Xi'an difficulties

There's absolutely nothing wrong--except the net is slow. So I'm very hesitant to upload photos. I'm mostly trying to take care of my upcoming travel plans and do the most necessary email (and of course, talk to my wife).

OK. I just skyped in public for the first time. I got a few smiles from across the room, and the waitresses were pretty intrigued. They came and looked over my shoulder for a few minutes. After hanging up I showed them some photos. One of them then started showing me name cards and talking really fast. Finally I gave her a card and told her she can write. That made her very happy.

I don't think I ever linked to this album of photos. It's the last week in Beijing.

Wow: the next batch of photos uploaded really quickly. Come to think of it, I had an excellent skype connection with home too. I guess it's just the UO email server that is slow. Sometimes I think my connectivity problems have more to do with UO than with China, because not a single person with a government email address has successfully sent me an email at my business address. Last week I even signed up for a Gmail account to ease the communication problem.

So, here are photos from final exam day in Beijing and my first two days in Xi'an. Tomorrow I return to the provincial library for a building tour, then will occupy myself for the afternoon somehow before getting dropped of at the station for my overnight train to Lanzhou. Friday I will take a bus up into the mountains for a weekend at a Tibetan pilgrimage site, where I will spend my 38th birthday. It will be my smallest town in China.