This is Ping Gong, one of my hosts and my fellow traveler. At breakfast this morning, he explained to me how he became an audiophile. "It was the Cultural Revolution," he said. "We weren't allowed to study, so we played music and talked. I had a big Russian turntable—mono! And one speaker, of course.
Somehow the gods of travel, who usually enjoy watching me suffer, had one of their rare bouts of whimsey and decided to ruin future journeys by upgrading me to first class.
If you were to do a Google image search on my work at Stereophile, you'd see that, basically, my days are simply filled with reading, writing, coordinating, and planning. No two consecutive days, however, are the same.
I'm leaving for China in about 10 minutes, so blogging will be even more erratic than usual—I foolishly almost said "normal," but it has never been that.