The two-week-long riot-avoidance tour* of Gansu and Qinghai provinces has come to a highly successful and riot-free end. I’m in Guangzhou for a day — tomorrow, it’s off to Hong Kong for work. Unfortunately, flu symptoms mean that I’m spending the day on the couch. Although I would have liked to explore the Glasses Market and some of GZ’s delicious restaurants, the upshot is plenty of time to do laundry and to get caught up on my overfilled Google Reader. From whence, these gems:
- The 11th of every month: China’s “Queuing Day” If you’ve ever tried to buy a train ticket in China, you know that “lines” are a pleasant euphemism for what happens at ticket counters all over China. Even when there are handy metal rails guiding people into straight lines, you need to be on the lookout for people trying to cut ahead of you. When you call them out, you might get a sheepish look, but never an apology. Mark McKinnon investigates the ongoing efforts to get Beijing residents to wait in line. (Why the 11th of every month? Because the numbers look like two straight lines.)
- Museums: Overrated or not? Roger Wade makes the daring argument that museums are overrated — rather than caring about pesky ol’ “history,” we should focus on seeing how people live now, by going to supermarkets and the like. Now, I don’t think you should force yourself to go to every museum in a city, but Wade writes off museums with a pretty broad brush. Over at World Hum, Eva Holland retorts: “I’m worried about what seems to be an increasingly popular theme in travel advice these days: the idea that museums, and history more generally, are somehow distinct or cut off from a destination’s true culture… I know, I know, we’ve all had Madonna-and-Child art gallery overload at some point—but trying to understand the Catholic world without taking a look at its most powerful iconography seems crazy to me.” At the moment, I’ve got a bit of Tibetan-monastery overload myself — but I wouldn’t have missed them for the world.
- What shoes should I pack? Over at the NYTimes, Frugal Traveler Matt Gross tackles the question of choosing shoes for travel. He takes the one-pair approach, though he is still questing for the perfect pair. This task would be even more difficult for women, for whom “casual” and “dressy” are more divergent. For my recent trip, I had to pack four pairs (Tevas, hiking boots, running shoes and flip-flops) — and that still means using pretty J. Crew flip-flops as my dress-up shoe in Hong Kong.
*The original plan to go to Xinjiang Province was scrapped after the July 5 protests.
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