Last week I went on a week-long round-the-world trip. Not a method of world touring I recommend. Twenty-two hours of flight time to get to Bangalore, with a stop in Frankfurt. Two days in Bangalore, then eleven hours of flight time to Beijing via Singapore, and a couple of days in Beijing, followed by a twelve hour flight home. Somewhere in there you lose a day, so you work six days but can't find one of them. Maybe that's an argument for going the other direction around. Hmm.
I had not been in Bangalore for five years, and at the rate it changes, that was a very long time. The rinky dink airport with a couple of luggage carousels opening off to a big banyan tree surrounded by traffic had been replaced by a gleaming international airport. The traffic was worse than before, which is hard to believe, but the monsoon season had cooled things off.
I was delayed in Singapore when they had to replace the plane. It had been struck by lightning, so I wasn't complaining. Still, I knewI was not on United when Singapore Airlines actually told us what happened, changed gates, provided free food and drinks, and personally delivered a printed letter of explanation and apology to everyone while they were waiting.
Beijing's general orderliness is a contrast to Bangalore's high energy chaos. Newspapers in India are also full of energy compared to the government-controlled ones in China, but the countries share some of the same problems associated with high economic growth -- most visible in traffic. Since in Beijing they can just declare whether you're allowed to drive based on the last two digits of your license plate, the clever people there are just working around the problem by buying multiple cars.
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