Eric's Beijing Diary

Boy, I have really been miserable the past week. Got a ferocious cold after I got back from Jilin. Actually, I think the problem was that I forgot to tell them to get me a soft sleeper ticket for the return train. The hard sleeper isn't really that hard physically, it's just very, very narrow. So it is hard to get consistent sleep. I was pretty tired coming back, and I think I just got run down. Anyway, I didn' get a whole lot done last week, because I was so wiped out.

You know, I've been thinking about it...when I was a kid, it somehow never even registered with me that "cold" was a sickness. I guess it's because I had allergies, so I could never tell whether my congestion came from a cold or from my allergies. But the idea of being sick in bed with a cold was just unknown to me. For some reason, colds hit me a lot harder now. I don't always end up in bed, but it does happen (like last week), and the sense of weakness and achiness is just much more noticable than when I was young. Does that mean I'm getting old?

Yesterday, I left Beijing in the morning and got to Narita at about 2 pm. Narita is known the world over as the main Tokyo airport for international flights, but actually it is quite a distance from Tokyo. There are several ways to solve that problem, but the simplest is the Narita Express, and I like simple. The Narita Express is a very fast train. Take the Narita Express to Shinjuku, hold on to your ticket, and you can take any connecting train on the JR lines without buying an additional ticket. Tokyo is pretty easy that way. But be sure to ask for a map of the JR lines when you buy your ticket at Narita.