Portrait of an LBX

Alexis in his training apparel / Alexis en habillement d'entraînement

English: Alexis, our friend and previous teammate, has finally gotten his lazy French butt around to opening his own site, entitled Sentiers De Chine (Trails of China), where he’ll be recording his adventures (in French) and pictures from May until whenever he decides to stop going. We wish him the best of luck on the rest of his voyage!

Pour les francophones: D’abord, comme Alexis me rappelle souvent, je ne suis qu’un ‘ricain, donc permettez-moi SVP quelques erreurs en la langue de Lafesse! M. Lerognon, notre cher ami et ex-co-aventurier, s’est enfin appliqué à se faire un site à lui-même, et avec seulement 3 mois de retard! Comme disent les chinois, “vite venu, vite parti (來得快，去得快),” et alors on espére qu’il pourra y partager les anecdotes et photos de son périple au moins aussi longtemps qu’il a pris en l’ouvrant! Mais franchement, le site, qui s’appelle Sentiers De Chine, est très bien conçu (apparemment grâce à Gilles Vigner), et nous lui souhaitons une excellente continuation et plein d’aventures et mésaventures (car celles-ci sont les plus marrantes à raconter)!

Et oui… Il semblerait que la chaîne francophone CCTV-F améliore sans cesse son audimat, car après ma précédente vidéo intitulée Les doigts ou la queue, relayée par Aujourd’hui la Chine, Marianne 2 et Libération, mais aussi par l’excellent blog d’Olivier (qui m’a gentiment interviewé), Marketing Chine, c’est aujourd’hui le reportage Leon Van Bon au Lac Qinghai qui commence à faire du bruit sur la Toile, notamment par le biais des blogs Marketing Chine, Cédric en Chine, mais également grâce au site Internet du quotidien parisien Métro. CCTV-F vous remercie!

Il paraît que, depuis peu, la chaîne a créé un nouveau poste: censeur francophone. Il n’y a donc plus seulement un censeur chinois pour contrôler le politiquement correct des formulations, mais également un censeur francophone pour prévenir jeux de mots et allusions déplacées. Délateur… Quel beau métier… Et ça paie! La preuve: je me suis aperçu le soir de la Saint-Sylvestre que la soirée de CCTV était co-présentée par la talentueuse collabo qui m’a vendu lors de la diffusion du texte de billard.

“Je retourne ma veste… toujours… du bon côté…”

Chers amis,

c’est avec surprise et joie que je viens d’apprendre que le reportage de CCTV-F, intitulé “Les doigts ou la queue“, que j’ai traduit et lu, et pour lequel j’ai été lourdé de la chaîne, était visionné, re-visionné et re-re-visionné par un nombre croissant d’internautes.

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We’ve been without an update here for a while, and it’s time for at least a little explanation. We’ve committed ourselves to taking this little project on the road for a year long bicycle ride around China. Both Evan and I are unemployed and homeless as a result, and have been for what is beginning to seem like a very long time. Both of us have made trips back to our homes in Pennsylvania and Louisiana and dropped a large pile of cash on new bikes and a bunch of other gear. Evan spent a few weeks riding a Dahon up and down the California coast where he also attended a paragliding camp and is now certified to catch updrafts over the cliffs of the California coast and other beautiful places around the world. He and another friend also went on a bike trip in Taiwan, intending to circumnavigate the island, but having to adjust plans plans when a monstrous typhoon wiped out the roads on the southern part of the island.

Now we are both back in Beijing and in a holding pattern. You see, when Evan was helping me move out of my apartment in July, he noticed my passport sitting in a drawer and, recognizing its vast importance, put it in his bag for his version of “safe keeping.” A couple days later, I realized that my passport was missing and after tearing apart everything I still owned, we declared the thing lost. I spent the last week of my working time in Beijing running around getting the requisite documents together and spending another pile of money for an emergency passport and to get my visa transferred into the emergency passport before leaving for America five days later. I arrived in the States and signed into my email account to find an apologetic email from Evan, who had unknowingly handed my passport to the lady at the check-in counter at the airport while on his way to Taiwan. Well, what’s done is done, but our original expected departure of early September has come and gone as we wait for my new passport, for my visa to be transferred into said new passport and for my visa to be renewed. Our hope was to leave by the 19th, but that dream too has now faded.

But the whole ordeal is not without its positive side. Another member has been added to our cycling team, pushing us closer to our half-serious dream of a Forrest Gump-style following as we make our trip around China and attempt to grow beards. Evan’s French friend Alexis recently left his job at CCTV’s French channel (okay he was asked to leave) and intends to join us for the entire journey. Our delayed departure will allow us to all leave together from Beijing rather than having him meet us somewhere out on the road. Alexis will be contributing a French-language travelogue to the site, which we’re pretty excited about.

But for now we wait.