Marathon Trip to China-Australia begins - Aug 13-14

I'm running out of laptop battery in the Seoul, Korea airport, so this will be a quick couple of entries. Also, I realized that I somehow left my camera-computer connector cord in Morgantown, so I will only be uploading iphone images in the near-term, for this trip. But now that I know that I can take pics accordingly.

So, I left Pittsburgh at 6ish AM for Wash. DC, which necessitated beginning this trip at 3 AM from my house. 23 hours later I arrived in Beijing with the usual sleep deprivation and jet lag issues. But generally the drive-flight-flight went very well with very few issues. Bags arrived. I arrived. Took a nap when I arrived and had dinner without the need to be alert for interactions with newfound relatives (Ming's family) during dinner, and all went well on the first day. In fact, after dinner, we called on Ming's father's parents and there were several uncles and aunts and cousins in the place too. We are hoping we didn't embarrass Ming or Ian, or Min or Drew (MIng's parents) too much. We presented the grandparents with four bottles of fish oil (don't ask why? it is custom), and they gave us 2 boxes of tea.

The photo above was an image taken from the plane window showing the arctic ice sheet breaking up near northwest Greenland. I don't know that this level of breakup is unusual, but reports over the past several years are that the ice sheet has been melting significantly more than in previous decades, suggestive of a dramatic global warming effect, which could accelerate through feedback by changing the albedo of the earth (water absorbs more heat than ice). Anyway, we flew over the north pole again, though the pilot didn't point it out this time, like he did last time. Even though it was a longish 14 hour flight, you do realize you're flying halfway around the world (12 time zones!), so the world does seem small when this change happens so fast. The feeling of small worldness is accented by the joining together of two families from opposite sides of the globe. Ming's family seem like really nice people, though the language divide makes it hard to get to know them very fast.