We are not in Kansas anymore...

In China, but not for the Olympics 24 July, 2008 I stepped onto a plane in the quaint, conventional Midwestern American town known as Columbus, Ohio, and disembarked in Beijing, China; a smoggy, Communist, mid-eastern city. Beijing was just a layover, a pit stop from which to catch the last flight of our journey to Kuala Lumpur. And yet this respite seemed to capture all my fears, emotions, and hopes in one geographic location. Each sign was laden with text, but none of which was in anyway legible to my gloriously illiterate American eyes. The one sign I could decipher was the Olympic rings, a source of great disappointment that I was arriving to the 2008 Summer Olympics one month too early. Not only that, but the bloody Chinese, in a rash move to protect "the Communist Way" had refused my husband’s request for a visa so we can not return to visit during the festivities. In fact we are not the only applicants refused, it seems as if the city of Beijing’s hotels are operating at half capacity because the government has declined much of the visas applications. Imagine that the country is to play host to the most international peaceful event to occur in this century and they aren’t allowing the world attend. As if the visa situation isn’t ironic enough my family was sent out of the airport via immigration, only to reenter ten minutes later at the ticketing counters and receive our boarding passes. You see, we could not get boarding passes from China to Malaysia because we were changing airlines. Our bags were easily tagged all the way to their final destination, but not we pesky people. We were let loose into the bowels of the Beijing city with full trust we would return and continue on to our final destination. Now I am not, nor have I ever claimed to be a genius, but this system seems to me to be a clear example of why the world is a mess. Everyone, everything and every system is so narrow-mindedly specialized that the "whole" never works. But being the exquisitely regimented first born rule followers that Brian and I are; we walked out the back doors of Beijing airport, around the electric people mover sidewalks to the automatic sliding front doors of Beijing Airport and reentered as we were expected to do. Our entire adventure in China proper lasted four hours in which exactly ten minutes occurred outside the airport walls. Who says we’re not "world traveling adventurers?" We did however, purchase three Beijing Olympic T-shirts as souvenirs so that we can pretend we participated. Sadly the T-shirts are sized for the Chinese frame, which means our young nieces and nephews will be sporting the shirts next summer.