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Keith's Blog Continued...

View the album here

Been so busy getting photos — with captions — and videos of our China trip onto the site that I have not yet had time to prepare my written commentary of our extraordinary trip. We’re in Hong Kong now where I will stay for about a week for business after my family heads back to Phoenix on the 18th.

I promise that my written commentary — and Part II of the Yangtze River Trip Video (even cooler than Part I) — will be posted very soon.

Thanks for your patience.

–Keith

Click here to view photos

…about not writing more dispatches or posting more photos recently.

Hint: If you want to write reliably, and to post photos and videos almost every day to your website, you should probably not — with your wife, two young sons, adult daughter and her boyfriend in tow (or am I the one in tow?) — try to visit five cities in eight days in Mainland China, and then squeeze in a three-day river cruise up the Yangtze before returning to Hong Kong. And you should definitely not lose your passport in the middle of the trip.

Anyway, boy have I got stories to tell! Stories about the great wall; about how imperial — and polluted — a city Beijing really is; about the six hours I stood in 16 different lines just to get out of the country as scheduled; about the sights, smells and sounds of a nation with 1.3B people. People who sell fried eel and candied insects on the street for God sakes!

And, Oh, you should see the photos and videos we have. And yes, I know, I’m also backed up in responding to many of your financial questions.

I promise — I absolutely promise — I’ll do everything humanly possible to get all these goodies to you tomorrow or the next day, or as soon as I possibly can if I’m not arrested or shot by either the government or my wife — and I promise to keep trying my very best.

Keep the faith. Stay patient. Thanks for being the most important part of The Global Adventure!

–Keith

Hangzhou, China:
Keynes Meets Darwin

Question: How do you control the economic activities of 1.3B people?

Answer: You don’t.

John Maynard Keynes would have loved the spirit of enlightened self-interest that drives the Chinese. But in their robust growth-at-all-costs economy (according to the World Bank, air and water pollution kill 750,000 Chinese each year), the free-market here is as much Darwinian as Keyesnian.

You see the intense competition among the Chinese everywhere. They are very polite to each other, but whether competing for a cab or a job, the competition is beyond fierce.

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