But It Wasn't Here

Changsha.  Rolled in here last night.  I’ve been to this city a few times before.  But when have I been here to this Sheraton?  I recognize the lobby as we pull in.  Checking into my room I’m hit with a wave of nostalgia.  Didn’t I stay here with my kids when we came to climb Heng Shan?  Steeped in melancholy as I check in all by myself, but as I unpack that memory, I realize that we never really stayed the night in Changhsa on that trip.  We went straight down south.  There are other Hunan memories from 2017.  I came here with a friend.  But it wasn’t here.  No.  We took the train west.  It must have been a business meeting here back in 2001 or so.  Not nearly so romantic. 

We head over to a remarkable campus for a company that is only two years old.  Once upon a time I’d have expected that an office in the provinces, would have necessarily been wanting, facilities aspirational at-best.  This place is astoundingly post-modern.  I tell my colleagues and later my guest that my benchmark is often . . . the bathrooms.  You can’t fake the bathrooms.  These bathrooms are very clean.

At a testing ground we ride a bus that has a driver, but he doesn’t drive.  He’s just there for the contingency of something completely unexpected.  I learn a remarkable amount about driver-less trucks.  And assisted driving busses.  And places where a truck can be driven remotely to dangerous places, by a driver who is safe behind some console.

A dinner at a compromised place.  Is it so hard to find good Hunanese food?  Third shitty Xiang Cai meal in as many days.  Next time we need an upgrade.  We've time to swing by the Xiang River bank and consider the enormous, Rushmore-scale bust of Lao Mao out in the river's island.  The train station has yet to confront modernity.  The bathrooms are not certainly not clean here.  But we get bottles of water and soon duck into our soft sleeper cabin, the three of us with one stranger.  Settling in to my upper bunk, considering the rhythm of the wheels, I am once again, nostalgic for something inchoate. 

Wednesday, 12/04/19