No Vacation Plans

Two things to avoid:  boring people and crowds.  The second thing is making it hard for me to decide what the Kaulins Family China will do for the week off that we will have at the end of August.  Crowds consisting of tourists make many places in China not worth visiting in Summer.  They also result in places that cater to them that I like to call tourist traps that must be avoided.

Now the obvious solution would be to go to places in China that are off the beaten path and thus avoided by the typical Chinese tourist who is a herd animal of the worst kind.  But my wife is Chinese and my son is a member in good standing of the computer-game-stay-at-home generation.  To please my son I would like to go to Beijing and the People's Liberation Army museum.  Tony is keen to do this.  However, my wife grimaces and moans when I mention the idea; and insists that if we do go to Beijing, we should pay a mandatory visit to the Great Wall which I think of as the Great Tourist Trap, especially the portion near Beijing that we would go to if we went to Beijing.

My wife hasn't any alternate suggestions for what we should do....

Wuxi Humidity. I Hate It.

I was curious to listen to Scott Adams's account of his visit with Donald Trump.  One detail, from his podcast where he talked of the visit, that resonated with me personally was his talking of the humidity of a Washington DC summer.  Adams wore a suit, that he had bought for the occaision, and by the time he arrived in the West Wing of the White House he was soaked, as he said, like he had been in a rain storm.  That is an experience I have all the time in Wuxi.  One time, walking into a shop, soaked with sweat from a long evening walk, I was asked by the proprietors if it had been raining outside.

The genius of the American founding fathers in placing the national capital at a location with such summer humidity was that it prevented the legislators, for at least three months of the year, from doing more damage to the country.  But thanks, or no thanks, to air-conditioning, you can now carry on and think to live and try to do things in a place like Washington DC or Wuxi, China which have high humidity in summer.

You think to, but really you can't.  The humidity is killer.  The thought of doing anything, going anywhere in Wuxi in summer is disheartening.  All there is to do is find a cool place, read a book and drink a nice cold beverage.  Recently, I had a few days off where the rest of the K Family China also had no commitments.  I discovered that I could not think of anything to do that didn't involve sweating or going to an air-conditioned shopping mall.