Eric's Beijing Diary

When I got home late Tuesday evening and tried to turn on my cell phone, it kept saying, "Insert SIM." Couldn't figure out what that might be. It finally dawned on me that I had put my cell phone in my large backpack before going to the airport. My cell phone doesn't work in the States, of course, but I thought perhaps I could use the watch and calendar portions of it to sorta keep on track. But it burned up so much juice looking for a connection, that it just wasn't worth it.

The Portland airport has these huge X-ray machines for checked baggage that I have never seen before. When you check your luggage, instead of putting it on the belt behind the counter, they tell you to carry it across the hall to these gigantic machines, and they take it from there.

At first I thought those machines had fried my SIM card, because the phone didn't seem to recognize it. But I was sitting in the coffee bar talking with Peter about this problem. He took my SIM card and put it into his phone. Worked perfectly. That tells me that it's the phone that is the problem.