Results tagged “Travel” from Bill's Words

Today, we left China. We have been there for almost three weeks, seeing the country in a way which we felt was safe, namely on a Viking cruise. I mean, c’mon: would you take your 90-year-old grandmother on a tour if it wasn’t safe for her to do? Neither would Viking. And so we felt safe in going, too.

And, indeed, it felt and was safe. We cruised north along the coast of China from Hong Kong to Shanghai, and then took an overland extension from there inland to Xi’an and then to Beijing. We have now left China and are in the Incheon International Airport near Seoul, South Korea.

Strangely, even though at no time did I ever feel unsafe or under threat, I am relieved to have left China. I didn’t expect any sense of relief in any way, because I didn’t think there was ever any kind of tension, worry, or concern the entire time. So what I feel now must be the result of the relief of some kind of subconscious tension which I never noticed. It probably came on gradually, but its exit was sudden, and surprisingly so.

Over the next few weeks, I will share our experiences. However, instead of sharing my experiences chronologically, I’ll try to divide them into categories, e.g., food, people, transportation, etc. Whether I succeed or not, only time will tell, because I haven’t written word one yet!

But I do hope you’ll come back and share our story with us and, I hope, decide that you, too, could visit the amazing country that China is.

Charles Kenny in Bloomberg Businessweek:

But what makes the experience of air travel truly abominable is the government agency ostensibly designed to ease anxieties about getting on planes: the Transportation Security Administration. Far from making travel safer, the U.S.’s approach to airport security is putting the lives of even more people at risk.

Where have I heard that before? Oh… right. Here. As in, here on this blog::

I’d have to venture a guess that even if we let people bring anything onboard an airplane, air travel would still be safer than the drive from home to the airport. 43,443 people were killed in 2005 while driving their cars. That’s over 200 Boeing 737’s full of people.

Six years ago.