On Oct 19 I began the first trip in many years that wasn't primarily for the sake of my work. Tania asked me to go to Bogota to be with her in her thesis presentation. I was happy that my presence was important to her, so of course I said yes. After various schedule changes, we settled finally on Oct 19 to 28. That would give me a fair amount of time after her presentation, when she would be more relaxed.

While in Boston a couple of weeks before the trip, I had an idea: I would bring along some Chinese recipes and cook them. I picked recipes from my favorite cookbook, and asked Tania to check which ingredients were not available in Colombia, so I could carry them with me.

I looked for these ingredients in New York a few days before departure. I could not find star anise in the neighborhood, which ruled out soy sauce chicken. Produce would have to be obtained in Colombia, but I did bring some dried black mushrooms with me, hoping there would be no problem with customs. I also brought along a number of books that Tania wanted to read or that I hoped might interest her. In any case, I had no problem that evening, because both of my suitcases were left behind in Miami. I had to return to the airport the next day to pick them up, and then went through customs in the worst possible way. In fact, they saw something that worried them in my bags, but it was a metal object; I don't recall which. There was no problem.

I was staying with Tania in the two-room apartment inhabited also by her brother, her brother's girlfriend, and two of the programmers of her company. Quite a crowd--but it felt like home, albeit a not a materially comfortable one.

Tania's thesis was supposed to be finished before I arrived, but as I arrived she was working around the clock, not sleeping at all most days. I tried to make her work easier in whatever little ways I could, by getting groceries and supplies she needed, and otherwise staying out of her way. Once in a while one of us would go over to hug and hold the other for a minute, for emotional invigoration. When she considered the thesis finished, she found out that it was dozens of pages too long according to the rules. Just how much too long was uncertain, as each new attempt to format the text, based on learning more about the rules, gave a different amount. I provided suggestions for what she should cut. The thesis was ready the day before the presentation--which meant she could start on the slides for the presentation itself.

Custom required that she bring various food and drink to the presentation, and I went to get them, but I objected to buying a bottle of wine because that's a task I don't know how to do properly. (I decided many years ago not to try to keep track of wines; I also did not know what might be perceived as adequate or inadequate by the people this was intended for.) I said that I would choose based on total ignorance if she was sure she wanted me to, but that if she wanted good results, it would have to be done another way. I suggested she call for advice from people who knew enough to make intelligent suggestions. I am not sure how, but in the end someone bought something.

On the day of the presentation, we arranged that I would raise my hand if I thought she was speaking too quickly, as a signal to slow down. I did that a few times, but she was too excited to remember the arrangement, and thought I was commenting on the substance. But this did not really matter; her speech seemed to be entirely audible to everyone else, and the professors were extremely pleased with the presentation.

But they had other appointments and had to leave, and we had to vacate the room too. Thus, they did not have any of the food or the wine that Tania had been obligated to bring. She went off to sign various forms, I spoke with a couple of university officials about how to get them advice on migrating to free software, and her other relatives and friends sat on stone seats in a corridor and ate some of the food. (We finished off the rest later on.)

I had two whole days left to give a couple of speeches at universities. But then someone organized a meeting with people from Bogota city hall, for Friday, the day I was supposed to leave. Fortunately I could change my flight to Sunday.

The mayor, who a year earlier had been eager to move to free software, was out of town, but people from various city departments attended. They raised issues about obstacles that they faced in converting to free software--and from listening to them, I found that the biggest problem was the lack of real will to convert. One said that his department had made a tender recently for a new web site, and that only one bid offered to use free software, and it lost to a lower bid. (Tania told me that only large companies could meet the requirements; hers could not even try.)

I told them that the most essential thing they need, if they want to make progress towards freedom, is a firm policy of refusing to backslide. They need to adopt a clear requirement for use of free software. One of them told me that a city ordinance was being considered to change the software procurement, so I asked to see a copy. He promised to send me a copy that evening, but it didn't arrive. It doesn't look like the Bogota city government really has the will to migrate.

The two-day delay at least provided a good opportunity to do the Chinese cooking I had planned. I decided to make two dishes I had made before--beef soong (on a bed of fried bean thread) and a meat cake with sausage--and one new one, stir fried string beans with garlic. I couldn't find the vegetables I really wanted for the beef soong, and it turns out I had bought pork instead of beef, but the dish tasted good anyway. We were unable to get the pork for the meat cake chopped, so we had to settle for cutting it up into smaller pieces. Chinese sausage was not available, and I thought chorizo would go badly with the recipe, so we ended up using an "American sausage", more or less a frankfurter, which tasted ok in the end. The string beans were quite underdone, and I think the recipe must have been intended for much thinner beans, but even raw string beans would have been enjoyable to eat. Everyone there, including Tania and her mother (who cut the vegetables and meat), was pleased with the food. However, as I removed the fried bean thread from the hot oil, a tiny drop hit my finger and caused a burn that hurt all through the meal.

I'm writing this in New York on Dec 31. In a few hours I will be meeting Tania at the airport.

I went to Guadalajara, Mexico, in response to a request from my friend Richard Couture, who used to run the Coffeenet in San Francisco some years ago. Although people say that Guadalajara's weather is eternal springtime, for me it was too hot to be comfortable; my sleeping room did not cool down enough for me to sleep until around 3am or 4am. An electric fan made it possible for me to sleep, starting the second night.

I don't particularly like most Mexican food. Sure that I had gained weight eating in China, I decided to make Guadalajara an opportunity to lose a little. We mostly ate in, one or two meals a day. There was not much to see in Guadalajara that I was interested in; colonial-era buildings don't fascinate me, nor villages where people go to buy things. So I stayed in essentially the whole time except for my speech at the university, catching up on email, reading some of his collection of fantasy, and trying not to get bitten by mosquitoes.

To go to the bathroom, I had to pass through the rabbits' room. Richard has two angora rabbits. The male is named Duh, because the first thing it did when it arrived was run headfirst into a wall---twice. The female is named "beetch", effectively "bitch" with a Mexican accent. In front of people who might not appreciate the humor in this, they call her "playita", which means "little beach". Every month she has around nine babies, which Richard sells a few weeks later to a pet shop. I had the misfortune to visit during the short period in between two litters.

The current rabbit room was not always just for rabbits. When only the male, Duh, was living here, Richard used to sleep in that room, and Duh would often go to sleep with him. When Beetch arrived, she started a territorial fight with Duh over the bed. The way rabbits claim territory is by urinating on it. This was no fun, so he moved his bed and things into the back room, leaving the front room to the rabbits.

Downstairs in this concrete building is a very large room with a long table on its longest wall, and a balcony on the opposite side. This is where GNU/Linux activities take place: people come and use computers which are put on the long table. Meanwhile, the balcony serves as the office. The stairs have no banisters and are somewhat scary.

The activities are somewhat cramped at the moment, because the only entrance to the space is through a long narrow hallway between shelves filled with mechanical junk on both sides. Richard intends to knock a door through one of the back walls, but before he can do this, he has to solve some legal problems with the person he's buying the building from. It is likely to take years to settle this and turn the place into something like the Coffeenet. However, this has not prevented a GNU/Linux user group and activist group from getting started.

The idea was that I would travel to the conference in Puerto Vallarta by car with the people from Guadalajara that were attending, including Richard. However, he decided not to go there, and it turned out nobody had a car to use. This meant I had to go by bus. That's ok---I don't mind a few hours in a bus. Then someone conceived the idea that it would help me to be accompanied by someone from Guadalajara, rather than go by myself. It's true that accompanying a local person can help cope with some kinds of possible problems. Unfortunately, nobody explained this idea to me, or who had decided on it, or why, or what other the options there were. The person who was going to travel with me had lots of work to do, and proposed taking a bus that left at 11pm. The prospect of not getting to sleep until something like 5am was not appealing in the slightest. I objected vociferously, but I was told that earlier was impossible. What was the difficulty, I asked? Were there no earlier buses? I had to probe hard to discover that the sole obstacle, the sole reason to propose that ridiculous hour, was the idea I should travel with that other person.

I never found out who it was that thought giving me a traveling companion was worth keeping me up all night.

Problems like this happen frequently in cultures with a strong and rigid sense of hospitality. I've concluded that courtesy is an affliction that causes nothing but trouble for everyone that it touches.

For instance, over and over I have to cope with the confusion caused by people who ask, "When do you think we should leave?" when what they mean is, "It's time to leave, let's go now!" That question misrepresents the facts of the situation. The truth is that they know what's needed for successful execution of the joint activity, and they have to tell me what to do. By misrepresenting this as a situation where we could do whatever I prefer, they risk ruining everything.

The best thing that can happen, at that point, is that I will say, "Why ask me? I don't live here. You live here---why don't you tell me when we need to leave?" Then they explain to me what they really meant to say. That's if we're lucky.

The worst that can happen is that I take them at their word, and say, "I'd like to leave an hour from now." They wait an hour, and only afterward inform me that this made me 40 minutes late for my speech. Or they may try to inform me of the problem, but because they can't bear to tell me straight out that the choice they asked me to make was bad, they couch it in hints so indirect that I don't get the point. One may as well say nothing as say words designed not to be understood.

People trying to work together need to give each other information. To do so effectively, they must not misrepresent where the information is coming from and where it is going to. I wish nobody would ever be courteous (and therefore dishonest) to me again.

Since Puerto Vallarta is on the coast, and hot, and has nothing whatsoever that might interest me, I arranged to spend just two nights there---the minimum necessary to give a speech without a horrible rush. To get to Guatemala I passed through the airport of Mexico City, and remembered the two times I had been there with Tania. The first time, when she was sick and we didn't know where we were supposed to go. The second time, when we were parting for two months. I thought about how in two weeks I would see her again.

My first two days in Guatemala City included the speech which brought me there. Unfortunately, it turned out that speech was in a country club hotel about an hour out of town. That meant I would be unable to try to see any of the people who I met there three years ago. However, it turned out that those people mostly no longer live there anyway. It also meant that there would be no chance of going to interesting restaurants. It rained most of the time, and I spent most of the time in my room.

On Saturday the event was over and I went to stay in the home of one of the event's organizers. His home turned out to be a little hotel in Antigua Guatemala, the Yellow House. I stayed in a little room on the roof, much like a cabin, which we fixed up with an extra table and electric fan to make it a convenient place to work. None of the touristic options that fit the available time were appealing enough, so I mostly worked and read. I went to the market to buy gifts for Tania, and my hosts bargained on my behalf while I drifted away. It was a comfortable two days.

See pictures from the trip by Bill Xu

We decided to save money by getting me a flight from Shenzhen instead of Hong Kong; this also provided an opportunity for me to meet Leo, in whose Hong Kong apartment I had been staying for five days. He spends most of his time in Shenzhen, which is why his Hong Kong apartment was available. We had a lot of fun together, and had a wonderful lunch (see the meal log).

The plane from Shenzhen took me to Wuhan, which was just as oppressively hot as Hong Kong. There I met Hong Feng, the main free software activist in China. We only stayed overnight; in the morning we took a 6-hour train ride to Wudang Mountain, which is considered the center of Taoism. An important Taoist temple is there, which claims to have been founded by a prince who was the reincarnation of Laotse. (In ancient times people felt there was nothing wrong in inventing such relationships to give more importance to themselves.) Hong Feng told me that Taoism today mainly consists of holding ceremonies to dispel evil spirits, and divination; the temple offered lots of opportunities to pay for offerings to various gods in the court of the emperor of heaven. This is a far cry from the lofty but perhaps meaningless philosophical ideas of Laotse.

The road to the temple is fairly new; the first time Hong Feng went there, as a teenager in 1988, he had to hike for miles into the mountains. This remoteness protected the temples from being destroyed during the cultural revolution of the 70s.

We departed early in the morning to visit the temple, which was quite extensive and beautiful. While I was there, a large green mantid flew onto my bag and stayed there. I was delighted to have this friend and showed it to everyone I met.

After leaving the temple, we stopped at an old stone bridge, and my friend flew away. I was rather sad.

Then we drove quite a ways to a cable car lift which goes up to the highest peak, which has a temple on it too. The cable car ticket cost the equivalent of ten US dollars, which is a lot of money in China; the train ticket from Wuhan was cheaper. Well, I guess tourists can afford it. However, as we came close to the top, we saw men carrying heavy loads up the old footpath (which Hong Feng had climbed on his visit). After we exited the car, Hong Feng spoke with one of them, who said it took four hours to carry a load up.

Why do they do this, instead of using the cable car? It seems outrageous to make people work so hard, and so inefficiently, as to spend 4 hours doing what a machine can do in 15 minutes. Surely the cable car operators could send these loads up whenever no passengers are waiting to ascend. In Merida (Venezuela) there is a separate cargo cable system which parallels the passenger cable system; it was built first, and used to lift the material to build the passenger cable lift.

On Sep 12, in the afternoon, we took the train back to Wuhan. The next morning we flew to Shanghai, and I gave a speech that afternoon in a "software park" where some 200 software companies have their offices. I was not surprised to get a few "how do we make money from this" questions at the end, but I think my explanation about custom software vs proprietary software satisfied them.

Then we had dinner in a seafood restaurant whose buffet must have offered at least 100 different dishes. After I had become quite full trying small portions of some 30 dishes, and finishing it up with a green tea mousse cake and some kiwi fruit juice, and just as we were about to leave, I discovered the second counter of food, fully as large as the one from which I had obtained all but the dessert. So I sampled 6 of them. I hope that restaurant is still as good, whenever I get back to Shanghai.

On Sep 14 we visited the city of Suzhou. What is fascinating about Suzhou is that it has many "gardens", actually estates built centuries ago by rich officials. Some of the monuments on Tiger Hill are a thousand years old. In my first visit, I saw two of these gardens, and I have been eager to return ever since to see others.

Sadly, Hong Feng had pain in his foot which made it hurt to walk--a result of eating seafood the night before. He limped through the Lingering Garden, then after he discovered that the necessary medicine to relieve his problem was probably not available in Suzhou, he decided to skip Tiger Hill. But he told me he would make arrangements to return some day. The Lingering Garden was also graced by women playing traditional Chinese music, and a performance of traditional Chinese opera--not the harsh Beijing style that has become slightly known in the West.

That evening we stayed in the hotel to have dinner; one of his former students came over to help him and push his wheelchair. The meal in the hotel was marvelous also, but I noticed that all the bottled water sold by the hotel was made by Coca Cola company, so I explained the boycott (see killercoke.org) to the hotel's manager.

The next day it was on to Beijing. There I met up with Gong Min again, from the Co-Create Software group. I stayed there for two whole days, and with two speaking engagements each day, I had no time for sightseeing. I did have time for marvelous food, though. One of the appearances a sort of speech/interview together with Hong Feng at sina.com, a large web portal. I spoke about free software and education, while he described his Hackerdom Training Program where people learn to be good programmers by working with and on free software. sina.com wanted to webcast this, but it turned out that they normally use only proprietary formats. I insisted that they could make a video only if they do it in Ogg/Theora format. So they made arrangements to do that, and their CTO said they will start using it regularly from now on. That alone makes the event a considerable success.

The last event was a visit to a meeting of the Beijing GNU/Linux User Group. It turns out to consist mostly of foreign expatriates, and meets in a restaurant called "steak and eggs" which features the food that an "ordinary" restaurant in the US would have. When I saw this, I said, "I'll be glad to stay for a while and talk with you, but I intend to have dinner somewhere else." After half an hour of answering questions, some 25 of us went to a Chinese restaurant where we had peking duck, bean thread with cabbage, and various other delectable things.

The following morning, we visited a department store to look for shoes for me. I have a strong fear of slipping and falling, ever since I broke my elbow doing just that in Finland. I found some sneakers with velcro straps, which I hope will work out well. Then it was off to the airport. My flight was scheduled for the worst possible time, since we had to leave the city before 10am and it arrived in Shenzhen at almost 4pm--meaning no chance to have a nice lunch. And since today is a major holiday, the autumn moon festival, everyone is busy with family. Leo was going to meet me at the airport and have dinner, but his girlfriend demanded he go to their family instead. Someone from sina.com had a friend in Shenzhen, who came to meet me at the airport so that at least I would not have trouble getting to Hong Kong. After a bus, a taxi, the China border, a bus, the Hong Kong border, another bus, a subway, and another bus, I arrived at Leo's apartment with a bag of junk food that I expected to hold me for the night. When taking the bus that went to Hong Kong, it wasn't clear where to buy the ticket, because the tickets were sold after passing through the border control. People outside were selling tickets for about $90. Fortunately I knew they only cost $5.

However, when I finished writing the Hong Kong immigration card, in parallel with standing on line, I stuck the pen back in my pocket. It picked this moment to leak. I noticed, once in the apartment, that my arm was covered with ink smears. The bottom of the shirt pocket is permanently stained. I can't decide whether to consider it ruined.

Here are the meals I had in Hong Kong and China.

I've represented the four tones as yi yí yî yì.

Sep 6 dinner (Saikung)

• Lobster and noodles in cheese sauce
• Razor clams in black bean sauce
• Steamed garoupa with scallions
• Giant prawns with spicy salt

Sep 8 dinner (Yung Kee restaurant)

• Mini sea cucumbers fried in salt and pepper
• Roast goose
• Frog with gluten (also some black mushrooms)
• Double-boiled mushroom soup

Sep 9 lunch (Guangshifang Restaurant, Shenzhen)

• Kun-yum tea
• Round pea pods, cooked rather crisp, in a white sauce with dried onion.
• Wood ears (a variant), soft, in a sour and spicy sauce.
• Seafood rolls, with interesting rough-texture outside, but too much mayo inside.
• Fish balls in curry with coconut milk
• Sticky rice in a sort of yellow gravy, with mushrooms inside
• Turnip cakes were not great
• Beef brisket with turnip.
• Roast goose
• Little spare ribs on taro rectangles
• "Crystal rolls" dessert: egg custard, with soft crust of little tapioca-like balls
• Steamed dao bao fish (a flatfish, very fatty inside)

Sep 9 dinner (Wuhan)

• Mellon cookies: brown crispy on outside, like rice cake inside, a little sweet. Eaten with sweet condensed milk
• Lotus root
• Green vegetable (woju?)
• Mushroom
• Soup with long egg noodles that were too soft.

Sep 10 lunch (Wudang)

• Small ferns, peppers, and shredded pork
• Chopped pieces of chicken and big meaty local mushrooms
• Cabbage and bean curd
• Steamed fish that tasted too fishy.

Sep 10 dinner (Wudang)

• Baby bok choi and fáng xièn mushrooms
• Pork and local bamboo stalks
• Soup with pork balls, cabbage, and rice noodles

Sep 11 lunch (Wudang)

• Pork-filled dumplings with think skins
• Si-gua vegetable (seems like a kind of squash) with wood ears
• Chinese-fried potatoes, too spicy for me to eat
• Local type of cabbage with fried bean curd

Sep 11 dinner (Wudang)

• Fried noodles were ok.
• Lotus root was good.

Sep 12 lunch (Wudang)

• Cold beef slices in a spicy sauce with coriander
• Thin local mushrooms in a somewhat similar sauce
• Local bamboo again

Sep 13 dinner (Shanghai, buffet)

• Slightly cooked pea pods
• Slightly cooked celery
• Chicken-leg mushrooms
• Bâi-ling (hundred belles) mushrooms, taste almost like a mollusc
• Concubine mushrooms
• A piece of pork rib in pungent sauce
• Concubine chicken (boiled, with interesting sauce on it)
• Jellied beef (5-spice flavor)
• Small toast with chopped whitefish and bricks of tobiko with wasabi mayo
• Dish of lobster chunks with sweet sprinkles, in shredded cabbage
• Sliced abalone
• "North pole" mollusc
• Mussel in interesting sauce
• Lettuce, corn, shrimp and other seafood.
• Jellied lamb in brown sauce
• Japanese oshitashi
• Snail meat with cucumber pieces (a little spicy)
• Broiled squid
• Small whole fish with roe, in soy/oyster sauce
• Smoked salmon wrapped around asparagus
• Jellyfish salad with carrots and white cabbage
• Soy-marinated pine-tree mushrooms (tall and thin) with corn and peas
• Pieces of bamboo shoot
• Glass noodles with slivers of fish, in sour sauce
• King crab meat on mashed potato, with a piece of tomato and broccoli
• Mushroom soup
• Sweet white wood-ear with lily seed soup
• Black beans
• Pork tongue slices
• Green tea mousse cake
• Kiwi fruit smoothie
• Bacon-wrapped scallions
• Soy-sauce/pepper chichen
• Peculiar fried doufu (partly liquid inside) surrounded by flakes
• Scallop filled with cheese
• Tempura made from a small fish full of roe
• Sweet bean paste surrounded by vegetable jelly
• Melon

Sep 14 lunch (Suzhou, Garden Hotel near the Lingering Garden)

• Thin mushrooms with coriander (very good this time)
• Cashews covered in sesame seeds and sugar
• Cucumber pieces in a white sauce with garlic
• Giant pork meatballs (with a little crab and other things at the center) in broth with slivers of omelette and slivers of a white vegetable. Chinese people poke a chopstick thru the meatball to pick it up, just as Americans struggling to use chopsticks often do.
• Shrimp in a delicate oil-based sauce that comes from another dish made of small chunks of crabmeat and of crab eggs.
• Thick soup containing lake algae and small white lake fish, as well as small clouds of egg white
• Asparagus, celery, and lily bulbs
• Thick wantons stuffed with chopped vegetable and chopped egg, in a little broth

Sep 14 dinner (Shanghai)

• Shrimp balls covered with toast cubes.
• Fried seaweed
• Soup with some dried pork and little shreds of dòufu and dried seafood
• Bean jelly slices in three flavors.
• String beans with pork and garlic
• Gourd and boiled almonds
• Scallops and hundred-belles mushrooms
• Little dumplings filled with meat (and juice)
• Pork intestine and bok choy (I asked for it, thinking it was rib bellies)

Sep 15 dinner (Beijing)

• Sauteed vegetable with garlic (a kind of lettuce which is stalks and thin leaves).
• Sauteed wojù with peppers (another kind of lettuce, according to my friends, which is much thicker than western lettuce.
• Fried chicken wings
• Shrimp dumplings (not very good ones)
• Tall cylindrical pork, shrimp and crab meat dumplings (very good)
• Fried breaded chicken wings, a little spicy
• Chrysanthemum tea

Sep 16 lunch (Beijing, Cháo Tài Seafood Restaurant, Chaozhou style 55 Zhichun road Haidien district)

• Gòng cài with garlic and pepper
• Broiled eel (almost Japanese style)
• Sizzling beef steak in slightly peppery sauce, with onion
• 1000-year egg (best I've had)
• Pickled cabbage root
• Slices of jellied pork
• Soft-boiled almonds with celery and huái san and cucumber
• Scallop with breadcrumbs and glass noodles and scallion
• Fried dòufu covered with pork ball, and tiny pieces of mushroom
• Sea cucumber roll with pork and surimi
• Flaky rolls containing roast pork and sweet sauce
• Lotus-seed moon cake

Sep 16 dunner (Beijing, East Ocean Restaurant)

• Lóngjîng tea
• Cashews baked in a paste that is sweet and has spices (saffron?)
• Sliced goose neck, somewhat salted and spicy
• Half-sour sliced radish (daikon)
• Pork balls covered with glutinous rice
• Braised beef with beef broth full of shreds of something.
• Salt-preserved fish, but it wasn't salty, tasted more like eastern European smoked fish, except that it was juicier.
• Wood ears in sauce
• Radish balls
• Pork bone soup, with radish chunks to absorb the flavor (we put on plastic gloves to eat the meat off the bones, and were given straws to suck the marrow)
• Whole wûchang fish
• Snail meat with diced vegetables
• Catfish slices in flaky pastry with curry-ish flavor
• Little cakes of durian covered by crispy rice
• Cakes of crushed peanuts covered by rice cake.

Sep 17 lunch (Beijing)

• Cold, fried ji fish
• Sliced daikon with very strange feel, pickled in sweet dark vinegar
• Fluffy-breaded lamb meat with dipping spices
• Fresh egg rolls filled with diced vegetables
• Peking duck
• A bowl containing two kinds of thick soup
• that don't mix. One has egg drop, one has tiny pieces of spinach.
• Pork and Sìquan pickles noodle soup

Sep 17 dinner

• Lóngjîng tea
• Fried cashews, rather spicy
• Sweet and sour "squirrel" mandarin fish
• Sour cabbage with fên si
• Pork with fên pi (ribbons, like fen si)
• Corn kernels with pine nuts
• Peking duck
• Minced beef and egg white soup
• Sizzling rice with vegetables
• Big pork ribs (but I didn't get one)
• Shredded potato, stir fried.

I originally planned to stop in Hong Kong for two days between Cambodia and China. It would be a convenient stopping place, and I had met someone at the conference in Montreal who teaches in Hong Kong and wanted me to give a talk. From Hong Kong I would go to Guangzhou, nearby, to give the first of the talks in China. I also hoped that some of my friends from Boston would be there at the time.

However, every aspect of this fell apart during the summer. My friends’ visit to China started to late for them to be in Guangdong while I would be there. The professor in Hong Kong never answered my mail, leaving me in somewhat of a jam for where I’d stay while in Hong Kong. I had already bought the airline tickets to go there, and to fly home from there, so I couldn’t change the plans. Hong Feng, the organizer of the China visit, found some friends who arranged for me to give a speech in Hong Kong. They also had a friend who had an apartment there which I could stay in.

Meanwhile, the people in Guangzhou who wanted a speech disappeared completely. Which meant there was no sense in my going there at all. Having a place to stay rent-free in Hong Kong, I decided to stay there a few days longer. I would fly from Hong Kong to Wuhan.

Getting to Leo’s apartment was somewhat inconvenient because the key I was supposed to use had been lost. My host had to go to Leo’s office and pick up a spare key from there. While he walked to the office and back, I remained in a restaurant with my baggage, having dinner. Then we took the subway to a place near the apartment. It takes about 5 minutes from the subway to the apartment by minibus, and a minibus leaves every minute or two, but we were unsure about taking my large suitcase onto a minibus, so we took a cab.

The apartment was so small it was incredible. Its main room was as wide as a bed is long. The room’s other dimension was about three times the bed’s width. Aside from this, there was a small bathroom. The temperature inside was about 30 degrees and humid, even worse than outside; but I started the air conditioner and soon began to feel some relief. Despite the tininess of the apartment, it turned out to be perfectly comfortable as a place to stay and work.

On my first full day, I gave a speech at the Chinese University. We went to the campus a few hours early. I found the campus and surroundings quite beautiful, and decided to take some photos. My camera’s batteries were empty, but rather than get new batteries for it, we decided to use my host’s camera, which had better resolution anyway. After an hour of walking around the campus and finding the best places to photograph—including getting onto the roof of a neighboring building—I returned to his office, transferred the photos to my computer, and began looking through them to discard those that came out bad. As I looked at photo after photo, I started to realize that all of them were peculiarly grainy. What was wrong? We discovered that his camera had been set to compress the photos to an extra level. I was rather unhappy with this.

On the second full day, I visited Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and gave another speech. No photos there, because it was very rainy. We had dinner in Sai Kung, a little fishing town that you get to by minibus, where you go to the fish store and choose your fish or shellfish and they bring it to the restaurant for you.

On the third day, I decided to return to the Chinese University to take the photos again with my camera. I did not want that mistake to defeat me! However, that day was grayer and hazier. Many of these replacement photos did not look as good, even though they had better resolution.

The FOSSAP II meeting in Siem Reap, Cambodia, was organized by APDIP, a part of UNDP that covers the Asia/Pacific region. Many free software activists were invited, as well as representatives of various Asian governments.

One of the nice aspects of meeting in Siem Reap was that we could visit the Angkor temples and see Cambodian court dancing. However, I couldn't join the meeting's arranged tour because that was the day after the event, the day when I was leaving for Hong Kong. So I arranged to go to Siem Reap two days early. This gave me a chance to see more, including the temple of Banteay Srei, a ways to the north of Angkor, which has the most beautiful carvings of all. I put the photos in stallman.org/photos/cambodia.

Cambodian court dancing was revived largely by Cambodian exiles abroad, after most of the dancers were killed by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. I had seen this dancing just twice before, in Boston, back when First Night was aimed at adults as much as children. (It no longer has performances like this, so I no longer bother with it.) I was amazed by the beauty of the performance by the Angkor Dancers, and when it was done, I wanted to shout "Angkor, Angkor". Ever since then I have wished for a chance to see Cambodian dance again; I even tried to find the group so I could ask when and where they would perform again, but I never succeed. For FOSSAP II, the Cambodian government sponsors arranged performances for the meeting.

We also took a boat out onto the large lake, Tonle Sap, which is a short way south of Siem Reap. The edge of the lake slopes very gradually, so there is a large coastal area where the water advances and retreats seasonally. The people in that area live in boats. Our tourist boat went out to the lake alongside a path that kept getting narrower and lower until it was underwater--but people stood and walked on it nonetheless. It looked as if they were walking on water. When we got to the lake, it was somewhat of an anticlimax--except for the thunder in the distance from an approaching storm. Fortunately the storm did not reach us until we had arrived back in port.

Several people from Nepal were at the meeting. When I met them, I mentioned what I had heard about the arrests and censorship there. They told me that these reports were exaggerated, and minimized everything. The reports come on good authority--newspapers such as the Guardian, and direct from refugees. These people, who must have traveled with the king's permission, were telling me the story that the king wants the world to believe.

Also at the meeting was the second Chinese free software activist I've encountered, Min Gong from the Co-Create Software League. I arranged to meet him in Beijing later on.

One of the presentations I saw was about the Sahana project, which used and developed free software to organize aid to tsunami victims in Sri Lanka. They hope to adapt it to aid for other disasters in the future. Seeing this project inspired the new FSF award for using free software to serve other social purposes.

The climax of the event, for me, occurred when the representative of the government of a rather undemocratic Asian country defended the WTO. (The WTO requires copyright rules that forbid people from sharing.) He explained, condescendingly and at excessive length, that people who decide to play soccer must abide by its rules, arbitrary though they may be; then he compared the WTO's rules to the rules of soccer. He said, "These are the rules that the wealthy countries have set for access to their markets. We have to accept them."

I responded, "The WTO's rules were designed to be unjust. In every country, they benefit the the wealthy and hurt everyone else. They give us a world of sweatshops. No country should accept these rules." Half the people in the room then applauded. The other half probably support trickle-down economics.