To Do So on Tian Bei Lu

Back in Beijing.  The cabbie says its cooler than he than it had been.  We called one Didi but you need connectivity to summon a Didi.  My China SIM card is out of funds.  Needs to be recharged.  My daughter, is of course, somehow already on line.  "How did you do that?" "I’m on the US SIM card. "  "It works here?"  "Yes.  It does."  I couldn’t use this T Mobile SIM card to get a connection on Route Nine in Poughkeepsie.  But I was able to do so on Tian Bei Lu in Beijing. 

Back home I unpack.  I want to see all the refrigerator magnates I bought.  There’s the one of the submarine we saw in Vladivostok.  Where is that naïve Georgian painting of the girl in the purple dress.  I keep scrounging and eventually find the one for Krasnarsk, which we didn’t visit, but I grabbed a magnate, there in the town train station, when I was also getting juice and bad sausage and cheese. 

I got all my photos uploaded.  This took a while.  My computer, the old workhorse, has issues.  It got stuck on some upload.  Then it told me there wasn’t enough room.  We sorted it.  They’re all up there now.  And I’ve flagged the ones I want to see and rotated them all so they’re facing in the right direction.  And now I can sit back and wait for them to rotate in to view.  I’ve been looking now for the last fifteen minutes.  Certainly one or two snaps of St. Petersburg have materialized and more photos will follow. 

The internet turned off at midnight.  I quickly discerned that it was just the phone company’s way of saying: “come pay your bill.”  I’ll be over toe Unicom kiosk then, for sure, first thing in the morning.  But there goes my evening of catching up on work and getting all back in place.  I can’t hop on my phone’s WiFi.  The US SIM won’t work as a personal hotspot and those people don’t want me to have any service till I’ve paid them either.  We’ll do it all tomorrow then. 

I left some things behind in SF.  That’s for the best.  I’ll pick up that thread later, let’s get back into stretching for now and put myself to sleep with a paperback. 

Monday 8/06/18