East Meets East (Liz is in India
Aaron is in China)

Liz, As you know, I went to Tibet earlier last month during national holidays.  The train ride to there and and back was brilliant, as were all the monasteries we visited.  Some of the more frustrating moments however came from our tour guide, an unfunny, unprepared fake who insisted on speaking to me exclusively in Spanish despite the fact that he did not actually speak Spanish.  We lovingly, and then not so lovingly, called him by two of his self appointed names: Jimmy-Miguel.  By we I mean myself and students from the university across town, Fudan University, some of whom are shown in the clip.  The following moment is brought to you by Jimmy-Miguel as we find ourselves - as Paulina so desperately says without any consolation - stranded atop the Himalayas surrounded by a throng of Chinese tourists.  About an hour earlier our bus had overheated and we hitchhiked to the top of the mountain.  We did eventually hitchhike our way back down, but not without several of us suffering from severe altitude sickness and one particularly weak soul gaining an oxygen dependency (which, to my knowledge, still has not gone away).  Like for most figures you come to hate in life, our disdain for Jimmy-Miguel did not come from this botched excursion or any single screw-up, but from a series of repeat, boneheaded lies and offenses.  To reference our former blog and DFW, a Chinese tour is without a doubt a supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again. - Aaron