In which there is an Announcement of Technical Difficulties and additional bits and bats I neglected to write about before

So, first of all:

It appears the text messaging is... occasionally inconsistent. If you ever sent me a text message and didn't hear back from me, assume I didn't get it.

I can make and receive phone calls (please try not to call in the middle of the night, as I sometimes forget to turn the phone off)but cannot check my voicemail.

Email is always the best way to reach me.

I hear that there are some weirdnesses of punctuation, etc. in some of my prior posts- I will edit them upon returning to a non-oppressive land.

Now, to the things I neglected to write about previously:

I'm sure everyone who's ever been to China or read about travelling here has heard of the beauty of half- and mis- translated signs. In general, I've been pretty surprised by the number of things that ARE translated, and don't feel the need to cavil much. Without Alan, I would definitely be at sea for some things, but if one were to make a fully tourist-oriented trip, I think it wouldn't be that much of a problem (staying in fancier hotels with properly English-speaking conciereges, etc).

However, it's the things that are seemingly BEST translated that amuse me the most, as there is a level of formality that we Americans are completely unaccustomed to. For instance, my in-flight magazine on China Southern, which was basically all in Chinese except for the occasional headline, featured an article on Ewan Macgregor entitled "Ewan MacGregor: an Enchanting and Eccentric Scottish Actor." I'm not sure about eccentric (though perhaps the writer saw "Long Way Round," aka the Best TV Show No One Saw, and was taken aback by his adventures in Mongolia, etc.), but I would certainly agree on the enchanting.

In a more vaguely ominous way, the customs and immigration forms seemed to presume a level of honesty on the respondent that could only be induced by fear of a totalitarian regime: "Please mark check before the items of following symptoms or illness if you have any now: fever, cough, difficulty breathing, diarrhea, vomiting, psychosis, AIDS, venereal disease, AIDS, active pulmonary TB." Frankly, I can't imagine who would answer honestly if there WERE an issue.. kind of like the admonition that, should you be thinking of travelling to Tibet or Xinjiang (the ethnically central Asian (think 'stans) province to the far west), you should under no circumstances announce that on your application for a tourist visa, as the government will not actually check your itinerary once you're in China, and you shouldn't draw attention to yourself in advance.

However, the customs form itself was even more entertaining, as it contained what seemed to me to be the seeds of a potential Kafka-esque nightmare: "Mark check before the items of following articles if you bring any of them: animal, animal products, animal carcasses and specimens, plant, plant propagating materials, plant products, microbes, human tissues, biological products, blood and blood products, soil." First of all, "plant propagating materials" is about the most excellent overuse of syllables I've ever seen, given that "seeds" seems easy enough to find in a dictionary. Perhaps they meant to include fertilizer. More pertinently, however, is the fact that EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING who enters a country brings with them microbes, human tissues, and blood and blood products. I had brief visions of being stopped by some stern guard: "You did not mark microbe! You are dishonest subversive American!" Or, you know, maybe not. But if *I* were a bored customs guard, I might be tempted, language inquisitor that I am.

One final thing before I embark on a description of our by-now-epic stay in Dali: when we were leaving Kunming, we had a brief moment of feeling like we were in the Amazing Race: when we were unable to book our tickets on the soft sleeper train, we bought tickets on a bus that left earlier, and took four hours, rather than going overnight. That bus left at 7 PM, which gave us about two hours to go back to our hotel, collect our bags, have dinner, and get back to the bus station. The catch was that both Alan and Cristoph had left clothes with the hotel's laundry service, and it wasn't clear when the laundry would get back to the hotel.

At 6:20, we were starting to sweat (for those who haven't done the backpacking thing recently, there's something a little more stressful about the train/bus schedule than there is even in dealing with airplane schedules- it's something about the fact that, depending on your watch, their watch, and the operators' whim, you may or may not make it with split second timing). In the event, the laundry was delivered (the boys were told repeatedly that the laundry was "on the bus" on its way back- it seems things are frequently on a bus here), not just clean, dry, pressed, and folded, but sealed in individual plastic bags with cheerful stickers. It all looked brand new.

Up next: Dali, this time for real.