Word: aires
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...take a taxi to my friend's briskly air-conditioned apartment, do some sightseeing, and fall asleep at 11 p.m. Wake up at 6 a.m. The travel gods are smiling on me: no jet lag, and the weather is gorgeous...
...breakfast again, ordering in Mandarin. Like the first waitress, this one glares and unhelpfully points to menus I can't read when I ask for help; she rolls her eyes when I ask for water, and she drops down my food with a tension that hangs in the air like the subtropical humidity here. I again give up on figuring out the menu, agree to something I don't understand, and end up with bowl of Ramen and pork chops. I wash it down with a painfully cloying iced tea. When I have a question in the bill, the employees...
...that has so far defined my time in China never felt so apt as the morning when, bouncing along in the back seat of an old grey van through the winding dirt roads of Inner Mongolia, I realized that here, among the wide open grasslands and majestic mountains with air blowing through the windows and every bump throwing me up against the roof, I felt at home...
...sheep be slaughtered (or, in my case, hid in the yurt while others watched), roasted the sheep, watched Mongolian wrestling and horse racing, and ridden horses and danced with traditional Mongolian singers and dancers. Away from the exciting but polluted bustle that is Beijing and into the refreshingly clean air of the yet unsullied minority province, the dirt under our fingernails came from dusty back roads rather than Olympic preparation construction...
...Those lines, deep into a lengthy speech, were too much for the traveling press to pass up. Bush hadn't exactly stepped off Air Force One wearing a gas mask, as the U.S. Olympics cyclists did earlier this week, but he had, according to the press narrative, slammed Beijing on the eve of his final trip here. Beijing's foreign ministry dutifully returned fire, denouncing Bush for "meddling in China's internal affairs...