging Keats poem whose title I can’t remember and can’t look up. Coming from an analog childhood and much adulthood, I have resources to fall back on. 

 

Maybe it’s a good time to report back on the fabulous play The Lunchbox that my wife and I just saw at the Berkeley Rep Theater. Made yet more sweet by hesitating at the $150 tickets and then discovering that if you call on a Tuesday at 1:00 pm, you might get seats in the front row for $25 each!! Not only an amazing bargain, but a fabulous close-up way to see a fabulous show. We got them! 

 

The show is about a fascinating lunch delivery system that exists in Mumbai, India where delivery people (doomballahs) bring lunches daily to millions of people in ecological metal containers (tiffens) and using an analog system that has been in place for a hundred years or so, literally never makes a wrong delivery. Except once in this story. 

 

At a time when the world is dependent on QR codes, phones, robotic voice mails, AI and other all-electronic systems, this remarkable way of organizing a business is ecological, offers employment and is supremely efficient. Nothing is broken that needs to be fixed with an electronic solution and it’s the perfect answer to the sheer wonder people feel when they ask, “How did we do this before cell phones?” The answer is thousands of different ways and many of them more efficient, more pleasurable, more human-centered.

 

My daughter Talia will soon come back from a 14-day back-packing trip where she was entirely off the grid. Could be the same for me here in the next 12 days, though instead of bathing in alpine lakes and lying awake at night looking up at the stars, I’ll be back in the teaching circle in my own form of renewal. For two weeks, none of my family or friends will be in touch, no folks in my Facebook virtual community will see photos of my work and needless to say (but worth saying these days), we’ll all be fine. 

 

There you have it. It’s now 2:00 am and dare I hope that I feel a little drowsiness? Is anyone waiting on the edge of their seat wondering if I got back to sleep? Just by daring to write as I do and following some inbred dubious character trait, I clearly think that I’m the hero of my own story, but at the end of the day, know that no one really cares that much and neither should I. The whole point is that you kept me company in my jet-lagged middle-of-the-night and perhaps a thought or image or reflection spoke to you for a moment and that is enough. If nothing else, a little moment of schadenfreude if you’ve felt I’ve boasted just a bit too much about the romance of my traveling life and you’re comfortably in the midst of your own lovely life where you don’t have to deal with passports and visas and lines at the airport and three days of dazed jet-lag and such. Enjoy it!

 

Good night!

 

P.S. The conclusion to this gripping story? Got back to sleep at 3:00 and slept to 7:00. Yay!