I am never asked what I think of gay marriage

but here is my opinion of marriage anyway. I have spent a good part of the last week trying to change our departure date from Shanghai to Seoul from the 4th of August to the 7th of August.

People who haven’t been completely tuning me out, and I will understand if you are; I wish I could — will recall that last April the Chinese Government revealed that it would grant no visas longer than 30 days, period. This required a big change of our itinerary just to be allowed to apply for a visa, the change involving an extremely optimistic rush to Shanghai and flight out to the nearest place not-China we could find, which is Seoul.

The plan was, to find a taxi from Lake Barkol to Hami immediately after the sun reappeared, board the overnight train at Hami which leaves at 1:11 AM on the morning of August 2nd and arrives in Shanghai the next day, and fly out of Shanghai the day after. (The train actually gets to Shanghai before the first flight we could get from Urumqi would, and flights are way expensive.)

Then, three more things happened:

The Chinese government said that you could no longer buy a sleeper ticket from other than the originating station, which Hami isn’t. I suppose this has something to do with trains heading toward Beijing which would arrive in time for the opening ceremonies. Gee, I wonder if anybody is doing that.

Fine, said I to chinatraintickets.net, just purchase the tickets from Urumqi (the originating station) and we’ll get on at Hami.

Not so fast, said the Chinese government, you also can’t hold an empty seat. Somebody has to be in your couchette or we’ll sell it to somebody else.

In India, you quite often used to hire a boy to run and get you a seat on public transportation and hold it for you while the red-shirted fellows nudge their way on with you and your luggage. China also has such an option; but the nudge here is half the length of the State of California, and the dollar is not worth what it was in the days of the Raj.

In addition, there would have to be another show of tickets made to get into the train station at Hami. So we were looking at paying off Fake Ray Spears and Fake Dave Oppenheim to get on the train at Urumqi, while Fake Ray Spears 2 and Fake Dave Oppenheim 2 loitered about the train station in Hami and waited for a taxi to wind down the mountains covered with dust from the Northern Desert for Fifth Contact. This was going to run to the thousands of yuan renminbi.

But meanwhile; when we got our visas back from Los Angeles, they had both been issued for 60 days, without our even requesting it.

So that part got easier. There is a reason they call those little push-pull-nudge boxes “Chinese puzzles.”

Given the price increase to the train tickets, it might now be cheaper to move the flight out to a later date and ease all these sketchy connections.

China Southern Airlines issues paper tickets. The process of making a change to a paper ticket purchased through Travelocity, you don’t want to do that. It culminated in a 40 minute conversation this afternoon, most of which was actually NOT spent on hold, but just explaining and repeating myself, to Apu Nahasapeemapetilan whose voice was being done this week by Sasha Baron-Cohen in his Bruno avatar.

Travelocity moved its call centers from Clintwood, Virginia and San Antonio, Texas, in 2004. They are now managed by a company called WNS North America from Mumbai, Pune, and Nashik, Maharashtra. So will your job, soon enough.

From the standpoint of legibility to an English speaker, Texas to Mumbai represents about a wash. Indian English is a dignified and widely spoken dialect and anyone in California can converse in it, but this guy — he said “Thank you ver’ much” in perfect Borat, and sometimes Schwarzenegger’ed his w’s and the whole thing was a mish mash, for all I know he was a hacker in East Clintwood asking, Do you feel Lucknow? PLUS the phone connection was through a vo-de-oh-do underwater mike plug-in. I hope I’ve changed my tickets to the 7th. I might have changed them to Saturn.

I guess what I am saying is that Paper Tickets are a Covenant Marriage; and if it’s this much trouble to change an airline reservation, how much more careful should you all be on your non-refundable lives? Obviously I hope everyone will vote for Equality before the Law this November, but our change fee ended up being $79.95; how much does it cost Britney to unwind her sacred bands of God-sanctioned matrimony?