Eric's Beijing Diary

Arrived in Tokyo this afternoon. I was going to come the end of last week, but the sisters in Dawanglu had invited me to a music festival at their small community church, so I decided to wait until this morning. The flight from Beijing to Tokyo is always nice, because it begins in the morning, so you have blue sky and sunshine all the way. I got off the plane at Narita with 10,000 yen in my pocket, and 15 minutes later, half of it was gone. Thirty-one hundred for a ticket to Shinjuku on the Narita Express. Coffee and a sandwich at Starbucks ate another thousand. One fifty for the International Herald Tribune, a hundred for a phone call...man! Money really slides through your fingers fast in this country.

I watched part of Marie-Antoinette on the plane from Beijing. Hard to take it seriously, though. That is a very, very American movie. It's supposed to be about the young Marie-Antoinette who is from Austria, and married off the French to improve relationships. But this Marie-Antoinette is not the least bit Austrian. She is American to the core. I don't know if most Americans watching this movie would even notice it, because Americans tend to be pretty ethnocentric, so this movie will probably make a lot of money even though it gives a highly caricatured picture of history. Nevertheless, it would sure be nice to see a movie once in awhile that made at least a casual attempt to depict history the way it actually happened.