Blogging update
Greetings from China! Minor post with little content. Still here for another couple of days. Conferencing is done so the next couple days is touristy stuff. So far I've seen the Great Wall, the Lama temple, Forbidden City, and the Temple of Heaven. Today is the museum of Chinese history. Oh yeah, and I found the Peking Man remains under a bush outside the hotel here. *yawn*

Most of the sights so far haven't been that old, with the temples and what not being mostly Ming-Qing Dynasties. The museum supposedly has a lot of the older paleontology fossils and older cultural stuff. Hopefully, I'll get a lot of photos of that stuff while there.

Beijing's not bad. Much cleaner and less noisy than Cairo, but more polluted. I'm not sure of the geography in detail but the city seems to be sitting in a basin with mountains to the west which looks like it makes temperature inversions likely and thus trapping all of the pollutants in, ergo, smog, and lots of it. It cleared out magnificently yesterday and today seems clear as well. Food. . . .eh. We stopped at a local placed on the way back from the Wall which was excellent, but we went to a banquet at the Great Hall of the People (very swank) but I didn't like much of that. Haven't had Peking duck yet, which is supposedly the local thing to eat when here.

A colleague flies out today to see the terracotta army, but I'm staying put. I think I am catching a cold, too. Dang it. Weather's been great, low 60s and sunny. I hope this is just thre dry weather and lack of sleep last night. . . . .

Will post more probably Sunday or Monday.