Our Minder

We arrived in Beijing at 5 a.m. after leaving LA at 1.30 a.m. It was a 12 hour flight spent mostly in a catatonic daze, especially after the rough take-off from LAX through a rainstorm. (LA is the new Seattle.)

Li Haonan greeted us. Haonan works for the Central Arts Performance agency, which is putting on the Chaoyang Festival. It dawned on me after a few foggy hours that his sole duty was to herd us around--just us, not the Kiwi Band from New Zealand, not the Don Johnson Big Band from Finland (the seven deadly Finns, as we've been calling them), and not the Blous (probably Blues) band from Ottawa. Just us. A huge responsibility because some of us wander off to look at junk food displays or gawk at torn flyers taped to lightposts. Like herding cats.

Haonan has worked at the Kennedy Center and will go on to an internship at the Carnegie. I don't know if he has any idea what the band sounds like or what an Old School punk band who no one knows of even in LA is doing in the thick of this extravaganza. But he's game.

He's game, but....after I figured out how to get connected through the network cable in our hotel room, he told me at lunch that I'd have to pay for my connection time. I hadn't mentioned it. How did he know.....?