Back in the US

After a missed flight and two delayed flights, Qian and I finally made it back to Kansas City last night 49 hours after our first flight in Xi'an. It was a huge mess. China Eastern airlines has very cheap fares, but I'm not sure I can recommend flying them to anyone.

I don't want to focus too much on the air travel though. We had a great three week trip in Xi'an.

We spent most of our time catching up with Qian's family and old friends. I felt over and over again that things in Xi'an were very 幸福 (xìng fú). 幸福 roughly translates to happy or blessed, but is even deeper than the English word happy (in my understanding of the word). Truly, it was special being back in Xi'an.

This is the first post I've done in a month. Blogspot is 100% blocked in China right now. I didn't set up a VPN before I went. I tried using proxy servers, but Blogspot is locked down even harder than sites like Twitter and Youtube.

Not being able to surf the internet freely was pretty damn annoying but at the same time it did keep me from using the internet as much as I might've otherwise. That is probably a good thing.

One of the only disappointments from the trip is that I never got my film SLR camera to work. It probably would've been a good idea for me to test that camera out before I went (sigh). I did take some photos with my digital camera, but not as many or of the quality that I was hoping for. Oh well.

I took several notes on things I found of interest while I was in Xi'an and have a few ideas swirling around my jet-lagged mind for posts. I'll try to get a few posts up here in the coming days.