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I touched down at SeaTac with a terrible case of jetlag yesterday evening.  This was only somewhat mitigated by the fact that I had managed to get a little bit of sleep on the flight from Beijing despite the man behind me who insisted on tugging on my seat every time he got up to use the bathroom (and, given that every time the flight attendants passed by he asked for beer, this was rather often).

My first flight had landed at SFO, and I was immediately shocked by the blue sky (minus the pollution that often makes it safe to look at the sun with your naked eyes in China) and the warm air (it didn’t get above freezing the whole time I was in Beijing).  During my layover, I found that I had to remind myself that I didn’t need to crowd up right behind the person in front of me in line and that I did need to throw toilet paper into the bowl rather than into the trash beside it.  When I passed through the security checkpoint for the domestic terminal, I also found once again that US airport security seemed far more absurd and repressive than Chinese airport security.  In China, you don’t have to take off your shoes; domestic flights allow liquids of any size in your carry-on.  If you set off the metal detector, they quickly and unobtrusively wand you.  In San Francisco, I heard security guards demanding that baseball caps and sunglasses be sent through the X-ray machine.

Once I feel a bit more awake and manage to edit my photographs, I’ll provide more details about my experiences in Beijing and the most frightening taxi ride I have ever experienced.  In the meantime, you can read these three poems in the current issue of Philament.

Related posts:

1. Return from Shanghai
2. Seattle is Still Seattle
3. The Seattle of My Childhood is Dead
4. Travel Trouble
5. Back in Longhu
6. Hey Mariners, WTF?
7. Back In Longhu
8. The Joys of Flying in Post-Freedom America
9. The Architecture of the Security Theater
10. Where in the world is Elizabeth?

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