adding passport pages

If you ever need to add passport pages, I highly recommend doing it abroad, where they do it while you wait. Every page of my passport has now been stamped or visa’d, so I went to the consulate here in Chengdu, which (after getting past the security) was an extremely pleasant experience, since the waiting room was air conditioned and they had old copies of the South China Morning Post (the Hong Kong-based English-language newspaper whose front page is one of the ones posted outside Moffitt, for those of you in Berkeley). Since I get no news here, even week-old news was welcome. I don’t make an effort to watch the TV news here, since it’s mostly sob stories about various natural disasters happening around the country—either that, or reports of where the “holy Olympic torch” was paraded around today. International news is pushed to the very end, it seems—you know, the spot where, in American news broadcasts, they show pictures of the cute puppies from today’s county fair dog show. Newspapers are probably better, but I don’t bother spending money on those either since all information is filtered by the you-know-who.