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I took a great trip to China this past spring, hitting Hong Kong, Beijing, Nanjing and Shanghai. Here's a story that I wrote with Andrew Collins, fellow writer and partner in crime on this trip, on how to spend four hours in Shanghai --the only city I've ever been to that made my native New York seem old and fuddy duddy.
Here's a story about the best way to spend four hours in Beijing --a city so large that it can take at least four hours to figure out how to read the map (which is probably outdated anyway). The picture at right is in the Imperial Garden, inside the Forbidden City.
In this story for women's magazine All You, I profile three women who work in homeland security.
The senior managers of Timbuk2, a San Francisco-based manufacturer of messenger bags, gathered on a gently sloping granite ledge at an altitude of 12,000 feet, overlooking the blue-gray shimmer of one of the dozen or so Ice Lakes, slopes of stubby pine trees, and beyond onto ragged peaks. It was the middle of June, but snow still mounded on the ground. A thunderstorm had just skirted the campsite and the wind screamed constantly, cold and fierce.
These four men and two women lead a growing company of 70 employees back at sea level, where they'd typically be worrying about things like financing, brand management, e-commerce, and retail sales. But for the past four days they'd been in the backcountry, and their concerns had been somewhat more basic: Would that small blister turn into a festering sore? Would those dark clouds bring rain? Does that bear paw print in the mud mean there's an actual bear nearby?
The group was halfway through a seven-day backpacking trip organized by the National Outdoor Leadership School, or NOLS. Accompanying them were two NOLS instructors and me; I'd tagged along to see what would happen. It had been nearly 100 hours since any of us had had a shower, or used a flushing toilet, cradled a cell phone to our ear, or run our fingers across a keyboard. As the sun started to set, the temperature, which had hit the high 80s when we'd set out from the town of Lander, Wyoming, just four days before, was hovering just above freezing.
To read the story, click here.
