After a refreshing night’s sleep, we rose early in the morning to do a little more touristing before our afternoon flight back to sunny and ignominious Newark. Our goal for the day was to hit up the world famous pandaquarium, home of pandas and other such fantastical aquatical beasts. So we bought our tickets, found the map that came with them to be thoroughly useless while still being visually impressive, and headed off to see the panda, exotic and delicious creature that it is.

Okay, everybody knows the pandae are all extra endangered and rare and that we all need to feel exceptionally guilty about not doing enough to find homes for them all and recycling and blah, blah, blah, but what a lot of people (including myself until just this very second), don’t know is that the panda is in fact amongst the animals most spectacularly ill-suited for continued existence (being narrowly edged out by the play-in-trafficasuarus and the now extinct delicious-no-leg-gazelle). For instance, there are about 1,000 different kinds of bamboo native to China, and of those 1,000 varieties, pandas eat precisely three. Honestly, if there’s one thing no one can stand, it’s a choosy panda. Remember that kid you knew in first grade who would only eat Spaghettios, fruit roll ups, and bologna with the edges peeled off? And how he was all like, extra anemic and broke his arm more often that Little Timmy did in Oregon Trail? And how years later when you heard from a friend of a friend of a friend that he died from starvation while in a functioning Arby’s, you didn’t feel all that bad about it? That kid was a panda, in spirit, if no by unhappy accident of birth, and ought to be mocked accordingly. But wait, there’s more! Pandae also usually just have one or two cubs (or as the Indians call them, maize) at a time, and when they have two, the standard panda practice is to sit on one of them until it attains the shape of a beer coaster and the consistency of a melted Snickers bar, and thus is no more. So, in short, pandas really aren’t all that brilliant, and they smoke way too much and swear whenever there’s kids around, and I for one wouldn’t mind too terribly much if they’d all just shuffle off this mortal coil in the form of panda cordon bleu and trendy totebags.

The aquarium part of the zoo was much better, with all the various freaky things like sea lions, regular lions who were just really good at swimming, those goldfish with all that crazy mess growing out of their heads (What is that anyway? Is it some kind of mutant super brain thing? And if so, shouldn’t we stop them before they o’erthrow mankind?), and a big funky Legends of the Hidden Temple Olmec Indigenous American Head (also, over 750 little nautical gift shops selling 2008 Olympic Aquarium doohickeys). Now finding ourselves inexplicably in the mood for seafood, we all went to the Indonesian Giant Gourd Bug Restaurant and slaked our thirst for some marine life (except me, I got a pork chop, which is not without good reason oft known as the pileated rockfish of the land).

After a quick trip back tot he apartment where I packed once more with far more haste than care and made our way past the Chinese Door Nazi, who makes you sign a paper for the bags you take out, but not the ones your bring in (which means that he probably gets in trouble every month when it turns out that his total of bags is something like -937 in arrears), it was back to the airport where they have approximately 7,000 ticket counters for all sorts of made-up red-herring fictional Chinese airlines that they only put there to deter the impure of heart and those wanting in courage and chutzpah. We finally found our way to the Continental gate (Continental: where the stewardesses are dudes, but the food is pretty good), checked our 28 pieces of luggage, and boarded a 777 capable of leaving Beijing at 5:00 PM and arriving at Newark at 5:30 PM, a mere half an hour later. I’m not entirely sure how this is supposed to work, but I can only hope that something in our transwarp matrix or our dilithium crystals will go wonderfully awry and hurl us back into the 80s. Meanwhile, the in flight movie is A Christmas Story, that one about that kid having a mystical vision quest for a BB gun back in the 50s and where it ends up, appropriately enough, with the family in a Chinese restaurant where the waiters speak pidgin English and they get a duck with the head still on, much as I myself had had not 24 hours ago. The only porblem is, I laughed uproariously at this particular comedic juncture and our Chinese stewardess shot me a really dirty look. I can only hope that none of the other movies they show accurately make light of the foibles of other ethnic groups, because then I’ll have to laugh at all of them too, unless I want to look like some kind of anti-Chinese only guy. Also, the fact that my Genghis Khan hat wouldn’t fit in my suitcase and I had to wear it on the plane probably didn’t do anything to improve her opinion of me, since wearing a Genghis Khan hat in China is kind of a bad historical reminder to them, like wearing a Ronald Reagan shirt in Moscow or driving a lawn mower through Mexico.

Continental, much to their apparent credit, gives out free headphones for the in flight movies. Then, however, you realize that these are the most legendarily sucky headphones ever. Imagine that instead of headphones at all, you’re listening through an eight foot long toilet paper roll tube, to a tiny man with a bad sinus infection inside of a minifridge who doesn’t speak English but is trying to perform the musical score to your movie with nothing but a piece of moldy wax paper and a handful of squirrels. Actually, that would be a lot more entertaining than these headphones, and a whole lot funnier to visualize. Alexander Graham Bell’s first call home to his mom had better sound quality than these headphones. In fact, I suspect that the only reason that they’re free is that ten years ago, Continental foolishly bought a jillion and a half of them off the internet whilst in a drunken stupor, and after discovering that federal law forbid them to just bury them all in the deserts of New Mexico like so many E.T. Atari cartridges, were forced to just pawn them off on unsuspecting customers for the next thousand years.

You know how they always say that planes fly over the North Pole because it’s shorter? I don’t think that’s it at all; I think it’s just because when you flush the toilets on a plane, it all just falls out and plummets to the Earth below, and they thought they’d get fewer complaints if they dumped on penguins than if they were always bombing Iowa. But this can backfire, because Santa lives at the North Pole and I bet nothing gets you on his naughty list faster than dropping a chunk of frozen poop on his head from ten miles up. And at what point, exactly, did naughty stop meaning "bad" and start meaning ""delightfully skanky"? Or is Santa really just a somewhat jollier fellow than we tend to believe and all those switches in your stocking were really more of a twisted reward than a punishment all a long.

There’s some show on right now about a bunch of nurses, a nun in love with chewing gum commercials, and a loveable Donald Sutherland Hobo who all live in a hospital and kill people. Everyone around me is watching it raptly; I think it’s some kind of mind control thing or something, like that time Wesley Crusher brought that weird alien stereo opticon game to the Enterprise and Data had to save the day by building a funky strobe light and throwing a rave to make everyone chill out again. I can only hope that my stores of willpower and raveability are up to the challenge. It has now been 37 hours since last I slept; I wonder when I’m gonna start getting punchy and imagining crazy stuff. So far, so good, I suppose.

Now watching the Polar Express; this is the most messed up movie I’ve ever seen, at least while riding on an airplane, and the fact that we just passed the North Pole only makes it weirder. Remember the Final Fantasy movie and how inescapably creepy everyone in it looked? Imagine that Tom Hanks took a whole lot of acid and decided to make a sequel. If he did, that sequel would be the Polar Express. This movie is like scientific proof that there is no Santa, because if there were, he would never have allowed such a freaky movie to have been connected to his noble franchise without taking out a full-page ad in the newspaper denouncing and disavowing any connection to this completely bizarre and unnatural film where all the kids sound like grownups and Tom Hanks is bald. Way. Too. Weird.

Okay, now Santa looks like Moses, and sounds like Abraham Lincoln, I mut be hallucinating this. And now the dude beside me is watching me write. Yes, dude, you, I’m on to your little game. And now Santa has a whip. Okay, Santa’s sleigh just took off with those fire tracks that Deloreans leave behind when they go back in time, this movie can’t be real. Man, I hope that nerdy kid gets eaten by velociraptors or something equally ghastly.

Man, I hope I don’t go back and read all this tomorrow morning and have no idea what I"m taking about here.

Oh crap, it was done by the same guy who did Back to the Future! It all makes sense now! Horrible, horrible sense. I wonder where I left that ice cream cup they gave me when we took off in Bejing. Oh well, here comes Newark.