He's leaving home (bye-bye)

In a few hours I leave for the airport. I'm off to China to work on something I can't yet talk about, which is also connected to the project I was doing the last two times I went to China.

Last time I was out there, in Autumn of 2009, I spent several weeks in Xinjiang Province, where things like the Internet, text messaging and international calling were completely turned off by the government following the riots in June 2009 (and not turned back on until May 2010). [Xinjiang, in the West, is an area the size of Western Europe, population about 25 million.]

When I got back to the rest of China I still had to battle with the Great Firewall of China, which turns off access to things like Blogger and Twitter, and while I used my US phone a lot for things like Twitter and email, I discovered when I came home a phonebill for about $5000 had been incurred -- although given that the astonishingly heavy phone usage in China seemed, from the bill, to have continued for over a month after I left China, it was more likely that the phone had been hacked or cloned while I was out there, as even at T-Mobile's extortionate foreign rates, that seemed a bit much.

So this time I plan to do it the easy way.

Bye-bye blog. Bye-bye people reading this. Farewell denizens of Twitter and the folk of Facebook. I'll miss you all, in a very intimate and personal sort of a way.

I'll be back at the end of March.

I've handed the keys to the blog to the Webgoblin while I am gone.

In the meantime, you could check out Judge John Hodgman's podcast. Learn about the Geek A Week trading cards article on CNN. (And buy a signed round of my honey - and so much else- in their charity auction.)

You could read Hayley Campbell's glorious blog - here's an entry about Getting A Man In that is funny, well observed, beautifully written and toe-curlingly embarrassing.

(Oh, and if you're in Edinburgh, my wife is looking to rent a three or four bedroom house or flat in August. The address to email to is at the link.)

Here are some photos I took on previous visits to China. My first trip in 2007. On the Great Wall.

Yaks for sale in the market of Kashgar

An Ixat. I also got a great photo of an Enternit cafe. (And for a similar phenomenon in reverse, check out http://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/ as described in http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/fashion/sundaystyles/02tattoos.html)

My breakfast ticket at a small hotel...

Dates drying in the desert sun. The man who guarded them had been dropped off by his family a few days before. They would come and get him a few days later...

Riding with Khazaks in the mountains south of Urumqi.

Goodnight. Do not break everything while I'm away.

(The hardest bit of leaving is going to be maintaining the exercise I've been doing at home while I'm on the road. Wish me luck.)

Labels: A photo I like of the great wall, China, going away, photo, the great firewall of china

I See You Quiver With Antici....

On my last day in China I nipped up the wall, hastily blogged, and then went out shopping.

I really enjoyed the shopping expedition, despite exasperating my handlers (and even my driver) at my inability to haggle properly. I suspect I even irritated the gentleman I was meant to be haggling with. I don't have getting insulted by the ridiculous price being asked, criticising the seller and the quality of his merchandise, and then threatening to walk off in a huff down, not even half-way, and at the point where the wallet (it was for me. My old one had dissolved into frayed cardboard) was significantly cheaper than it would have been in the US, I just said Okay, and paid for it.

Cygnus and Heather (who were my handlers) and the driver (who was just sort of hanging around to help carry things because it was more interesting than waiting down in the car park)immediately told me off in no uncertain terms. I had let the side down. With another ten minutes of histrionics and finger-wagging (it was made very clear to me) I could have probably got at least another couple of dollars off the price of that wallet. After that I let Cygnus and the driver do the haggling (Heather had already said goodbye and gone off somewhere, probably in disgust at my haggling crapness). I picked out things I liked, and, in the end, paid for whatever had been haggled for. They did the in-between bits.

(Thanks to all the handlers and interpreters, to my driver, to Grace-the-Great-Wall-Guide, and all the people from Harper Collins US, UK and China.)

The nice things I got were gifts for the people from Harper Collins China. The fun stuff was gifts for other people and odd things for me, like a jade disk that, I have discovered, gives me something to do with my hands on long flights.

Then back to the Beijing hotel for a marathon stint of packing -- China is a gift-giving culture, and I had been given many things -- and a trip to the airport this morning. Got onto the plane, worked on the plane until my computer died, slept a little, then changed planes in Amsterdam, and flew to Budapest where I am now posting this on the astonishingly expensive local hotel internet.

When I got on line I learned that Montreal won the 2009 Worldcon bid -- http://www.anticipationsf.ca/ is the website, where we learn that:

Anticipation, the WorldCon will be held August 6-10 at Palais des
congrès de Montréal from August 6th - 10th, 2009.

Neil Gaiman - Guest of Honour

Elisabeth Vonarburg - Invitée d'honneur

Taral Wayne - Fan Guest of Honour

David Hartwell - Editor Guest of Honour

Tom Doherty - Publisher Guest of Honour

Julie Czerneda - Master of Ceremonies

Our new mailing address is:

C.P. 105, Succursale NDG Montréal, Québec Canada H4A 3P4

And before I read the email telling me I was a guest I had already read this, from the FAQ line,

Congratulations on officially becoming a Worldcon GOH! Looking forward to Montreal in 2009. How do you feel about it?

A bit nervous. Happy, too. I hope I can do it justice. Someone else wrote in to tell me that he thought I was a bit young to be a Worldcon Guest of Honour. I'll be 48 in 2009, and a couple of minutes with Wikipedia showed that Brian Aldiss, Roger Zelazny, Harlan Ellison, James Blish and Bob Silverberg were all some years younger than I am now when they were first Worldcon Guests of Honour (or, in the case of American conventions, Honor) (and there may be more -- after I found those five I stopped looking). And if anyone wishes to point out that Aldiss, Blish, Ellison, Silverberg and Zelazny were giants of the field while I'm just someone who writes stuff then they'll get no argument from me. (I'll have been earning a living by writing, and working in the SF and fantasy field for about 27 years by that point, for anyone who wondered.)

I'll be a Guest of Honour at the British Eastercon in 2008 (http://www.orbital2008.org/), and will, I am fairly certain at this point, be saying no to any other convention invitations in 2008 and 2009.

Labels: 2009 Montreal Worldcon, A photo I like of the great wall, In which it is discovered that I cannot haggle