China is still big. Three days after my last post, size continues to be an issue here.

There's just too much STUFF. It starts to make me crazy, when I think about it for too long. What to blog, what to photograph, what to eat, what to leave out ... too many moments, and too few minutes in which to have them, it would seem.

Do I tell you about waking up in the middle patch of a thirty-three hour train journey, only to discover that my entire, blustering belief system concerning China being 'ugly' and 'unpicturesque' was blown wide open by a rolling view of tiered rice paddies where whole sections were filled with melt-in-your-mouth butter-yellow flowers, topped off with the most sumptuous icing of gnarled trees covered in virgin-white blossoms I have ever witnessed?

Or do I talk about how on another train journey we were in a compartment with several Chinese grandparents, who ate endless sunflower seeds and hot noodles, and carefully unwrapped mandarins from clear cellophane packets bearing red double happiness symbols? Said mandarins were duly consumed, and their skins were saved and popped into jam jars to be steeped with boiling water and drunk as a tea. Their careful use and re-use of everyday items touched something within me. It reminded me of my own grandparents, who save every rubber band and every jar or bottle. Despite living in a society geared to the consume/discard cycle, something inside them cannot abide the amount of waste that that lifestyle entails. And so the jam jars are kept, and the margarine containers rinsed out. So far from home, our elderly train companions were doing the same. They each wore trendy, modern sneakers, and had upmarket clothes, but old habits gleaned from leaner and more frugal times stayed in tact.

Shall I tell you about making our way on a series of buses to Beijing's outlying computer district - not mentioned in any of the guidebooks - looking for a screen protector for a PDA? How it was a glittering mass of high-rise towers, not yet a Bangkok or a Singapore or a Hong Kong, but still something lurking, waiting to explode forth into full-blown Asian computer-philia? How there were women crouched on the pavement cooking processed-meat sausages on bunsen-burner flames, back-lit by massive neon billboards for Epson and Samsung and Dell?

So many moments, so many contradictions ...