I am in Beijing, in the Exhibition Centre Hotel.  It’s a convenient location, because starting tomorrow I’ll be in the exhibition for four days.  Never mind that those four days include Saturday and Sunday.  And Monday will be a fine day off: a customer visit to do support and training, which will take until the customer’s satisfied or my flight leaves on Thursday, whichever comes first. 

For dinner I had the menu items with the squiggly characters and the lacking or incomprehensible translations.  I know that the meat with coriander and cuminseed was lamb, because that’s a squiggly I recognize, even untranslated, but that the translated salad I got contained walnuts wasn’t clear to me.  It’s a good thing that I’m not allergic to any food, otherwise I couldn’t just order at semi-random.  I did avoid the sea cucumber.  I’ll try it another day. 

There were a lot of people setting up our booth – at least eight plus me.  Half of us stood around without being able to help at all, and nobody seemed to be in control.  I prefer being in charge of a booth myself or following clear instructions. 

It seems like everyone in this hotel is a trainee: the receptionists, the foreign cash exchange guy, the café waitress where I had lunch (cookies, ice cream, and tea), the three waitresses who later served me dinner, the lady cleaning the elevator.  I wonder why.  Is that so that they can be given one step more to climb on the corporate ladder?  I did note that (as far as I can tell) they are all Chinese.  It made me think how even the most manual jobs are usually done by locals, not as in Switzerland by foreigners.  Is that because we’re a richer country?  Or is it because the Chinese have Confucianism ingrained in them?  Granted, there are some people who are naturally inclined to enjoy boring, disrespected, and poorly paid jobs, but they’re a minority.  Everyone else needs some explanation.  “I’m scrubbing floors to give my kids a better future.”  “I’m an indentured servant because that’s my station in life.”  “I’m flipping burgers because I don’t have the language skills for a better job.”  “I’m stacking shelves because that’s where you start with my skin color.”  For Chinese in China, only the first two work, meaning that we’re looking at a country with large inequalities or a stoic metanarrative philosophy or both. 

It does make me think that if we want to rid Switzerland of foreigners, as some do, we would at the same time have to abort any attempts at equality amongst inhabitants.  The feudal system worked pretty well without foreigners. 

I arrived in Beijing weary.  I’d only slept three hours from Monday to Tuesday, when I needed to catch the 4:55 bus to the Basel airport.  In Vienna I took the CAT downtown and did the tourist thing for a few hours, returning a bit early to the airport and catching perhaps 90 minutes of sleep in the lounge.  I asked at least three different people if I’d be able to get in after the last disappointment in Tokyo. 

In Vienna I first walked to the Danube.  The sun was rising in a cloudless sky and beginning to warm the air, and I figured that a former royal city like Vienna would have a riverbank to sit on like Basel, except bigger, better, and more beautiful.  Imagine my disappointment when I saw the Danube.  It wasn’t even half the width of the Rhine in Basel and walled in by concrete.  Yes, I could sit on a bench, but from there, instead of a nice view of the old town, I saw the subway tunnel and the 20th century houses beyond the road on the other side.  I later found out that that was only a canal and that the “old” Danube flows quite a bit away from town. 

The veal schnitzel in Viennese style in the Café Vienne did a lot to cheer me up about Vienna, as did the decor and comfort that made me wonder if Vienna needed Starbucks at all.  I found one later, and promptly heard English spoken there, so apparently the standardized fare and non-smoking atmosphere still justify a chain coffee shop in the city that invented coffee shops.  I walked up the tower of the Stephansdom, leaving the microscope in the clerk’s room, and glad to have done that because even with just a backpack crossing was difficult.  It’s slightly disappointing that one can only climb halfway up that tower, but halfway up there means higher than in Basel by going all the way up.  The roof of the nave was perhaps 15 degrees steeper than the roof in Basel.  Vienna may have lost in terms of waterways, but its cathedral is twice as wide, twice as long, and twice as high as ours, and it has an organ that looks like a group of angels in flight.  This building fit in better with the huge manors and parks I’d seen from the plane flying in – the kind of buildings that befit a city that once was capital to half the continent. 

I sat on the square after that, looking at the cathedral, sipping a latte (it’s Vienna, I’ll make an exception) and eating a Sacher cake, soaking up the sun.  I was tired, but life was good.