Does St. Louis Have Buddha Nature?

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Mrs. C and I finally got to the Lantern Festival last night at the Missouri Botanical. It's made up of interesting sculpture by day and glowing giant lanterns on Chinese themes after dark. It's late (again) so just a couple of quick snaps. I got so much good stuff I can milk this subject for days.

We're Outta Here

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Guest photo by Mrs. C., taken in Kathmandu a year and a half ago. A young Buddhist monk walks past Boudnath Stupa in the sunset. You can see more of her Nepal pictures here.

We leave today on a 19 day trip, going through Chicago and then on to Delhi, a 14 hour flight. One night there and then Kathmandu Saturday. Tibet on Tuesday. I may post a few days ahead if I get some editing done on the plane - no problem with Internet service in India. With luck I'll post something from from Nepal, as long as there is a place to hook up my laptop. No uploads from Tibet - the altitude is too high to run a laptop without damaging the hard drive. The Chinese government blocks Blogger, anyway.

Team member ShadowyOne will cover St. Louis as much as possible while I'm away. Expect a big tub-o-photos from Asia starting about September 22. Hasta la vista, y'all.

Ni hao, y'all

Home again after two fascinating, exhausting weeks in China. It is a must experience if you have the means. My wife and I may have seen the shape of the future (and the air is worse than you could imagine).

Many thanks to ShadowyOne for keeping the blog up to date while I was away. I may ask her to do a few more days until I get some new local material. It was interesting to see my city through someone else's eyes.

Sincere thanks, too, to Shanghai CDPB's Song Jing, who acted as our tour guide for an evening and took us out to dinner at a typical local restaurant we would not have found on our own. This was one of the joys of the CDPB community.

I took a zillion pictures, of course. Some of the best are on my Flickr site, so have a look if you are interested. There will be a few more over the coming days as I get all the material organized. This pictures below are from a boat ride down the breathtaking Li River between Guilin and Yangshuo, in the southeast of the country. The drizzly day was magical.

My brain is still somewhere over the mid Pacific but all will be back to normal soon.