After the world's most comfortable trans-Pacific flight, happy adventures in Beijing, and a taxi cab ride from the Chengdu airport that brought me closer to God, we've arrived in Sichuan and the outlook is good. Goodbye to ferocious Siberian winds blowing down every avenue, but goodbye as well to Western-style toilets. Hello to fantastic and amazing Sichuan cooking.

In case you've never eaten Sichuan food, you can tell that a dish is well made if it is very spicy, pleasantly filling, and causes you to fall asleep for fourteen straight hours after you eat it. We arrived in Chengdu hungry and full of ambitious plans, and ended up asleep in our clothing at four in the afternoon, happy and sated, not destined to wake up until just before dawn. You wouldn't think it possible to spend fourteen hours on a Chinese mattress (midway in hardness between gypsum and quartz), but a fine Sichuan meal makes anything possible.

Chengdu is full of curious tea houses, back alley markets, and has at least one stunning Buddhist temple in the northern part of town. The whole ensemble - all of China in general - bears an unexpected resemblance to what Poland looked like to me when I first went back in 1990, immediately after the fall of Communism. Except that the capital is much richer, and you never tasted such food.

Now we go to book a trip down the Chang Jiang (Yangtse) river, from Chongqing to the Three Gorges dam, and then it's time to find the restaurant that looked so promising to me last night. Each table had a propane stove under it, and there was an enormous banner over the windows with a picture of happily grazing goats.

I'm going to China on Thursday, and apparently not a minute too soon.

I am a cheapskate and a control freak who feels lost at sea if he can't speak the language, perhaps not the best travel companion if you are headed to central China. But my boss (who is Taiwanese) went this spring to see the Three Gorges, and told me that I must go and see them, too, before they get flooded by the dam.

The Chinese government, you see, is building a very large dam - the largest dam in the world - to tame the Yangtze river. Whatever posesses socialist governments to build enormous dams, the Chinese have it in spades, and they have not let the massive environmental and historical impact of the flooding shake their resolve. The Three Gorges Dam is going to raise the water level by five hundred feet. Once the flooding begins, the gorges will become the Three Flat Stretches Of Artificial Lake (and if you think it couldn't happen here, you're too late).

Today I got a message from an alert coworker, warning me that as of last week, the Chinese have turned the stopcock, or however else it is that you start filling a giant artificial lake. So it appears I am going to get there in the nick of time.

Honestly, I am both terrified and delighted to be going to China. We are going as a triad - myself, my girlfriend, and her Mandarin-speaking brother, and we are going to eat. The journey starts in Beijing, followed by a flight to Chengdu, a bus ride down to where the river cruise begins in Chongqing, some kind of boat to Wuhan, and then a train to Shanghai, with a possible stop in Nanjing or excursion to a Buddhist mountain shrine.

In between feeling terrified and completely unprepared, I can't wait.

I was supposed to run this Sunday New York City marathon, but I didn't do it. Something happened to my knee the very last week - I had grown used to feeling some soreness there after long runs (OK, to not being able to walk after long runs), but this time it stayed sore, and two days before the marathon I couldn't even complete a short four miles. The outside of my left knee felt tighter and tighter, and then started to hurt more and more, until I had to stop.

I suppose one consolation is that I can now write "a short four miles" with a straight face, considering how unattainable that distance seemed before I started training. But I would rather have my knees back!

In the end, I had a wonderful time just watching. I had never seen a marathon up close before, and certainly not any kind of race of this magnitude, with over thirty thousand runners taking part. Somehow the Sudbury Road Race (20 runners, 10 kilometers) did not quite prepare me for the New York City marathon. Even as a spectator.

We got to the sixteen mile mark just in time to see the lead men streak past. One thing I hadn't really understood before starting my own lumbering fitness program was just how fast a champion marathon runner goes. The fact is, there is no distance at which I could match a competitive marathon pace. Even in a ten yard dash to the refrigerator to get another box of Mallomars, I'm no match for a good distance runner. Consider that at the 18 mile mark, the leaders were clocking mile times of 4:30. The slowest mile of the race was a leisurely five minutes and change. Nothing makes you feel like a wuss quite as effectively as a marathon.

Relative speeds, as observed at the 16 mile mark:

FAST

Elite female runners
Kenyans
Very very thin white men
Buff fit people with shades
Buff fit people in funny hats
Holstein cow
Man in clown nose
First of many annoying cellphone users
Santa Claus
Man juggling four balls in the air
Spiderman
Waiter carrying full bottle of vermouth on tray
Man filming race on camcorder
Transvestite in full evening gown
Racewalkers
Man running backwards
Foam-rubber rhinoceros #1
Lumpy people in funny hats
Lumpy people running slowly
Assorted walkers
People staggering towards the med station
Me
NOT FAST