Alone with everybody.

It's the name of a Richard Ashcroft album and a poem by Charles Bukowski, but it's also what I feel like in China. Which is not a bad thing, it just is what it is.

Instead of talking, reading or understanding what I hear around me, I observe. It's sort of beautiful, really. Isolating in one sense, expansive in the other. It just depends how closely I'm willing to pay attention to what I see and sense and intuit. At least half of the time I feel like the village idiot; laughter and nuance and niceties and deep thoughts and inane commentary all sounding the same.

In all of this blissful ignorance, I feel remarkably calm and grounded, able to function on my own terms without the self-consciousness that comes along with familiar surroundings and an (unjustly) assumed knowledge of what makes other people tick.

(Although I must admit that my assumptive nature has not left for vacation entirely-- I was pretty sure of what was going on when a woman looked at me, turned to her friend, then turned back at me, pointing, with her fingers forming big circles around her eyes. God bless the subtlety.)

With all this observing comes photo-taking, so here you go:

From the National Museum in Beijing.

I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why there are night lights displayed at a museum. But, here you go. Night lights displayed at a museum.

Kitsch, anyone? Irony? Are we trying to be avant-guard? I'm afraid the answer to all of the above is "No, thank you. We'll take our night lights straight-up, please."

Beijing airport. More bad socks.

I'd give these a solid B+ in the "working sock" category for their aggressive constriction of the ankles. Well done.

Stairwell, Nanjing.

The first time I walked up one of these staircases- dark, dusty, empty- I didn't know what to expect on the other side of the door. And as I sit here, I'm still not sure how to describe the kids' homes.

Super clean. Really, really small. Modest. Austere. Precise. Well-loved. Bright. Nothing wasted.

Suffice it to say, I'm humbled.

From our final interview in Nanjing:
The bed/A door.

Earlier in the day I sat down on a kid's bed expecting a mattress, but landed on a very hard surface. Although that bed was covered in a blanket of some sort, I assume it looked a lot like this underneath; a door laid horizontally across a twin bed frame.

Off to work now.

And thanks for all the emails and comments. I'm so honored y'all are reading. XO