All my electronics work now!
OK, now for the promised pictures:
This is my last view of Jacksonville.
This is the northern tip of Greenland. 
This is either the North Pole or very close to it (Dad, your GPS doesn't work).
This is Siberia
This is the view from the stairwell in my apartment.
This is what I ate for breakfast this morning.
Bikes outside my apartment gate.
Just felt my first earthquake! Wow... been through the eye of a hurricane and now I've been through an insignificant earthquake. They feel like jello. Really. I thought there would be noise. For a moment I realized that the our companies main building probably has the "structural integrity of a blade of grass," as Joe Flowers so described a chair.
Anyway... my clutziness has gone international. I'm pretty sure I messed something up in the wiring at the apartment bathroom wherein the light stopped coming on. It happened within minutes of me fiddling with the hot water heater. Today I finally found an adapter for my laptop in a four-story electronic flea market. So I get home, plug it in and... POW... all the lights go out. My roommates were a little pissed. Fairly certain they kind of don't like me anyway (sample conversation - me: "What was your major?" roommate: "Political Science." me: "Ahh, mine too!" roommate: silence.)
Finally got the laptop up and running and now it's not picking up the WiFi. Three reboots later and I've decided to search for a USB WiFi card at the flea market. Pictures will be up today hopefully.
Happy Anniversary Dad and Joann. 20 years... amazing :-)
Happy Independence Day everyone else. I had a Chinese intel/propoganda officer talking to me about the beauty of the US Constitution. Go figure...
Just a quick "I'm here" note. It was a beautiful flight over the north pole. I snapped some awesome photos of glaciers on the northern tip of Greenland. It also might surprise you to know that the north pole is... watery. Really. It was a broken ice sheet. Needless to say Siberia was the loneliest place I've ever seen... it must have been 2 hours over it before I saw my first road or town. Someone tell Kevin I have pictures from over Mongolia too.
My first impressions of China are that it's a LOT more Western than I imagined. Almost everyone wears t-shirts with English writing all over them, about half of signs and billboards have small English subscript, and every number is Arabic. Few people speak English, but it's OK. I've dedicated myself to learning Mandarin.
The people seem really friendly. In the cab ride over we got stuck in traffic for a moment and I smiled looking all around me. A man on a bike coming towards me said "hallo" and went to give me what i thought was a high five... which turned into a mangled and awkward handshake out the cab window.
The food is.... incredible. I have no idea what I ate last night but it was amazing. Four giant courses that three of us only ate 1/3 of and two gigantic beers cost $10. Some sort of giant fried-egg-on-sorta-pita-with-mushrooms-maybe-and-spices cost me a whopping 25 cents (!!). Add an orange drink and the whole meal was 75 cents.
A funny side-note: I woke up at 8:30 this morning. The net effect of jet lag going back 12 time zones has put me on a normal sleep schedule :-)
I'll have pics up soon. I need a power converter for my laptop.
P.S. - I might or might not be going to Shanghai. I'll be Tianjin for at least two months though.
Tags: Treyopia Tianjin China First Post First Impressions Arrival
I'm looking across the concourse now out into the New York skyline 15-odd miles away and it's still not real. It comes in flashes... trying to explain to Jacob for the final time that I was going to be away for awhile. Izak and Rebecca crying with me. Saying goodbye to my father... hell, even writing about it. But it's still not quite real.
Saying goodbye to Jacob was the hardest. His denials that I was leaving are my only clue that he kind of understands. My attempts to illustrate how long a year is by browsing through a calander were a bit futile in retrospect. "You'll be five when I come back home," didn't seem to sink either; "but I'm four..."
Last night I was feeling really selfish. I'm missing some of the best years of Jacob's life before he turns into a rotten brat like the others. I'm flying out while Carson undergoes chemo in Wolfson's. I really can't convince myself this is anything other than some elaborate scheme to get someone else to subsidize a prolonged vacation. I'll get over it though.
I told Izak there was a signficant amount of good in us closing things out, this chapter anyway, on our own terms instead of letting things just fade away with benign neglect. Every moment I've spent with family and friends over the past few weeks has been held in the highest esteem in my mind, not a moment wasted, not a word left unsaid that needed to come out. I'm going to miss everyone like hell and I needed that. Maybe we all needed it. You don't recognize what things mean till they're gone.
I leave you with two pictures. The first is my last view of Jacksonville. The second is my view out the window of the Manhatten skyline as I type this.
Much love.
