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Last night, Myf—who isn't Jewish and personally had no intention of going to synagogue a third time in one month—asked me what time I wanted to wake up for services. Being fairly sure that the last thing I'd read or been told was that services were going to start at 9:30 and knowing Jews in general and Kehillat Beijing in specific well enough to know that this actually meant sometime around ten past ten, I told him I'd try to wake up "before 10:00". I even set my "hurry up, you'll be late" alarm for 10:00.

Myf then set his alarm for something ridiculous like 8:00 which led to my starting off a new year where I had already made the resolution to "be less bitchy" with the two of us slinging insults at each other. Cause y'know it was clearly my fault that he set his alarm way earlier than necessary and the beep beep beep beep beep noise which I was doing a reasonably good job of ignoring was making it hard for him to keep sleeping. 

It was just like practically every morning the last month of us touring together in 2015 when we had reached the point of communicating entirely by grunts, insults, and not actually very funny anecdotes that made no sense to anyone else.

In any case, I got to the synagogue at 9:20, while whatever organization that had booked the social hall for some kind of breakfast thing hadn't even been completely packed away yet.

Services were services. The Chinese people walking past or fishing in the canal where we did Tashlikh were—no surprise—completely confused by us. Afterwards, some twenty or thirty of us walked to a nearby Italian restaurant for bruschetta, pizza, avocado salad, and real tiramisu. I'm pretty sure that the slightly less than one pound which the big postal scales in Shijiazhuang said I lost in my week on the road have all been gained back ready for me to lose them again.

I went to the nearby offices of The Future Affairs Administration [未来事务管理局]. They organize writing workshops on the Clarion model, publish Chinese sf, publish foreign sf in Chinese, and are one of the big name organizations doing stuff with regards to getting Chinese sf translated into foreign languages. In general, it was a really good meeting with the only real hiccup being my inability to show them any of the works I've done for any of the known Chinese sf organizations since, despite occasionally doing paid translation for a couple of different groups over the past four years, none of the stuff I'd translated had—to the best of my knowledge—ever been published.

As I was getting ready to go, they grabbed some swag to give me along with some examples of some of the cool foreign language stuff they've already done including a copy of the August 17, 2016 edition of the Non-Existent Daily News.

And I recognized the front page story.

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I wasn't entirely 100% sure at first that it was my translation. It didn't have my name anywhere and it was so many years ago that I couldn't immediately be completely sure. However, the article covering all of page 6 and most of page 7 actually listed me as the translator and, later, going back and carefully reading the front page article, I found a number of idiosyncrasies that I recognize from my writing.

Safe to say then that I'll probably be getting work from them in the future. Work which (unlike the stuff that I'm currently avoiding by updating this journal) will actually be interesting.

All of today's biking was done on share bikes. I've toyed with the idea of trying to do a Share Bike Tour but, I can now say, it'll have to be somewhere like Hainan. The maintenance (or lack thereof) on Beijing sharebikes is appalling.