Well, 6 of the 11 who had expressed interest showed up for yesterday’s lunch, including Jeremy , Brendan, Emile, Brian, Adam and myself (of course), plus my friend Ben. It was fascinating, discovering the faces and the voices behind the electronic ink, and the Peking duck was fantastic (not me, the food). Thanks to everybody who showed up, and Adam should be posting the group picture once he gets back on his feet.

As for the six no-shows, all I can say is Be careful. Beijing is a small city, and we will find you.

Even though online polls are not an exact science (what an understatement), I hope you can get over to Whizbang’s Weblog Awards and cast a vote for me in the Best Foreign Blog category. Up against such big players as Tim Blair and Gweilo Diaires I’m obviouisly not going to win, but what the heck….

Inspired by Whizbang, Phil of Flying Chair notoriety is holding the first-ever Asia Weblog Awards. If you have nothing better to do, you can vote for me in the Best Singapore Blog and Best Essayist categories. Thanks.

Rushed post: Reporters without Borders (RSF) is taking a much more pro-active stance against the Western firms behind the Great Firewall of China. Especially Cisco.

The RSF sent letters to the CEOs of Cisco, Microsoft, Intel, Thomson, Nortel, HP, Logitech, Oracle, NEC, Samsung, Sun, IBM, Yahoo!, and Alcatel. The letters expressed the fact that the government of China has continued to crack down on Internet users it considers to be political dissidents, and that these companies have aided the Chinese Communist Party in that endeavor. Specifically, the group mentioned that Cisco Systems supplies the government with special online spying systems, and Yahoo!, in 2002, agreed to assist in the filtering and censoring of Internet content via its search and portal services in exchange for more access to Chinese markets

It’s great that they are doing this, though how much difference it makes remains to be seen.

I tried to post all day but apparently Hosting Matters was down much of the day.

I don’t have much time now, but I just want to tell the world that this has been the most beautiful trip. Beijing looks happier, cleaner, nicer and more humane. Could it just be me and my own mood, or can the city really have changed so much in seven moinths?

In visiting old friends, I was offered two jobs, one in Beijing and one Shanghai. Unfortunately, my loyalties lie elsewhere, namely in Phoenix. But I would be lying if I didn’t say I was damned tempted. (And still am.)

Tomorrow, the bloggers of Greater Beijing congregate in my hotel lobby and we all head off to eat (what else?) Peking duck. Some of us see the world very differently, so let’s hope we all get along. It’s going to be strange, since I have such preconceived notions of what these guys (and at least one girl, I think) are like. It will be fascinating to see what they are really like.

Okay, I’ll try to post more tomorrow, if my site’s host remains stable. It’s just so nice here. Beijing looks so beautiful….

UPDATE: Looking back a day later at this post, I see that it reeks of sentimentality. Sincerest apologies. Maybe I should delete it.

I am so proud of this.

I think it gets kind of tiresome to always refer to anything and everything about North Korea as “surreal”….but what the heck? This is an utterly surreal (and very funny, in a surreal sort of way) article about taking your vacation in the world’s most surreal place:

In the surreal world of North Korean tourism, you can feast on local delicacies served by glamorous lady comrades, watch an acrobatics show infused with Stalinist humor and climb a storied mountain covered with plaques and monuments celebrating the totalitarian Kim clan.

But be back indoors by the midnight curfew — or face fines, questioning by authorities or, well, worse.

This is Mount Kumgang, the fortified tourist compound where the Hermit Kingdom meets the Magic Kingdom, right down to Disneyesque guys in fuzzy bear suits greeting visitors. A window into hermetically sealed North Korea since foreign visitors were granted limited access five years ago, it lies an hour’s drive north of the minefields and missile batteries lining the most heavily militarized border in the world.

Actually, nothing in this article is especially new. We all know by now that life in North Korea is one long David Lynch movie, but I’m still amazed every time I read about it. I mean, it can’t be real, can it? It’s all a joke, Kim Jong Il is one day going to smile and tell us it was a big hoax to see how gullible we dumb Westerners can really be — right? There’s no other explanation for such looniness:

The son [Kim Jong Il] is said to have entered this world on a mountaintop, his birth heralded by lightning bolts and a double rainbow. Recently named “Guardian of Our Planet” by the North Koreans, Kim Jong Il rules through a cult of personality that is alive and well in Mount Kumgang.

No act of the Kims is too small to be noted on these ancient rocks, now coated with more than 4,000 monuments, etchings and other commemorative inscriptions to the clan. A spot where Kim Il Sung is said to have especially appreciated the view is dutifully marked with a six-foot-tall stone tablet. Elsewhere a young guard stood by an etching commemorating the exact location where Kim Jong Sook, mother of the younger Kim, once rested her weary bones.

Check out the article. It’s long and rich with additional evidence that whatever else you can say about North Korea, there is certainly no other place on earth even remotely like it.

I swore last winter that if I ever did return to Beijing, it would never, ever be in the winter.

So guess where I’m going tonight?

I hear it is absolutely brutally cold at the moment. Before I left Beijing, I gave away all my heavy clothing — scarves, sweaters, coats, gloves — to poor people there, knowing I would never need them again. After all, I was going to Singapore, and I live in Phoenix, and the thought of returning in December would have been absurd. Now I wish I had kept at least a couple of those things.

Blogging should dwindle to a trickle over the next 24 hours, but I suspect I’ll be back in true form by Friday, after Beijing has once more inspired, delighted, terrified, mystified and utterly overwhelmed me. So hang on.

Another former friend and colleague of my dear late friend Roy has commented.

Along with the comments, I’ve received four separate emails over the past year from people who knew him, mainly college friends from Princeton. It’s so wonderful, how we can keep his memory alive….

And would it be her dream come true?

In a provocative post, The Almost Daily Grind takes on The Big Man Himself, King-for-Life “Senior Minister” Lee Kuan Yew, and in so doing manages to make a total laughing stock of the once mighty city-state.

I was told when I started blogging about Singapore that I could pretty much say what I wanted — as long as I didn’t criticize LKY. Popagandhi seems to think she is above the law.

She starts by citing today’s newspaper headline, “Lee tells forum he didn’t realise importance of those who think outside the box when he was building Singapore,” and a quote from Lee, “I didn’t know this when I started, I know this now – you need both.”

Hurrah! Now, in order to allow us to “think outside the box”, they will tell us where the perimeters of the box are and where and what exactly to think when we’re outside it. I daresay this will be achieved through “creativity workshops” our schools will send us to (funded by the Teach Our Children To Think Holdings, part of Singapore Inc., also a Government Linked Company, but don’t tell anybody that because they’re really a private firm).

Also, doesn’t “when he was building Singapore” make it all sound like a game of Lego? I can’t say that is too far from the truth, even though I desperately wish I could.

(sidenote: “He challenged his audience to find another South-east Asian country where visitors could fly in, be out of the airport in 10 minutes, arrive in the city in another 15 minutes, attend a conference and fly out the same evening.” – the marvels of being small, I guess, and that’s about it.)

Wow, can she write or what?

In a few slicing syllables she manages to capture the very essence of Singapore, the do-as-your-government-tells-you-to-do mentality, the inability of Lee & Co. to keep its fingers out of absolutely everything, the way it is scraping rather pathetically to instill an “entrepreneurial spirit” after brainwashing its citizens for nearly half a century that stupid is better.

(Popagandhi, I am presuming if you get away with this I can, too. I’m not going to get in any trouble, will I?)

Thanks for giving me my only laugh in a long hard day. (Once she takes over for Conrad, will we ever want him to come back?) (I misunderstood; the winner was Hemlock.)

Food for thought:

Visiting German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said in Beijing on Monday his country backed Beijing’s ”one-China” policy.

”Germany has experience of what it means when a country is separated,” Schroeder said.

Interesting.

If he had been told back in the 1970s that the East Germans wanted West Germany to join them as a single country with the East German government still in power would he have leapt at the opportunity? Somehow I suspect he might have thought that separation was indeed better — much better — than sleeping with the devil.