Pleasure of Thinking by Wang Xiaobo

Author:Wang Xiaobo [Xiaobo, Wang]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000 Fiction / General
Publisher: Astra Publishing House
Published: 2023-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

TALES FROM ABROAD: TRAVEL

WHEN WE (MY WIFE AND I) were studying in America, we took a trip to Europe one year. This required ordering round-trip tickets between America and Europe, as well as European train tickets. This process sounds complicated but in reality, it was a breeze. We went to our school’s travel agency and expressed our needs. A young lady picked up the telephone and asked us, “You wanted the cheapest tickets, right?” Then, after a few phone calls, everything was arranged. We departed on Kuwait Airways and returned on America’s People Express. In Europe, we used Eurail passes. All we had to do was to arrive at certain travel agencies in Europe and America to pick up our tickets and we could travel to over a dozen countries for a month. And this was the most complicated way of arranging travels. Had we had a credit card, we wouldn’t even have had to go to the school’s travel agency. We could have just made a few phone calls from home and it would have been done. This was six or seven years ago, but I assume it is still the same now.

Recently, my wife went to Africa to attend an international conference—as for what conference or what country specifically, I won’t mention it here. The topic of the conference was very important, the attendees were all high-level scholars and activists. From this perspective, the conference was very high quality, however its organization not so much. For my wife, it was difficult to even get to there. This was because the round-trip plane tickets were all arranged by the conference organizers. They sent us a fax detailing the departure time, port of transfer, etc., but did not reveal on which airline. When she called the conference organizers, no one answered. As a result, she had to go to every airline in Beijing to ask if there was such a route. Of course, the most probable were the African airlines, but nothing came of it. She tried to call and fax the conference organizers again, but still no one answered. Given such a situation, the fact that she was able to appear at the conference at all was pure serendipity.

After returning from Africa, she explained to me what the phone situation there was like: there were telephones in some places—for example, where their conference was held—the university had one phone at their gatehouse. Suppose someone wanted to call a representative, theoretically someone was supposed to run out of the gatehouse, go to the dormitory, look for the representative, and tell her to pick up the phone. The whole process should have taken an hour, and for the whole time, the caller would have had to stay on the line. Suppose it was an international call, the phone bill would have been astronomical. In reality, there was no one at the gatehouse taking calls, so such a process would not even have occurred. Furthermore, faxes sent out of Africa show up like ants forming a pattern in the sky, difficult to decipher.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.