Traveling to Paris

It's funny cause all the other international flights I've taken have been with non-Chinese airlines. I can now testify that it makes a REALLY BIG difference. Normally I would plug in my headphones, queue up a bunch of crappy (or ideally not crappy) movies and watch them until I fall asleep for a few minutes. My flight from Beijing to Paris (it was non stop which is ok) was on a littlish sort of plane with no entertainment (aside from the old-style overhead monitors that you can't see). I had a suspicion this would be the case so I brought my laptop etc along. But what happens is that the (mostly) Chinese fliers all stand in the aisles yelling at each other, or they all watch movies on their iPads with the sound up or they all play games (also with the sound up). It's pretty annoying! So the one flight I want to sleep through is also during the day so I really should stay awake. GRRRR!

An interesting thing happened very early in the flight though. If you've been following my blog (and if not WHY NOT?)(also I understand :) you would already know that yesterday Jane and I and her friend from work Jie Xia (Jessie) went skiing at a place just outside Beijing. It was roughly an hour out of town. Well about 5 minutes after we take off, what do we fly over but the ski place. It was easily recognised by the fact that it's all man-made snow in the middle of a brown string of hills. Sort of sticks out a little! And if you've been reading even further back (and you should have been) then you would clearly remember my camping trip on the Great Wall. If not, please take this opportunity to remind yourself. Right, well I flew over the same spot. It looks pretty much the same from up here too. ABout 10 minutes after that though, everything went white and snow covered and it's been that way for the last 5 hours or so. Mongolia and southern (and probably even more so northern) Russia are seriously empty and desolate. There is nothing here but hills, snow and (very few) trees. No roads, railways and certainly no towns. Jessie was saying that last year they went horse riding in Inner Mongolia last year and that maybe we should do it again. It would be interesting but do you think they'll let me swap the horse for a trail bike? I really don't like horses.

I finally watched the first episode of Game of Thrones. I've read the (existing) books a few times but for some reason never quite got around to watching the show. I guess I've slightly avoided them because 1) I know the story isn't finished and 2) the author is producing one book every 5 or so years, one just came out and he seems pretty fed up with the whole thing really. Still, I enjoyed the show, I think I will definitely try to watch the rest of the episodes. Would have been nice if they'd called it "A Song of Ice and Fire" cause Game of Thrones was just the first book. At least I have an advantage of knowing who the many, many, many characters are :)

I should probably also have brought more than a single episode for my 11 hour flight! I also should really invest in more games on my mac than ones I can't run without running the battery down like Oblivion/Minecraft/Terraria and less battery intensive but also less interesting games that I'm not very good at like chess/mahjong. I won 3 chess games in a row against the computer which is a record for me because I don't think I've ever actually won a game before :) At least I how the pieces work.

So I'm kind of running down my battery and hoping that some award- and cash-winning novel idea will come to me (and that I could write it). Nothing so far though.