Capers With Carroll

I want to wish a very Happy New Year (and a warm place to sit by a window and look out at the beautiful snow) to all of my shivering friends in China. I have been reading the emails and news reports. Yuting tells me it has been over ten years since they last had snow in Chongqing. I’ve also been watching video reports on the hundreds of thousands (400,000 to 600,000?) people camped out at the Guangzhou Railway Station in Guangdong province, waiting for the trains to start running so they can get back to their families for New Years. (Oooops, when I first wrote this, I was confusing Guangzhou [where I have not been] with Guiyang [where I did go], so I'm removing some of my original post. Now, however, I am particularly concerned about my school-teacher friend Suyun, who would have needed to pass through Guangzhou to get home for the holiday.) It is hard to imagine half a million people waiting in line for trains, camped out in weather that turned suddenly cold. Today’s reports say the trains have finally begun to move. I hope everyone gets home quickly, and that the holidays with family make it all worth while.

Ever since I began this blog in 2004, I have hoped to find a way it could be viewed from inside China. With many thanks to Middle Son, I believe my Chinese friends can now visit here as often as they like. This certainly makes visiting easier than having to ride 20 hours on a hard seat train, or waiting several days in the cold outside a train station! So I welcome my Chinese friends, and wish you all 新年快乐. Please leave a message, so I know who stopped by to visit.

(P.S., This post receives more traffic than any other post I have written. It draws some all year long, but heavy traffic during December, January, and February. It comes especially from Singapore, UK, Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia, UAE, and the European continent. After this 2011 firestorm, I wrote about it here.)