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Writing this on the plane back to Shanghai, after an extended weekend of sorts in Beijing. First things first, I’ve got to give some love to the new airport here. It involved a leap of faith to head to Terminal Three (Shanghai Airlines hasn’t updated its ticketing system to let passengers know… ahem… where exactly the plane is), but that was the right decision. And the new terminal is a thing of beauty. The architects followed the design of the Pudong terminal in Shanghai: large and amazingly clean glass walls stretch up on all sides towards a curved roof that arches across the entire breadth of the terminal. There’s an enormous feeling of spaciousness and general organization. Also a touch of the Hong Kong railway terminal in their decision to place the restaurants and shops that dominate the concession area on an elevated platform. Kudos to the team that designed and built it.

What can I say about the weekend except that it was good. Flew to Beijing on Sunday and encamped at a hostel in the university district. Spent Monday morning wandering through 中关村 in a quest for the Fujitsu outlet: I really like their ultraportable S-series because the machines are light, compact, have great battery life and come with a 13-inch screen, which hits the right balance between size and usability: it’s usable on a plane but still “feels” like a fullsized machine. Eventually found them tucked away in the basement of one of the main complexes, and bought an S6410. Have been using it for two days and am happy with the choice. The only downside is that the machine came preinstalled with Vista, which refuses to play nicely with SSH, despite my best efforts to coax the firewall into opening port 22. Assuming I can massage the wireless card into working with Linux I’ll be happy to remove it. Sad to see that Linux has made essentially zero progress in the laptop market since my last purchase about three years ago.

Spent Monday afternoon and evening working in the 978 art district, and then Tuesday morning back in 五道口 at the cafe that used to be 雕刻时光 but is now called 桥咖啡. I asked the waitress about the name change, and she muttered vaguely about some sort of falling-out between the owners. Whatever it’s called, the cafe is still a good place to work. Had breakfast, telecommuted and ended up in an interesting conversation with a former speechwriter for Pierre Trudeau who is doing management consulting work in China. We talked about both Canadian and American politics (he is very positive on Obama and considers the liberal party to be in disarray). After lunch I rediscovered the old Beijing tradition of the 午觉 and was pleased to find my laptop picking up the Wifi signal from 桥咖啡 about a fifty meters away and through several walls of cement. Way to go Fujitsu!

Headed to see a friend of Echo’s at BCLU later that afternoon before taking the subway to 国贸 for Danwei’s Second “Plenary Session” that evening. The event was well-organized: Jeremy handled the panel while Rob fielded questions from the crowd. There were the standard roster of throwaway questions everyone equivocates on, but still some surprises. The most interesting panelist was a woman from Channel Four News in Britain who deftly skipped past the politics when asked about the protests in western China to point out that no-one in the Western media has access to what is happening on the ground and there isn’t much informed reporting that anyone can do about it.

Ran into Jim, Joel, Elyse and a few others at the session. Chatted with Jim about Marx and the British Labour Movement, and eventually headed off to Sandglass where we hooked up with Joel and eventually Chris and looted the fridge until around 2:00am. I was surprised by how of the Beijing crowd had headed down to Moganshan for the conference on literary translation. Did not sound like I would have enjoyed it though. Waking up early to argue over the wording of sentence-level translations? Sounds like a combination of work and group struggle session.

Only hiccup has been getting back. Shanghai Airlines booked my return ticket for the 27th rather than the 26th and I didn’t catch the error since I’d simply asked for a ticket on Wednesday morning.

Tags: beijing, danwei, sandglass