here, there, everywhere

One of the comparatively nicer things about being away from home this time around is traveling with a webcam; as dorky as it sounds, I've been able to actually talk face to face with my dad, stepbrother, Lauren and - yesterday night, quite unexpectedly - my grandparents! Even if conversation gets a bit disjointed at times, it's so great just being able to see people's faces; so I'm keeping my fingers crossed wherever we live in Japan will have good internet connection as well.
At any rate: on semi-radio silence for the next few days as we head down to Edinburgh; back in a week or so!

Fields and blue skies near the River Don.

The jet-lagged view from Iain's bedroom, at about 5:30 am.

The closest I got to a photo of Amsterdam's red light district (if you squint, you can totally see some lanterns.)
By the time you're reading this, we'll be in Scotland, though I'm writing this from the Amsterdam airport and so can't say much about what Aberdeen or Iain's family are like yet. This post, by the way, is post-dated only because Iain hasn't told either of his sisters that we're coming, and though I seriously doubt either of them will see this, I don't want to risk ruining the surprise. We left Beijing yesterday and landed in Amsterdam yesterday for a fifteen hour layover, which gave us enough time to go into the city and wander around a bit, and then come back and go to sleep in a little pod here. So I'm writing this from a tiny futuristic capsule room that sort of feels like what I always imagined the Enterprise must feel like, and wishing I had more time to spend in Amsterdam, which was beautiful, but mostly just looking forward to being in Scotland.

Leaving Beijing was a bit of a mess, though not nearly as horrible as it could have been. After carefully weighing our bags to accommodate what we thought were KLM's luggage restrictions, we found ourselves facing more than $1,500 in baggage fees (that would be thirty euroes a kilo), as it turns out there are two types of tickets you can buy, one that lets you carry about as much luggage as the flight we took to China, and another that does not, and if you book through a site like Orbitz, you have no way of knowing this until an officious KLM lady laughs in your face, crumples up your baggage form, and turns her back on you. To make a long story short (especially since it's one I'm still a bit annoyed about it), as we were sitting there dumbstruck and deciding whether we could just throw everything we owned out right there, this amazing random lady who is my new hero appeared out of nowhere and told us there was a post office just around the corner. We ended up having to mail two gigantic suitcases worth of stuff ahead to Aberdeen, which was expensive, but nowhere near the fifteen hundred we were looking at, and throwing out the suitcases, which fortunately were pretty junky to begin with. That random woman literally saved us hundreds of dollars, and I wish I had some way to tell her how insanely grateful we both are, but as it is, I can just pass on the information that Beijing's Terminal Two has a super-helpful, English-speaking post office, even if none of the nasty airline staff bother to tell you about it. Anyway, that's enough whining, and the next post will be from Aberdeen!

I don't have as many photos of the Great Wall as I would like, as I almost passed out - either from the heat or not having eaten or just being monstrously out of shape, whatever it is that makes your entire field of vision go blinding white for several minutes - the minute I got to the wall and decided against trying to hike ten more kilometers. So instead, I ingloriously hopped a cab to the end point to wait for Iain, and climbed a much more modest distance on the wall at Simatai to wait for him. I feel pretty stupid about wimping out on the hike, but seeing Iain collapse at my feet two hours later at least convinced me it had been a good idea. At any rate, it's been a long time since I've had to take in any massive tourist sight all on my own, but it was something I loved about the time I spent backpacking through the UK and Spain, and it was actually really nice, just sitting on the steps, taking my time and watching everyone go by.

Inside the Forbidden City; apparently all of China had the same idea as us yesterday, so it was massively, overwhelmingly crowded and we didn't have the energy to see all of it, though what we did manage to see was pretty amazing.

After crawling from our train to our hotel laden with way too much luggage and not enough sleep, we didn't really manage to see much of the city when we first arrived, so the massive entrance to the Forbidden City yesterday was one of my first impressions of Beijing.