My one and only very fabulous son, Anthony, is in China this summer, taking seven weeks of intensive language classes. His e-mails home are both interesting and informative... he's a great kid off on a grand adventure.
But. This morning I awoke to news reports of bombs on buses - which is how he gets home from school. The fact that they were in Kunming (near Tibet and Viet Nam) and Anthony is about 1,300 miles away doesn't ease my mind very much. Becoming a mother transformed me into an Olympic-class worry wart.
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Happily, Anthony has now checked in. We spent an hour chatting on Skype, which is one of the coolest things ever. There is no news reporting in Beijing about the bus bombings, and links to news reports in the U.S. and U.K. media are blocked. No surprise, the Chinese government continues to exercise paranoia. Note to Dubya: a government that doesn't trust the People can not be trusted by the People, dude.
This past weekend Anthony and his classmates were supposed to camp out at the Great Wall. They were allowed to visit,
but the camping was canceled due to concerns about protests. Now I can sorta understand the concern - a group of highly intelligent and well educated teenagers just might express their opinions - but you gotta know that the only thing they're going to agree on is that everybody else is wrong. Regardless, he sent a picture showing where they climbed - er, actually he raced somebody up to the top. It took an hour.If you look carefully, there's a building just below the ridgeline by the right-most peak. It looks reddish. That's where they went, Anthony said he took pictures. Hope the camera survives the trip, if he's racing around with it strapped to his back.
See? Something else for me to worry about...
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